Chapter 1 - Study Guide\Review

US: A Narrative History Volume 1

Chapter 1 - The First Civilizations of North America

The Power of a Hidden Past

Stories told about the past have power over both the present and the future. Until recently, most students were taught that American history began several centuries ago—with the “discovery” of America by Columbus, or with the English colonization of Jamestown and Plymouth. History books ignored or trivialized the continent's precontact history. But the reminders of that hidden past are everywhere. Scattered across the United States are thousands of ancient archaeological sites and hundreds of examples of monumental architecture, still imposing even after centuries of erosion, looting, and destruction.

Man-made earthen mounds, some nearly 5,000 years old, exist throughout eastern North America in a bewildering variety of shapes and sizes. Many are easily mistaken for modest hills, but others evoke wonder. In present-day Louisiana an ancient town with earthworks took laborers an estimated 5 million work hours to construct. In Ohio a massive serpent effigy snakes for a quarter-mile across the countryside, its head aligned to the summer solstice. In Illinois a vast, earthen building covers 16 acres at its base and once reached as high as a 10-story building.

Observers in the colonial and revolutionary eras looked on such sites as curiosities and marvels. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and other prominent Americans collected ancient artifacts, took a keen interest in the excavation of mounds, and speculated about the Indian civilizations that created them. Travelers explored these strange mounds, trying to imagine in their mind's eye the peoples who had built them. In 1795 the Reverend James Smith traced the boundaries of a mound wall that was strategically placed to protect a neck of land along a looping river bend in the Ohio valley. “The wall at present is so mouldered down that a man could easily ride over it. It is however about 10 feet, as near as I can judge, in perpendicular height…. In one place I observe a breach in the wall about 60 feet wide, where I suppose the gate formerly stood through which the people passed in and out of this stronghold.” Smith was astonished by the size of the project. “Compared with this,” he exclaimed, “what feeble and insignificant works are those of Fort Hamilton or Fort Washington! They are no more in comparison to it than a rail fence is to a brick wall.”

But in the 1830s and 1840s, as Americans sought to drive Indians west of the Mississippi and then confine them on smaller and smaller reservations, many began thinking differently about the continent's ancient sites. Surely the simple and “savage” people just then being expelled from American life could not have constructed such inspiring monuments. Politicians, writers, and even some influential scientists instead attributed the mounds to peoples of Europe, Africa, or Asia—Hindus, perhaps, or Israelites, Egyptians, or Japanese.

Many nineteenth-century Americans found special comfort in a tale about King Madoc from Wales who, supposedly shipwrecked in the Americas in the twelfth century, had left behind a small but ingenious population of Welsh pioneers who built the mysterious mounds before being overrun by Indians. Some observers even thought Indian skin boats resembled Welsh coracles, designs brought over by King Madoc. The Welsh hypothesis seemed to offer poetic justice, because it implied that nineteenth-century Indians were only receiving a fitting punishment for what their ancestors had done to the remarkable mound builders from Wales.

These fanciful tales were discredited in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In recent decades archaeologists working across the Americas have discovered in more detail how native peoples built the hemisphere's ancient architecture. They have also helped to make clear the degree to which prejudice and politics have blinded European-Americans to the complexity, wonder, and significance of America's history before 1492. Fifteen thousand years of human habitation in North America allowed a broad range of cultures to develop, based on agriculture as well as hunting and gathering. In North America a population in the millions spoke hundreds of languages. Cities evolved as well as towns and farms, exhibiting great diversity in their cultural, political, economic, and religious organization.

A Continent of Cultures

Most archaeologists agree that the Western Hemisphere's first human inhabitants came from northeastern Asia. At least 15,000 years ago b.p.* during the most recent Ice Age, small groups of people began crossing the Bering Strait, then a narrow bridge of land connecting Siberia to Alaska. Gradually these nomads filtered southward, some following the Pacific coastline in small boats, but most making their way down a narrow, glacier-free corridor along the eastern base of the Rocky Mountains and onto the northern Great Plains. There they found and hunted a stunning array of huge mammals, so-called megafauna. These animals included mammoths that were twice as heavy as elephants, giant bison, sloths that were taller than giraffes, several kinds of camels, and terrifying, 8-feet long lions. Within a few thousand years the descendants of these Siberians, people whom Columbus would wishfully dub “Indians,” had spread throughout the length and breadth of the Americas.

As the new world of the Americas was settled, it was changing dramatically. The last Ice Age literally melted away as warmer global temperatures freed the great reservoirs of water once locked in glaciers. A rise in sea levels inundated the Bering Strait, submerging the land bridge, and creating new lakes and river systems. The emergence of new ecosystems—climates, waterways, and land environments in which humans interacted with other animals and plants—made for ever greater diversity. The first human inhabitants of the Americas had fed, clothed, warmed, and armed themselves by hunting megafauna, and few of these giants survived the end of the Ice Age. As the glaciers receded, later generations had to adapt to changing conditions. They adjusted by hunting smaller animals with new, more specialized kinds of stone tools and by learning to exploit particular places more efficiently.

So it was that between 10,000 and 2,500 years ago distinctive regional cultures developed among the peoples of the Americas. Those who remained in the Great Plains turned to hunting the much smaller descendants of the now-extinct giant bison; those in the deserts of the Great Basin survived on small game, seeds, and edible plants; those in the Pacific Northwest relied mainly on fishing; and those east of the Mississippi, besides fishing and gathering, tracked deer and bear and trapped smaller game animals and birds. Over these same centuries, distinct groups developed their own languages, social organizations, governments, and religious beliefs and practices. Technological and cultural unity gave way to regional diversity as the first Americans learned how to best exploit their particular environments.

Cultures of Ancient Mexico

To the south, pioneers in Mesoamerica began domesticating squash 10,000 years ago. Over the next several thousand years farmers added other crops including beans, tomatoes, and especially corn to an agricultural revolution that would transform life through much of the Americas. Because many crops could be dried and stored, agriculture allowed these first farmers to settle in one place.

By about 1500 b.c.e., farming villages began giving way to larger societies, to richer and more advanced cultures. As the abundant food supply steadily expanded their populations, people began specializing in certain kinds of work. While most continued to labor on the land, others became craftworkers and merchants, architects and artists, warriors and priests. Their built environment reflected this social change as humble villages expanded into skillfully planned urban sites that were centers of trade, government, artistic display, and religious ceremony.

The Olmecs, the first city builders in the Americas, constructed large plazas and pyramidal structures, and sculpted enormous heads chiseled from basalt. The Olmec cultural influence gradually spread throughout Mesoamerica, perhaps as a result of their trade with neighboring peoples. By about 100 b.c.e., the Olmecs' example had inspired the flowering of Teotihuacán from a small town in central Mexico into a metropolis of towering pyramids. The city had bustling marketplaces, palaces decorated with mural paintings that housed an elite of warriors and priests, schools for their children, and sprawling suburbs for commoners. At its height, around 650 C.E., Teotihuacán spanned more than ten square miles and had a population of perhaps a quarter million—larger even than that of Rome at the time.

More impressive still were the achievements of the Mayas, who benefited from their contacts with both the Olmecs and Teotihuacán. In the lowland jungles of Mesoamerica they built cities filled with palaces, bridges, aqueducts, baths, astronomical observatories, and pyramids topped with temples. Their priests developed a written language, their mathematicians discovered the zero, and their astronomers devised a calendar more accurate than any then existing. In its glory, between the third and ninth century C.E., the Mayan civilization boasted some 50 urban centers scattered throughout the Yucatán Peninsula, Belize, Guatemala, and Honduras.

But neither the earliest urban centers of the Olmecs nor the glittering city-state of Teotihuacán survived. Even the enduring kingdom of the Mayas had collapsed by 900 C.E. Like the ancient civilizations of Greece and Rome, they thrived for centuries and then declined. Scholars still debate the reasons for their collapse. Military attack may have brought about their ruin, or perhaps their large populations exhausted local resources.

Mayan grandeur was eventually outdone in the Valley of Mexico. In the middle of the thirteenth century the Aztecs, a people who had originally lived on Mesoamerica's northern frontiers, swept south and settled in central Mexico. By the end of the fifteenth century they ruled over a vast empire from their capital at Tenochtitlán, an island metropolis of perhaps a quarter of a million people. At its center lay a large plaza bordered by sumptuous palaces and the Great Temple of the Sun. Beyond stood three broad causeways connecting the island to the mainland; many other tall temples were adorned with brightly painted carved images of the gods, zoological and botanical gardens, and well-stocked marketplaces. Through Tenochtitlan’s canals flowed gold, silver, exotic feathers and jewels, cocoa, and millions of pounds of maize—all trade goods and tribute from the several million other peoples in the region subjugated by the Aztecs.

Unsurpassed in power and wealth, in technological and artistic attainments, theirs was also a highly stratified society. The Aztec ruler, or Chief Speaker, shared governing power with the aristocrats who monopolized all positions of religious, military, and political leadership, while the commoners—merchants, farmers, and craftworkers—performed all manual labor. There were slaves as well, some captives taken in war, others from the ranks of commoners forced by poverty to sell themselves or their children.

Cultures of the Southwest

Mesoamerican crops and farming techniques began making their way north to the American Southwest by 1000 b.c.e. At first the most successful farmers in the region were the Mogollon and the Hohokam peoples, two cultures that flourished in New Mexico and southern Arizona during the first millennium c.e. Both tended to cluster their dwellings near streams, relying either on flood-plain irrigation or a system of floodgates and canals to sustain their crops. The Mogollon came to be the master potters of the Southwest. The Hohokam pioneered vast and complex irrigation systems in arid southern Arizona that allowed them to support one of the largest populations in precontact North America.

Their neighbors to the north, in what is now known as the Four Corners of Arizona, Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah, are known as the Anasazi. The Anasazi adapted corn, beans, and squash to the relatively high altitude of the Colorado Plateau and soon parlayed their growing surplus and prosperity into societies of considerable complexity. Their most stunning achievements were villages of exquisitely executed masonry buildings—apartment-like structures up to four stories high and containing hundreds of rooms at such places as Mesa Verde (Colorado) and Canyon de Chelly (Arizona).

Hundreds of villages in Chaco Canyon (New Mexico), the largest center of Anasazi settlement, were linked to the wider region by hundreds of miles of wide, straight roads. Besides their impressive dwellings, the Anasazi filled their towns with religious shrines, astronomical observatories, and stations for sending signals to other villages. Their craftworkers fashioned delicate woven baskets, beautiful feather and hide sashes, decorated pottery, and turquoise jewelry that they traded throughout the region and beyond. For more than a thousand years, Anasazi civilization prospered, reaching its zenith between about 900 and 1100 C.E. During those three centuries, the population grew to approximately 30,000 spread over 50,000 square miles, a total area larger than present-day California.

Cultures of the Eastern Woodlands

East of the Mississippi, Indian societies prospered in valleys near great rivers (Mississippi, Ohio, Tennessee, and Cumberland), the shores of the Great Lakes, and the coast of the Atlantic. Everywhere the earliest inhabitants depended on a combination of fishing, gathering, and hunting—mainly deer but also bear, raccoon, and a variety of birds. Around 2000 b.c.e. some groups in the temperate, fertile Southeast began growing the gourds and pumpkins first cultivated by Mesoamerican farmers, and later they also adopted the cultivation of maize. But unlike the ancient peoples of the Southwest, most Eastern Woodland peoples continued to subsist largely on animals, fish, and nuts, all of which were abundant enough to meet their needs and even to expand their numbers.

Indeed, many of the mysterious earthen mounds that would so fascinate Europeans were built by peoples who did not farm. About 1000 b.c.e., residents of a place now known as Poverty Point in northeastern Louisiana fashioned spectacular earthworks—six semicircular rings that rose nine feet in height and covered more than half a mile in diameter. Although these structures might have been sites for studying the planets and stars, hundreds of other mounds—built about 2,000 years ago by the Adena and the Hopewell cultures of the Ohio and Mississippi valleys—served as the burial places of their leading men and women. Alongside the corpses mourners heaped their richest goods—headdresses of antlers, necklaces of copper, troves of shells and pearls—rare and precious items imported from as far north as Canada, as far west as Wyoming, and as far east as Florida. All these mounds attest powerfully not only to the skill and sheer numbers of their builders but also to the complexity of these ancient societies, their elaborate religious practices, and the wide scope of their trading networks.

Even so, the most magnificent culture of the ancient Eastern Woodlands, the Mississippian, owed much of its prominence to farming. By the twelfth century C.E. these peoples had emerged as the premier city-builders of North America, and their towns radiated for hundreds of miles in every direction from the hub of their trading network at Cahokia, a port city of perhaps 30,000 located directly across from present-day St. Louis at the confluence of the Missouri and the Mississippi rivers. Cahokia's many broad plazas teemed with farmers hawking their corn, squash, and beans and with craftworkers and merchants displaying their wares. But what commanded every eye were the structures surrounding the plazas—more than 100 flat-topped pyramidal mounds crowned by religious temples and the palaces of rulers. Cahokia's many broad plazas teemed with farmers hawking their corn, squash, and beans and with craftworkers and merchants displaying their wares.

Cultures of the Great Plains

Cahokia's size and power depended on consistent agricultural surpluses. Outside the Southwest and the river valleys of the East, agriculture played a smaller role in shaping North American societies. On the Great Plains, for example, some people did cultivate corn, beans, squash, and sunflowers, near reliable rivers and streams. But more typically plains communities relied on hunting and foraging, migrating to exploit seasonally variable resources. Plains hunters pursued game on foot; the horses that had once roamed the Americas became extinct after the last Ice Age. Sometimes large groups of people worked together to drive the buffalos over cliffs or to trap them in corrals. The aridity of the plains made it a dynamic and unpredictable place to live. During times of reliable rainfall, bison populations boomed and hunters flocked to the region. But sometimes centuries passed with lower-than-average precipitation, and families abandoned the plains for eastern river valleys or the foothills of the Rocky Mountains.

Cultures of the Great Basin

Some peoples west of the Great Plains also kept to older ways of subsistence. Among them were the Numic-speaking peoples of the Great Basin, which includes present-day Nevada and Utah, eastern California, and western Wyoming and Colorado. Small family groups scoured their stark, arid landscape for the limited supplies of food it yielded, moving with each passing season to make the most of their environment. Men tracked elk and antelope and trapped smaller animals, birds, even toads, rattlesnakes, and insects. But the staples of their diet were edible seeds, nuts, and plants, which women gathered and stored in woven baskets to consume in times of scarcity. Several families occasionally hunted together or wintered in common quarters, but because the desert heat and soil defied farming, these bands usually numbered no more than about 50 people.

Cultures of the Pacific Northwest

The rugged stretch of coast from the southern banks of present-day British Columbia to northern California has always been an extraordinarily rich natural environment. Its mild climate and abundant rainfall yield forests lush with plants and game; its bays and rivers teem with salmon and halibut, its oceans with whales and porpoises, and its rocky beaches with seals, otters, abalone, mussels, and clams. Agriculture was unnecessary in such a bountiful place. From their villages on the banks of rivers, the shores of bays, and the beaches of low-lying offshore islands, the ancestors of the Nootkans, Makahs, Tlingits, Tshimshians, and Kwakiutls speared or netted salmon, trapped sea mammals, gathered shellfish, and launched canoes. The largest of these craft, from which they harpooned whales, measured 45 feet bow to stern and nearly 6 feet wide.

By the fifteenth century these fecund lands supported a population of perhaps 130,000. They also permitted a culture with the leisure time needed to create works of art as well as an elaborate social and ceremonial life. The peoples of the Northwest built houses and canoes from red cedar; carved bowls and dishes from red alder; crafted paddles and harpoon shafts, bows, and clubs from Pacific yew; and wove baskets from bark and blankets from mountain goat wool. They evolved a society with sharp distinctions among nobles, commoners, and slaves, the latter being mainly women and children captured in raids on other villages. Those who were free devoted their lives to accumulating and then redistributing their wealth among other villagers in elaborate potlatch ceremonies in order to confirm or enhance their social prestige.

Cultures of the Subarctic and Arctic

Most of present-day Canada and Alaska were equally inhospitable to agriculture. In the farthest northern reaches—a treeless belt of Arctic tundra—temperatures fell below freezing for most of the year. The Subarctic, although densely forested, had only about 100 frost-free days each year. As a result, the peoples of both regions survived by fishing and hunting. The Inuit, or Eskimos, of northern Alaska harvested whales from their umiaks, boats made by stretching walrus skin over a driftwood frame and that could bear more than a ton of weight. In the central Arctic, they tracked seals. The inhabitants of the Subarctic, both Algonquian speaking peoples in the East and Athapaskan speakers of the West, moved from their summer ﬁshing camps to berry patches in the fall to moose and caribou hunting grounds in the winter.

Innovations and Limitations

The first Americans therefore expressed, governed, and supported themselves in a broad variety of ways. And yet they shared certain core characteristics, including the desire and ability to reshape their world. Whether they lived in forests, coastal regions, jungles, or prairies, whether they inhabited high mountains or low deserts, native communities experimented constantly with the resources around them. Over the course of millennia, nearly all the hemisphere's peoples found ways to change the natural world in order to improve and enrich their lives.

America's Agricultural Gifts

No innovation proved more crucial to human history than native manipulation of individual plants. Like all first farmers, agricultural pioneers in the Americas began experimenting accidentally. Modern-day species of corn, for example, probably derive from a Mesoamerican grass known as teosinte. It seems that ancient peoples gathered teosinte to collect its small grains. By selecting the grains that best suited them and bringing them back to their settlements, and by returning the grains to the soil through spillage or waste disposal, they unintentionally began the process of domestic cultivation. Soon these first farmers began deliberately saving seeds from the best plants and sowing them in gardens.

In this way, over hundreds of generations, American farmers transformed the modest teosinte grass into a staple crop that would give rise to the hemisphere's mightiest civilizations.

Indeed, ever since contact with Europe, the great breakthroughs in Native American farming have sustained peoples around the world. In addition to corn, the first Americans gave humanity scores of varieties of squash, potatoes, beans, and other basic foods. Today, plants domesticated by indigenous Americans account for three-fifths of the world's crops, including many that have revolutionized the global diet. For good or ill, a handful of corn species occupies the center of the contemporary American diet. In addition to its traditional forms, corn is consumed in chips, breads, and breakfast cereals; corn syrup sweeteners are added to many of our processed foods and nearly all soft drinks; and corn is fed to almost all animals grown to be consumed, even farmed fish.

Other Native American crops have become integral to diets all over the world. Potatoes revolutionized northern European life in the centuries after contact, helping to avert famine and boost populations in several countries. Ireland's population tripled in the century after the introduction of potatoes. Beans and peanuts became prized for their protein content in Asia. And in Africa, corn, manioc, and other new-world crops so improved diets and overall health that the resulting rise in population may have offset the population lost to the Atlantic slave trade.

Landscapers

Plant domestication requires the smallest of changes, changes farmers slowly encourage at the genetic level. But native peoples in the precontact Americas transformed their world on grand scales as well. In the Andes, Peruvian engineers put people to work by the tens of thousands creating an astonishing patchwork of terraces, dykes, and canals designed to maximize agricultural productivity. Similar public-works projects transformed large parts of central Mexico and the Yucatan. Even today, after several centuries of disuse, overgrowth, and even deliberate destruction, human-shaped landscapes dating from the precontact period still cover thousands of square miles of the Americas.

Recently, scholars have begun to find evidence of incredible manipulation of landscapes and environments in the least likely of places. The vast Amazon rainforest has long been seen by westerners as an imposing symbol of untouched nature. But it now seems that much of the Amazon was in fact made by people. Whereas farmers elsewhere in the world domesticated plants for their gardens and fields, farmers in the Amazon cultivated food-bearing trees for thousands of years, cutting down less useful species and replacing them with ones that better suited human needs. All told there are more than 70 different species of domesticated trees throughout the Amazon. At least one-eighth of the nonflooded rainforest was directly or indirectly created by humans. Likewise, native peoples laboriously improved the soil across as much as a tenth of the Amazon, mixing it with charcoal and a variety of organic materials. These managed soils are more than 10 times as productive as untreated soils in the Amazon.

Today, farmers in the region still eagerly search for the places where precontact peoples enriched the earth. Native North Americans likewise transformed their local environments. Sometimes they moved forests. Anasazis cut down and transported more than 200,000 trees to construct the floors and the roofs of the monumental buildings in Chaco Canyon. Sometimes they moved rivers. By taming the waters of the Salt and Gila Rivers in present-day Arizona with the most extensive system of irrigation canals anywhere in precontact North America, the Hohokam were able to support large populations in a desert environment. And sometimes they moved the land itself. Twenty-two million cubic feet of earth were moved to construct just one building in the Mississippian city of Cahokia.

Indians also employed fire to systematically reshape landscapes across the continent. Throughout North America's great eastern and western forests, native peoples periodically set low fires to consume undergrowth and fallen trees. In this way the continent's first inhabitants managed forests and also animals. Burning enriched the soil and encouraged the growth of grasses and bushes prized by game animals such as deer, elk, beaver, rabbit, grouse, and turkey. The systematic use of fire to reshape forests helped hunters in multiple ways: it increased the overall food supply for grazing animals, it attracted those animal species hunters valued most, and, by clearing forests of ground debris, fire made it easier to track, kill, and transport game. Deliberate burns transformed forests in eastern North America to such an extent that bison migrated from their original ranges on the plains and thrived far to the east. Thus, when native hunters from New York to Georgia brought down a buffalo, they were harvesting a resource that they themselves had helped to create.

The Shape of a Problem

No matter how great their ingenuity, the first Americans were constrained by certain natural realities. One of the most important is so basic that it is easy to overlook. Unlike Eurasia, which stretches across the northern hemisphere along an east-west axis; the Americas fall along a north-south axis stretching nearly pole to pole. Consequently, the Americas are broken up by tremendous geographic and climactic diversity, making communication and technology transfer far more difficult than it was in the Old World.

Consider the agricultural revolution in Eurasia. Once plants and animals were first domesticated in the Fertile Crescent around 10,000 years ago, they quickly began spreading east and west. Within 1,500 years these innovations had been adopted in Greece and India. A thousand years later the domesticated plants and animals of the Fertile Crescent had reached central Europe, and, from there, it took perhaps 200 years for them to be embraced in presentday Spain. Eurasia's east-west axis facilitated these transfers. Locations at roughly the same latitude share the same seasonal variation, have days of the same length, and often have similar habitats and rates of precipitation, making it relatively easy for plants and animals to move from one place to the next.

In contrast, the north-south orientation of the Americas erected natural barriers to plant and animal transfer. Mesoamerica and South America, for example, are about as far apart as the Balkans and Mesopotamia. It took roughly 2,000 years for plants and animals domesticated in Mesopotamia to reach the Balkans. But because Mesoamerica and South America are separated by tropical, equatorial lowlands, it took domesticated plants such as corn several thousand years to jump between the two regions. Sometimes the transfer never happened at all before European contact. South American potatoes would have thrived in central Mexico, but the tropics stopped their northward migration. Equatorial jungles also denied Mesoamerican societies the llama and the alpaca, domesticated more than 5,000 years ago in the Andes. One wonders what even greater heights the Olmec, Toltec, Mayan, and Aztec civilizations would have achieved if they had had access to these large creatures as draft animals and reliable sources of protein.

Dramatic variations in climate likewise delayed the transfer of agriculture from Mexico to regions north of the Rio Grande. Archaeologists have recently discovered evidence of 10,000-year-old domesticated squash in a cave in southern Mexico, an indication that agriculture began in the Americas nearly as early as anywhere else in the world. Yet squash and corn were not cultivated in the present-day American Southwest for another 7,000 years, and the region's peoples did not embrace a fully sedentary, agricultural lifestyle until the start of the Common Era. Major differences in the length of days, the growing season, average temperatures, and rainfall between the Southwest and central Mexico meant that farmers north of the Rio Grande had to experiment for scores of generations before they had perfected crops suited to their particular environments. Corn took even longer to become a staple crop in eastern North America, which is why major urban centers did not arise there until approximately 1000 C.E.

By erecting barriers to communication and the spread of technology, then, the predominantly north-south orientation of Americas made it more difficult for the hemisphere's inhabitants to build on one another's successes. Had American innovations spread as quickly as innovations in Eurasia, the peoples of the Western Hemisphere would likely have been healthier, more numerous, and more powerful than they were when Europeans first encountered them in 1492.

Animals and Illness

One other profound difference between the Eurasian world and the Americas concerned animals and disease. Most diseases affecting humans originated from domesticated animals, which came naturally into frequent and close contact with the humans who raised them. As people across Eurasia embraced agriculture and started living with one another and with domesticated animals in crowded villages, towns, and cities, they created ideal environments for the evolution and transmission of infectious disease. For example, measles, tuberculosis, and smallpox all seem to have derived from diseases afflicting cattle.

Eurasians therefore paid a heavy price for living closely with animals. Yet in the long run, the continent's terrible illnesses hardened its population. Victims who survived into adulthood enjoyed acquired immunity to the most common diseases: that is, if they had already encountered a particular illness as children, their immune systems would recognize and combat the disease more effectively in the event of reinfection. By the fifteenth century, then, Eurasian bodies had learned to live with a host of deadly communicable diseases.

But Native American bodies had not. With a few important exceptions, including tuberculosis, pneumonia, and possibly herpes and syphilis, human populations in the western hemisphere seem to have been relatively free from major communicable pathogens. Insofar as most major diseases emerge from domesticated animals, it is easy enough to see why. Indigenous Americans domesticated turkeys, dogs, Muscovy ducks, and Guinea pigs but raised only one large mammal—the llama or alpaca (breeds of the same species).

This scarcity of domestic animals had more to do with available supply than with the interest or ability of their would-be breeders. The extinction of most species of megafauna soon after humans arrived in the Americas deprived the hemisphere of 80 percent of its large mammals. Those that remained, including modern-day bison, elk, deer, and moose, were more or less immune to domestication because of peculiarities in their dispositions, diets, rates of growth, mating habits, and social characteristics. In fact, of the world's 148 species of large mammals, only 14 were successfully domesticated before the twentieth century. Of those 14, only one—the ancestor to the llama/alpaca—remained in the Americas following the mass extinctions. Eurasia, in contrast, was home to 13—including the five most common and adaptable domestic mammals: sheep, goats, horses, cows, and pigs.

With virtually no large mammals to domesticate, Native Americans were spared the nightmarish effects of most of the world's major communicable diseases—until 1492. After that date, European colonizers discovered the grim advantage of their millennia-long dance with disease. Old-world infections that most colonizers had experienced as children raged through indigenous communities, usually doing greatest damages to adults whose robust immune systems reacted violently to the novel pathogens. Often native communities came under attack from multiple diseases at the same time. Combined with the wars that attended colonization and the malnutrition, dislocation, and despair that attend wars, disease would kill native peoples by the millions while European colonizers increased and spread over the land. Despite their ingenuity and genius at reshaping plants and environments to their advantage, native peoples in the Americas labored under crucial disadvantages compared to Europe—disadvantages that would contribute to disaster after contact.

Crisis and Transformation

With its coastal plains, arid deserts, broad forests, and vast grasslands, North America has always been a place of tremendous diversity and constant change. Indeed, many of the continent's most dramatic changes took place in the few centuries before European contact.

Because of a complex and still poorly understood combination of ecological and social factors, the continent's most impressive civilizations collapsed as suddenly and mysteriously as had those of the Olmecs and the Mayas of Mesoamerica. In the Southwest, the Mogollon culture went into eclipse around the twelfth century, the Hohokam and the Anasazi by about the fourteenth. In the Eastern Woodlands, the story was strikingly similar. Most of the great Mississippian population centers, including the magnificent city of Cahokia, had faded by the fourteenth century.

Enduring Cultures

The survivors of these crises struggled to construct new communities, societies, and political systems. In the Southwest, descendants of the Hohokam withdrew to small farming villages that relied on simpler modes of irrigation. Anasazi refugees embarked on a massive, coordinated exodus from the Four Corners region and established new, permanent villages in Arizona and New Mexico that the Spaniards would collectively call the Pueblos. The Mogollons have a more mysterious legacy, but some of their number may have helped establish the remarkable trading city of Paquime in present-day Chihuahua. Built around 1300, Paquime contained more than 2,000 rooms and had a sophisticated water and sewage system unlike any other in the Americas. The city included 18 large mounds, all shaped differently from one another, and three ballcourts reminiscent of those found elsewhere in Mexico. Until its demise sometime in the fifteenth century Paquime was the center of a massive trading network, breeding macaws and turkeys for export and channeling prized feathers, turquoise, sea shells, and worked copper throughout a huge region.

The dramatic transformations remaking the Southwest involved tremendous suffering. Southwesterners had to rebuild in unfamiliar and oftentimes less productive places. Although some of their new settlements endure even to this day, many failed. Skeletal analysis from an abandoned pueblo on the Rio Grande, for example, indicates that the average life expectancy was only 16.5 years. Moreover, drought and migrations increased conflict over scarce resources. The most successful new settlements were large, containing several hundred people, and constructed in doorless, defensible blocks, or else set on high mesas to ward off enemy attacks. These changes were only compounded by the arrival of Athapaskan-speaking peoples (known to the Spanish as Apaches and Navajos) in the century or two before contact with Europeans. These hunters and foragers from western Canada and Alaska moved in small bands, were sometimes friendly, sometimes hostile toward different Pueblos, and eventually became key figures in the postcontact Southwest.

In the Eastern Woodlands, the great Mississippian chieftainships never again attained the glory of Cahokia, but key traditions endured in the Southeast. In the lower Mississippi valley, the Natchez maintained both the temple mound–building tradition and the rigid social distinctions of Mississippian civilization. Below the chief, or “Great Sun,” of the Natchez stood a hereditary nobility of lesser “Suns,” who demanded respect from the lowly “Stinkards,” the common people.

Other Muskogean-speakers rejected this rigid and hierarchical social model and gradually embraced a new, more flexible system of independent and relatively egalitarian villages that forged confederacies to better cope with outsiders. These groupings would eventually mature into three of the great southeastern Indian confederacies: Creek, Choctaw, and Chickasaw.

To the North lived speakers of Iroquoian languages, roughly divided into a southern faction including Cherokees and Tuscaroras, and a northern faction including the powerful Iroquois and Hurons. Like Muskogeans to the South, these Iroquoian communities mixed farming with a hunting/gathering economy and lived in semipermanent towns. The distinctive feature of Iroquois and Huron architecture was not the temple mound but rather the longhouse (some stretching up to 100 feet in length). Each sheltered as many as 10 families.

The Algonquins were the third major group of Eastern Woodlands people. They lived along the Atlantic seaboard and the Great Lakes in communities smaller than those of either the Muskogeans or the Iroquois. By the fifteenth century, the coastal communities from southern New England to Virginia had adopted agriculture to supplement their diets, but those in the colder northern climates with shorter growing seasons depended entirely on hunting, fishing, and gathering plants such as wild rice.

Cultures of equal and even greater resources persisted and flourished during the fifteenth century in the Caribbean, particularly on the Greater Antilles—the islands of present-day Cuba, Haiti and the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, and Puerto Rico. Although the earliest inhabitants of the ancient Caribbean, the Ciboneys, may have come from the Florida peninsula, it was the Tainos, later emigrants from northern South America, who expanded throughout the Greater Antilles and the Bahamas. Taino chiefs, known as caciques, along with a small number of noble families, ruled island tribes, controlling the production and distribution of food and tools and exacting tribute from the great mass of commoners, farmers, and fisherfolk. Attending to these elites were the poorest Taino peoples—servants who bedecked their masters and mistresses in brilliant diadems of feathers, fine woven textiles, and gold nose and ear pieces and then shouldered the litters on which the rulers sat and paraded their finery.

North America on the Eve of Contact

By the end of the fifteenth century, North America's peoples numbered between 5 and 10 million—with perhaps another million living on the islands of the Caribbean—and they were spread among more than 350 societies speaking nearly as many distinct languages. (The total precontact population for all of the Americas is estimated at between 57 and 112 million.)

These millions lived in remarkably diverse ways. Some peoples relied entirely on farming; others on hunting, fishing, and gathering; still others on a combination of the two. Some, like the Natchez and the Iroquois, practiced matrilineal forms of kinship, in which women owned land, tools, and even children. Among others, such as the Algonquins, patrilineal kinship prevailed, and all property and prestige descended in the male line.

Some societies, such as those of the Great Plains and the Great Basin in the West, the Inuit in the Arctic, and the Iroquois and Algonquins in the East, were roughly egalitarian, whereas others, like many in the Caribbean and the Pacific Northwest, were rigidly divided into nobles and commoners and servants or slaves. Some, such as the Natchez and the Tainos, were ruled by powerful chiefs; others, such as the Algonquins and the Pueblos, by councils of village elders or heads of family clans; still others in the Great Basin, the Great Plains, and the far North by the most skillful hunter or the most powerful shaman in their band. Those people who relied on hunting practiced religions that celebrated their kinship with animals and solicited their aid as guardian spirits, whereas predominantly agricultural peoples sought the assistance of their gods to make the rain fall and the crops ripen. When Europeans ﬁrst arrived in North America, the continent north of present-day Mexico boasted an ancient and rich history marked by cities, towns, and prosperous farms. At contact it was a land occupied by several million men, women, and children speaking hundreds of languages and characterized by tremendous political, cultural, economic, and religious diversity. This diversity was heightened by the north/south orientation of the Americas rather than the east/west orientation of Eurasia, since the spread of crops and animals in temperate regions was impeded by the tropical zones of the equator. The isolation from European diseases would make their arrival after 1492 even more devastating. Before 1492, though, the civilizations of North and South America remained populous, dynamic, and diverse.

For most of our nation’s short history, we have not wanted to remember things this way. European Americans have had a variety of reasons to minimize and belittle the past, the works, even the size of the native populations that ruled North America for 99 percent of its human history. In 1830, for example, President Andrew Jackson delivered an address before Congress in which he tried to answer the many critics of his Indian removal policies. Although “humanity has often wept over the fate of the aborigines of this country,” Jackson said, the Indians’ fate was as natural and inevitable “as the extinction of one generation to make room for another.” He reminded his listeners of the mysterious mounds that had so captivated the founding fathers. “In the monuments and fortresses of an unknown people, spread over the extensive regions of the West, we behold the memorials of a once powerful race, which was exterminated, or has disappeared, to make room for the existing savage tribes.” Just as the architects of the mounds supposedly met their end at the hands of these “savage tribes,” the president concluded, so, too, must Indians pass away before the descendants of Europe. “What good man would prefer a country covered with forests and ranged by a few thousand savages, to our extensive republic, studded with cities, towns, and prosperous farms; embellished with all the improvements which art can devise, or industry execute; occupied by more than twelve millions of happy people, and ﬁlled with all the blessings of liberty, civilization, and religion!”

Indeed, stories told about the past have power over both the present and the future. Jackson and many others of his era preferred a national history that contained only a few thousand ranging “savages” to one shaped by millions of indigenous hunters, farmers, builders, and inventors.

Yet every generation rewrites its history, and what seems clear from this latest draft is the rich diversity of American cultures on the eve of contact between the peoples of Eurasia, Africa, and the Americas. We are still struggling to ﬁnd stories big enough to encompass not only Indians from across the continent but also those who have come from all over the world to forge this complex, tragic, and marvelous nation of nations.

Chapter Overview

Over 15,000 years before the present era, the first human inhabitants crossed the Bering Land Bridge migrating from Asia and Siberia into what is now Alaska. These nomads slowly wandered southward and eastward. Within a few thousand years the descendants of these Siberians, including the people Columbus called "Indians," had spread throughout the length and breadth of the Americas and built societies of tremendous complexity and accomplishment. Archaeologists have discovered new details that reveal a diversity of cultures, economies and political systems that incorporated millions of people and hundreds of languages, all of which existed before the "contact" period with European explorers began in 1492.

A Continent of Cultures

As the first human inhabitants crossed the Bering Strait and moved onto the soil of North America, they found, during the Ice Age, a bountiful supply of big-game animals, so-called megafauna. These animals included mammoths that were twice as heavy as elephants, giant bison, sloths that were taller than giraffes, several kinds of camels, and terrifying, 8-foot long lions. These animals supplied the earliest settlers with all their material needs. But as the Ice Age ended and ecosystems diversified as the glaciers receded, later generations had to adapt to the changing conditions. Adaptation formed the basis for the distinctive regional cultures that developed among the peoples in different parts of the Americas sometime between 10,000 and 2,500 years ago.

Mesoamerican crops and farming techniques began making their way north to the American Southwest by 1000 B.C.E. at first the most successful farmers in the region were the Mogollon and Hohokam peoples, two cultures that flourished in New Mexico and southern Arizona during the first millennium C.E. Both tended to cluster their dwellings near streams, which allowed them to adopt the systems of irrigation as well as the maize cultivation of central Mexico. The Mogollon came to be the master potters of the Southwest. The Hohokam pioneered vast and complex irrigation systems in arid southern Arizona that allowed them to support one of the largest populations in precontact North America.

The Olmec’s were the first city-builders in the Americas, but their accomplishments were outdone by the achievements of the Mayans, who developed cities with bridges, aqueducts, and observatories as well as a sophisticated system of mathematics, a highly accurate calendar, a written language.

These great Mesoamericancultures did not survive; for reasons still undetermined by scholars, they disappeared by 950 C.E. Yet Mesoamerican influence is clearly visible in the peoples of the Southwest, where farming had spread by 1000 B.C.E. and where some architectural styles clearly resembled those of Mexico.

It is much more difficult to see the Mesoamerican influence among the peoples who ranged across the Eastern Woodlands of North America.

Among the cultures that developed in the Great Plains, the Great Basin, the Subarctic and Arctic regions, and in the Pacific Northwest, there was great cultural diversity. Great farming villages developed along the tree-lined streams and rivers of the Great Plains, but other people in this same region migrated with the seasons and relied for their survival almost entirely on hunting buffalo. In the Great Basin, while men did track and trap certain animals for food, the staples of their diet were seeds, nuts, and plants gathered by women. The Inuit, people who lived in what is today the far north of Canada and Alaska, survived exclusively by hunting and fishing. Those people farther south in the Subarctic migrated from summer fishing camps, to berry patches in the fall, to moose and caribou hunting grounds in winter.

In some important ways the early people of the Pacific Northwest were among the most culturally sophisticated in North America. The abundance of food and other natural resources in this region allowed for considerable leisure time to create works of art, plus an elaborate social and ceremonial life.

THE MAYAS, AZTECS, CHIBCHAS, AND INCAS

Between about 2000 and 1500 B.C., permanent farming towns appeared in Mexico. The more settled life in turn provided time for the cultivation of religion, crafts, art, science, administration—and warfare. From about A.D. 300 to 900, Middle America (Mesoamerica) developed great city centers complete with gigantic pyramids, temples, and palaces, all supported by the surrounding peasant villages. Moreover, the Mayas developed enough mathematics and astronomy to devise a calendar more accurate than the one the Europeans were using at the time of Columbus. In about A.D. 900 the complex Mayan culture collapsed. The Mayas had overexploited the rain forest upon whose fragile ecosystem they depended.

As an archaeologist has explained, “Too many farmers grew too many crops on too much of the landscape.” Deforestation led to hillside erosion and a catastrophic loss of farmland. Overpopulation added to the strain on Mayan society. Unrelenting civil wars erupted among the Mayas. Mayan war parties destroyed one another’s cities and took prisoners, who were then sacrificed to the gods in theatrical rituals. Whatever the reasons for the weakening of Mayan society, it succumbed to the Toltec’s, a warlike people who conquered most of the region in the tenth century. But around A.D. 1200 the Toltec’s mysteriously withdrew.

The Aztecs arrived from the northwest to fill the vacuum, founded the city of Tenochtitlan (twenty-five miles north of what is now Mexico City) in 1325, and gradually expanded their control over central Mexico. When the Spanish invaded in 1519, the Aztec Empire under Montezuma II ruled over perhaps 5 million people—though estimates range as high as 20 million.

Farther south, in what is now Colombia, the Chibchas built a similar empire on a smaller scale.

Still farther south the Quechuas (better known as the Incas, from the name for their ruler) controlled an empire that by the fifteenth century stretched 1,000 miles along the Andes Mountains from Ecuador to Chile. It was crisscrossed by an elaborate system of roads and organized under an autocratic government.

The Indians of the present-day United States developed three identifiable civilizations:

The Adena-Hopewell culture of the Northeast (800 B.C.– A. D. 600);

The Mississippian culture of the Southeast (A.D. 600–1500);

The Pueblo-Hohokam culture of the Southwest (400 B.C.–present).

None of these developed as fully as the civilizations of the Mayas, Aztecs, and Incas to the south.

· The Adena-Hopewell culture, centered in the Ohio River valley, left behind enormous earthworks and burial mounds—some of them elaborately shaped like great snakes, birds, or other animals. Evidence from the mounds suggests a complex social structure and a specialized division of labor. More-over, the Hopewell Indians developed an elaborate trade network that spanned the continent.

· The Mississippian culture, centered in the Mississippi River valley, resembled the Mayan and Aztec societies in its intensive agriculture, substantial towns built around central plazas, temple mounds (vaguely resembling pyramids), and death cults, which involved human torture and sacrifice. The Mississippians developed a specialized labor force, an effective government, and an extensive trading network. They worshipped the sun.

· The Mississippian culture peaked in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and finally succumbed to diseases transmitted from Europe.

· The arid Southwest hosted irrigation-based cultures, elements of which persist today and heirs of which (the Hopis, Zunis, and others) still live in the adobe pueblos erected by their ancestors.

· The most widespread and best known of the Ancestral Pueblo people cultures, the Anasazi (“enemy’s ancestors” in the Navajo language), developed in the “four corners,” where the states of Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah meet.

· Anasazi society lacked a rigid class structure. The religious leaders and warriors labored much as the rest of the people did. In fact, they engaged in warfare only as a means of self-defense (Hopi means “Peaceful People”), and there is little evidence of human sacrifice or human trophies. Environmental factors shaped Anasazi culture and eventually caused its demise. Toward the end of the thirteenth century, a lengthy drought and the pressure of new arrivals from the north began to restrict the territory of the Anasazi’s. Into their peaceful world came the aggressive Navajos and Apaches, followed two centuries later by Spaniards marching up from the south.

Innovations and Limitations

While these first Americans created a tremendously diverse group of cultures, they shared a common desire and ability to reshape their world. By experimenting with the resources around them, they created farming breakthroughs that have sustained peoples around the world. Plants domesticated by indigenous Americans, including corn, squash, potatoes, and beans, today account for three-fifths of the world's crops, and have revolutionized the world's diet for better and for worse. Native Americans also implemented more drastic changes in the landscape, from vast engineering projects in central Mexico and managed cultivation of the Amazon rain forest to re-routing of rivers and reshaping of forests in North America, all to enhance their agricultural production and further the building of their cities.

§ No innovation proved more crucial to human history than native manipulation of plants.

§ Landscapers - Plant domestication requires the smallest of changes, changes farmers slowly encourage at the genetic level. But native peoples in the precontact Americas transformed their world on grand scales as well.

Yet certain natural realities constrained the ingenuity of these societies. Unlike Eurasia, which exists on an east-west axis, the Americas fall along a north-south axis, creating greater geographic and climactic diversity that made communication and technology transfer far more difficult than it was in the Old World. In addition, the scarcity of domesticated animals in the Americas meant that the population did not build immunities to disease comparable to those of their Eurasian counterparts, a distinction that would have disastrous consequences for Native Americans in the decades after European contact.

Crisis and Transformation

Great changes occurred in the cultures of the Americas during the three to four hundred years before the arrival of Europeans on these shores. Many well-developed and sophisticated cultures in America declined significantly or disappeared during this period of time. The explanations for their decline and/or disappearance are one of the past's greatest mysteries. Those inhabitants that remained struggled to construct new societies, with some of the most successful efforts occurring in the Caribbean and central Mexico. Both of these cultures were deeply stratified; in Mexico the Aztecs ruled over an empire that encompassed millions of people that they divided into classes of aristocrats, commoners, and even slaves.

The world that Columbus and other European explorers encountered after 1492 was astonishingly diverse. Somewhere between 9 and 14 million people lived in over 350 societies in North America and the Caribbean alone. In fact, their experiences were so varied that historians are still struggling to find stories big enough to encompass the lives of all the people living in this nation of nations.

Chapter Summary

During the thousands of years after bands of Siberian nomads migrated across the Bering Strait to Alaska, their descendants spread throughout the Americas, creating civilizations that rivaled those of ancient Europe, Asia, and Africa.

· Around 1500 B.C.E. Mesoamerica emerged as the hearth of civilization in the Western Hemisphere; a process started by the Olmec’s and brought to its height by the Mayans and Aztecs.

· These Mesoamerican peoples devised complex ways of organizing society, government, and religious worship and built cities remarkable for their art, architecture, and trade.

· Both commerce and migration spread cultural inﬂuences throughout the hemisphere, notably to the islands of the Caribbean basin and to North America, an inﬂuence that endured long after these empires declined.

· The adoption of agriculture gave peoples in the Southwest and the Eastern Woodlands the resource security necessary to develop sedentary cultures of increasing complexity.

· These cultures eventually enjoyed great achievements in culture, architecture, and agriculture.

· Inhabitants of the Great Plains, the Great Basin, the Arctic, and the Subarctic evolved their own diverse cultures, relying for subsistence on ﬁshing, hunting, and gathering.

· Peoples of the Paciﬁc Northwest boasted large populations and prosperous economies as well as an elaborate social, ceremonial, and artistic life.

· The native inhabitants of the Americas transformed their environments in a variety of ways, from pioneering crops that would eventually feed the world to Terraforming Mountains and jungles.

· Nonetheless, natural constraints would leave Native Americans at a disadvantage compared to Europe. The continent’s north-south orientation inhibited the spread of agriculture and technology, and a lack of domesticated animals compared to Europe left Native Americans with little protection against disease.

· For reasons that remain unclear, many of North America’s most impressive early civilizations had collapsed by the end of the ﬁfteenth century. In their wake a diverse array of cultures evolved across the continent.

· In the Southwest, Pueblo Indians were joined by Athabaskan speaking hunters and foragers in an arid landscape.

· In much of eastern North America, stratiﬁed chiefdoms of the Mississippian era gave way to more egalitarian confederacies of independent villages subsisting on farming and hunting.

· Although Americans in the nineteenth, twentieth, and even twenty-ﬁrst centuries have been slow to recognize the fact, the societies of precontact America were remarkably populous, complex, and diverse. Their inﬂuence would continue to be felt in the centuries after contact.

KEY TERMS, PEOPLE, PLACES, CONCEPTS

Madoc:

Madoc, according to folklore, a Welsh prince who sailed to America in 1170, over three hundred years before Christopher Columbus's voyage in 1492. According to the story, he was a son of Owain Gwynedd who took to the sea to flee internecine violence at home. The legend evidently evolved out of a medieval tradition about a Welsh hero's sea voyage, only allusions to which survive. However, it attained its greatest prominence during the Elizabethan era, when English and Welsh writers made the claim that Madoc had come to the Americas as a ploy to assert prior discovery, and hence legal possession, of North America by the Kingdom of England. (Page 4)

Mandan:

The Mandan are a Native American people living in North Dakota. They are enrolled in the Three Affiliated Tribes of the Fort Berthold Reservation, North Dakota. About half of the Mandan still reside in the area of the reservation; the rest reside around the United States and in Canada. Historically they lived along the banks of the Missouri River and two of its tributaries--the Heart and Knife Rivers--in present-day North and South Dakota. Speakers of Mandan, a Siouan language, the people developed a settled culture in contrast to that of more nomadic tribes in the Great Plains region. They established permanent villages featuring large, round, earthen lodges some 40 feet in diameter, surrounding a central plaza. (Pages 4, 12)

Nomad:

Nomadic people, commonly known as itinerants in modern-day contexts, are communities of people who move from one place to another, rather than settling permanently in one location. There are an estimated 30-40 million nomads in the world. Many cultures have traditionally been nomadic, but traditional nomadic behavior is increasingly rare in industrialized countries. (Page 5)

Olmec:

The Olmec were the first major civilization in Mexico. They lived in the tropical lowlands of south-central Mexico, in the modern-day states of Veracruz and Tabasco. The Olmec flourished during Mesoamerica's Formative period, dating roughly from as early as 1500 BCE to about 400 BCE. P re-Olmec cultures had flourished in the area since about 2500 BCE, but by 1600-1500 BCE Early Olmec culture had emerged centered around the San Lorenzo Tenochtitlán site near the coast in southeast Veracruz. (Page 5)

Ecosystem:

Ecosystem refers to a community and/or region studied as a system of functioning relationships between organisms and their environments. (Page 5)

Mesoamerica:

Mesoamerica is a region and cultural area in the Americas, extending approximately from central Mexico to Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and northern Costa Rica, within which a number of pre- Columbian societies flourished before the Spanish colonization of the Americas in the 15th and 16th centuries.

As a cultural area, Mesoamerica is defined by a mosaic of cultural traits developed and shared by its indigenous cultures. Beginning as early as 7000 BC the domestication of maize, beans, squash and chili, as well as the turkey and dog, caused a transition from paleo-Indian hunter-gatherer tribal grouping to the organization of sedentary agricultural villages. (Page 5)

Toltec:

The Toltec culture is an archaeological Mesoamerican culture that dominated a state centered in Tula, Hidalgo, in the early post- classic period of Mesoamerican chronology (ca 800-1000 CE). The later Aztec culture saw the Toltecs as their intellectual and cultural predecessors and described Toltec culture emanating from Tollan (Nahuatl for Tula) as the epitome of civilization, indeed in the Nahuatl language the word 'Toltec' came to take on the meaning 'artisan'. The Aztec oral and pictographic tradition also described the history of the Toltec empire giving lists of rulers and their exploits.

Incas:

The Quechuas (better known as the Incas, from the name for their ruler) controlled an empire that by the fifteenth century stretched 1,000 miles along the Andes Mountains from Ecuador to Chile. It was crisscrossed by an elaborate system of roads and organized under an autocratic government.

Maya:

The Maya is a Mesoamerican civilization, noted for the only known fully developed written language of the pre-Columbian Americas, as well as for its art, architecture, and mathematical and astronomical systems. Initially established during the Pre-Classic period (c. 2000 BC to AD 250), according to the Mesoamerican chronology, many Maya cities reached their highest state of development during the Classic period (c. AD 250 to 900), and continued throughout the Post-Classic period until the arrival of the Spanish.

The Maya civilization shares many features with other Mesoamerican civilizations due to the high degree of interaction and cultural diffusion that characterized the region. Advances such as writing, epigraphy, and the calendar did not originate with the Maya; however, their civilization fully developed them. Maya influence can be detected in Honduras, Belize, Guatemala, and western El Salvador to as far away as central Mexico, more than 1,000 km (620 mi) from the central Maya area. The many outside influences found in Maya art and architecture are thought to have resulted from trade and cultural exchange rather than direct external conquest. The Maya peoples survived the Classic period collapse and the arrival of the Spanish conquistadores and sixteenth-century Spanish colonization of the Americas. Today, the Maya and their descendants form sizable populations throughout the Maya area; they maintain a distinctive set of traditions and beliefs resulting from the merger of pre-Columbian and post-Conquest ideas and cultures. Millions of people speak Mayan languages today. (Page 6)

Aztecs:

The Aztec people were certain ethnic groups of central Mexico, particularly those groups who spoke the Nahuatl language and who dominated large parts of Mesoamerica in the 14th, 15th and 16th centuries, a period referred to as the late post-classic period in Mesoamerican chronology. Aztec (Aztecatl) is the Nahuatl word for 'people from Aztlan', a mythological place for the Nahuatl-speaking culture of the time, and later adopted as the word to define the Mexica people. Often the term 'Aztec' refers exclusively to the Mexica people of Tenochtitlan (now the location of Mexico City), situated on an island in Lake Texcoco, who referred to themselves as Mexica Tenochca or Colhua-Mexica.

Sometimes the term also includes the inhabitants of Tenochtitlan's two principal allied city-states, the Acolhuas of Texcoco and the Tepanecs of Tlacopan, who together with the Mexica formed the Aztec Triple Alliance which has also become known as the 'Aztec Empire'. (Page 6)

Mogollon and Hohokam:

Hohokam is one of the four major prehistoric archaeological Oasisamerica traditions of what is now the American Southwest. Many local residents put the accent on the first syllable (ho'-ho-kahm).Variant spellings in current, official usage include Hobokam, Huhugam and Huhukam. The term Hohokam, borrowed from the Akimel O'odham, is used to define an archaeological culture that existed from the beginning of the current era to about the middle of the 15th century AD. As an abstract construct, this culture was centered on the middle Gila River and lower Salt River drainages, in what is known as the Phoenix basin. This is referred to as the Hohokam Core Area, as opposed to the Hohokam Peripheries; or adjacent regions into which the Hohokam Culture extended. In North America, the Hohokam was the only culture to rely on irrigation canals to water their crops, and their irrigation systems supported the largest population in the Southwest by AD 1300. Archaeologists working at a major archaeological dig in the 1990s in the Tucson Basin, along the Santa Cruz River, identified a culture and people that were ancestors of the Hohokam that might have occupied southern Arizona as early as 2000 BC. This prehistoric group from the Early Agricultural Period, grew corn, lived year round in sedentary villages and developed sophisticated irrigation canals. Mesoamerican crops and farming techniques began making their way north to the American Southwest by 1000 B.C.E. At ﬁrst the most successful farmers in the region were the Mogollon and Hohokam peoples; two cultures that ﬂourished in New Mexico and southern Arizona during the ﬁrst millennium C.E. Both tended to cluster their dwellings near streams, relying either on ﬂood-plain irrigation or a system of ﬂoodgates and canals to sustain their crops. The Mogollon came to be the master potters of the Southwest. The Hohokam pioneered vast and complex irrigation systems in arid southern Arizona that allowed them to support one of the largest populations in precontact North America. (Pages 6-7)

Anasazi:

The most widespread and best known of the Ancestral Pueblo people cultures, the Anasazi (“enemy’s ancestors” in the Navajo language), developed in the “four corners,” where the states of Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah meet. Anasazi society lacked a rigid class structure. The religious leaders and warriors labored much as the rest of the people did. In fact, they engaged in warfare only as a means of self-defense (Hopi means “Peaceful People”), and there is little evidence of human sacrifice or human trophies. Environmental factors shaped Anasazi culture and eventually caused its demise.

Toward the end of the thirteenth century, a lengthy drought and the pressure of new arrivals from the north began to restrict the territory of the Anasazi’s. Into their peaceful world came the aggressive Navajos and Apaches, followed two centuries later by Spaniards marching up from the south. (Page 7)

Ancient Pueblo People:

Ancient Pueblo People, were an ancient Native American culture centered on the present-day Four Corners area of the United States, comprising southern Utah, northern Arizona, northwest New Mexico, and southern Colorado. They lived in 'houses' called pueblos in which they lifted up ladders during enemy attacks, providing the Pueblo peoples security. The cultural group has often been referred to in archaeology as the Anasazi, although the term is not preferred by contemporary Pueblo peoples. (Page 7)

Pueblos:

The Pueblo people are Native American people in the Southwestern United States comprising several different language groups and two major cultural divisions, one organized by matrilineal kinship systems and the other having a patrilineal system. These determine the clan membership of children, and lines of inheritance and descent. Their traditional economy is based on agriculture and trade. At the time of Spanish encounter in the 16th century, they were living in villages that the Spanish called pueblos, meaning "towns". Of the 21 surviving pueblos in the 21st century, Taos, Acoma, Zuni, and Hopi are the best-known. The main pueblos are located primarily in the present-day states of New Mexico and Arizona.

Athapaskan-speakers

Athapaskan-speaking peoples – ancestors of the Navajos and the Apaches – began filtering from the north and west into the deserts and southern prairies of North America some five to possibly 10 or more centuries ago, at some point during the fluorescence of the Puebloan peoples. Athapaskan is a large family of indigenous languages of North America, located in in western North America in three groups of contiguous languages: Northern, Pacific Coast and Southern (or Apachean).

Adena and Hopewell peoples:

The Adena-Hopewell culture, centered in the Ohio River valley, left behind enormous earthworks and burial mounds—some of them elaborately shaped like great snakes, birds, or other animals. Evidence from the mounds suggests a complex social structure and a specialized division of labor. More-over, the Hopewell Indians developed an elaborate trade network that spanned the continent.

The Hopewell Culture: Around 200 B.C, the beginning of the Middle Woodland period, a new Native American culture developed that spread throughout the Midwest (then known as the Eastern Woodland) identified as Hopewell. There was not a specific tribe that can accredited with the establishment of the Hopewell principles, instead Hopewell is more of a culture and way of life that was experienced throughout multiple areas spanning from places including: Nebraska to Mississippi, Indiana to Minnesota, Virginia to the epicenter area of Ohio. Specifically in Ohio the culture was heavily influential in the Southeastern region that consists of the Ohio Valley, the Scioto Valley, and the Miami Valley. Typically Hopewell tribes resided near major waterways and abundantly resourced rivers to support their agricultural lifestyle and expand the complex trading system they were cultivating. A Hopewell cultured settlement was generally smaller in size and temporary, instead residing in one area for a certain amount of time before relocating to discover fresher resources and advance trading routes. These miniscule hamlets consisted of only a few rectangular homes with thatched roofs and daub walls. As preceding tribes did before the Hopewell communities gained sustenance and supplies through techniques including: hunting and gathering and farming. One definitive practice that represents the Hopewell culture was the focus on an agricultural system. These societies emphasized planting indigenous seeds that were abundant in the fertile regions where the villages resided in. Some of the major plants they cultivated included: sunflower, squash, and maygrass. The switch from a concentration on hunting to that of agriculture represented the official birth of mass farming within the Native American network. The Hopewell communities are also defined by their intricate trading system. Routes connected societies all throughout the Eastern region, linking distant areas such as the Great Lakes to Florida so that tribes were able to obtain and utilize exotic goods not found within their settlements. The system was arranged so that those peoples residing at the important locations of the trading channel would receive a variety of resources from all connecting regions, then they either shipped those exotic goods to different areas or developed finished products such as tools to transport using local dispatching systems. Hopewell art was considered some of the finest created during that era because they had access to a variety of resources and were not limited by regional assets. With varying resources to utilize, the Hopewell culture allowed the sustaining of an artisan class that could specialize in developing different arts and tools. Much of the art that was produced depicted a multitude of animals (deer, bear, and birds were the most popular) and in many cases animal effigies were used to depict the guardian spirit of a shaman. The Hopewell culture coincided with the introduction to shapes such as bowls and jars so imprints of figures were also placed on pottery. In the communities residing in Ohio, copper, mica, and obsidian were three dominant exotic goods that the tribes desired. Architecture is the prominent representation of the Hopewell culture. Earthworks and burial mounds which were used for a multitude of ceremonies such as religious practices and funerals were discovered intact throughout the Midwestern region; these mounds provide insight to this relatively unknown lifestyle. There was a variety of earthworks created that ranged from geometric complexes, hilltop enclosures, and conical mounds which could be found around fertile rivers or stream valleys. Many of them, considered to be used for burial purposes, were filled with a varied amount of exotic goods which demonstrated a possible hierarchical system within the community. The most prominent example of Hopewell burial mounds can be found in Chillicothe, Ohio at the Mound City Group. Ohio is considered to be the epicenter for the most impressive Hopewell earthworks.

Around 400 A.D Hopewell culture began to decline for an unknown reason. The prediction is that there was a cultural collapse within the communities as the succeeding settlements showed signs of a lifestyle switch to larger, permanent, more isolated societies. Also, the introduction of the bow and arrow made for a shift in hunting, gathering, and war which may have forced Hopewell societies to become more secluded for survival. Mounds became less prominent and the trading routes diminished but the legacy of the Hopewell people can still be viewed today.

The Adena culture refers to the prehistoric Native Americans that lived in southern Ohio and neighboring regions of West Virginia, Kentucky, and Indiana during the Early Woodland Period. They were the first people in this region to settle down in small villages, cultivate crops, use pottery vessels, acquire exotic raw materials, such as copper and marine shell, to make ornaments and jewelry, and bury their honored dead in conical burial mounds.

This transition from a purely hunting and gathering way of life to a more settled farming way of life sometimes is referred to as the "Neolithic Revolution," but in Ohio, the process was more evolutionary than revolutionary. The Late Archaic ancestors of the Adena already had begun to gather intensively many of the plants that would become the staple crops in the Early Woodland Period and they occasionally made pottery and used copper and shell to make ornaments.

The Adena grew a variety of plants in their gardens, including squash, sunflower, sumpweed, goosefoot, knotweed, and maygrass. This set of native plants often is referred to as the Eastern Agricultural Complex. The Ohio and Mississippi valleys were one of only seven regions in the world where people turned local plants into the basis for a food-producing economy. The consequences of this change in how people made a living would be far-reaching.

The Adena lived in small villages near their gardens, but they likely moved frequently as they continued to follow a hunting and gathering way of life, which they supplemented with the harvest from their gardens. Adena pottery consisted of large, thick-walled vessels that likely were used to cook the ground-up seeds of the Eastern Agricultural Complex into gruel something like oatmeal. The Adena cemented their ties to particular regions by burying their dead in prominent mounds that may have served as territorial markers. Sometimes the mounds would be accompanied by small, circular earthen enclosures that surrounded ritual spaces. The Miamisburg Mound, in Montgomery County, is the largest example of an Adena burial mound in Ohio. By 100 B.C., some of the Adena groups had begun to build larger earthworks and expand their efforts to acquire exotic raw materials. These groups became the Hopewell culture, but many people continued to follow the old ways and in some regions, such as southwestern Ohio, the Adena culture persisted well into the 1st century A.D. It is important to emphasize that the Adena culture is not the name of a Native American tribe. We do not know what these people might have called themselves. Instead, it is a term of archaeological convenience that encompasses similarities in artifact style, architecture, and other cultural practices that distinguish the Adena culture from earlier and later cultures in the region. The name comes from the name of the estate of Governor Thomas Worthington in Chillicothe. A large mound on this property was called the Adena Mound. Since this mound site exemplified all the significant features of the culture, it became the "type site" and the name of the site was applied to the entire culture. (Page7)

Cahokia:

Cahokia was the largest and most influential urban settlement in the Mississippian culture which developed advanced societies across much of what is now the Southeastern United States, beginning more than 500 years before European contact. Cahokia's population at its peak in the 1200s would not be surpassed by any city in the United States until the late 18th century. Today, Cahokia Mounds is considered the largest and most complex archaeological site north of the great Pre-Columbian cities in Mexico.

Cahokia Mounds State Historic Site is located on the site of an ancient Native American city (c. 600-1400 CE) situated directly across the Mississippi River from modern St. Louis, Missouri. This historic park lies in Southern Illinois between East St. Louis and Collinsville.

The park, operated by the Illinois Historic P reservation Agency, is quite large, covering 2,200 acres (890 ha), or about 3.5 square miles, and containing about 80 mounds, but the ancient city was actually much larger. In its heyday, Cahokia covered about six square miles and included about 120 human-made earthen mounds in a wide range of sizes, shapes, and functions. (Pages 7-8)

The Mississippian culture:

The Mississippian culture, centered in the Mississippi River valley, resembled the Mayan and Aztec societies in its intensive agriculture, substantial towns built around central plazas, temple mounds (vaguely resembling pyramids), and death cults, which involved human torture and sacrifice. The Mississippians developed a specialized labor force, an effective government, and an extensive trading network. They worshipped the sun. (Page 7-8)

Eskimos: (Inuits)

Eskimos are indigenous peoples who have traditionally inhabited the circumpolar region from eastern Siberia, across Alaska (United States), Canada, and Greenland. There are two main groups that are referred to as Eskimo: Yupik and Inuit. A third group, the Aleut, is related. (Page 9)

Inuits:

Among the last Native groups to come into North America, the Inuit crossed the Bering land bridge sometime between 6000 B.C. and 2000 B.C., according to various sources. Anthropologists have discerned several different cultural epochs that began around the Bering Sea. The Denbigh, also known as the Small Tool culture, began some 5000 years ago, and over the course of the next millennia it spread westward though Arctic Alaska and Canada. Oriented to the sea and to living with snow, the Denbigh most likely originated the snow house. Characterized by the use of flint blades, skin-covered boats, and bows and arrows, the Denbigh was transformed further east into the Dorset Tradition by about 1000 B.C.; Most of present-day Canada and Alaska were equally inhospitable to agriculture. In the farthest northern reaches—a treeless belt of Arctic tundra— temperatures fell below freezing for most of the year. The Subarctic, although densely forested, had only about 100 frost-free days each year. As a result, the peoples of both regions survived by ﬁshing and hunting. The Inuit, or Eskimos, of northern Alaska harvested whales from their umiaks, boats made by stretching walrus skin over a driftwood frame and that could bear more than a ton of weight. In the central Arctic, they tracked seals. (Page 9)

Muskogean:

Muskogean is an indigenous language family of the Southeastern United States. Though there is an ongoing debate concerning their interrelationships, the Muskogean languages are generally divided into two branches, Eastern Muskogean and Western Muskogean. They are agglutinative languages. The Muskogean family consists of six languages which are still spoken: Alabama, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek-Seminole, Koasati, and Mikasuki, as well as the now-extinct Apalachee, Houma (generally considered a dialect of Choctaw), and Hitchiti (the latter generally considered a dialect of Mikasuki)

Chickasaw:

The Chickasaw are Native American people originally from the region that would become the Southeastern United States. They are of the Muskogean linguistic group and are federally enrolled as the Chickasaw Nation. Sometime prior to the first European contact, the Chickasaw migrated and moved east of the Mississippi River, where they settled mostly in present-day northeast Mississippi. (Page 13m)

Choctaw:

The Choctaw are a Native American people originally from the Southeastern United States (Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, and Louisiana). The Choctaw language belongs to the Muskogean linguistic group. Noted 20th century anthropologist John Swanton suggested that the name was derived from a Choctaw leader.

(Page 13m)

Natchez:

The Natchez are a Native American people who originally lived in the Natchez Bluffs area, near the present-day city of Natchez, Mississippi. They spoke a language isolate that has no known close relatives, although it may be very distantly related to the Muskogean languages of the Creek Confederacy. The Natchez are noted for being the only Mississippian culture with complex chiefdom characteristics to have survived long into the period after the European colonization of America began. Others had generally declined a century or two before European encounter. The Natchez are also noted for having had an unusual social system of nobility classes and exogamous marriage practices. It was a strongly matrilineal society with descent reckoned along female lines. The paramount chief named the Great Sun was always the son of the Female Sun, whose daughter would be the mother of the next Great Sun. This ensured that the chiefdom stayed under the control of the single Sun lineage.Ethnologists have not reached consensus on how the Natchez social system originally functioned, and the topic is somewhat controversial. Around 1730, after several wars with the French, the Natchez were defeated and dispersed. Most survivors were sold by the French into slavery in the West Indies; others took refuge with other tribes, such as the Muskogean Chickasaw and Creek, and the Iroquoian-speaking Cherokee. Today, most Natchez families and communities are found in Oklahoma, where the Natchez Nation is a treaty tribe. Members are also enrolled in the federally recognized Cherokee and Muscogee (Creek) nations. Two Natchez communities are recognized by the state of South Carolina. . (Page 13m)

Iroquois:

The Iroquois also known as the Haudenosaunee or the 'People of the Longhouse', are a league of several nations and tribes of indigenous people of North America. After the Iroquoian-speaking peoples of present-day central and upstate New York coalesced as distinct tribes, by the 16th century or earlier, they came together in an association known today as the Iroquois League, or the 'League of Peace and Power'. The original Iroquois League was often known as the Five Nations, as it was composed of the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga and Seneca nations. After the Tuscarora nation joined the League in 1722, the Iroquois became known as the Six Nations. The Iroquoian languages are a First Nation / Native American language family. They are known for their general lack of labial consonants. The Iroquoian languages were originally spoken over a very large expanse of territory, including much of the southern Canada (Ontario and Quebec), particularly along the St. Lawrence River and the Great Lakes, through large portions of the Mid-Atlantic States, and down into the Carolinas. Today, speakers of Iroquoian languages are still found in many of these same areas, but the largest number of them are now in Oklahoma, among the Cherokee.

Cherokee:

The Cherokee are a Native American people historically settled in the Southeastern United States. Linguistically, they are part of the Iroquoian language family. In the 19th century, historians and ethnographers recorded their oral tradition that told of the tribe having migrated south in ancient times from the Great Lakes region, where other Iroquoian-speaking peoples were located. (Page 13m)

Egalitarian:

Egalitarian means exhibiting or asserting a belief in the equality of humans in a social, political, or economic context. (Page 14)

Algonquians:

The Algonquian Native Americans are the most extensive and numerous North American groups with hundreds of original tribes speaking several related dialects of the language group, Algonkian. They lived in most of the Canadian territory below the Hudson Bay and between the Atlantic Ocean and the Rocky Mountains. The term "Algonquian" refers to "A place for spearing fishes and eels." Because Northern weather patterns made growing food difficult, the Algonquian moved their families from place to place to fish, hunt, trap, and gather roots, seeds, wild rice, and berries. They trekked on foot and with canoes made of birch bark in warm weather, then used snowshoes and toboggans in snowy weather. Their garments, as well as their shelters, known as wigwams, were fashioned with skins. They were also occasionally sheathed with birch bark. The Algonquian men were the leaders and the heads of the family and sons inherited territorial hunting rights from their fathers. The shaman, or medicine man, occupied an influential position in Algonquian social life. It was assumed he could heal sick persons and traffic with the spirit world, whose constituents were a great spirit, lesser spirits who controlled the elements, evil spirits responsible for illness and misfortune, and benevolent spirits who purveyed good luck and health. (Page 15)

Chapter Discussion Questions

1. How did native cultures differ region to region, and what accounts for these differences?

Native Americans had distinct cultural traditions depending on their tribes. Each tribe had its own values and belief systems that differed from those of other tribes. The region they were positioned in had much to do with their cultural traditions. The natural resources available, the weather, the animals and what they meant to them, etc.

Some Differences:

· There were over 200 North American tribes speaking over 200 different languages.

· Lifestyles varied greatly. Most tribes were domestic, but the Lakota followed the buffalo as nomads.

· Most engaged in war, but the Apache were particularly feared, while the Hopis were pacifistic. Most societies were ruled by men, but the Iroquois women chose the leaders.

· Native Americans lived in wigwams, hogans, igloos, tepees, and longhouses.

· Some relied chiefly on hunting and fishing, while others domesticated crops.

· The Algonkian chiefs tried to achieve consensus, but the Natchez "Sun" was an absolute monarch.

· The totem pole was not a universal Indian symbol. It was used by tribes such as the Chinook in the Pacific Northwest to ward off evil spirits and represent family history.

2. How did the native inhabitants of the Americas transform their environments?

The Native Americans used natural resources in every aspect of their lives. They used animal skins (deerskin) as clothing. Shelter was made from the material around them (saplings, leaves, small branches, animal fur). Native peoples of the past farmed, hunted, and fished. They used natural resources such as rock, twine, bark, and oyster shell to farm, hunt, and fish. Through their agricultural practices, Native Americans increased soil erosion and sediment yields to the Delaware River basin." Researchers found that prehistoric people decreased forest cover to reorient their settlements and intensify corn production. They also contributed to increased sedimentation in valley bottoms about 700 to 1,000 years ago, much earlier than previously thought. The findings suggest that prehistoric land use was the initial cause of increased sedimentation in the valley bottoms, and sedimentation was later amplified by wetter and stormier conditions.

What natural constraints put them at a disadvantage to Europeans?

There were a few natural constraints. The Native American Indian did not understand the concept of land ownership, so it made it very hard to deal with peoples who felt land ownership was their due. Secondly, lying was not an acceptable practice. If a native gave his word, he kept it. There were no gray areas, nor did he go back on it. Thirdly, most tribes loved and honored God. Their whole lives were dependent upon the living in the spiritual way. They did not understand the white fear of God, or their lack of walking the spiritual path.

3. What was life like in the Americas on the eve of European contact?

The societies of precontact America were remarkably populous, complex, and diverse. Their inﬂuence would continue to be felt in the centuries after contact. Native American people developed inventive and creative cultures. They cultivated plants for food, dyes, medicines, and textiles; domesticated animals; established extensive patterns of trade; built cities; produced monumental architecture; developed intricate systems of religious beliefs; and constructed a wide variety of systems of social and political organization ranging from kin-based bands and tribes to city-states and confederations.

Native Americans not only adapted to diverse and demanding environments, they also reshaped the natural environments to meet their needs. And after the arrival of Europeans in the New World, Native Americans struggled intently to preserve the essentials of their diverse cultures while adapting to radically changing conditions.

4. Discuss the early migration patterns of the peoples that first settled in the Americas.

Over 15,000 years before the present era, the first human inhabitants crossed the Bering Land Bridge migrating from Asia and Siberia into what is now Alaska. The Land Bridge Theory, also known as the Bering Strait Theory or Beringia Theory, is a popular model of migration into the New World. This theory was first proposed in 1590 by José de Acosta and has been widely accepted since the 1930s. The Land Bridge Theory proposes that people migrated from Siberia to Alaska across a land bridge that spanned the current day Bering Strait. The first people to populate the Americas were believed to have migrated across the Bering Land Bridge while tracking large game animal herds.

5. Compare and contrast the early cultures of ancient Mexico.

The most crucial adaptation for the development of North America occurred in Mesoamerica about 9,000 years ago, when the population began to domesticate plants, inciting an agricultural revolution in the Western Hemisphere. Because farming allowed these people to settle in one place, they began to build complex and large urban cultures. In these cities work became more specialized, which resulted in the development of palaces covered with art, marketplaces, schools, and suburbs for the common people. Mesoamerican crops and farming techniques began making their way north to the American Southwest by 1000 B.C.E. at first the most successful farmers in the region were the Mogollon and Hohokam peoples, two cultures that flourished in New Mexico and southern Arizona during the first millennium C.E. Both tended to cluster their dwellings near streams, which allowed them to adopt the systems of irrigation as well as the maize cultivation of central Mexico. The Mogollon came to be the master potters of the Southwest. The Hohokam pioneered vast and complex irrigation systems in arid southern Arizona that allowed them to support one of the largest populations in precontact North America. The Olmec’s were the first city-builders in the Americas, but their accomplishments were outdone by the achievements of the Mayans, who developed cities with bridges, aqueducts, and observatories as well as a sophisticated system of mathematics, a highly accurate calendar, a written language. These great Mesoamerican cultures did not survive; for reasons still undetermined by scholars, they disappeared by 950 C.E. Yet Mesoamerican influence is clearly visible in the peoples of the Southwest, where farming had spread by 1000 B.C.E. and where some architectural styles clearly resembled those of Mexico.

6. Identify and describe the early cultures of the American Southwest.

The arid Southwest hosted irrigation-based cultures, elements of which persist today and heirs of which (the Hopis, Zunis, and others) still live in the adobe pueblos erected by their ancestors. Three significant cultures emerged in the region around 300 B.C. All three were based on a farming society augmented by hunting and gathering. They included the Anasazi, who erected cliff houses in northern Arizona and New Mexico, Utah and Colorado; the Hohokam, who dug complex irrigation systems in central Arizona; and the Mogollon, who hunted and farmed along the rivers of western New Mexico and eastern Arizona. Water was a precious natural resource in Southwestern societies, which kept strict rules about its use down to the youngest child. Some argue that these cultures were the most sophisticated of any Native American society north of present-day Mexico during the first 1,200 years A.D.

7. Identify and describe key elements of the cultures that resided in the Eastern Woodlands, Great Plains, Great Basin, Pacific Northwest, Subarctic and Arctic areas.

The Great Basin culture area, as its name implies, comprises a huge natural desert basin comprising practically all of Utah and Nevada, parts of Colorado, Wyoming, Idaho, Oregon and California, as well as the northern fringes of Arizona and New Mexico. Death Valley, situated below sea level and reaching summer temperatures as high as 140º F, represents the Basin’s geographic extreme. Because of that harsh environment, Great Basin Native Americans at the time of Contact were primarily gatherers who foraged and dug for anything edible - seeds, nuts, berries, roots, snakes, lizards, insects and rodents - and thus have been referred to as "diggers". They were also hunters, as well as, to a lesser extent, fishermen. Because of the meager food supplies, people traveled for the most part in small family groups, with minimal tribal identity and few community rites. The major groupings of peoples are Paiute, Ute and Shoshoni, with various subdivisions and offshoots. By the 18th and 19th centuries, some bands had become horse-mounted hunters on the Great Plains to the east.

The Great Plains culture area stretches west from the Mississippi River Valley to the Rocky Mountains, and south from varying latitudes in present-day Manitoba, Saskatchewan and Alberta to southern Texas. This vast region is predominantly treeless grassland. The Great Plains culture area is unique in the sense that the typical Indian subsistence pattern and related ways of life evolved long after Contact. It was the advent of horses, brought to North America by whites - the first horses since the post-Pleistocene extinction of the native species - that made the new life on the Plains possible. With increased mobility and prowess, former village and farming tribes of the river valleys became nomadic hunters, especially of the buffalo. Some other tribes migrated onto the Plains from elsewhere to partake of this life-style. With time, varying tribal customs blended into what is sometimes referred to as the Composite Plains Tribe, shaped by the horse and buffalo culture. At the time of the Contact, it is believed that most of the tribes were villagers and farmers, or at least semi-nomads, with settlements located especially along the Missouri River. Some of the most well-known tribes of the area: Sioux, Pawnee, Blackfoot, Crow, Cheyenne, Arapaho.

The Subarctic culture area spans the entire North American continent; all in all, it covers most of Canada as well as much of Alaska’s interior. The scattered and few aboriginal peoples of the Subarctic had to cope with long, harsh winters, as well as summers that were all too short and plagued with mosquitoes and black flies. Most peoples were nomadic, hunting, fishing, and foraging in small bands united by dialect and kinship. For many bands, life revolved around the seasonal migrations of the big game between the tundra and the taiga. The fur of the mammals was as valuable to the peoples for warmth as the meat was for sustenance. Subarctic peoples can be organized linguistically into two groups - the Athapascans and Algonquians. The westernmost Athapascans lived near and influenced by the Eskimos.

The Arctic culture area runs for more than 5,000 miles from eastern Siberia across the northern stretches of Alaska and Canada all the way to Greenland. The peoples who settled the upper regions of North America out of Siberia came relatively late to the continent, circa 3000 B.C. They came in skin and wooden boats, or perhaps by riding the ice floes.

They were of a different stock than other Native Americans, generally of a shorter and broader stature, rounder face, lighter skin, and with the epicanthic eye fold, the small fold of skin covering the inner corner of the eye and typical of Asian peoples. They are known historically as the Eskimos and the Aleuts. The Inuits and Aleuts adapted remarkably well to the harsh Arctic environment, with hunting as the primary means of subsistence and supplemented by fishing. Those parts of their catch they didn’t eat, they used to make clothing, housing, boats, different tools, weapons, and even heating and cooking fuel. There were several Eskimo groups in the area. The Central Eskimos demonstrated what is considered typical "Eskimo" ways of life - igloos (houses made of ice), kayaks, sleds, and dog teams.

Everywhere in this environment the inhabitants depended on a combination of fishing, gathering, and hunting, but around 2000 B.C.E. some groups in the Southeast began to cultivate gourds, pumpkins, and later maize. Most of the ancient Eastern Woodlands peoples did not adopt agriculture at all, and depended on hunting and gathering for their subsistence. Among the cultures that developed in the Great Plains, the Great Basin, the Subarctic and Arctic regions, and in the Pacific Northwest, there was great cultural diversity. Great farming villages developed along the tree-lined streams and rivers of the Great Plains, but other people in this same region migrated with the seasons and relied for their survival almost entirely on hunting buffalo. In the Great Basin, while men did track and trap certain animals for food, the staples of their diet were seeds, nuts, and plants gathered by women. The Inuit, people who lived in what is today the far north of Canada and Alaska, survived exclusively by hunting and fishing. Those people farther south in the Subarctic migrated from summer fishing camps, to berry patches in the fall, to moose and caribou hunting grounds in winter. In some important ways the early people of the Pacific Northwest were among the most culturally sophisticated in North America. The abundance of food and other natural resources in this region allowed for considerable leisure time to create works of art, plus an elaborate social and ceremonial life.

8. Discuss how disease impacted the native civilizations.

Prior to the arrival of the Europeans, American Indians were remarkably free of serious diseases. People did not often die from diseases. As the European explorers and colonists began to arrive, this changed and the consequences were disastrous for Native American people. The death tolls from the newly introduced European diseases often reached 80-90 percent. Entire groups of people vanished before the tidal wave of disease.

CHAPTER REVIEW

1. The centers of Mesoamerican culture in the first millennium C.E. developed primarily in:

A) New York

B) Mexico

C) Canada

D) California

2. The end of the Ice Age brought:

A) new inhabitants to the Americas

B) European settler

C) A change in the physical environment

D) All of these are correct

3. The builders of the first cities in North America were:

A) the Olmecs

B) the Hohokam

C) the Apache

D) the Spanish under Columbus

4. The Mayan civilization is famous for its:

A) written language

B) discovery of zero

C) calendar

D) all of these are correct

5. The Mississippian culture was famous for Cahokia – a port city (and mound site) of more than 10,000 people near what present-day city?

A) St. Louis

B) Los Angeles

C) New Orleans

D) Chicago

6. The primary source of food for the hunters of the Great Plains was:

A) Buffalo

B) Wheat

C) Fish

D) Maize

7. The Natives of the Pacific Northwest used canoes to:

A) net salmon

B) harpoon whales

C) gather clams

D) all of these are correct

8. Why were Native American societies more susceptible to communicable diseases than their European counterparts after contact?

A) Native American societies had too many domesticated animals that transmitted disease

B) Native American societies did not have enough domesticated animals transmitting disease

C) Native Americans had fewer cities than Europeans

D) Tuberculosis was more contagious than smallpox

9. How did the north-south axis of the American affect the development of its societies?

A) it facilitated the transmission of plants and animals from one region to another

B) it created geographic diversity that made communication between societies more difficult

C) climate and geographic diversity allowed the Native American groups to share agricultural practices easily

D) all of these are correct

10. Right before European contact, the following societies collapsed EXCEPT:

A) Hopewell

B) Anasazi

C) Hohokam

D) Pueblos

11. The first human inhabitants of the western hemisphere came from:

A) western Europe.

B) northeastern Asia.

C) Africa.

D) the Middle East.

12. The Mayan civilization fell because of:

A) military invasion.

B) epidemic disease.

C) earthquakes.

D) unknown reasons.

13. The earliest inhabitants of the eastern woodlands relied on each of the following for food EXCEPT:

A) fishing.

B) agriculture.

C) hunting.

D) gathering.

14. The people of the Pacific Northwest traveled in canoes to:

A) net salmon.

B) harpoon whales.

C) gather clams.

D) All of these are correct.

15. Which of the following foods was not native to the Americas?

A) corn

B) rice

C) squash

D) potatoes

16. One famous legacy of the tribes of the lower Mississippi valley, including the Natchez, is their

A) pyramids.

B) mound building.

C) totem poles.

D) longhouses.

17. The Caribbean cultures of the fifteenth century were strongly influenced by

A) the Algonquins.

B) the Europeans.

C) the Mayans.

D) the Inuits.

18. The Aztec society was

A) peaceful.

B) impoverished.

C) egalitarian.

D) highly stratified.

19. Although misnamed "Indians" by Columbus, the Native Americans in the Western Hemisphere were the descendants of Asians who came to the "New World" thousands of years before the Europeans by:

A) crossing a temporary land bridge across the Bering Strait from Siberia to Alaska.

B) sailing large ships from islands in the central Pacific.

C) sailing small, simple boats from what is now China and Indonesia.

D) migrating across Antarctica, then moving further north.

20. One major difference between Aztec civilization and that of the Spanish was that the Aztecs:

A) did not practice slavery.

B) did not possess a written language.

C) had no urban centers of great size.

D) did not expand their territory by sailing across oceans.

21. Aztecs were known for all of the following EXCEPT:

A) participating in a lively trade in various goods.

B) engaging in mass human sacrifice to the Sun God.

C) having friendly alliances with neighboring tribes.

D) a high susceptibility to smallpox and other diseases brought by the Spanish.

22. King James I wanted to:

A) put an end to English efforts to settle North America.

B) increase England's power and wealth by imitating in North America what the Spanish had done in Mexico and much of South America.

C) promote his ideals of democracy, free enterprise, and Catholicism throughout the world, and especially in the "New World."

D) treat the native peoples living in North America with more respect and compassion than the Spanish had done in South America.

23. Which of the following civilizations was not located in Mesoamerica?

A) Olmecs

B) Incas

C) Maya

D) Aztecs

24. Many pre-Columbian tribes east of the Mississippi River were loosely linked by:

A) common linguistic roots.

B) economic compacts.

C) the Iroquois Confederacy.

D) intertribal religious festivals.

25. The great mounds, which served as burial places and would so fascinate Europeans were built by:

A) Anasazi

B) Adena and Hopewell cultures

C) Mogollon and Hohokam peoples

D) Numic speaking people

26. African and American Indian societies tended to be matrilineal, which meant:

A) only women would be the heads of families.

B) men could not inherit property

C) people traced their heredity through their mothers.

D) women were in control of the social institutions.

E) only mothers could act as political leaders.

27. Which of the following animals had become extinct after the last Ice Age, and was reintroduced by the Europeans?

A) pigs

B) bison

C) horses

D) sheep

28. The origins of the majority of human existence in North America began:

A) as a result of the development of the wheel.

B) long after the last ice age ended.

C) from the southern tip of South America.

D) with migrations from Eurasia over the Bering Strait.

E) with the explorations of Christopher Columbus.

29. All of the following societies had mysteriously collapsed before the arrival of Europeans except:

A) Aztecs

B) Mogollon

C) Olmecs

D) Mississippians

30. The pre-Columbian American peoples in the Pacific Northwest:

A) were the most peaceful of pre-Columbian societies.

B) depended on fishing more than agriculture for their survival

C) developed political systems as sophisticated as the Maya and Aztecs

D) were known as the Inuit.

E) did not have permanent settlements

31. The following crops which have become integral to diets all over the world, are all native to the Americas except for:

A) potatoes

B) peanuts

C) coffee

D) corn

32. The pre-Columbian North American peoples in the Southwest:

A) created an economy exclusively based on trade.

B) primarily pursued moose and caribou for sustenance.

C) lived in small, nomadic tribes.

D) were primarily hunters of small game.

E) built large irrigation systems for farming.

Fill in the blank.

33. The adoption of ________ gave people in the Southwest and the Eastern Woodlands the security necessary to develop complex societies.

Answer: agriculture

34. The Natchez practiced a form of kinship in which ________ owned land, tools, and even children.

Answer: women

35. The ________ lived along the Atlantic seaboard and the Great Lakes, in communities smaller than those of either the Muskogean’s or the Iroquois.

Answer: Algonquin’s

36. Between 10,000 and 2,500 years ago, many regional ________ developed among the peoples of the Americas. Answer: cultures

37. No innovation proved more crucial to human history than native manipulation of ________.

Answer: plants

38. Between the third and ninth centuries, the ________ Empire founded some 50 urban centers scattered throughout the Yucatán Peninsula, Belize, Guatemala, and Honduras.

Answer: Mayan

39. The master potters of the American Southwest were the ________ people.

Answer: Mogollon

40. The aridity of the __________ made it a dynamic and unpredictable place to live.

Answer: plains

41. Pioneers in Mesoamerica began domesticating ________ about 10,000 years ago.

Answer: plants

42. A distinctive feature of Iroquois and Huron architecture was the ________.

Answer: longhouse

43. Archaeologists discovered evidence of 10,000-year-old domesticated ________ in a cave in southern Mexico; the same would not appear in the American Southwest for another 7,000 years.

Answer: squash

44. The significant Indian trading center near present-day St. Louis was called ________.

Answer: Cahokia

45. Ideal environments for the evolution and transmission of disease were created when Eurasian peoples embraced ________ and started living with one another and domesticated animals.

Answer: agriculture

True or False

46. Today it is generally believed that there were fewer Native Americans when the Europeans arrived than there were a century later.

True

False

47. The large Indian trading center in the Mississippi River Valley near present-day St. Louis was Cahokia.

True

False

48. Some historians have suggested that European diseases virtually exterminated many native tribes.

True

False

49. The civilizations and political systems of pre-Columbian Native Americans north of Mexico were less elaborate than those to the south.

True

False

50. The early Native peoples who inhabited most of present-day Canada and Alaska, survived mostly by hunting and fishing.

True

False

Fill in the Blank

Fill in the blanks with the correct term from the word list.

Word List

A) Ecosystem	B) Maya	C) Madoc	D) Incas
E) Anasazi	F) Mandan	G) Egalitarian	H) North America
I) Mesoamerica	J) Cahokia	K) Adena-Hopewell culture	L) Natchez
M) Mississippian culture	N) Iroquois	O) Choctaw	P) Chickasaw
Q) Cherokee	R) Toltec	S) Hohokam	T) Ancient Pueblo People
U) Olmec	V) Aztec	W) Nomadic

1. The Quechuas (better known as the ________________________, from the name for their ruler) controlled an empire that by the fifteenth century stretched 1,000 miles along the Andes Mountains from Ecuador to Chile. It was crisscrossed by an elaborate system of roads and organized under an autocratic government.

2. The most widespread and best known of the Ancestral Pueblo people cultures, the _______________________ (“enemy’s ancestors” in the Navajo language), developed in the “four corners,” where the states of Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah meet. Anasazi society lacked a rigid class structure.

3. ________________________ refers to a community and/or region studied as a system of functioning relationships between organisms and their environments.

4. ________________________ means exhibiting or asserting a belief in the equality of humans in a social, political, or economic context.

5. The________________________ is a Mesoamerican civilization, noted for the only known fully developed written language of the pre-Columbian Americas, as well as for its art, architecture, and mathematical and astronomical systems.

6. ________________________ was a Welsh prince who sailed to America in 1170, over three hundred years before Christopher Columbus's voyage in 1492. According to the story, he was a son of Owain Gwynedd who took to the sea to flee internecine violence at home. The legend evidently evolved out of a medieval tradition about a Welsh hero's sea voyage, only allusions to which survive.

7. The ________________________ people were certain ethnic groups of central Mexico, particularly those groups who spoke the Nahuatl language and who dominated large parts of Mesoamerica in the 14th, 15th and 16th centuries, a period referred to as the late post-classic period in Mesoamerican chronology.

8. ________________________ is a region and cultural area in the Americas, extending approximately from central Mexico to Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and northern Costa Rica, within which a number of pre- Columbian societies flourished before the Spanish colonization of the Americas in the 15th and 16th centuries.

9. ________________________ people, commonly known as itinerants in modern-day contexts, are communities of people who move from one place to another, rather than settling permanently in one location.

10. ________________________ is a continent wholly within the Northern Hemisphere and almost wholly within the Western Hemisphere. It is also considered a northern subcontinent of the Americas.

11. The ________________________ were the first major civilization in Mexico. They lived in the tropical lowlands of south-central Mexico, in the modern-day states of Veracruz and Tabasco.

12. The ________________________, centered in the Ohio River valley, left behind enormous earthworks and burial mounds—some of them elaborately shaped like great snakes, birds, or other animals. Evidence from the mounds suggests a complex social structure and a specialized division of labor.

13. ________________________, were an ancient Native American culture centered on the present-day Four Corners area of the United States, comprising southern Utah, northern Arizona, northwest New Mexico, and southern Colorado.

14. The _________________are a Native American people who originally lived in the Natchez Bluffs area, near the present-day city of Natchez, Mississippi. They spoke a language isolate that has no known close relatives, although it may be very distantly related to the Muskogean languages of the Creek Confederacy.

15. ________________________ is one of the four major prehistoric archaeological Oasisamerica traditions of what is now the American Southwest.

16. The ______________________ are Native American people originally from the region that would become the Southeastern United States. They are of the Muskogean linguistic group.

17. ________________________ Mounds State Historic Site is located on the site of an ancient Native American city (c. 600-1400 CE) situated directly across the Mississippi River from modern St. Louis, Missouri. This historic park lies in Southern Illinois between East St. Louis and Collinsville.

18. The ________________________, centered in the Mississippi River valley, resembled the Mayan and Aztec societies in its intensive agriculture, substantial towns built around central plazas, temple mounds (vaguely resembling pyramids), and death cults, which involved human torture and sacrifice

19. The ______________________ are a tribe in the United States that historically lived along the banks of the Missouri River and two of its tributaries--the Heart and Knife Rivers--in present-day North and South Dakota.

20. The _____________________ also known as the Haudenosaunee or the 'People of the Longhouse', are a league of several nations and tribes of indigenous people of North America.

21. The _____________________ culture is an archaeological Mesoamerican culture that dominated a state centered in Tula, Hidalgo, in the early post- classic period of Mesoamerican chronology (ca 800-1000 CE).

22. The ___________________ are a Native American people originally from the Southeastern United States (Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, and Louisiana).

23. The _______________________ are a Native American people historically settled in the Southeastern United States. Linguistically, they are part of the Iroquoian language family.

Answers:

1- D) Incas

2- E) Anasazi

3- A) Ecosystem

4- G) Egalitarian

5- B) Mayas

6- C) Madoc

7- V) Aztec

8- I) Mesoamerica

9- W) Nomadic

10- H) North America

11- U) Olmec

12- K) Adena-Hopewell culture:

13- T) Ancient Pueblo People

14- L) Natchez

15- S) Hohokam

16- P) Chickasaw

17- J) Cahokia

18- M) Mississippian culture

19- F) Mandan

20- N) Iroquois

21- R) Toltec

22- O) Choctaw

23- Q) Cherokee

Chapter 1 Quiz

1. In the Columbian Exchange, the Old World and the New World exchanged ________.

A) animal, plant, and microbial life forms

B) technologies

C) religious beliefs

D) political systems

E) scientific theories

2. The most significant factor that allowed large numbers of nomadic hunters to enter the heart of North America was ________.

A) the domestication of horses

B) global warming

C) population growth

D) the search for new food supplies

E) the growing diversity of people

3. The agricultural practices of pre-Columbian tribes in the Northeast were characterized by:

A) extensive irrigation systems.

B) the development of metal-tipped plows.

C) a sacred respect for trees that kept people from cutting them down.

D) a rapid exploitation of the land.

E) an emphasis on tobacco cultivation.

4. Cahokia was a large trading center located near what present-day city?

A) St. Louis

B) Memphis

C) New Orleans

D) Baton Rouge

E) Detroit

5. Distinct regional cultures developed among the peoples of North America between 10,000 and 2,500 years ago. Over centuries distinct groups developed their own:

A) languages

B) social organizations

C) religious beliefs and practices

D) governments

E) All of the above

6. Which of the following groups lived in what is now known as the Four Corners region of the United States?

A) Hohokam

B) Woodlands

C) Aztecs

D) Anasazi

7. The eastern third of what is now the United States was inhabited by the:

A) plains Indians.

B) woodland Indians.

C) mountain Indians.

D) coastal tribes.

E) pineland tribes.

8. The Aztecs were the first group to build cities in the "new world."

True

False

9. The single greatest factor that caused the destruction of Native Americans after contact with Europeans was ________.

A) disease

B) forced conversions to Christianity

C) forced removal from tribal lands

D) planned genocide

E) warfare

10. Mounds built by the Adena and Hopewell cultures of the Ohio and Mississippi valleys, were built as sacrificial platforms for their religious ceremonies.

True

False

11. Most modern archeologists would agree that the earliest inhabitants of the Western Hemisphere came from which of the following areas of the world?

A) South America

B) Europe

C) the Arctic

D) Asia

12. In the Great Plains region, most pre-Columbian societies:

A) engaged in sedentary farming.

B) lived in small nomadic tribes.

C) hunted buffalo for survival.

D) used horses.

E) developed a harsh religion that required human sacrifice.

13. The first truly complex society in the Americas was that of the:

A) Maya.

B) Aztecs.

C) Incas.

D) Pueblos.

E) Olmec.

14. The Mississippian people were from the:

A) Eastern Woodlands.

B) Great Plains.

C) Great Basin.

D) Pacific Northwest.

15. The early Native peoples who inhabited most of present-day Canada and Alaska, survived mostly by hunting and fishing.

True

False

AMH 2010 - History of the US to 1877

Chapter 1 - Study Guide\Review

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