Americas to 1500 CE

The Americas feature perhaps the richest range of prehistoric craft to have survived through history, with adapted versions of some aboriginal vessels remaining in use to this day, particularly off the coasts of Peru, Brazil, and Chile in South America. Because of the longevity of many American watercraft, the primary source of information on pre-Columbian seafaring, the corpus of drawings and descriptions provided by Europeans (primarily in the 18th and 19th centuries CE), is remarkably informative about prehistoric vessel types and their uses.