To learn about the indigenous peoples of the Americas, scholars draw on the rare texts that survived the European encounter, as well as objects used by indigenous peoples. The richest source of Pre-Columbian historical information comes from the ancient Maya, who developed the most sophisticated writing system in the Americas. The Maya and other native cultures often embellished their texts with illustrations, recording or carving them on objects of stone, ceramic, wood, and other surfaces. This section of the exhibition draws on select artifacts in the Kislak Collection and presents them as objects that, like books or documents, provide us with information about ceremonies, wars, court life, alliances, astronomy, calendars, and the reigns of kings. Reflecting the strengths of the Kislak Collection, this area deals principally with the pre-contact cultures of Mesoamerica, a territory that includes most of the modern countries of Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, western Honduras, and El Salvador.

Christopher Columbus’s voyages began a centuries-long series of encounters between peoples of the Americas and Europe.  The Kislak Collection includes a selection of dramatic objects and records that reflect this complicated and extraordinary epoch.  This section presents materials from the voyages of exploration of Christopher Columbus (1451–1506), Hernán Cortés (1485–1547), and Francisco Pizarro (ca. 1475–1541) and material about the natives of the Americas they encountered.  It also features the Conquest of Mexico paintings, created in the seventeenth century, which depict the cataclysmic encounter between Cortés and the conquistadors and Moctezuma and his people.

The encounters between the Americas and Europe altered the civilizations of both deeply and irrevocably. Among the many dramatic changes resulting from the encounters are the three covered in this section. “Language and Religion” documents the efforts of Spanish missionaries to convert natives and to record their languages. “Competition for Empire” reveals how other European powers, and eventually the newly created United States as well, vied for position and control in the Americas. Finally, in “Documenting New Knowledge,” the exhibition examines two disciplines, natural history and geography, in which post-encounter Europe recorded the abundant “New World” information that often challenged their earlier conceptions and worldview.