America in two massive ice sheets. Th e western ice sheet is
called the American cordillera, and the eastern is called the
Laurentia. At certain times these two sheets met, and at other
times a narrow corridor opened, stretching to Alberta, Can-
ada, and there opening to the northern plains. Th ere is much
disagreement still about whether it would have been possible
to traverse what certainly would have been an inhospitable
environment between massive glaciers.
While an inland route of exploration would have served
a cold-adapted population best, it would not have been the
only option available. When the land bridge was submerged,
prehistoric peoples could have walked across the ice pack in
winter or paddled across in small boats in summer. Th e Nor-
wegian explorer and archaeologist Th or Heyerdahl, among
others, has shown the extraordinary exploratory possibili-
ties of seafaring among prehistoric peoples. He established
the feasibility of contact via an ocean crossing between South
America and the South Pacifi c. Archaeological evidence in
Australia, Melanesia, and Japan indicate that boats were in use
as far back as 25,000 to 40,000 years ago. However, any signs
of an exploratory route along the Pleistocene coastal shelf is
now submerged; consequently, there is no direct archaeologi-
cal evidence to support a Pacifi c coastal migration route. It is
also possible that populations crossed the 56 miles of the Ber-
ing Strait via boat when it was submerged and then continued
south along the coast, a theory now growing in popularity.
Regardless of the route, highly mobile populations ar-
rived and diff used as far as Patagonia in what appears to be
an extremely abrupt period of time. Th is area of investigation
is still contested; few agree on when and where the earliest
explorers and settlers arrived and under what conditions.
Th ese hunter-gatherer societies slowly fi lled in the continents,
eventually establishing sedentary or semisedentary patterns
based on resource utilization. By approximately 4000 b.c.e.
increased density and intensifi cation of resource exploita-
tion, characterized by pastoralism and agriculture, defi ned
the period. Few areas remained without human populations.
However, why some areas developed agriculture and domes-
tication and some remained hunter-gatherer is still debated.
In South America, for example, during the Late Holo-
cene (5,000 years ago to the present) the area from contempo-
rary Venezuela and Colombia to central Chile and from the
coast to the Andean cordillera was defi ned by agriculture and
pastoralism, producing more than 80 percent of all food. In
Amazonia, the area including most of contemporary Brazil
and the drainage of the Amazon, Orinoco, and Paraná river
systems, between 20 percent and 80 percent of food was pro-
duced. And in the southern portion, dominated by Patago-
nia, a hunter-gatherer system was maintained.
Similarly, between 4,000 and 6,000 years ago, back at
the point aft er the original entrance into North America,
the Inuit explored the top of the globe, pushing east as far as
Greenland. Subsequent cultural effl orescences and declines,
and population expansions and contractions, from the stand-
point of exploration, meant that people were continually on
the move, populating new territory and sometimes repopu-
lating previously occupied land. Given the great amount of
time that passed, these populations might have had no idea if
they were the fi rst to explore an area.
Increasingly sedentary civilizations led to development
of ceremonial centers and ultimately to cultures with greater
density and more complex social, political, and economic
structures. As civilizations advanced, exploration took on a
diff erent form, based in part on trade and exchange. Like-
wise, as states grew and empires arose, exploration developed
into a form related to war and conquest in the interest of se-
curing and expanding borders, spreading state-supported
religious ideals, and procuring objects or materials of signifi -
cant value.See also agriculture; art; astronomy; borders and
frontiers; ceramics and pottery; cities; climate and
geography; empires and dynasties; foreigners and bar-
barians; gender structure and roles; hunting, fish-
ing, and gathering; language; literature; migration
and population movements; military; nomadic and
pastoral societies; roads and bridges; seafaring and
navigation; settlement patterns; ships and shipbuild-
ing; social collapse and abandonment; social organi-
zation; trade and exchange; war and conquest.FURTHER READING
M. Cary and E. H. Warmington, Th e Ancient Explorers (Baltimore,
Md.: Penguin Books, 1963).
James C. Chatters, Ancient Encounters: Kennewick Man and the
First Americans (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2001).
John Haywood, Th e Penguin Historical Atlas of Ancient Civiliza-
tions (New York: Penguin Group, 2005).
Jona Lendering, “Hanno.” Livius: Articles on Ancient History.
Available online. URL: http://www.livius.org/ha-hd/hanno/
hanno03.html. Downloaded on January 9, 2007.
R. B. Parkinson, Th e Tale of Sinuhe and Other Ancient Egyptian
Poems: 1940–1640 B.C. (Oxford. U.K.: Griffi th Institute, Ash-
molean Museum, 1997).
Heather Pringle, In Search of Ancient North America: An Archaeo-
logical Journey to Forgotten Cultures (New York: John Wiley
and Sons, 1996).
Duane W. Roller, Th rough the Pillars of Herakles: Greco-Roman Ex-
ploration of the Atlantic (London: Routledge, 2006).446 exploration: further reading