Three-Worlds Collide: Early American History and Transatlantic Encounters

Vocabulary flashcards covering Indigenous North American cultures, urban developments, transoceanic expansion, European conquest, and transatlantic rivalries based on the provided text.

Beringia

The ancient land bridge underneath the Bering Sea that connected Siberia to Alaska, exposed during the last Ice Age when massive ice sheets blocked water.

Clovis Point

A lance-shaped, fluted spear point that served as the most distinctive stone toolkit artifact of Paleoindian culture used to hunt big game.

Paleoindian Culture

The oldest widespread cultural tradition in North America, emerging around 11,000 BCE, characterized by mobile bands using specialized stone toolkits to hunt big game and gather seasonal plants.

Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA)

A 1990 U.S. federal law requiring universities and museums to share information about and repatriate human remains and sacred cultural items to descendant Native American communities.

Three Sisters

The trio of companion crops—corn, beans, and squash—cultivated together by Native American farmers to provide a full range of amino acids and a healthful diet.

Hohokam

An ancient southwestern urban culture that built thousands of miles of irrigation canals and Mesoamerican-style ball courts in modern-day Arizona.

Anasazi

An ancient southwestern urban culture that built a commercial hub at Chaco Canyon, featuring massive multi-story structures called great houses and ceremonial kivas.

Great Houses

Massive multi-story Anasazi structures found in Chaco Canyon, such as Pueblo Bonito, which contained hundreds of rooms and dozens of kivas.

Kivas

Circular ceremonial structures built by the Anasazi and used in Native southwestern towns for religious and community gatherings.

Chiefdoms

Hierarchical, multivillage regional polities ruled by hereditary leaders from capital towns, characteristic of Mississippian culture.

Cahokia

The largest Mississippian chiefdom city, located near modern-day St. Louis, which featured over 100 earthwork mounds and a population exceeding 15,000 around 1100 CE.

Monks' Mound

The largest human-made earthwork mound at Cahokia, containing over 21 million cubic feet of earth.

Little Ice Age

A period of global cooling starting around 1300 CE that brought severe drought, resource scarcity, de-urbanization, and increased warfare across North America and Europe.

Haudenosaunee

The name meaning 'People of the Longhouse' used by the five Iroquoian-speaking nations (Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca) who formed the Great League of Peace around 1400.

Mexica

The Nahuatl-speaking people (often called Aztecs) who migrated from Aztlán, founded Tenochtitlán in Lake Texcoco around 1325, and created a dominant Mesoamerican empire.

Tlatoani

The Nahuatl title for the supreme ruler or emperor of the Mexica Empire, translating literally to 'the one who speaks.'

Reconquista

The centuries-long military and religious effort by Christian kingdoms in Iberia to reclaim the peninsula from Islamic emirates, concluding in 1492 with the surrender of Granada.

Encomiendas

Grants of conquered land and rights to extract labor and tribute from Indigenous residents, awarded by Spanish monarchs to victorious private entrepreneurs.

Feitoria

A fortified coastal trading post established by the Portuguese to control regional commercial networks and secure monopolies in gold and enslaved humans.

Guanches

The Indigenous Berber-descended inhabitants of the Canary Islands who were decimated by 15th-century Iberian slaving raids and European diseases.

Taínos

The Arawak-speaking Indigenous inhabitants of the Caribbean islands, including Guanahaní and Española, who first encountered Christopher Columbus in 1492.

Zemis

Carved physical idols that housed deities in Taíno culture and occupied places of honor in villages and homes.

Conucos

Agricultural plots created through slash-and-burn methods by Taínos to cultivate staple crops like cassava.

Columbian Exchange

The post-1492 transatlantic movement of people, plants, animals, cultural practices, and pathogens between the Americas and the Eastern Hemisphere.

Mestizos

A social category created by Spanish colonists in the 1530s to designate individuals born of combined European and Indigenous ancestry.

Requerimiento

A 1512 Spanish royal declaration read to Indigenous populations demanding immediate submission to Spanish rule and Catholicism under threat of war and forced enslavement.

Doctrine of Discovery

A body of 15th-century papal decrees, including the Inter Caetera, establishing that Christian nations could claim title to non-Christian lands and disenfranchise Indigenous inhabitants.

Malintzín

A Nahua woman acquired by Hernán Cortés who served as a translator, advisor, and key negotiator, enabling Spanish alliances against the Mexica Empire.

Huey Zuahtal

The Nahuatl term meaning 'big rash' used by the Mexica to describe smallpox, which devastated Tenochtitlán during the Spanish siege of 1520–1521.

Florentine Codex

A 12-volume research compilation created in 1547 under Franciscan friar Bernardino de Sahagún and Nahua scholars documenting pre- and post-conquest Aztec society.

Act of Supremacy

The 1534 act passed by English Parliament that abolished papal authority over England and established King Henry VIII as the head of the Church of England.

Huguenots

French Calvinist Protestants who launched early colonial attempts in the Americas, including the establishment of Fort Caroline in Florida in 1564.

St. Augustine

Founded in 1565 by Spanish governor Pedro Menéndez de Avilés, it is the first permanent European settlement in the present-day United States.