First people in America: PALEO-INDIANS

25,000 - 12,000 BCE (???) – hunters-gatherers crossing through a land bridge (BERINGIA) from Siberia to Alaska - contributing to the extinction of great mammals

c. 10 000 BCE - the end of the last ice age

c. 7 000 – the land bridge submerges

c. 3,000 BCE – Agricultural Revolution in the Americas:

• SHIFT: hunting-gathering (nomadic) à farming (settled) – depending on climate zone and regional ecology

• Three Sisters: corn, beans, squash (companion planted)

Folsom and Clovis, New Mexico, c. 11 000 BCE (excavated in the 1930s)

• the earliest human sites in the USA

• Clovis points – sharpened stone arrowheads and spearheads

EXAMPLES OF PREHISTORIC CIVILIZATIONS

EAST: MOUND BUILDERS

Adena

Hopewell

Mississippian

• cultures in the Ohio and Mississippi valleys – disappeared before the arrival of the first European settlers

• complex social networks with divisions of labor

• large towns with central plazas

• trade networks and markets

• earthen ceremonial mounds

• Watson Brake, Louisiana (3500 BCE) – the oldest earthwork mound complex in North America discovered in 1997

• Cahokia, Illinois (c. 1100 CE)

• Kincaid Site, Illinois (c. 1150 CE)

• Serpent Mound, Ohio (c. 1000 CE)

SOUTHWEST: OASISAMERICA

Ancestral Puebloans (Basketmakers, Anasazi)

Hohokam

Mogollon

·       ancestors of modern Pueblo people and other southwest native cultures - all three cultures vanished around by the end of the 15th century

·       peaceful farming societies

·       irrigation canals and well-constructed roads

·       crafted jewelry and decorated pottery

·       terraced adobe dwellings (pueblos) and cliff dwellings, e.g.

·       Mesa Verde Cliff Palace, Colorado

·       Pueblo Bonito, Chaco Canyon, New Mexico

Native cultures (American Indians, Amerindians) in the territory of present-day USA before 1492 (pre-contact, pre-Columbian)

General characteristics:

·       extremely DIVERSE cultures with distinct social and cultural practices

·       around 10 million people, 200 distinct ethnic groups, 10 broad culture groups in North America adapted to their environments

·       over 300 languages – none written

·       hunters, gatherers, farmers (farming and gathering often done by women)

·       constant intertribal warfare

the Arctic

·       Inuit (Eskimo from Algonquian ‘raw meat eaters’ - name acceptable only in Alaska)

·       Aleut

·       Yupik

• transpolar hunting, gathering and fishing cultures

• caribou, seals, whales

Eastern Woodland Cultures

Algonquian tribes

·       first tribes encountered by English colonists

·       inland hunters, coastal fishermen

·       patriarchal

Iroquois Confederation (League) of Five Nations

(People of the Longhouse)

Seneca, Cayuga, Onondaga, Oneida, Mohawk

In 1722 the Iroquoian Tuscarora joined the League forming the Six Nations – in permanent peace and military alliance with one another

• founded in the 15th century by legendary Great Peacemaker and his disciple Hiawatha

·       northernmost farmers in North America (slash-and-burn agriculture) but also hunters and fishermen

·       a highly political and democratic society - possible inspiration to the Founding Fathers of the USA as the oldest representative democracy in North America (1988 US Congress resolution)

·       matriarchal

the Southeast

Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, Seminole

·       mostly settled farmers

·       later referred to as Five Civilized Tribes since they adopted codes of law, European customs, slaveholding, cattle herding and writing systems

the Great Plains

·       semi-nomadic hunters depending on buffalo

·       tepees made of buffalo bones and hides

·       later domestication of the horse introduced by the Spanish in the 17^th century

·       Dakota - 'allies' or Sioux - 'enemies' (name applied by the French)

·       Wichita – farmers and traders

·       Comanche, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Kiowa

the Southwest

• Pueblo, Hopi, Zuni – farmers living in adobe apartment-house complexes and cliff dwellings

• Apaches - warriors and hunters engaged in frequent raids against their neighbors and later wars with both the US and Mexican governments

• Navajo – the largest tribe in the USA

the Pacific Northwest

·       hugely diverse ethnic and linguistic groups

·       ocean and inland waters fishermen and whale hunters

·       plank houses and large cedar canoes

·       caste systems (chiefs, commoners, slaves)

·       animist beliefs - totem pole cultures – clan coats of arms

·       concepts of material property and land ownership (unusual for Native Americans)