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neither the moral values necessary for a civilised life nor the scientific understanding necessary to properly exploit the resources of nature. Well into the twentieth century the curator of physical anthropology at the Smithsonian Museum was insisting that the antiquity of the ‘Indian … cannot be very great’.
    Then in 1927 a team of archaeologists in New Mexico found a stone spear point embedded in the ribs of an ice age bison. Since then more finds along with improved radiocarbon dating and DNA analysis show that the first nomads trekked down from the Bering Strait at least 23,000 years ago and perhaps as much as 40,000 years ago. It hardly matters exactly when the trek started, the important point is that it was a long time ago; and indeed there may have been various waves of immigrants. Not surprisingly, then, the newcomers had evolved in radically different ways as they moved south. Rather than facing tribes of more or less similar ‘Indians’, the Europeans were arriving in a land populated by people as different from each other as Romans and Russians. There were at least 375 native languages being spoken in North America when the Europeans arrived. Differences of language, culture, politicalsophistication, technology and religion were massive. Combined with the enormous distances that separated the various groups, there was one thing of which the European invaders could be certain: there was absolutely no chance of the ‘natives’ uniting.
    The main civilisations in the Americas were in central and South America, but early explorers found massive earthworks covering hundreds of square miles in Ohio; 12 foot high walls enclosed perfect circles, squares and octagons, many of them fifty times the size of a football pitch. They have now largely been destroyed by the advances of ‘civilisation’, but archaeologists have still managed to find below the earthen structures thousands of amazingly beautiful artefacts: copper head-dresses in the shape of deer antlers, human hands crafted in mica, shells from the Gulf of Mexico and obsidian from the Rocky mountains. They also found evidence that the Hopewell people who lived there had taught themselves to grow crops from seed, something that early Europeans copied from the Middle East. Or had the Hopewell also learnt from the Middle East?
    Again, early American scientists were unwilling to believe that the savages their forefathers wiped out could have produced such enormous monuments. Numerous theories were propounded to explain their origins; perhaps visiting Phoenicians or even the lost tribe of Israel. Eventually the Smithsonian assembled a team of experts and, after ten years of study, concluded that all the fanciful theories were false. The Hopewell Mounds had been constructed by the ancestors of the ‘Indians’ whom the early settlers had encountered when they arrived. While east and west were battling each other at Châlons, the Hopewell people were knapping flint blades, working copper from the shores of Lake Superior and crafting jewellery from bears’ teeth.
    Seven centuries later another native American people was leaving enormous signatures on the landscape. In the Chaco canyon of New Mexico buildings were going up of a size that would not be matched again in North America until the 1920s. Five-storey buildings, some with more than a thousand rooms, were built of sandstone and clay. Hugewooden beams brought over 40 miles from the nearest forest supported the upper storeys and roofs.
    In the middle of the eleventh century, as Kievan Rus was reaching its peak, Cahokia itself flourished on the eastern side of the Mississippi. Experts believe the city was a little smaller than the London that William the Conqueror was about to take, or twice its size, or somewhere in between. Its suburbs stretched across the river into what is St Louis today. Cahokia was the capital of a people known as the Mississippian culture. Their