More Words, Deeper Hole

Didn't the Māori only arrive in New Zealand about 1000 CE? Possibly as late as 1300 CE? If I was trying to invent a virgin Americas for Europeans to find I might have Polynesians on the west coast, but just barely starting out since their first attempts fail for whatever reasons. And the Europeans would then conveniently ignore them. "It was a virgin New World free for our claims, ours by right of first discovery and settlement." "What about those people with the taro on the west coast?" "Oh hush you, they don't count."

Or I might do like Turtledove did and have some animal in the Americas that would make initial settlement very hard and thus a reason for the first small bands to get wiped out (including Vikings) and only get generalized European settlement with better guns and/or large groups with crossbows. He used Homo erectus in A Different Flesh, which I thought fairly clever.

Or it could only seem virgin with the population of the Americas having been decimated by a disease. Perhaps one that was not terribly virulent in of itself, but that would make a large percentage of the people who contract it sterile and thus making it where the generation after the disease will be so small and spread out that humanity in the Americas is reduced to next to nill. Given the slow population growth of people prior to germ theory this would mean an almost virgin Americas if it happened in the 500 years prior to first contact.