Long before contemporary
uncontacted peoples, there were many more cases of communities and states being isolated from each other, sometimes only having poor knowledge of each other and poor contact. One such case is the poor formal contact between Europe and
China in the course of the long history of the
Silk Road trade and later contact with the
Mongol Empire. Frustration with the lack of contact gave rise to the characterization of China as
isolationist, and after being identified with
Greater India and
Prester John, the European powers, such as the Portuguese
Prince Henry the Navigator, attempted to reach the isolated Greater India by travelling westward. The European colonial powers thereby mistakenly identified the
Americas as the
West Indies - a part of Greater India - and named the
indigenous peoples of the Americas incorrectly as "
Indians". This contacting has been called one-sided "
discovery" as is the case with
discovery doctrine, and has been reinvented contemporarily by narratives of
first contact beyond Earth finding its way into actual
space exploration (for example the
Pioneer plaque). It has been argued that, for colonialism, this seeking out of first contact proved to be a crucial element to gain control over knowledge and representation of
the other, fetishizing and
objectifying contact and its place on the
frontier drawing a long history of one-sided contact, until today with
indigenous peoples and specifically uncontacted peoples. == Notable examples ==