The Problem with the Term “Pre-Columbian”
Researchers often refer to ancient civilizations of the Americas, or indigenous peoples in general, as ‘Pre-Columbian’. The Pre-Columbian era means, essentially, anything that came before the arrival of Christopher Columbus, therefore, a human experience in the Americas untainted by European influence. The term is used to evoke a matter-of-fact, scientific approach to time in several fields of study; history, biology, botany, geography, anthropology, politics, and the list goes on. But why frame time in this way? Any human experience before 1492 is a period of at least 15 thousand years, across 2 continents. Of the overall time covered by ‘pre’ and ‘post’ Columbian in human existence, ‘Post-Columbian’ amounts to roughly 3% of the total. As such, this system seems even more arbitrary than ‘before’ and ‘after’ Christ. Neither of these men are objectively at the center of any measure of time.
Technically, the term ‘Pre-Columbian’ is not incorrect. It’s also not incorrect to describe the US’ Civil War as “Pre-Social Media”, but why would you do that if you are not talking about Social Media? The only point to describing something as “not European” is to center Europe in the conversation, and doing so does nothing to achieve accuracy in the analyses of time. It also fails to achieve accuracy in the analyses of indigenous experiences, because it’s too vague to be useful. At least useful to any intellectual production that aims towards objectivity, and respect towards its subjects.
If the subject of research is the Incas, for instance, it shows no respect to categorize them generally as ‘existing before Europeans arrived’. By that measure, the Mayans and Aztecs were also Pre-Columbian, but were from vastly different regions and eras. Uncountable civilizations, peoples, ethnicities and languages existed in the Americas before the arrival of Europeans, and the broad ‘Pre-Columbian’ category is one of the least remarkable characteristics of each of them.
Only Europeans would label the existence of an Indigenous people as ‘before we conquered them’. In the academic field of Human History, which birthed this term, only European historical accounts were taken into consideration. Even when this started to be called into question, halfway through the 19th century by “explorers” like John Lloyd Stephens, these native peoples, and their constructions or artifacts, were still described as having been ‘discovered’. This is perhaps the only objective reason to use the term “Pre-Columbian”, to signify something that was happening or was made before a European discovery.
John Lloyd Stephens is often credited as the discoverer of Mayan ruins, but he relied on “word of mouth” to get to them, which means, someone told him where they were. Stephens and his entourage were not discoverers, they were well-resourced documentarians, who analyzed the historical documents they gathered and arrived at an unsurprising conclusion that it really was the Mayans who built the monuments. When thinking of the legacy of the Mayan civilization, and what these ruins symbolize, describing them as “Pre-Columbian” is as informative as saying “this was built, not by us”.
It has been argued that the term ‘Pre-Columbian’ is an effort against Eurocentrism, as it de-emphasizes his role in the period. However, even as a negation, Columbus, one man, is placed at the center. How can it be that one man, setting foot on one island, instantly and single-handedly ends an era of tens of thousands of years? Magnificent monuments, pyramids, architecture, crafted forests, agricultural and medicinal technologies, possibly 100 million people scattered across some 40 million square kilometers of land are all placed in the shadow of this one man. This is too unrealistic to be scientific.
“Though the data should be pure and straightforward, science is done by people, who are never either.” (Adam Rutherford, in A New History of the First Peoples in the Americas)
Botany
Platypodium elegans, photographed by Riccardo Riccio, for the Seeds and Tales project.
In botany, several plant species are attributed as being first described by Europeans. That is because the process of ‘species description’ as we know today is a European invention – it has nothing to do with which human first encountered the species.
The Graceful platypodium, for instance, native to Brazil, is associated with a 19th century German botanist named Vogel. However, the indigenous Xavante people, considered one of the “founding populations of the Americas”, already referred to this plant as ‘wede itsaipro’, or “foam tree”.
Species description is about the first person encountering the specimen, who happens to also operate within the framework of publishing scientific papers. This means that several people, communities, or cultures may well have intimate contact with the plant species, for years or centuries, but not with scientific publications in European academic institutions.
The concept of ‘first describing’ new plants is about the building of a database which follows a standard laid out in 1735, in the Netherlands, by a Swedish botanist named Carl Linnaeus. In other words, it is not about discovery, but about a consensus to follow a specific standard, created in a specific place by a specific person. This standard may at any moment be questioned, and the consensus revoked.
At the time Linnaeus published Systema Naturae, he believed the world would not house more than 10 thousand species of plants. Though his method is interesting and useful, it was not exactly equipped to sustain modern levels of data input, and had to be adapted. This adaptation may, and must, be taken further to honor not only accuracy in plant species descriptions, but also the civilizations which have held vast knowledge about these plants for millennia. These peoples have played a part in the genetic development of plants through ancient agricultural technologies and crop domestication, and valuable insights about these plants’ medicinal, dietary and cultural properties will no longer be neglected.
Xavante is a name that should be known and spoken about as much as, if not more than, Columbus, Stephens or Vogel. For that, a concerted effort must be put into replacing “Pre-Columbian” with anything more specific, such as a date rage, location, and name of the indigenous civilization or peoples. The documentation gathered by European expeditions may often times be useful, but when accepted uncritically, much more knowledge is lost than gained.
Mirna Wabi-Sabi
Mirna is a Brazilian writer, site editor at Gods and Radicals and founder of Plataforma9. She is the author of the book Anarcho-transcreation and producer of several other titles under the P9 press.