@Smokin Joe
Seems like Celtic or Viking influence was here before Columbus.
Perhaps the Phoenicians earlier. But I think there was a worldwide civilization, pre flood.
Cortez was greeted treated as a god.
I think it is easy to underestimate the amount of interaction of people on a global scale when Darwinism blinds you to the idea that any others might have done things before you that only you, according to that theory of evolution, as the highest developed beings on the planet, could have just recently done.
The amazing part is that the meetings of the past were preserved in the culture at all, even enough to make such an error.
If you abandon the teachings of the past, a story told in relics and stones, in earthworks, and artifacts, you are free to ignore it, and even ascribe the accomplishments of those who died out so long ago you can't read their language to space aliens and the like.
Archaeology has been ever hobbled by Darwin, by the circular reasoning which says previous civilizations couldn't have done that because they were old and primitive. That and other dogmas have been sufficient to destroy the most valuable of those civilizations' writings, from the library at Alexandria to the Mayan Codices.
If we read
A Canticle for Leibowitz or simply ponder what would remain of our culture in 5,000 or 10,000 years of erosion and geological wastage, maybe we begin to be humbled by the thought that those who came before us may have been far more capable than we imagined.
Trade, no matter the means of travel, motivated by profit and knowing what and even who was over the next hill, is as ever present in the intrepid human nature as the desires of some to have and stay at their secure homes. But despite the risks, he who returns with exotic goods and tales to tell returns to the rewards of a conquering hero, or the threat of torture and destruction for the heresy of relating that which he has seen by those who have not.
So has it always been.