Nigel Davies, author of a popular study of the Aztecs, has performed another service for the general public. Voyagers to the New World covers the difficult subject of how and when humans, from the proto-Amerindians millenia ago to Columbus 500 years ago, came to the Americas. It is a good introduction for the lay reader and a useful quick review for scholars of this subject up to and through the 1970s—a review we need because Man Across the Sea: Problems of Pre-Columbian Contacts (Carroll L. Riley et al., eds.) is 15 years old.

General readers will be fascinated and professionals impatient with Davies’s lengthy decimation of Immanuel Velikovsky and Erich von Däniken and the like, who find it easier to envision visits of aliens or Phoenician and Chinese shuttle service across the Atlantic and Pacific than to believe in the possibility of Amerindian originality. The best parts of the book, for amateurs and professionals alike, are the chapters on the first crossings of Beringia by homo sapiens and on the later, but pre-Columbian, voyages of the Vikings and Polynesians. The latter chapter is an eyeopener for Americanists who insist that trans-Pacific contacts before Magellan were absolutely nonexistent.

This book has the usual advantages and disadvantages of a publication aimed at the general public. It reads easily, but some parts are more cute than helpful, and there are a lot of little mistakes. Does calling the founders of the Olmec and Chavín civilizations “America’s First Capitalists” help or hinder understanding? Hinder, I think. And there are no native antelopes in the New World. If Davies means the pronghorns, they live in North, not South, America. Carl Ortwin Sauer was primarily a geographer, not a botanist. Columbus could not have seen black Americans “long before” the Spaniards brought black Africans to America because he almost certainly brought some himself, and their arrival in Española in 1502 is a known fact. The Beothuk Indians are long gone, every last one of them. The Gokstad ship did not have a rudder. Writing in Ogham script most certainly did not die out by 300 B.C.; it probably did not exist yet.

Having said that, let me reemphasize the usefulness of this book as a prophylactic against new outbreaks of Danikenian silliness. I also want to thank Davies for telling me that there was once an Americanist who believed that humans first got to the New World by walking from Australia across Antarctica to South America. In addition, I am grateful for a devastating example of the pitfalls of interpreting artistic evidence: the Old World elephants portrayed in ancient Mexican friezes are probably New World macaws. Big noses are a lot like big beaks, and it is easy to understand the confusion.