A Continent of Villages

Mississippian Culture: FARMING Cultures near the Mississippi river

  • Farming Culture

  • Most prominent: Cahokia. Grew corns, beans and squash. Long distance trading system. Tribute and taxation.

More farming cultures

  • farming communities began in the SOUTHWEST

  • Hohokam (pueblo) people: lived in farming villages in four corners area. Made the first pueblos

  • Anasazi people: another indigenous group living close to hohokams, they were also farmers but climate and disasters resulted in their demise. The remaining population integrated themselves, with navajos, apaches, and hohokams around them.

  • Athapascans who moved south became either Navajos or Apaches. Apaches mainly stuck to old ways of gathering stuff like foraging and hunting, but Navajos learned farming techniques from their neighbors

Maize farming started in south and spread, north, west, and east.

Woodland culture: practiced in the south areas of Ohio river valley etc.

  • Adena, a group practicing woodland culture, built large burial mounds

  • Hopewell culture followed them, they also established an extensive trade network, collapsed because of climate

  • some cultures in the southwest had chiefdom that were unstable and broke down, so they migrated east to the south and started practicing woodland culture. These groups included the Cherokees, Choctaws, Chickasaws - for them farming was not as important as hunting.

Forest Efficiency and Farming: In the Northeast

  • farmed a lot, bc they were near coasts and water

  • lots of forests too

  • Iroquois Confederacy

3 groups crossed over through Beringia

  • 1st : Siberian nomadic hunters following big animals

  • 2nd: Athapascans moved to NORTHWEST forests in America (a group later broke off and went to southwest where they would become Apaches and Navajos.)

  • 3rd: Traveling by boat once Beringia disappeared, the Eskimos/Inuits came to the arctic areas of Alaska and Canada

Becoming of the Aztecs

  • First a prominent and rich city called Teotihuacan in Mexico had a lot of power and great trading network →

  • From their ashes rose the Toltec’s

  • A group of people named Aztec took over Toltec’s and established Aztec empire