First Encounters

Drawing on the most recent historical and archaeological research, "First Encounters" describes the period of early Spanish contact with New World peoples. This series of essays reports original research mounted over the last ten years, a decade of remarkable breakthroughs in knowledge about significant events in the first decades after 1492. In non-technical language the authors invite us to play Watson to their Sherlockian investigations. We are made privy to the modus operandi of anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians as they assemble clues from historic documents, topographic features, and excavated artifacts to map out the neighbourhood boundaries of Puerto Rial, Hispaniola, abandoned in 1578, or to establish which sites in the South East United States can legitimately claim that "de Soto slept here". We learn how Columbus's ship "Nina" must have smelled on her 1498 voyage, and how the discovery of a pig mandible helped nail down the site of Anhaica, de Soto's 1539-1540 winter camp.