As contact unfolded across the Caribbean, as well as North, Middle, and South America, Europeans encountered a rich, dynamic human landscape. Nations were at war with each other, negotiating peace, forming confederacies, abandoning ancestral settlements, or migrating across the continent. The New World was a system in motion.

We have significant evidence for hostilities between nations, as well as the major players in many wars on the eve of European interaction. Columbus saw first hand evidence of conflict, specifically in the form of battle scars on Taino males who fought against encroaching Caribs. When English settlers established Jamestown Powhatan/Wahunsunacawh, the paramount chief of Tsenacommacah (densely inhabited land), had already allied over thirty other settlements against Spanish encroachment from the south. Powhatan then extended the chiefdom's influence and integrated Jamestown, through John Smith, into the Powhatan Paramount Chiefdom. Through a combination of warfare and diplomacy the Inca Empire expanded to become the largest empire in the New World. On the eve of Pizarro's invasion the empire was fighting a costly civil war between Huayna Copac's two sons, Huascar and Atahualpa. Pizarro's lucky timing took advantage of the turmoil, and paved the way for the long decline of the Inca Empire. Jesuit fathers followed their Huron/Wendat flock as refugees escaping Iroquois raids fled west to the Great Lakes. They heard and detailed the warfare and changes occurring further west on the Great Plains, often by interviewing slaves captured by their Native American allies in raids in the heart of the continent.

These were simply a few of the many, many accounts detailing the state of the New World before direct Native American-European interaction. European accounts, combined with Native American oral histories, detail the dynamic, and yes sometimes violent, nature of Native American interactions beyond the frontier of European contact.