Timelines: Imagining the Past in Theodor De Bry’s America

The “antiquity” of Native American societies is a recurring theme in European representations of the New World, particularly in those that focus on cultural practices that were enigmatic to Western eyes. The present essay identifies variations on this rhetoric of temporal dislocation in two engravings, published in 1591 and 1627 respectively, that appeared in the series of illustrated travel books about the Americas that was conceived by the leading Flemish printmaker Theodor de Bry. Showing forms of indigenous hunting and agriculture, the engravings link the Native American figures they depict to the time of nature and to the era before civilization--temporalities which, in Western art and literature, were strongly associated with archetypes such as the wild man or the fortunate inhabitants of the Golden Age. Exploring these connections, the essay finds that the overlapping timelines in the engravings both assert the difference (and, at times, the inferiority) of Native American people, and produce unexpected continuities between the European self and a foreign other whose ways of living uncannily recalled Western images of the mythic past.