The Americas

Abstract

The history of literature in America predates the arrival of Columbus in 1492 and of the European colonists who came after him. By the time the European explorers came across the Atlantic, the original peoples from the Ice Age migrations had spread across the hemisphere from Alaska in the north to Tierra del Fuego at the tip of South America. The Olmec are credited, among other things, with being the first society in the Americas to develop a loose system of writing or epigraphy. Native mechanisms such as the Incan quipus foreground our limitations as historians and interpreters of indigenous cultures. The concept of history as a chronological phenomenon, structured according to a strict, diachronic spectrum, is as much a European idea as is the current concept of literature, and indigenous cultures in the Americas did not share Europe's purely diachronic notion of historical time.