The purpose of this research is to examine black African and Native American societies before European contacts in regard to their religions, political structure, and economics. The plan of the research will be to set forth the historical context in which pre-encounter societies flourished, and then to discuss distinctive features of these societies that illustrate their stability and institutional nature.
The fact that as of A.D. 1000 European civilization was less advanced and united than civilizations in Asia, Africa, or America has been well documented, as well as the fact that after that time Europe gradually emerged to dominate the world (Elson, 1992). However, the period of transformation that began roughly at the time of the Crusades was not necessarily the same as the bringing of superior civilization to non-European societies. Indeed, the societies that Europeans encountered in the Americas and Africa were reshaped along European lines in significant part because of European territorial and conquest ambitions. According to one account, "the indigenous populations of most colonized lands went under. Indians in America and aborigines in Australia had not sufficiently tamed and filled their continents to prevent newcomers from settling among them" (Oliver, 1966, p. 7). African societies survived the encounter more successfully because they were "too numerous and too much the masters of their environment to be overtaken" (p. 7).
If the pre-encounter societies of Africa and the Americas differed in the hold they had on the respective territories they inhabited, they appear to have been similar in possessing well-developed and refined (though unappreciated, by the Europeans) structures of social organization. In the case of the Maya, Inca, and Aztec, society was organized around imperial authority, although the empires of the Americas would not survive the encounter. In Africa, too, there were indigenous empires. Leaving asid...