Chapter 1: The Collision of Cultures Vocabulary

Vocabulary flashcards based on lecture notes covering pre-Columbian civilizations, European exploration, Spanish colonization, and early North American developments.

Clovis people

Early land-based migrants to the Americas, named after a town in New Mexico where evidence of their stone tools and weapons was first discovered in the 1930s.

Archaic period

A scholarly term for the early history of humans in the Americas, beginning around 8000 B.C.E.

Incas

The empire in Peru that created the largest empire in the Americas, stretching almost 2,000 miles along western South America.

Mesoamerica

A cultural region comprising Mexico and much of Central America where organized societies emerged around 10,000 B.C.E.

Olmec people

The first complex society in Mesoamerica, whose roots trace back to between 1500 and 1500 B.C.E.

Maya

A sophisticated civilization in Central America and the Yucatán peninsula that developed a written language, a numerical system, an accurate calendar, and advanced agricultural systems.

Mexica

The name that the Aztec people called themselves; they established the city of Tenochtitlán in central Mexico around 1325 C.E.

Tenochtitlán

The capital city built by the Mexica in 1325 C.E. on a lake island in central Mexico, featuring large public buildings, schools, and a sophisticated water navigation system.

Chaco Canyon

A thriving center of ancient Pueblo culture and commerce in modern-day northwestern New Mexico that existed between 900 and 1150 C.E.

Pueblo Bonito

One of the largest villages in Chaco Canyon, constructed of sandstone, timber, and adobe, reaching five stories high with 600 rooms.

Cahokia

A major Mississippian trading center near present-day St. Louis that peaked around 1200 C.E. with a population of 40,000.

Matrilineal

A system of social organization in which family association and clan membership flow through the mother's heritage.

Christopher Columbus

A Genoese navigator who sailed west across the Atlantic under the Spanish flag in 1492 and landed in the Bahamas believing he had reached East Asia.

Amerigo Vespucci

A Florentine merchant whose vivid descriptions of his New World voyages popularized the idea that the Americas were newly encountered continents.

Ferdinand Magellan

A Portuguese explorer in Spanish employment whose expedition completed the first known circumnavigation of the globe from 1519 to 1522.

Hernando Cortés

A Spanish conquistador who led a 1518 military expedition against the Aztecs in Mexico and conquered Tenochtitlán.

Conquistadores

Brutal Spanish conquerors who aimed to exploit stores of gold, silver, and lands in the Americas.

Bartolomé de Las Casas

One of the first Spanish friars to work in the colonies who fought for the fair treatment of Indigenous peoples.

Encomiendas

Grants awarded to favored Spaniards allowing them the right to exact tribute and labor from Indigenous peoples on designated tracts of land.

Popé

A Pueblo religious leader who led a 1680 uprising that killed hundreds of European settlers and temporarily drove the Spanish from Santa Fe.

Mestizos

People of mixed European and Indigenous heritage who came to numerically dominate the population of Spanish colonies.

Mercantilism

An economic concept resting on the belief that a nation grows rich only at the expense of others by maximizing exports and minimizing imports.

Puritans

English Protestants who wanted to simplify worship and reform the leadership of the Church of England to purify it of Roman Catholic elements.

Roanoke

An island off the coast of North Carolina where Sir Walter Raleigh and Sir Richard Grenville sponsored early failed English colonizing attempts in 1585 and 1587.

Samuel de Champlain

The French explorer who established the first permanent French settlement in North America at Quebec in 1608.

Coureurs de bois

French fur traders and trappers who integrated deep into North American regions, learned Indigenous languages, and expanded trade networks.

Jesuits

Members of the male-only Catholic Society of Jesus who established missions in North America starting in 1634 to convert Indigenous people to Catholicism.