If you go back 500 years, the mighty Inca empire stretched some two and a half thousand miles north to south along the Andes range from Colombia to Chile - and reached west to east from the Atacama desert to the Amazon rain forest.
It had been growing since the 13th century and was the largest nation on Earth. In 1532, the Spanish conquest began in earnest and within 40 years - it was all over.
Other civilisatons in Americas also perished as living cultures within a couple of generations, but one that held out a lot longer - well into the 1700s - was the incredibly-sophisticated Calusa, who developed a complex culture based on estuarine fisheries rather than agriculture in what's now the Florida peninsula in the US.
Victor Thompson - Director of the Archaeology laboratory at the University of Georgia - is the lead author of a just-published study shedding light on just how the Calusa did it and why they should be a lot better known than they are.
Photo: Florida Museum
