Until the 1960s, anthropologists and ethnohistorians paid little attention to North America in the sixteenth century. Although aware of European exploration at that time, they generally assumed that Native cultures had remained static until Europeans established direct and lasting contact with them, often in the seventeenth century or later. Most anthropologists believed that descriptions of Native cultures dating from the seventeenth century recorded ways of life that had persisted essentially unchanged from much earlier times. As a result, little was done to discover and explain the significance of what had happened to Native people in the century following the Columbian discovery of the Western hemisphere. Even in the southeastern United States, where it has long been recognized that European entradas and diseases might have had a major impact on indigenous cultures at that time, there was little systematic investigation of the nature and extent of these changes. Today it is generally acknowledged that the sixteenth century was a time of major changes over large areas of North America. Yet it is far from agreed how geographically extensive or far-reaching were the transformations brought about by European contact.

The sixteenth century is a difficult period to study from the point of view of Native history. Much of the written documentation takes the form of maps or lists of place names, accompanied by a few notes containing material of historical and ethnographic interest. Only a small corpus of written documents furnishes detailed eyewitness accounts of contacts between Native North Americans and Europeans at that time.