"A welcome addition to the growing literature dedicated to 'Atlantic Studies.'. . . Recommended for the professional scholar, the university student, and the educated public."—History

Paints a compelling picture of impressive pre-Columbian cultures and Old World civilizations that, contrary to many prevailing notions, were not isolated from one another In Ancient Ocean Crossings: Reconsidering the Case for Contacts with the Pre-Columbian Americas, Stephen Jett encourages readers to reevaluate the common belief that there was no significant interchange between the chiefdoms and civilizations of Eurasia and Africa and peoples who occupied the alleged terra incognita beyond the great oceans. More than a hundred centuries separate the time that Ice Age hunters are conventionally thought to have crossed a land bridge from Asia into North America and the arrival of Columbus in the Bahamas in 1492. Traditional belief has long held that earth’s two hemispheres were essentially cut off from one another as a result of the post-Pleistocene meltwater-fed rising oceans that covered that bridge. The oceans, along with arctic climates and daunting terrestrial distances, formed impermeable barriers to interhemispheric communication. This viewpoint implies that the cultures of the Old World and those of the Americas developed independently. Drawing on abundant and concrete evidence to support his theory for significant pre-Columbian contacts, Jett suggests that many ancient peoples had both the seafaring capabilities and the motives to cross the oceans and, in fact, did so repeatedly and with great impact. His deep and broad work synthesizes information and ideas from archaeology, geography, linguistics, climatology, oceanography, ethnobotany, genetics, medicine, and the history of navigation and seafaring, making an innovative and persuasive multidisciplinary case for a new understanding of human societies and their diffuse but interconnected development.

A welcome addition to the growing literature dedicated to 'Atlantic Studies.'. . . Recommended for the professional scholar, the university student, and the educated public.--History

"This is a reader devoted to the life and writings of Bartolomé de las Casas (1485-1566), and the effects of his legacy on the age of the Encounter when Europeans-principally but not exclusively Spaniards-conquered the Americas. Las Casas is arguably the most important figure of the Encounter Age after Christopher Columbus, and Las Casas is well known to those who teach Western civilization, various survey histories of Spain and Latin America, and Atlantic history. He is known principally as the author of the "Black Legend," as well as the "protector" of American Indians. He was one of the pioneers of the human rights movement, and a Christian activist who invoked Biblical scripture to interpret what was right and wrong in the great age of the Encounter. He was also one of the first and most thorough chroniclers of the conquest, and a biographer who saved the diary of Columbus's first voyage for posterity through his History of the Indies, for the journal of that voyage was lost. He was also an innovator in political theory and a proto-ethnographer, and his contributions in geography, philosophy, and literature are no less significant. That he was also crusty, self-righteous, judgmental, given to gross exaggerations, and not a very loving Christian adds the very human dimension of failure to his character. This reader provides the most wide-ranging, and concise anthology of Las Casas' writings, in translation, ever made available. It contains not only excerpts from his most well-known texts, but also his writings on political philosophy and law, which are largely unavailable. Many of these selections have never been translated into English and they mostly address these under-appreciated aspects of his thought. As such, this volume presents Las Casas as a more comprehensive and systematic philosophical and legal thinker than he is given credit. The introduction puts these writings into a synthetic whole by biographically tracing his indigenous advocacy throughout his career"--

"Who were the first humans to inhabit North America? According to the now familiar story, mammal hunters entered the continent some 12,000 years ago via a land bridge that spanned the Bering Sea and introduced the distinctive stone tools of the Clovis culture. Drawing from original archaeological analysis, paleoclimatic research, and genetic studies, noted archaeologists Dennis J. Stanford and Bruce A. Bradley challenge that narrative. Their hypothesis places the technological antecedents of Clovis technology in Europe, with the culture of Solutrean people in France and Spain more than 20,000 years ago, and posits that the first Americans crossed the Atlantic by boat and arrived earlier than previously thought."--Back cover.

Presents an illustrated examination of the Atlantic Ocean and the transformative role it has played as a corridor for the exchange of people, technologies, ideas, goods, and cultures for over two thousand years as exploration and discovery helped in the growth of global commerce.