ttlement that was strictly European in nature before Columbus, one must consider whether and to what extent earlier settlements may have merged with a native American culture, so that a pre-Columbian European influence might be detected in some extant native American cultures.
Third, questions about whether Africans came to America as free persons, whether as traders, explorers, or settlers, immediately run into problems of racist assumptions. Racism has certainly not disappeared in America, but at least it is much less virulent than it was three decades ago. Hence, it may be possible to examine the evidence for pre-Columbian African presence in America more calmly; the possibility that some native American cultures may have been partly African in origin and ancestry need not now be so potentially frightening either to whites or to native Americans.
Conversely, the possibility that some native American cultures may have been partly European or Middle Eastern in origin may not be so threatening to native American political sensibilities, so long as it does not appear that such a line of thought is hiding a secret agenda of explaining away native American cultural achievements by proposing a non-Amerindian origin for them. Of course, native Americans never were racist; historically they intermarried freely with Europeans, Africans, or Asians, and seem to have had a cultural understanding that being native American -- or, more precisely, Iroquois or Cherokee or Dineh or . . . -- was an issue of nurture, not nature, or of culture, not heredity, as an anthropologist would now put it. To the extent that native Americans now define being native American in terms of having a certain percentage of native American ancestry, to that extent they have absorbed European racist assumptions.
Thus the Scylla; the Charybdis of possibly factitious "evidence" arises from the fact that the question of pre-Columbian contact between the Old and...