Since its publication in 1976, Ivan van Sertima's book They Came Before Columbus has gone through 21 printings, while receiving widespread--though not unanimous--condemnation from the American archaeological establishment, culminating in a hostile, full-length forum in Current Anthropology. And yet, startlingly, the field of American archaeology has recently found itself in the midst of a major paradigm shift, caused by archaeological evidence that obliterates the Clovis model as a legitimate demarcation of the first presence of human settlement in the New World. Kamugisha proposes to trace the response to They Came Before Columbus, while discussing the issue of diffusionism in van Sertima's work.;
