Key Concepts in Pre-Columbian and Colonial American History

Columbian Exchange

The global exchange of people animals plants and microbes that bridged more than ten thousand years of geographic separation.

Three Sisters

Corn beans and squash grown together in the Eastern Woodlands.

Matrilineal

Family and clan identity proceeding along the female line through mothers and daughters.

Pre Columbian environmental disasters

Ecological challenges such as deforestation overirrigation and droughts that weakened societies like Chaco Canyon and Cahokia.

Cahokia

A Mississippian city east of modern St Louis that at its peak held between ten thousand and thirty thousand people.

Native American slavery

Captivity in which enslaved people were those without kinship networks and could be integrated into a community through adoption or marriage.

Kinship

Networks of family and clan ties that bound Native communities together.

Potlatch

Elaborate feasts in the Pacific Northwest where hosts gave away goods to celebrate births weddings and status.

Crusades

Religious wars that linked Europe with the wealth power and knowledge of Asia.

Reconquista

The centuries of warfare that ended in 1492 with the expulsion of Muslim Moors and Iberian Jews from Spain.

Sugar cultivation

The labor intensive process of growing sugar on Atlantic islands using enslaved workers.

Christopher Columbus

A Genoese sailor backed by Spain who crossed the Atlantic in 1492 and landed in the Bahamas.

Encomienda

A Spanish system in which land and Indigenous laborers were granted to colonists.

Bartolomé de Las Casas

A Spanish Dominican priest who described the destruction and abuses against Indigenous people.

Tenochtitlán

The Aztec capital city built on islands in Lake Texcoco founded in 1325.

Aztecs

A powerful empire in central Mexico that ruled through tribute alliances and military strength.

La Malinche

A Native translator called Doña Marina who guided Cortés.

Inca

A Quechua empire in the Andes with roads terraces and millions of subjects.

Sistema de Castas

A racial hierarchy in Spanish America that ranked people by ancestry and supposed purity of blood.

Virgen de Guadalupe

The Virgin Mary's appearance to Juan Diego in 1531 as a dark skinned Nahuatl speaking figure.