The first galleries explore the events leading up to the conquest of Mexico. Pre-Hispanic artifacts illustrate features of Mesoamerican civilizations and northern arid-zone groups. The exhibition also examines the Iberian Peninsula at the time of contact with the Americas. Navigation instruments and model ships explain the factors that made Columbus’s arrival possible, along with the experiences of early colonists in the Caribbean and the expeditions to the mainland. Armor and indigenous deities evoke the conditions of the conquest, culminating in an 18th-century shell-inlaid folding screen that summarizes the final resistance of the Mexica and the fall of Tenochtitlán to Hernán Cortés and his indigenous allies.