Davidson6e_ch01

2 The First Civilizations of North America

CHAPTER 1

The First Civilizations of North America

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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 agowith the discovery of America by Columbus, or with the English

colonization of Jamestown and Plymouth. History books ignored or trivialized the continents 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

effi gy 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 minds 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 insignifi cant 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.

A Continent of Cultures

Cultures of Ancient Mexico

Cultures of the Southwest

Cultures of the Eastern Woodlands

Cultures of the Great Plains

Cultures of the Great Basin

Cultures of the Pacifi c Northwest

Cultures of the Subarctic and Arctic

Innovations and Limitations

Americas Agricultural Gifts

Landscapers

The Shape of a Problem

Animals and Illness

Crisis and Transformation

Enduring Cultures

North America on the Eve of Contacts

3

From the air, this serpentine mound fashioned thousands of years ago still stands out in bold relief. Located in southern Ohio, it extends from the snakes coiled tail at the left of the photo to the open mouth at the top right, which is pointed in the direction of the summer solstice sunset. The snakes tail points toward the winter solstice sunrise.



But in the 1830s and 1840s, as Americans sought to drive Indians west of the Mississippi

and then confi ne them on smaller and smaller reservations, many began thinking differently

about the continents 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 infl uential scientists dismissed the claim that North Americas ancient

architecture had been built by the ancestors of contemporary Indians, and instead attributed

the mounds to peoples of Europe, Africa, or AsiaHindus, 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. The Welsh hypothesis seemed to offer poetic justice,

because it implied that nineteenth- century Indians were only receiving a fi tting 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 hemispheres 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 signifi cance of Americas 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 Hemispheres rst 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 ltered southward, some following the Paci c 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-foot 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, sub-merging the land bridge, and creating new lakes and river systems. The emergence of

Hunters Cross the Bering Strait

Hunters Cross the Bering Strait

*Before the Present, used most commonly by archaeologists when the time spans are in multiple thousands of years. This text will also use C.E. for Common Era, equivalent to the Christian Era or A.D.; B.C.E. is Before the Common Era, equivalent to B.C.


The First Civilizations of North America Chapter 1 5

new ecosystems climates, waterways, and land environments in which humans inter-acted with other animals and plantsmade for ever greater diversity. The rst human inhabitants of the Americas had fed, clothed, warmed, and armed themselves by hunt-ing 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 hunt-ing smaller animals with new, more specialized kinds of stone tools and by learning to exploit particular places more ef ciently.

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 Paci c Northwest relied mainly on shing; and those east of the Mississippi, besides shing 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 rst 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, toma-toes, 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 rst 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 re ected 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 rst city builders in the Americas, constructed large plazas, pyra-midal structures, and sculpted enormous heads chiseled from basalt. The Olmec cultur-al in uence 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 owering of Teotihuacn 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. , Teotihuacn spanned 15 square miles and had a population of nearly 200,000making it the sixth largest city in the world.

More impressive still were the achievements of the Mayas, who bene ted from their contacts with both the Olmecs and Teotihuacn. In the lowland jungles of Me-soamerica they built cities lled 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 empire boasted some 50 urban centers scattered throughout the Yucatn Peninsula, Belize, Guatemala, and Honduras.

But neither the earliest urban centers of the Olmecs nor the glittering city-state of Teotihuacn 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.

Diversifi ed Societies Diversifi ed Societies

Agricultural Revolution Agricultural Revolution

Olmec City-Builders Olmec City-Builders

Mayan Civilization Mayan Civilization


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 Mesoamericas northern frontiers, swept south and settled in central Mexico. By the end of the fteenth century, they ruled over a vast empire from their capital at Tenochtitln, 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 adorned with brightly painted carved images of the gods, zoological and botanical gardens, and well-stocked marketplaces. Through Tenochtitlns canals owed gold, silver, exotic feathers and jewels, cocoa, and millions of pounds of maizeall trade goods and tribute from the several million other peoples in the region subjugated by the Aztecs.

Aztec EmpireAztec Empire

6

DAILY LIVES Play Ball

The band strikes uptrumpets blaring, drums pounding, fl utes trilling. Dancers whirl and gymnasts cavort. Then the players parade into the stadium, and the

athletic regalia kneepads, gloves, and belts festooned with images of their gods or skeletal heads. In most cultures, the rules of the game dictated that players could use only their hips, buttocks, or knees to bounce the ball against the parallel walls of the court and the alley lying between. And after about A.D. 800, the game became even more challenging: teams earned the most points by shooting hoopsthat is, by sending the ball through a stone ring set in the cen-ter of the side walls. No mean feat, since players could not use their hands or feet, and the impact of a fl ying ballabout six pounds of solid rubbercould infl ict seri-ous and even fatal injuries. But it was the ritual signifi cance of these competitions that made for greater danger. In the Southwest, ball games of-ten fi gured as friendly rivalries, festive oc-casions intended to strengthen military or trading alliances among neighboring peo-ples. In Mesoamerica, however, the games typically celebrated military conquests: during postgame rituals, the captain of the losing teama captive taken in warwas beheaded with an obsidian knife by the winning captain. That practice seems to have stemmed from the religious signifi -cance invested in the ball games, which both the winning players and spectators understood as a religious ceremony cel-ebrating their main deity, the Sun, an orb greater than any other celestial body, and encouraging the soils fertility with a sacri-fi ce of human blood.

Heavy padding protects the internal organs of this Aztec ball player from being injured by the heavy, dangerous rubber ball; the players head dress is a vulture painted brilliant Mayan blue.

crowd goes wild, cheering their favorites. So many magnifi cent athletes trained to win, looking all the more formidable in their heavily padded gear. Which team will carry the day? A great deal is at stake for both players and spectatorshonor, wealth, perhaps even life itself. The out-come hangs on the arc of a ball. The Super Bowl? The World Series? Good guesses, because those present-day athletic spectacles bear striking resem-blances to the scene described above: the beginning of a ball game in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica. Those contests, with all their accompanying fanfare, con-sumed the attention of both elites and commoners for many centuries. It was the Olmecs who got the ball roll-ing (and fl ying) around 1500 B.C.E. In the main plazas of their cities, they built or-nate stone ballcourts for teams to compete and celebrated star athletes with towering stone sculptures. Even as civilizations rose and fell in Mesoamerica, the passion for playing ball, following the games, and gambling on their outcome not only en-dured but even spread to the Hohokam in the American Southwest. Archaeologi-cal digs have revealed that nearly every city built by the Maya, Toltecs, and Aztecs boasted its own ball court: the most impres-sive were larger than present-day football fi elds, painted in vivid colors, and deco-rated with intricately carved birds, jaguars, and skeletal heads. Renowned players in-spired artists to paint murals or to fashion clay fi gurines depicting ballplayers in full


Aztec merchants, or pochtecas, spoke many languages and traveled on foot great distances throughout Mesoamerica and parts of North America. This one carries a cane and bears a sack of trade goods, topped off by a parrot.

Unsurpassed in power and wealth, in technological and artistic attainments, theirs was also a highly strati ed 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 commonersmerchants, 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 rst the most successful farmers in the region were the Mogollon and Hohokam peoples, two cultures that ourished in New Mexico and southern Arizona during the rst millennium C.E . Both tended to cluster their dwellings near streams, relying either on ood-plain irrigation or a system of oodgates 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 south-ern 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 buildingsapartment-like structures up to four stories high and containing hundreds of rooms at places such 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 lled 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

Mogollon and Hohokam Peoples Mogollon and Hohokam Peoples

The Anasazi The Anasazi




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 shing, gathering, and huntingmainly 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 rst 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, sh, 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 earthworkssix 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 moundsbuilt about 2000 years ago by the Adena and the Hopewell cultures of the Ohio and Mississippi valleysserved as the burial places of their leading men and women. Alongside the corpses mourners heaped their richest goodsheaddresses of antlers, necklaces of copper, troves of shells and pearlsrare 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 magni cent culture of the ancient Eastern Woodlands, the Mississippian, owed much of its prominence to farming. By the twelfth century C.E. ,

Adena and Hopewell Cultures

Adena and Hopewell Cultures

Mississippian Culture Mississippian Culture

The remains of Pueblo Bonito, one of the nine Great Houses built by Anasazis in Chaco Canyon. By the end of the eleventh century, Pueblo Bonito stood four stories high at the rear and contained 800 rooms as well as many towers, terraces, a large central plaza, and several round Kivas for religious and ceremonial purposes.



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 con uence of the Missouri and the Mississippi rivers. Cahokias 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 plazasmore than 100 at-topped pyramidal mounds crowned by religious temples and the palaces of rulers.

Cultures of the Great Plains

Cahokias 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 sun owers, near reliable rivers and streams. But more typically plains communities relied on hunting and foraging, mi-grating 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 ocked 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

Migratory Peoples Migratory Peoples

An artists reconstruction of the city of Cahokia, c. 1100 C.E., the hearth of Mississippian culture. Note how tiny the human gures are in comparison to the temples.


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 de ed farming, these bands usually numbered no more than about 50 people.

Cultures of the Pacifi c 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.

Canyon deChelly Chaco Canyon

PovertyPoint

Mesa Verde

HOHOKAM

MOGOLLON

ANASAZI

Mississippi R.

Ohio

R.

Missouri R.

Bering land bridge

Extent of ice cap duringmost recent glaciation

Adena cultures

Hopewell cultures

Primary Mississippiancultures

Possible migration routesof early Indians

Adena/Hopewell Site

Mississippian Site

Mayan Site

Olmec Site

Southwestern Sites

B e r in g

St r

a it

Early Peoples of North America Migration routes across the Bering Strait from Asia were taken by peoples whose descendants created the major civilizations of ancient America. The in uence of Mesoamerica is most striking among the cultures of the Southwest and the Mississippians.



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 shell sh, 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 fteenth 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 North-west built houses and canoes from red cedar; carved bowls and dishes from red alder; crafted paddles and harpoon shafts, bows, and clubs from Paci c 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 be-ing 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 con rm or enhance their social prestige.

Social and Ceremonial Distinctions Social and Ceremonial Distinctions

AFTER THE FACT in Br ief

The Numbers Game

Counting the Earliest AmericansLacking any statistical records of precontact populations,

how can historians estimate the population of North Amer-

ica? For much of the twentieth century scholars suggested

that North America contained about 1 million inhabitants and

Central and South America about 10 million. Over the past

several decades, however, archaeologists and historians have

increased those projections by a factor of 5 or 10, to as many

as 50100 million inhabitants of the Americas. A variety of

methods have produced these revisions.

Small-scale analysis. Archaeologists examine the surviving

layout of a single town such as Paquime (right). How many peo-

ple could have lived in each room? Multiplying the result by the

number of rooms in the village and then again by the number

of villages within a larger area gives one estimate for a region.

Die-off ratios and epidemic disease. Although death tolls varied

regionally, European diseases such as smallpox killed 90 to

95 percent of native American populations. Starting with census

records dating from after Europeans had arrived, historians use

the ratios to calculate backward toward larger precontact totals.

Ecological carrying capacity. Some scholars have estimated

how dense a population could be supported by Native American

The rooms of Paquime, divided by adobe mud walls, help archaeologists estimate population.

farming techniques, given climate and soils. Comparing and

combining such different methods provide a range of intelligent

estimates, but they remain just that: estimates.

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This ornately carved and painted house post once supported the main beams of a dwelling belonging to a Kwakiutl whaler in the Paci c Northwest. Depicting a man of wealth and high rank, the gure has a whale painted on his chest and copper ornaments on his arms. Two smaller gures, in shadow by the whalers knees, each support one end of a plank seat. These were his household slaves, most likely children captured in an attack on rival tribes.

Cultures of the Subarctic and Arctic

Most of present-day Canada and Alaska were equally inhospitable to agriculture. In the farthest northern reachesa 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 shing 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 shing camps to berry patches in the fall to moose and caribou hunting grounds in the winter.

Innovations and Limitations The rst Americans therefore expressed, governed,

and supported themselves in a broad variety of ways. And yet they shared certain core character-istics, including the desire and ability to reshape

their world. Whether they lived in forests, coastal re-gions, jungles, or prairies, whether they inhabited high mountains or low deserts, native communi-ties experimented constantly with the resources around them. Over the course of millennia, near-

ly all the hemispheres peoples found ways to change the natural world in order to improve and enrich their lives.

Americas Agricultural Gifts

No innovation proved more crucial to human history than native manipulation of individual plants. Like all rst 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 gath-ered 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 rst 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 hemispheres 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 rst Americans gave humanity scores of varieties of squash, potatoes, beans, and other basic foods. To-day, plants domesticated by indigenous Americans account for three- fths of the worlds 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 sh.

Rise of Agriculture Rise of Agriculture

Worldwide Spread of American Crops Worldwide Spread of American Crops




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. Irelands 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 land-scapes dating from the precontact period still cover thousands of square miles of the Americas.

Recently, scholars have begun to nd 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 elds, 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 non ooded 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 Ama-zon. Today, farmers in the region still eagerly search for the places where precontact peoples enriched the earth.

Cultivated Trees of the Amazon Cultivated Trees of the Amazon

Theodor de Bry, Florida Indians Planting Maize. Both men and women were portrayed as involved in agriculture. Except for the digging stick at the center rear, however, the farming implements drawn by the artist are European in origin.



Native North Americans likewise transformed their local environments. Some-times they moved forests. Anasazis cut down and transported more than 200,000 trees to construct the oors 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 re to systematically reshape landscapes across the conti-nent. Throughout North Americas great eastern and western forests, native peoples periodically set low res to consume undergrowth and fallen trees. In this way the continents rst 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 re 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, re 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 rst 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. Conse-quently, the Americas are broken up by tremendous geographic and climactic diversity, making communication and technology transfer far more dif cult than it was in the Old World.

Consider the agricultural revolution in Eurasia. Once plants and animals were rst 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 present-day Spain. Eurasias 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, mak-ing 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 barri-ers 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 reli-able 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

Fire as a ToolFire as a Tool

Transfer of Technology, Crop, and Animals

Transfer of Technology, Crop, and Animals



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 regions 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 approxi-mately 1000 C.E.

By erecting barriers to communication and the spread of technology, then, the pre-dominantly north-south orientation of Americas made it more dif cult for the hemi-spheres inhabitants to build on one anothers 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 rst encountered them in 1492.

Animals and Illness

One other profound difference between the Eurasian world and the Americas con-cerned animals and disease. Most diseases affecting humans originated from domesti-cated 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 af icting cattle.

Eurasians therefore paid a heavy price for living closely with animals. Yet in the long run, the continents 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 rein-fection. By the fteenth 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, includ-ing 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 mammalthe 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 peculiari-ties in their dispositions, diets, rates of growth, mating habits, and social characteristics. In fact, of the worlds 148 species of large mammals, only 14 were successfully domes-ticated before the twentieth century. Of those 14, only onethe ancestor to the llama/alpacaremained in the Americas following the mass extinctions. Eurasia, in contrast, was home to 13including the ve 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 worlds major communicable diseasesuntil 1492.

Eurasias Deadly AdvantageEurasias Deadly Advantage


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. Com-bined with the wars that attended colonization and the malnutrition, dislocation, and despair that attend wars, disease would kill native peoples by the millions while Euro-pean 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 Europedisadvantages 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 continents 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 continents most impressive civilizations col-lapsed 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 magni cent 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, descendents 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 f-teenth 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 suf-fering. 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 migra-tions increased con ict 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 gures in the postcontact Southwest.

Sudden Declines Sudden Declines

Trading City of Paquime Trading City of Paquime



In the Eastern Woodlands, the great Mississippian chieftainships never again at-tained the glory of Cahokia, but key traditions endured in the Southeast. In the lower Mississippi valley, the Natchez maintained both the temple moundbuilding tradi-tion 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 Muskoge-an-speakers rejected this rigid and hierarchical social model and gradually embraced a new, more exible system of independent and relatively egalitarian villages that forged confederacies to better cope with outsiders. These groupings would eventu-ally mature into three of the great southeastern Indian confederacies: Creek, Choc-taw, and Chickasaw.

To the North lived speakers of Iroquoian languages, roughly divided into a south-ern faction including Cherokees and Tuscaroras, and a northern faction including the powerful Iroquois and Hurons. Like Muskogeans to the South, these Iroquoian com-munities mixed farming with a hunting/gathering economy and lived in semiperma-nent 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 fteenth 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, shing, and gathering plants such as wild rice.

Cultures of equal and even greater resources persisted and ourished during the fteenth century in the Caribbean, particularly on the Greater Antillesthe islands of present-day Cuba, Haiti and the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, and Puerto Rico. Although the earliest inhabitants of the ancient Caribbean, the Ciboneys, probably came 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 ex-acting tribute from the great mass of commoners, farmers, and sherfolk. Attending to these elites were the poorest Taino peoplesservants who bedecked their masters and mistresses in brilliant diadems of feathers, ne woven textiles, and gold nose and ear pieces and then shouldered the litters on which the rulers sat and paraded their nery.

North America on the Eve of Contact

By the end of the fteenth century, North Americas peoples numbered between 5 and 10 millionwith perhaps another million living on the islands of the Caribbeanand they were spread among more than 350 societies speaking nearly as many distinct lan-guages. (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, shing, 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 Algon-quins, patrilineal kinship prevailed, and all property and prestige descended in the male line. Some societies, like 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 egalitar-ian, whereas others, like many in the Caribbean and the Paci c Northwest, were rigidly divided into nobles and commoners and servants or slaves. Some, such as the Natchez and the Arawaks, were ruled by powerful chiefs; others, such as the Algonquins and the

Muskogean Peoples Muskogean Peoples

Iroquolans Iroquolans

Algonquins Algonquins

Caribbean Cultures Caribbean Cultures

Diverse Life-Ways Diverse Life-Ways



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 pow-erful 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, while predominantly agricultural peoples sought the assistance of their gods to make the rain fall and the crops ripen.

When Europeans rst arrived in North America, the continent north of present-day Mexico boasted an ancient, rich, and dynamic 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.


NATCHEZ

CHOCTAW

CHICKASAW

CHEROKEE TUSCARORAPAMLICO

APALACHEE

CALUSA

ARAWAK

TIMUCUA

YAMASEE

CREEK

SHAWNEEMOSOPELEA

LENNILENAPE

SUSQUEHANNOCK NARRAGANSET

IROQUOISPEQUOT

ABENAKI

PENOBSCOTALGONQUIN

HURON

NEUTRALERIE

POTAWATOMI

KICKAPOOILLINOISKASKASKIA

SAUK

FOXIOWA

PAWNEE

KIOWA

APACHEAN

APACHEAN

APACHEAN

SHOSHONE

SHOSHONEGOSHUTEMAIDU

COSTANO

CHUMASHCHEMEHUEVI

SERRANOCAHUILLA

DIEGUEOLUISEO

POMOMODOC

KLAMATH

CAYUSENEZ

PERC

WALLAWALLAUMATILLA

TILLAMOOK

CHINOOKPUYALLUP

COLVILLESALISHSKAGIT

KWAKIUTLS

TSHIMSHIAN

BLACKFEET

MANDANHIDATSA

TLINGIT

MAKAH

NOOTKIN

SHUSWAP

KOOTENAY

NORTHERNPAIUTE

SOUTHERNPAIUTE

FLATHEAD

CROW

PUEBLO

ZUI

PIMA

HOPI

UTE

ARAPAHO

SIOUX

SIOUX

WINNEBAGO

MENOMINEEOTTAWA

CHIPPEWA

CHIPPEWA

CHEYENNE

CREE

MONTAGNAIS

INUIT

INUIT

ASSINIBOINE

MICMAC

MOHEGANWAMPANOAG

CADDO

JANO

CONCHO

LAGUNERO

COAHUILTEC

KARANKAWAYAQUI

AZTECAZTEC

EMPIREEMPIRE

AZTEC

EMPIRE

MAYATenochtitln

WICHITA

CALIFORNIASOUTHWEST

CARIBBEAN

EASTERNWOODLAND

PRAIRIE

SUBARCTIC

ARCTIC

NORTHEASTMEXICO

GREAT BASIN

GREATPLAINS

PLATEAU

NORTHWESTCOAST

Agriculture

Hunting and gathering

Fishing

Main Subsistence Mode

ATLANTICOCEAN

PACIFICOCEAN

Indians of North America, circa 1500 The map shows approximate locations of some Native groups.

dav06848_ch01_002-025.indd Page 18 10/30/07 8:05:21 AM teamcdav06848_ch01_002-025.indd Page 18 10/30/07 8:05:21 AM teamc /Volumes/103/MHCA024/mhdav6%0/dav6ch01/Volumes/103/MHCA024/mhdav6%0/dav6ch01

Signifi cant Events


at least 15,000 B.C.E. First humans arrive in the Americas

ca. 10,0002500 Distinctive regional cultures develop in the Americas

ca. 10,0007000 Agriculture begins in the Western Hemisphere

ca. 2000 Agriculture spreads from Mesoamerica to the present-day Southeast

ca. 1700700 Poverty Point fl ourishes in present-day Louisiana

ca. 1500 The Olmecs begin to build the fi rst Mesoamerican cities

ca. 1000 Agriculture spreads from Mesoamerica to the present-day Southwest

ca. 500100 Adena culture reaches its height in North America

ca. 100 The classical civilization of Teotihuacn emerges in the highlands of

central Mexico

But for most of our nations 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 extinc-

tion 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 disap-

peared, 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 descendents 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 fi lled with all the blessings of liberty, civiliza-

tion, 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 be-

tween the peoples of Eurasia, Africa, and the Americas. We are still struggling to fi nd

stories big enough to encompass not only Indians but all those who have forged this

complex, tragic, and marvelous 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 ri-valed 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 Olmecs and brought to its height by the Mayans.

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

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

The adoption of agriculture gave peoples in the Southwest and the Eastern Woodlands the resource security neces-sary 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 fi shing, hunting, and gathering.

Peoples of the Pacifi c 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 en-vironments 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 continents north-south orientation inhibited the spread of agriculture and technology, and a lack of domesticatable animals compared to Europe would leave Native Americans with little protection against disease.

For reasons that remain unclear, many of North Americas most impressive early civilizations had collapsed by the end of the fi fteenth century. In their wake a diverse array of cultures evolved across the continent.

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

In much of eastern North America, stratifi ed chiefdoms of the Mississippian era gave way to more egalitarian confed-eracies of independent villages subsisting on farming and hunting.

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

ca. 100 B.C.E. 400 C.E. Hopewell culture thrives in the Ohio and Mississippi valleys

ca. 200800 C.E. The Mayan empire fl ourishes on the Yucatn Peninsula

ca. 200900 Mogollon culture fl ourishes in present-day New Mexico

ca. 650950 The Olmecs, the Mayan empire, and Teotihuacn decline

ca. 8001200 Mississippian civilization reaches its height

ca. 9001100 Anasazi civilization reaches its height

ca. 1100 Mogollon culture declines

ca. 1300 Hohokam, Anasazi, and Mississippian civilizations decline; Apache and

Navajo peoples enter the Southwest from Canada

ca. 13251500 Aztec empire rises in Mesoamerica



Additional Reading

The best descriptions of ancient American civilizations are offered by Brian M. Fagan, Kingdoms of Gold, Kingdoms of Jade: The Americas before Columbus (1991); and, especially, Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas be-fore Columbus (2005). For North America specifi cally, see Alice Beck Kehoe, America before the European Invasions (2002). For the Southwest, see Stephen Plog, Ancient Peoples of the South-west (1997). For the Eastern Woodlands, see George R. Milner, The Moundbuilders: Ancient Peoples of Eastern North America (2005). Roger G. Kennedy, Hidden Cities: The Discovery and Loss of Ancient North American Civilization (1994), gives a fas-cinating account of how white Americans responded to the ruins of ancient American cultures. For the consequences of

axis alignment and of domesticated animals, see the captivat-ing work by Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (1998). For the cultures of precontact Mexico, see Michael D. Coe and Rex Koontz, Mexico: From the Olmecs to the Aztecs (5th ed., 2002). For exhaustive surveys of all regional cultures in North America, see William C. Sturtevant, general editor, Handbook of North American Indians, 20 volumes projected (1978 ). Carl Waldman, Atlas of the North American Indian (1985), is also an excellent source of information, offering much more than good maps. For a fuller list of readings, see the Bibliography at www.mhhe.com /davidsonnation6.


AFTER THE FACT

Historians Reconstruct the Past

What methods do historians use to discover the history of a

past thousands of years before any humans knew how to write?

Archaeological research is key; and by carefully unearthing

layer after layer of soil, analyzing artifacts and their relation

to these layers, scientists and historians have been able to

discover a remarkable amount of information about the fi rst

immigrants to the Americas over 10,000 years ago.

But the deductions and inferences madeabout a past

without words and barren of historical documentsare often

contested. Archaeologists have continually argued with one

another over the scant available evidence. Even today the

debate continues over the nature of the earliest migrations.

And progress often depends on accidental discoveries, such

as the one made by an African American cowboy, George

McJunkin. McJunkin, a former slave, was a talented rancher,

not to mention a capable fi ddler, amateur astronomer, and sur-

veyor. Old fossils also fascinated him, and he collected them.

The Clovis DiscoveriesRiding his horse one day in 1908 near Folsom, New Mexico,

McJunkin looked down and saw some very old and very large

bison bones eroding from a slope. He took some of the

Tracking the First Americansbones home and soon realized that they must have belonged

to an extinct bison species. McJunkin failed to interest any

professional archaeologists in his fi nd, and only after his death

did New Mexican locals manage to convince scholars from the

University of Colorado to come and investigate. When the team

fi nally began excavations in 1926, they found something that

changed the course of modern archaeology: an exquisitely

crafted stone spear-point embedded in the bisons ribs.

The discovery rocked the scientifi c community, which for

the previous century had confi dently declared that Indians

had fi rst arrived in the Americas only about 4,000 years

before. Eleven years later another shock wave followed when

archaeologists digging near Clovis, New Mexico, found a

different sort of projectile point near butchered mammoth

bones. Finally, in 1949, scientists confi rmed the great antiq-

uity of both fi nds by using radiocarbon dating, a method for

measuring decay rates of the radioactive isotope of carbon,

which exists in organic matter such as bone and starts to break

down immediately after an organism dies. Tests revealed that

the Indians whose hunting grounds were now called Folsom

and Clovis had been turning ancient mammals into bones

between 10,800 and 11,500 years ago.

Those conclusions pointedly raised the question of exactly

how much earlier the fi rst American ancestors of such hunters

had come to the New World. This tantalizing mystery puzzles

(and divides) archaeologists and anthropologists, geologists

and historians, right down to the present. Such men and women

devote their lives to the hard work of digging in remote sites

or exploring the oceans fl oor, to the harder work of analyzing

their fi nds in laboratories, and to the hardest work of all trying

to make sense of what it all means. Their efforts have yield-

ed much new evidence and increasingly sophisticated tech-

niques for understanding its signifi cance, but many important

questions remain unanswered.

Even so, almost all of them agree on a number of points.

First, whoever the fi rst inhabitants of the New World were, they

came, originally, from Eurasia: scientists have found no fossil

remains to support the view that human beings evolved into

modern men and women in the Americas. Second, these fi rst

Americans were almost certainly fully evolved human beings,

known as Homo sapiens sapiensnot their less- developed Stone artifacts known as Clovis points found with the skeleton of a mammoth.22


forerunners, the Neanderthals, or even earlier

ancestors. These Homo sapiens sapiens excelled at

surviving anywhere, armed as they were with the

intellectual ability to plan and cooperate and with

the technology to sew warm clothing, hunt large

animals, and store food. About 35,000 years ago,

these resourceful adapters came to predominate,

edging out the Neanderthals, whose more limited

skills had restricted their settlements to the tropical

and temperate parts of the world.

Evidence of Migration from Siberia to North AmericaThe new species multiplied rapidly, and the pressure

of its growing population pushed many into settling in

less hospitable regionsincluding the Arctic frontier

of Siberia in northeastern Asia. Indeed, a third point

of general agreement among scholars is that the

descendants of these migrants to Siberia continued

the wandering ways of their ancestors and somehow,

at some time, wandered into North America by way

of Alaska. The research of physical anthropologists

documents key biological similarities between

Siberians and most American Indians. Both groups

share not only certain genetic variants that suggest

their descent from common ancient ancestors but

also distinctive formations of the roots and crowns

of their teeth known as sinodonty.

But how did Asians get to Alaskaa region

now separated from Siberia by 50 miles of ocean known as

the Bering Strait? It is not impossible that they sailed across,

for some Homo sapiens sapiens could build boats sturdy

enough to navigate short stretches of open ocean. Archae-

ologists have discovered that Southeast Asians fl oated across

55 miles of ocean on rafts to reach Australia some 35,000

years ago. Could their contemporaries in northeast Asia, us-

ing bark canoes, have made a voyage of similar length over

the Bering Strait? Not impossible, scientists conclude, but not

likely either, if only because navigating calm, tropical waters

of the southern Pacifi c is far less diffi cult than mastering the

Bering Strait, which even in summer is choked with ice fl oes.

Such an undertaking would have been even more daunting

to the earliest Siberians, who, as anthropologists have discov-

ered, were land-based hunters, not seafaring folk. So most

scientists now believe that Siberians did not sail to the New

World: instead, they walked.

They were able to do that because the Bering Strait is not a

timeless feature of Arctic geography. On the contrary, geologists

have discovered, submerged far below the Bering Strait lie traces

of a landmass that once connected Siberia to Alaska. Even in the

late nineteenth century, some naturalists suspected that such a

land bridge had once existed after noting that the vegetation

and wildlife of Siberia were nearly identical to those in Alaska.

By the 1930s, scientists had enough information to speculate

that what turned a waterway into an exposed, inhabitable

lowland plain was the coldest phase of the last Ice Age, which

began about 30,000 years earlier, when plunging temperatures

caused the worlds oceans to drop in depth by freezing great

expanses of seawater into sheets of ice. Those climatic changes

formed Beringia, a land bridge between Siberia and Alaska that

existed from about 25,000 B.P. until about 15,000 B.P. During

those millennia, most scientists now believe, Siberians gradually

settled the length of this link to the Americas. Thereafter, when 23


temperatures began to warm again and the seas rose and closed

over Beringia, some of its inhabitants strayed into Alaska.

An Even Earlier Arrival?But even today, some scientists doubt this account. True, no one

has yet discovered an archaeological site in Alaska that can be

positively dated to earlier than about 13,200 B.P. Yet two different

archaeological teams claim to have found artifacts in rock shelters

whose settlements, they assert, reach back 16,000 yearsand

perhaps even to 30,000 years ago, though this evidence is less

conclusive. One site, known as the Meadowcroft Rockshelter, is

located in southwest Pennsylvania. The other is in the far reaches

of southern Chile at a site known as Monte Verde.

The debates over the evidence produced from these exca-

vations and its proponents have been harsh. When a team of

independent experts visited Monte Verde in 1997 to assess

the evidence, the two sides got into a hot argument at the local

bar before the defenders of Monte Verde walked out in a huff.

(Or perhaps they did not; even this assertion was contradicted

by one of the skeptics.)

Beyond the operatic tales of bickering lie serious issues. The

advocates for the Clovis people as the fi rst Americans are per-

suaded partly because of the deadly spearpoints they made.

As one pro-Clovis advocate remarked, the spearpoints remind-

ed him of the deadly beauty of the Colt pistol and Winchester

rifl e. Just as production of these weapons coincided with the

demise of the buffalo and passenger pigeon, so does the Clovis

period coincide with the extinction of Americas megafauna

the mammoth, mastodon, and other ice-age giants. However,

advocates of an earlier human presence in North America posit

a less aggressive culture as arriving fi rst, whose gentle people

left little evidence of their presence. But they must also assume

that because these newcomers came earlier, they could not

have walked across the Beringia land bridge. They must have

sailed across the Bering Strait.

A discovery in the state of Washington is also prompting sci-

entists to wonder whether the fi rst inhabitants of the Americas

might have included peoples other than Asians. In 1996, the

sheriff of a small desert town, puzzled by a half-buried human

skeleton found along the shores of the Columbia River, showed

the bones to an anthropologist, James Chatters. Like McJunkins

fi nd of almost a century earlier, this skeleton encased a stone

spear point, and radiocarbon dating revealed it to be nearly as

old (9,300 years) as the Folsom bones. Also like McJunkins speci-

men, this one has sparked debate within the scientifi c commu-

nity. Chatters and others who measured the skull discovered that

it was far narrower than any Indian skull of similar antiquity. They

concludedastonishinglythat the Kennewick Man, as he came

to be known, was Caucasoid in appearance. It seemed to be evi-

dence that in addition to the Siberian migrations, some people of

European stock may have somehow crossed to the Americas.

But comparisons of the skull with all other known ethnic

groups led a panel of scientists to conclude that the Kennewick

Man is not a distant relative either of present-day Indians or

of Caucasians. The closest resemblance is to the Ainu people

of Japans Sakhalin Islands and to Polynesians of the South

Pacifi c. If such a link were established, it would strengthen

the hypothesis that some of the earliest Americans reached

the continent by boat, either hopscotching along the Bering

Strait or even sailing across the Pacifi c. Both the Ainu and the

Polynesians were maritime peoples.

So the debates about Americas fi rst colonizers continue, and

if recent history is any guide, so too will the discoveries. This

part of the past, like every other, holds in store many surprises

for those in the present determined to probe its secrets.

Bibliography Keeping up with recent discoveries in this fi eld poses many challenges. New discoveries turn up

frequently, and most reports of those fi ndings are written in

a highly technical language. Fortunately, a few well- written

books provide a guide to both the early Asian migration to and

throughout the Americas and the evolution of scholarly debate.

Brian M. Fagan, The Great Journey (London, 1987), is lucid, and

the same author has also written a more detailed textbook

on both ancient Native American archaeology and history,

Ancient North America (1991). Recent debates are explored in

Charles C. Manns 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before

To the left of the tag F-9 is a fragment of deer antler from excavations at Meadowcroft Rock shelter. Does this and other evidence suggest that hunters were present in Pennsylvania more than 16,000 years ago? Archaeologists hotly debate the point.24



Columbus (2005). The long and tense relationship between

archaeologists and Americas native peoples is the subject of

David Hearst Thomass excellent book Skull Wars: Kennewick

Man, Archaeology, and the Battle for Native American Identi-

ty (2000). Students seeking more advanced and specialized

information should consult Stuart J. Fiedel, Prehistory of the

Americas (2nd ed., Cambridge, 1992).

Fiedel is one of the skeptics of earlier claims of human en-

try into North America. He is treated with something less than

cordiality by J. M. Adovasio, the archaeologist who led the

excavations at Meadowcroft Rockshelter, in his account (with

Jake Page), The First Americans: In Pursuit of Archaeologys

Greatest Mystery (2002). Adovasios book is also of interest

to outsiders because it presents an unvarnished description

of the actual practice of archaeology. After twelve hours of

troweling thin layers of dirt and dust, Adovasio notes, you go

crazy at night. Running, weight lifting, drinking, fornicating,

staring off into space and babbling incoherentlyyou do

almost anything for relief. It takes a truly bizarre person to live

that way for months on end, and we had tents full of them.

25


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