Native Americans Prior to Europeans in Americans

Northwest

• people lived in longhouses/plank houses

• hunted, fished, gathered berries/nuts/roots

• mountain ranges isolated tribes preventing development

• preserved culture through totem poles

Southwest

• Dry region

• Tribes: Hokokam, Anasaz, Pueblos

• tribes developed farming techniques with irrigation systems

• susceptible to hostile natives / drought brought population down

Northeast - Great Lakes Region

• Descendents of Adena Hopewell Culture (from Midwest, large Earthen mounds, Mississippians) from Ohio to New York

• Hunted and Farmed

• farming techniques exhausted soil too quick so they moved frequently (semi-sedentary)

• Iroquois confederation (political union of 5 tribes in New York); battled rival Natives and Europeans during American Revolution

• Lived in longhouses

• Seneca, Cayuga, Onandoga, Oneida, Mohawks

Southeast

• Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw

• Farmed corn beans and squash

• permanent structural villages

• chiefdowns & large earth mounds

Great Plains

• nomadic hunters or sedentary who farmed & traded

• nomadic hunters hunted buffalo, so did sedentary but not so much

• sedentary grew squash, maize, beans & traded with other tribes