Before anyone gets too excited, I hasten to explain what "American" means in the context of this article. It does not refer to our becoming citizens of the great neighbour to the west of Bermuda, the United States of America, though many might wish that to be the case, especially for democratic ideals and um um, well, shopping and big Macs. Rather, I am naming you as denizens of this hemisphere, the American one, north, south and all the islands in between and around about. In that sense, we are as American as the indigenous "native peoples" or the more recent Latinoamericanos, or African- or Italian-Americans and so on.

We are more American than those last ethnic groups, for they were not first, but came later to a hemisphere already settled. Those groups were not indigenous in that sense of the word, for they are not the people known from historical or archaeological records to be the first human settlers of the lands of our hemisphere. I say settlers for, at Bermuda, there were transient occupants of this place from shipwrecks, probably from the late 1400s through to the summer of 1612, including, by some thinking, the passengers of the Sea Venture (1609) and the two, and then, three "kings" here left behind between May 10, 1610 and July 1612.

Humans did not settle Bermuda until the Plough arrived at St. George's Harbour on July 11, 1612, with some 50 passengers from England. Later ships brought peoples of African and other origins. By the fact that the colony succeeded, those setters constituted Bermuda's indigenous population by the mid-1620s. The first generation born on the island comprises the first true Bermudian-Americans.

Because Bermuda was not settled until the early 17th Century, we may lay claim to being one of the last strands of a million-year migration that began in central and southern Africa, when our ancestors walked north, east, west and south, in search of new lands.

The great southern treks extended into the Indian sub-continent, into the Asian peninsulas and adjacent archipelagos and hence to the island continent of Australia, the last about 50,000 years ago. The treks also included a walk down north, central and south Americas, from the Bering Straits in Alaska to the mountains of Patagonia in the far south of the continent mass of the Western Hemisphere, about 12,000 years ago.

Next with new marine technologies, people spread throughout the Pacific, reaching down into New Zealand but a mere 1,000 years ago, for the oceans formed insurmountable barriers to peoples without sailing vessels. Then, a little over 500 years ago, new types of ships, invented in Europe, allowed people to find and inhabit islands in the Atlantic, places like Cape Verde, Madeira, the Azores, and Bermuda. Later still, islands in the southern Atlantic, such as Tristan da Cunha, received their first indigenous peoples, or original settlers.

So as regards the migration of peoples around the globe, Bermuda is among the last places to be settled permanently by humans. Thus we are more American than many who so call themselves, for we were first-comers, like the peoples who inhabited the Americas before Columbus. We were in at the end of humans' million-year migration out of Africa to unsettled lands in all four corners of the globe. Isolated places like Bermuda, St. Helena or Mauritius are where that epic trek of our species ended.

Some years ago, when in New York meeting with Dr. David Fleming, the first Bermudian to carry out an archaeological land dig in Bermuda, he and his wife, Dr. Monica Barnes, both Andeanists, suggested I see an exhibition on the people called "Moche" at the Natural History Museum. The Moche are some of our early American cousins in Peru, where settlement took place along the coastal plain between the Pacific Ocean and the Andean Cordillera perhaps 10,000 years.

Until the subjects of the exhibition, being the spectacular finds in 1987 of the royal tombs at a village called Sipán, were found, little was known of the Moche culture, which flourished for about 700 years from 100 A.D.

"But the Moche took the arts, technology and social organisation they had inherited from previous civilizations and developed them to form their own distinctive culture. In so doing, they created one of the most remarkable civilizations of the ancient world."

The royal personages buried under huge mud-brick pyramids were interred with massive amounts of silver, gold and copper objects, the like of which had never before been seen in the Americas. Remarkable objects incorporating beads, feathers and other materials amplified the richness of the Moche culture, and some were identified from paintings of peoples and ceremonies on Moche pottery, known for some decades.

The Moche artifacts from Sipán stand, for example, with those of the African Pharoahs or the Chinese "Jade Queen" as some of the highest expressions of human artwork of ancient times. Like the Bermuda Rig, which we invented, the Moche cultural objects were "Made in America". The archaeology that was undertaken in the recovery of the Moche artifacts was itself one of the highest expressions of that discipline in the Americas.

"The contents of the royal tombs of Sipán are wonderful. They provide a dramatic contrast to the contents of the looted tomb, the remains of which are now divided and scattered in private collections throughout the world, unavailable for scholarly research or public viewing. Instead, the contents of these excavated tombs will be kept together, available for people today and in the future to see and appreciate."

One would hope that we too could flourish for 700 years. Yet we already appear to have condemned to extinction many of our cultural and heritage (and tourism!) assets, even some of those that have been inscribed by UNESCO as "World Heritage", a designation not yet attributed to Sipán, yet one which it richly deserves.

Edward Cecil Harris, MBE, JP, PHD, FSA is Executive Director of the National Museum of Bermuda, incorporating the Bermuda Maritime Museum. The opinions in this column are his own. Comments, always welcome, may be made to drharris@logic.bm or 704-5480.