If asked who discovered America, most of us would answer without any hesitation, that Christopher Columbus discovered America. The history of America began thousand of years before the pre-Columbian era. Debate over how the Europeans arrival affected the Indians still stimulates discussion. Two opposing views on this subject come from arguments made by James Merrell and Neal Salisbury. From these two arguments this essay will draw the conclusion about why the arrival of Europeans (and later Africans) in North America ushered Native Americans into a “New World.” In particular James Merrell argued that the arrival of Europeans and African forced the Natives into a new world and I agree. According to Merrell, For American Indians a new order arrived in three distinct yet overlapping stages. First, alien microbes killed vast numbers of natives. Next came traders , who exchanged European technology for Indian products. Merrell argues that before European contact, the localism characteristic…show more content… More specifically Salisbury says, What recent scholars of precolonial North America have found even more striking, giving this diversity, is the extent to which native peoples' histories intersected with another. They also expanded their exchanges with one another and conducted them over greater distances. Archaeologist have found evidence of exchanges dating back to 8000 B.C.. They traveled over distances hundreds of miles. Although the natives were already involved in complex exchange intersections they traded with the Europeans. Specifically, The Indians placed special value on the glass bead and other trinkets offered by the Europeans. They regarded the objects as equivalents of the quartz, mica, shell and other substances. Although they wore and received these goods on earth they more than often were not buried with the dead to accompany them in the
