Not the World as We Know It

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Ann F. Ramenofsky: Papers in Honor of a Non-Normative Career" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The Coronado expedition to Tierra Nueva of 1539-1542 was an enterprise of reconnaissance and conquest, traveled from home locales to one exotic target locale. But before anyone who eventually made the trip had ever heard the name Cíbola, the future expeditionaries were already certain where and what that place was. They were heirs to a geography of expectation. With the hindsight of more than five hundred years we might imagine that in the years after Columbus' voyages , navigators and geographers quickly corrected his geographical errors, bringing to the world maps of Earth that broadly resembled our modern vision of the planet from space. But that was not the case. At the time of the Coronado expedition, though, European conceptions of the Earth were still Medieval allowing for only three continents: Europe, Africa, and Asia. So since Cíbola was not in Europe or Africa, it had to be in Asia. Indications and presumed facts, learned from various independent sources, suggested this was so. The Tierra Nueva of Cíbola would be home to camels and elephants; great herds of yaks; producers of exquisite silks and luminous porcelains; and wholesalers of exotic spices and dyes. That much, future expeditionaries were sure of.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)   •
• Ann F. Ramenofsky: Papers in Honor of a Non-Normative Career

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23078