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2 The First Civilizations of North America

C HA PTE R 1
The First Civilizations
of North America
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A Continent of Cultures Innovations and Limitations

Cultures of Ancient Mexico America’s Agricultural Gifts
Cultures of the Southwest Landscapers
Cultures of the Eastern Woodlands The Shape of a Problem
Cultures of the Great Plains Animals and Illness
Cultures of the Great Basin Crisis and Transformation
Cultures of the Pacific Northwest Enduring Cultures
Cultures of the Subarctic and Arctic North America on the Eve of Contacts

The Power of a Hidden Past

Stories told about the past have power over both the present and the future. Until recently, most students were taught
that American history began several centuries ago—with the “discovery” of America by Columbus, or with the English
colonization of Jamestown and Plymouth. History books ignored or trivialized the continent’s precontact history. But the
reminders of that hidden past are everywhere. Scattered across the United States are thousands of ancient archaeological
sites and hundreds of examples of monumental architecture, still imposing even after centuries of erosion, looting, and
destruction.
Man-made earthen mounds, some nearly 5,000 years old, exist throughout eastern North America in a bewildering
variety of shapes and sizes. Many are easily mistaken for modest hills, but others evoke wonder. In present-day Louisiana
an ancient town with earthworks took laborers an estimated 5 million work hours to construct. In Ohio a massive serpent
effigy snakes for a quarter-mile across the countryside, its head aligned to the summer solstice. In Illinois a vast, earthen
building covers 16 acres at its base and once reached as high as a 10-story building.

Observers in the colonial and revolutionary eras looked on such sites as curiosities and marvels. George Washington,
Thomas Jefferson, and other prominent Americans collected ancient artifacts, took a keen interest in the excavation of
mounds, and speculated about the Indian civilizations that created them. Travelers explored these strange mounds, trying
to imagine in their mind’s eye the peoples who had built them. In 1795 the Reverend James Smith traced the boundaries of
a mound wall that was strategically placed to protect a neck of land along a looping river bend in the Ohio valley. “The wall
at present is so mouldered down that a man could easily ride over it. It is however about 10 feet, as near as I can judge, in
perpendicular height. . . . In one place I observe a breach in the wall about 60 feet wide, where I suppose the gate formerly
stood through which the people passed in and out of this stronghold.” Smith was astonished by the size of the project.
“Compared with this,” he exclaimed, “what feeble and insignificant works are those of Fort Hamilton or Fort Washington!
They are no more in comparison to it than a rail fence is to a brick wall.”

From the air, this serpentine mound fashioned thousands of years ago still stands out in bold relief. Located in southern Ohio, it
extends from the snake’s coiled tail at the left of the photo to the open mouth at the top right, which is pointed in the direction of the
summer solstice sunset. The snake’s tail points toward the winter solstice sunrise.
3
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4 The First Civilizations of North America

But in the 1830s and 1840s, as Americans sought to drive Indians west of the Mississippi
and then confine them on smaller and smaller reservations, many began thinking differently
about the continent’s ancient sites. Surely the simple and “savage” people just then being
expelled from American life could not have constructed such inspiring monuments. Politicians,
writers, and even some influential scientists dismissed the claim that North America’s ancient
architecture had been built by the ancestors of contemporary Indians, and instead attributed
the mounds to peoples of Europe, Africa, or Asia—Hindus, perhaps, or Israelites, Egyptians, or
Japanese. Many nineteenth-century Americans found special comfort in a tale about King
Madoc from Wales who, supposedly shipwrecked in the Americas in the twelfth century, had
left behind a small but ingenious population of Welsh pioneers who built the mysterious
mounds before being overrun by Indians. The Welsh hypothesis seemed to offer poetic justice,
because it implied that nineteenth-century Indians were only receiving a fitting punishment
for what their ancestors had done to the remarkable mound builders from Wales.
These fanciful tales were discredited in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In
recent decades archaeologists working across the Americas have discovered in more
detail how native peoples built the hemisphere’s ancient architecture. They have also
helped to make clear the degree to which prejudice and politics have blinded European-
Americans to the complexity, wonder, and significance of America’s history before 1492.
Fifteen thousand years of human habitation in North America allowed a broad range of
cultures to develop, based on agriculture as well as hunting and gathering. In North
America a population in the millions spoke hundreds of languages. Cities evolved as well
as towns and farms, exhibiting great diversity in their cultural, political, economic, and
religious organization.

A Continent of Cultures
Hunters Cross Most archaeologists agree that the Western Hemisphere’s first human inhabitants came
the Bering Strait from northeastern Asia. At least 15,000 years ago B.P.* during the most recent Ice
Age, small groups of people began crossing the Bering Strait, then a narrow bridge
of land connecting Siberia to Alaska. Gradually these nomads filtered southward,
some following the Pacific coastline in small boats, but most making their way down a
narrow, glacier-free corridor along the eastern base of the Rocky Mountains and onto
the northern Great Plains. There they found and hunted a stunning array of huge
mammals, so-called megafauna. These animals included mammoths that were twice
as heavy as elephants, giant bison, sloths that were taller than giraffes, several kinds of
camels, and terrifying, 8-foot long lions. Within a few thousand years the descendants
of these Siberians, people whom Columbus would wishfully dub “Indians,” had spread
throughout the length and breadth of the Americas.
As the new world of the Americas was settled, it was changing dramatically. The last
Ice Age literally melted away as warmer global temperatures freed the great reservoirs
of water once locked in glaciers. A rise in sea levels inundated the Bering Strait, sub-
merging the land bridge, and creating new lakes and river systems. The emergence of

*Before the Present, used most commonly by archaeologists when the time spans are in multiple thousands
of years. This text will also use C.E. for Common Era, equivalent to the Christian Era or A.D.; B.C.E. is
Before the Common Era, equivalent to B.C.
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The First Civilizations of North America Chapter 1 5

new ecosystems—climates, waterways, and land environments in which humans inter-

acted with other animals and plants—made for ever greater diversity. The first human
inhabitants of the Americas had fed, clothed, warmed, and armed themselves by hunt-
ing megafauna, and few of these giants survived the end of the Ice Age. As the glaciers
receded, later generations had to adapt to changing conditions. They adjusted by hunt-
ing smaller animals with new, more specialized kinds of stone tools and by learning to
exploit particular places more efficiently.
So it was that between 10,000 and 2,500 years ago, distinctive regional cultures Diversified Societies
developed among the peoples of the Americas. Those who remained in the Great Plains
turned to hunting the much smaller descendants of the now-extinct giant bison; those
in the deserts of the Great Basin survived on small game, seeds, and edible plants; those
in the Pacific Northwest relied mainly on fishing; and those east of the Mississippi,
besides fishing and gathering, tracked deer and bear and trapped smaller game animals
and birds. Over these same centuries, distinct groups developed their own languages,
social organizations, governments, and religious beliefs and practices. Technological
and cultural unity gave way to regional diversity as the first Americans learned how to
best exploit their particular environments.

Cultures of Ancient Mexico

To the south, pioneers in Mesoamerica began domesticating squash 10,000 years ago. Agricultural Revolution
Over the next several thousand years farmers added other crops including beans, toma-
toes, and especially corn to an agricultural revolution that would transform life through
much of the Americas. Because many crops could be dried and stored, agriculture
allowed these first farmers to settle in one place.
By about 1500 B.C.E., farming villages began giving way to larger societies, to
richer and more advanced cultures. As the abundant food supply steadily expanded
their populations, people began specializing in certain kinds of work. While most
continued to labor on the land, others became craftworkers and merchants, architects
and artists, warriors and priests. Their built environment reflected this social change as
humble villages expanded into skillfully planned urban sites that were centers of trade,
government, artistic display, and religious ceremony.
The Olmecs, the first city builders in the Americas, constructed large plazas, pyra- Olmec City-Builders
midal structures, and sculpted enormous heads chiseled from basalt. The Olmec cultur-
al influence gradually spread throughout Mesoamerica, perhaps as a result of their trade
with neighboring peoples. By about 100 B.C.E., the Olmecs’ example had inspired the
flowering of Teotihuacán from a small town in central Mexico into a metropolis of
towering pyramids. The city had bustling marketplaces, palaces decorated with mural
paintings that housed an elite of warriors and priests, schools for their children, and
sprawling suburbs for commoners. At its height, around 650 C.E., Teotihuacán spanned
15 square miles and had a population of nearly 200,000—making it the sixth largest
city in the world.
More impressive still were the achievements of the Mayas, who benefited from Mayan Civilization
their contacts with both the Olmecs and Teotihuacán. In the lowland jungles of Me-
soamerica they built cities filled with palaces, bridges, aqueducts, baths, astronomical
observatories, and pyramids topped with temples. Their priests developed a written
language, their mathematicians discovered the zero, and their astronomers devised a
calendar more accurate than any then existing. In its glory, between the third and ninth
century C.E., the Mayan empire boasted some 50 urban centers scattered throughout
the Yucatán Peninsula, Belize, Guatemala, and Honduras.
But neither the earliest urban centers of the Olmecs nor the glittering city-state
of Teotihuacán survived. Even the enduring kingdom of the Mayas had collapsed by
900 C.E. Like the ancient civilizations of Greece and Rome, they thrived for centuries and
then declined. Scholars still debate the reasons for their collapse. Military attack may have
brought about their ruin, or perhaps their large populations exhausted local resources.
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DAILY LIVES Play Ball

crowd goes wild, cheering their favorites. athletic regalia—kneepads, gloves, and
So many magnificent athletes trained to belts festooned with images of their gods
win, looking all the more formidable in or skeletal heads.
their heavily padded gear. Which team In most cultures, the rules of the game
will carry the day? A great deal is at stake dictated that players could use only their
for both players and spectators—honor, hips, buttocks, or knees to bounce the ball
wealth, perhaps even life itself. The out- against the parallel walls of the court and
come hangs on the arc of a ball. the alley lying between. And after about
The Super Bowl? The World Series? A.D. 800, the game became even more
Good guesses, because those present-day challenging: teams earned the most points
athletic spectacles bear striking resem- by shooting hoops—that is, by sending the
blances to the scene described above: ball through a stone ring set in the cen-
the beginning of a ball game in pre- ter of the side walls. No mean feat, since
Columbian Mesoamerica. Those contests, players could not use their hands or feet,
with all their accompanying fanfare, con- and the impact of a flying ball—about six
sumed the attention of both elites and pounds of solid rubber—could inflict seri-
commoners for many centuries. ous and even fatal injuries.
It was the Olmecs who got the ball roll- But it was the ritual significance of
ing (and flying) around 1500 B.C.E. In the these competitions that made for greater
main plazas of their cities, they built or- danger. In the Southwest, ball games of-
nate stone ballcourts for teams to compete ten figured as friendly rivalries, festive oc-
and celebrated star athletes with towering casions intended to strengthen military or
stone sculptures. Even as civilizations rose trading alliances among neighboring peo-
and fell in Mesoamerica, the passion for ples. In Mesoamerica, however, the games
playing ball, following the games, and typically celebrated military conquests:
gambling on their outcome not only en- during postgame rituals, the captain of the
dured but even spread to the Hohokam losing team—a captive taken in war—was
in the American Southwest. Archaeologi- beheaded with an obsidian knife by the
Heavy padding protects the internal organs cal digs have revealed that nearly every winning captain. That practice seems to
of this Aztec ball player from being injured city built by the Maya, Toltecs, and Aztecs have stemmed from the religious signifi-
by the heavy, dangerous rubber ball; the boasted its own ball court: the most impres- cance invested in the ball games, which
player’s head dress is a vulture painted
sive were larger than present-day football both the winning players and spectators
brilliant Mayan blue.
fields, painted in vivid colors, and deco- understood as a religious ceremony cel-
The band strikes up—trumpets blaring, rated with intricately carved birds, jaguars, ebrating their main deity, the Sun, an orb
drums pounding, flutes trilling. Dancers and skeletal heads. Renowned players in- greater than any other celestial body, and
whirl and gymnasts cavort. Then the spired artists to paint murals or to fashion encouraging the soil’s fertility with a sacri-
players parade into the stadium, and the clay figurines depicting ballplayers in full fice of human blood.

Aztec Empire Mayan grandeur was eventually outdone in the Valley of Mexico. In the middle of
the thirteenth century, the Aztecs, a people who had originally lived on Mesoamerica’s
northern frontiers, swept south and settled in central Mexico. By the end of the
fi fteenth century, they ruled over a vast empire from their capital at Tenochtitlán, an
island metropolis of perhaps a quarter of a million people. At its center lay a large plaza
bordered by sumptuous palaces and the Great Temple of the Sun. Beyond stood three
broad causeways connecting the island to the mainland, many other tall temples adorned
with brightly painted carved images of the gods, zoological and botanical gardens, and
well-stocked marketplaces. Through Tenochtitlán’s canals flowed gold, silver, exotic
feathers and jewels, cocoa, and millions of pounds of maize—all trade goods and tribute
from the several million other peoples in the region subjugated by the Aztecs.
6
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The First Civilizations of North America Chapter 1 7

Aztec merchants, or pochtecas,

spoke many languages and
traveled on foot great distances
throughout Mesoamerica and
parts of North America. This
one carries a cane and bears a
sack of trade goods, topped off
by a parrot.

Unsurpassed in power and wealth, in technological and artistic attainments, theirs

was also a highly stratified society. The Aztec ruler, or Chief Speaker, shared governing
power with the aristocrats who monopolized all positions of religious, military, and
political leadership, while the commoners—merchants, farmers, and craftworkers—
performed all manual labor. There were slaves as well, some captives taken in war, others
from the ranks of commoners forced by poverty to sell themselves or their children.

Cultures of the Southwest

Mesoamerican crops and farming techniques began making their way north to the
American Southwest by 1000 B.C.E. At first the most successful farmers in the region
were the Mogollon and Hohokam peoples, two cultures that flourished in New Mexico Mogollon and
and southern Arizona during the first millennium C.E. Both tended to cluster their Hohokam Peoples
dwellings near streams, relying either on flood-plain irrigation or a system of floodgates
and canals to sustain their crops. The Mogollon came to be the master potters of the
Southwest. The Hohokam pioneered vast and complex irrigation systems in arid south-
ern Arizona that allowed them to support one of the largest populations in precontact
North America.
Their neighbors to the north, in what is now known as the Four Corners of Arizona,
Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah, are known as the Anasazi. The Anasazi adapted corn, The Anasazi
beans, and squash to the relatively high altitude of the Colorado Plateau and soon parlayed
their growing surplus and prosperity into societies of considerable complexity. Their
most stunning achievements were villages of exquisitely executed masonry buildings—
apartment-like structures up to four stories high and containing hundreds of rooms at
places such as Mesa Verde (Colorado) and Canyon de Chelly (Arizona). Hundreds of
villages in Chaco Canyon (New Mexico), the largest center of Anasazi settlement, were
linked to the wider region by hundreds of miles of wide, straight roads.
Besides their impressive dwellings, the Anasazi filled their towns with religious
shrines, astronomical observatories, and stations for sending signals to other villages.
Their craftworkers fashioned delicate woven baskets, beautiful feather and hide sashes,
decorated pottery, and turquoise jewelry that they traded throughout the region and
beyond. For more than a thousand years, Anasazi civilization prospered, reaching its
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8 The First Civilizations of North America

The remains of Pueblo Bonito,

one of the nine Great Houses
built by Anasazis in Chaco
Canyon. By the end of the
eleventh century, Pueblo
Bonito stood four stories high
at the rear and contained 800
rooms as well as many towers,
terraces, a large central plaza,
and several round “Kivas”
for religious and ceremonial
purposes.

zenith between about 900 and 1100 C.E. During those three centuries, the population
grew to approximately 30,000 spread over 50,000 square miles, a total area larger than
present-day California.

Cultures of the Eastern Woodlands

East of the Mississippi, Indian societies prospered in valleys near great rivers (Mississippi,
Ohio, Tennessee, and Cumberland), the shores of the Great Lakes, and the coast of
the Atlantic. Everywhere the earliest inhabitants depended on a combination of fishing,
gathering, and hunting—mainly deer but also bear, raccoon, and a variety of birds.
Around 2000 B.C.E., some groups in the temperate, fertile Southeast began growing
the gourds and pumpkins first cultivated by Mesoamerican farmers, and later they also
adopted the cultivation of maize. But unlike the ancient peoples of the Southwest, most
Eastern Woodland peoples continued to subsist largely on animals, fish, and nuts, all of
which were abundant enough to meet their needs and even to expand their numbers.
Indeed, many of the mysterious earthen mounds that would so fascinate Europeans
were built by peoples who did not farm. About 1000 B.C.E., residents of a place now
known as Poverty Point in northeastern Louisiana fashioned spectacular earthworks—
six semicircular rings that rose nine feet in height and covered more than half a mile
in diameter. Although these structures might have been sites for studying the planets
Adena and and stars, hundreds of other mounds—built about 2000 years ago by the Adena and
Hopewell Cultures the Hopewell cultures of the Ohio and Mississippi valleys—served as the burial places
of their leading men and women. Alongside the corpses mourners heaped their richest
goods—headdresses of antlers, necklaces of copper, troves of shells and pearls—rare
and precious items imported from as far north as Canada, as far west as Wyoming, and
as far east as Florida. All these mounds attest powerfully not only to the skill and sheer
numbers of their builders but also to the complexity of these ancient societies, their
elaborate religious practices, and the wide scope of their trading networks.
Mississippian Culture Even so, the most magnificent culture of the ancient Eastern Woodlands, the
Mississippian, owed much of its prominence to farming. By the twelfth century C.E.,
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The First Civilizations of North America Chapter 1 9

these peoples had emerged as the premier city-builders of North America, and their
An artist’s reconstruction
towns radiated for hundreds of miles in every direction from the hub of their trading of the city of Cahokia, c.
network at Cahokia, a port city of perhaps 30,000 located directly across from present- 1100 C.E., the hearth of
day St. Louis at the confluence of the Missouri and the Mississippi rivers. Cahokia’s Mississippian culture. Note
many broad plazas teemed with farmers hawking their corn, squash, and beans and how tiny the human figures
with craftworkers and merchants displaying their wares. But what commanded every are in comparison to the
eye were the structures surrounding the plazas—more than 100 flat-topped pyramidal temples.
mounds crowned by religious temples and the palaces of rulers.

Cultures of the Great Plains

Cahokia’s size and power depended on consistent agricultural surpluses. Outside
the Southwest and the river valleys of the East, agriculture played a smaller role
in shaping North American societies. On the Great Plains, for example, some
people did cultivate corn, beans, squash, and sunflowers, near reliable rivers and
streams. But more typically plains communities relied on hunting and foraging, mi-
grating to exploit seasonally variable resources. Plains hunters pursued game on Migratory Peoples
foot; the horses that had once roamed the Americas became extinct after the last
Ice Age. Sometimes large groups of people worked together to drive the buffalos
over cliffs or to trap them in corrals. The aridity of the plains made it a dynamic
and unpredictable place to live. During times of reliable rainfall, bison populations
boomed and hunters flocked to the region. But sometimes centuries passed with
lower-than-average precipitation, and families abandoned the plains for eastern river
valleys or the foothills of the Rocky Mountains.

Cultures of the Great Basin

Some peoples west of the Great Plains also kept to older ways of subsistence. Among
them were the Numic-speaking peoples of the Great Basin, which includes present-day
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10 The First Civilizations of North America

it
ra
St
ing
Ber

Mis
sis
s
ip
p i R.

Miss
ou r
i R.

Bering land bridge

R.

ANASAZI io
Extent of ice cap during Mesa Verde Oh
most recent glaciation Canyon de
Chelly Chaco Canyon
Adena cultures

Hopewell cultures HOHOKAM Poverty

Point
Primary Mississippian
cultures MOGOLLON
Possible migration routes
of early Indians

Adena/Hopewell Site

Mississippian Site

Mayan Site

Olmec Site

Southwestern Sites

Early Peoples of North Nevada and Utah, eastern California, and western Wyoming and Colorado. Small
America Migration routes family groups scoured their stark, arid landscape for the limited supplies of food it
across the Bering Strait from yielded, moving with each passing season to make the most of their environment. Men
Asia were taken by peoples tracked elk and antelope and trapped smaller animals, birds, even toads, rattlesnakes,
whose descendants created the and insects. But the staples of their diet were edible seeds, nuts, and plants, which
major civilizations of ancient women gathered and stored in woven baskets to consume in times of scarcity. Several
America. The influence families occasionally hunted together or wintered in common quarters, but because
of Mesoamerica is most the desert heat and soil defied farming, these bands usually numbered no more than
striking among the cultures about 50 people.
of the Southwest and the
Mississippians. Cultures of the Pacific Northwest
The rugged stretch of coast from the southern banks of present-day British Columbia
to northern California has always been an extraordinarily rich natural environment.
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A F T E R T H E FA C T i n B ri e f

The Numbers Game

Counting the Earliest Americans

Lacking any statistical records of precontact populations,
how can historians estimate the population of North Amer-
ica? For much of the twentieth century scholars suggested
that North America contained about 1 million inhabitants and
Central and South America about 10 million. Over the past
several decades, however, archaeologists and historians have
increased those projections by a factor of 5 or 10, to as many
as 50–100 million inhabitants of the Americas. A variety of
methods have produced these revisions.
Small-scale analysis. Archaeologists examine the surviving
layout of a single town such as Paquime (right). How many peo-
ple could have lived in each room? Multiplying the result by the
number of rooms in the village and then again by the number
of villages within a larger area gives one estimate for a region.
Die-off ratios and epidemic disease. Although death tolls varied
regionally, European diseases such as smallpox killed 90 to The rooms of Paquime, divided by adobe mud walls, help
95 percent of native American populations. Starting with census archaeologists estimate population.
records dating from after Europeans had arrived, historians use
the ratios to calculate backward toward larger precontact totals. farming techniques, given climate and soils. Comparing and
Ecological carrying capacity. Some scholars have estimated combining such different methods provide a range of intelligent
how dense a population could be supported by Native American estimates, but they remain just that: estimates.

Its mild climate and abundant rainfall yield forests lush with plants and game; its
bays and rivers teem with salmon and halibut, its oceans with whales and porpoises,
and its rocky beaches with seals, otters, abalone, mussels, and clams. Agriculture was
unnecessary in such a bountiful place. From their villages on the banks of rivers, the
shores of bays, and the beaches of low-lying offshore islands, the ancestors of the
Nootkans, Makahs, Tlingits, Tshimshians, and Kwakiutls speared or netted salmon,
trapped sea mammals, gathered shellfish, and launched canoes. The largest of these
craft, from which they harpooned whales, measured 45 feet bow to stern and nearly
6 feet wide.
By the fi fteenth century these fecund lands supported a population of perhaps
130,000. They also permitted a culture with the leisure time needed to create works
of art as well as an elaborate social and ceremonial life. The peoples of the North-
west built houses and canoes from red cedar; carved bowls and dishes from red
alder; crafted paddles and harpoon shafts, bows, and clubs from Pacific yew; and
wove baskets from bark and blankets from mountain goat wool. They evolved a Social and Ceremonial
society with sharp distinctions among nobles, commoners, and slaves, the latter be- Distinctions
ing mainly women and children captured in raids on other villages. Those who were
free devoted their lives to accumulating and then redistributing their wealth among
other villagers in elaborate potlatch ceremonies in order to confirm or enhance their
social prestige.
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12 The First Civilizations of North America

Cultures of the Subarctic and Arctic

This ornately carved and
painted house post once Most of present-day Canada and Alaska were equally
supported the main beams inhospitable to agriculture. In the farthest northern
of a dwelling belonging to reaches—a treeless belt of Arctic tundra—temperatures
a Kwakiutl whaler in the fell below freezing for most of the year. The Subarctic,
Pacific Northwest. Depicting although densely forested, had only about 100 frost-
a man of wealth and high free days each year. As a result, the peoples of both
rank, the figure has a whale regions survived by fishing and hunting. The Inuit,
painted on his chest and copper or Eskimos, of northern Alaska harvested whales from
ornaments on his arms. Two their umiaks, boats made by stretching walrus skin over
smaller figures, in shadow by a driftwood frame and that could bear more than a
the whaler’s knees, each support ton of weight. In the central Arctic, they tracked seals.
one end of a plank seat. These
The inhabitants of the Subarctic, both Algonquian-
were his household slaves, most
speaking peoples in the East and Athapaskan speakers
likely children captured in an
of the West, moved from their summer fishing camps
attack on rival tribes.
to berry patches in the fall to moose and caribou
hunting grounds in the winter.

Innovations and Limitations

The first Americans therefore expressed, governed,
and supported themselves in a broad variety of
ways. And yet they shared certain core character-
istics, including the desire and ability to reshape
their world. Whether they lived in forests, coastal re-
gions, jungles, or prairies, whether they inhabited
high mountains or low deserts, native communi-
ties experimented constantly with the resources
around them. Over the course of millennia, near-
ly all the hemisphere’s peoples found ways to change the natural world in order to
improve and enrich their lives.

America’s Agricultural Gifts

Rise of Agriculture No innovation proved more crucial to human history than native manipulation of
individual plants. Like all first farmers, agricultural pioneers in the Americas began
experimenting accidentally. Modern-day species of corn, for example, probably derive
from a Mesoamerican grass known as teosinte. It seems that ancient peoples gath-
ered teosinte to collect its small grains. By selecting the grains that best suited them
and bringing them back to their settlements, and by returning the grains to the soil
through spillage or waste disposal, they unintentionally began the process of domestic
cultivation. Soon these first farmers began deliberately saving seeds from the best plants
and sowing them in gardens. In this way, over hundreds of generations, American
farmers transformed the modest teosinte grass into a staple crop that would give rise to
the hemisphere’s mightiest civilizations.
Indeed, ever since contact with Europe, the great breakthroughs in Native American
Worldwide Spread farming have sustained peoples around the world. In addition to corn, the first Americans
of American Crops gave humanity scores of varieties of squash, potatoes, beans, and other basic foods. To-
day, plants domesticated by indigenous Americans account for three-fi fths of the world’s
crops, including many that have revolutionized the global diet. For good or ill, a handful
of corn species occupies the center of the contemporary American diet. In addition to
its traditional forms, corn is consumed in chips, breads, and breakfast cereals; corn syrup
sweeteners are added to many of our processed foods and nearly all soft drinks; and corn
is fed to almost all animals grown to be consumed, even farmed fish.
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The First Civilizations of North America Chapter 1 13

Theodor de Bry, Florida

Indians Planting Maize.
Both men and women were
portrayed as involved in
agriculture. Except for the
digging stick at the center
rear, however, the farming
implements drawn by the
artist are European in origin.

Other Native American crops have become integral to diets all over the world.
Potatoes revolutionized northern European life in the centuries after contact, helping
to avert famine and boost populations in several countries. Ireland’s population tripled
in the century after the introduction of potatoes. Beans and peanuts became prized for
their protein content in Asia. And in Africa, corn, manioc, and other new-world crops
so improved diets and overall health that the resulting rise in population may have
offset the population lost to the Atlantic slave trade.

Landscapers
Plant domestication requires the smallest of changes, changes farmers slowly encourage
at the genetic level. But native peoples in the precontact Americas transformed their
world on grand scales as well. In the Andes, Peruvian engineers put people to work
by the tens of thousands creating an astonishing patchwork of terraces, dykes, and
canals designed to maximize agricultural productivity. Similar public-works projects
transformed large parts of central Mexico and the Yucatan. Even today, after several
centuries of disuse, overgrowth, and even deliberate destruction, human-shaped land-
scapes dating from the precontact period still cover thousands of square miles of the
Americas.
Recently, scholars have begun to find evidence of incredible manipulation of
landscapes and environments in the least likely of places. The vast Amazon rainforest Cultivated Trees of
has long been seen by westerners as an imposing symbol of untouched nature. But it the Amazon
now seems that much of the Amazon was in fact made by people. Whereas farmers
elsewhere in the world domesticated plants for their gardens and fields, farmers in the
Amazon cultivated food-bearing trees for thousands of years, cutting down less useful
species and replacing them with ones that better suited human needs. All told there
are more than 70 different species of domesticated trees throughout the Amazon.
At least one-eighth of the nonflooded rainforest was directly or indirectly created by
humans. Likewise, native peoples laboriously improved the soil across as much as a
tenth of the Amazon, mixing it with charcoal and a variety of organic materials. These
managed soils are more than 10 times as productive as untreated soils in the Ama-
zon. Today, farmers in the region still eagerly search for the places where precontact
peoples enriched the earth.
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14 The First Civilizations of North America

Native North Americans likewise transformed their local environments. Some-

times they moved forests. Anasazis cut down and transported more than 200,000
trees to construct the floors and the roofs of the monumental buildings in Chaco
Canyon. Sometimes they moved rivers. By taming the waters of the Salt and Gila
Rivers in present-day Arizona with the most extensive system of irrigation canals
anywhere in precontact North America, the Hohokam were able to support large
populations in a desert environment. And sometimes they moved the land itself.
Twenty-two million cubic feet of earth were moved to construct just one building in
the Mississippian city of Cahokia.
Fire as a Tool Indians also employed fire to systematically reshape landscapes across the conti-
nent. Throughout North America’s great eastern and western forests, native peoples
periodically set low fires to consume undergrowth and fallen trees. In this way the
continent’s first inhabitants managed forests and also animals. Burning enriched the
soil and encouraged the growth of grasses and bushes prized by game animals such
as deer, elk, beaver, rabbit, grouse, and turkey. The systematic use of fire to reshape
forests helped hunters in multiple ways: it increased the overall food supply for grazing
animals, it attracted those animal species hunters valued most, and, by clearing forests
of ground debris, fire made it easier to track, kill, and transport game. Deliberate burns
transformed forests in eastern North America to such an extent that bison migrated
from their original ranges on the plains and thrived far to the east. Thus, when native
hunters from New York to Georgia brought down a buffalo, they were harvesting a
resource that they themselves had helped to create.

The Shape of a Problem

No matter how great their ingenuity, the first Americans were constrained by certain
natural realities. One of the most important is so basic that it is easy to overlook.
Unlike Eurasia, which stretches across the northern hemisphere along an east-west
axis, the Americas fall along a north-south axis, stretching nearly pole to pole. Conse-
quently, the Americas are broken up by tremendous geographic and climactic diversity,
making communication and technology transfer far more difficult than it was in the
Old World.
Consider the agricultural revolution in Eurasia. Once plants and animals were first
domesticated in the Fertile Crescent around 10,000 years ago, they quickly began
spreading east and west. Within 1,500 years these innovations had been adopted in
Greece and India. A thousand years later the domesticated plants and animals of the
Fertile Crescent had reached central Europe, and, from there, it took perhaps 200 years
for them to be embraced in present-day Spain. Eurasia’s east-west axis facilitated these
transfers. Locations at roughly the same latitude share the same seasonal variation, have
days of the same length, and often have similar habitats and rates of precipitation, mak-
ing it relatively easy for plants and animals to move from one place to the next.
In contrast, the north-south orientation of the Americas erected natural barri-
ers to plant and animal transfer. Mesoamerica and South America, for example, are
about as far apart as the Balkans and Mesopotamia. It took roughly 2,000 years for
plants and animals domesticated in Mesopotamia to reach the Balkans. But because
Mesoamerica and South America are separated by tropical, equatorial lowlands, it took
domesticated plants such as corn several thousand years to jump between the two
regions. Sometimes the transfer never happened at all before European contact. South
American potatoes would have thrived in central Mexico, but the tropics stopped their
northward migration. Equatorial jungles also denied Mesoamerican societies the llama
and the alpaca, domesticated more than 5,000 years ago in the Andes. One wonders
what even greater heights the Olmec, Toltec, Mayan, and Aztec civilizations would
have achieved if they had had access to these large creatures as draft animals and reli-
able sources of protein.
Transfer of Technology, Dramatic variations in climate likewise delayed the transfer of agriculture from
Crop, and Animals Mexico to regions north of the Rio Grande. Archaeologists have recently discovered
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The First Civilizations of North America Chapter 1 15

evidence of 10,000-year-old domesticated squash in a cave in southern Mexico, an

indication that agriculture began in the Americas nearly as early as anywhere else
in the world. Yet squash and corn were not cultivated in the present-day American
Southwest for another 7,000 years, and the region’s peoples did not embrace a fully
sedentary, agricultural lifestyle until the start of the Common Era. Major differences
in the length of days, the growing season, average temperatures, and rainfall between
the Southwest and central Mexico meant that farmers north of the Rio Grande had to
experiment for scores of generations before they had perfected crops suited to their
particular environments. Corn took even longer to become a staple crop in eastern
North America, which is why major urban centers did not arise there until approxi-
mately 1000 C.E.
By erecting barriers to communication and the spread of technology, then, the pre-
dominantly north-south orientation of Americas made it more difficult for the hemi-
sphere’s inhabitants to build on one another’s successes. Had American innovations
spread as quickly as innovations in Eurasia, the peoples of the Western Hemisphere
would likely have been healthier, more numerous, and more powerful than they were
when Europeans first encountered them in 1492.

Animals and Illness

One other profound difference between the Eurasian world and the Americas con-
cerned animals and disease. Most diseases affecting humans originated from domesti-
cated animals, which came naturally into frequent and close contact with the humans
who raised them. As people across Eurasia embraced agriculture and started living with
one another and with domesticated animals in crowded villages, towns, and cities, they
created ideal environments for the evolution and transmission of infectious disease. For
example, measles, tuberculosis, and smallpox all seem to have derived from diseases
afflicting cattle.
Eurasians therefore paid a heavy price for living closely with animals. Yet in the Eurasia’s Deadly Advantage
long run, the continent’s terrible illnesses hardened its population. Victims who
survived into adulthood enjoyed acquired immunity to the most common diseases:
that is, if they had already encountered a particular illness as children, their immune
systems would recognize and combat the disease more effectively in the event of rein-
fection. By the fi fteenth century, then, Eurasian bodies had learned to live with a host
of deadly communicable diseases.
But Native American bodies had not. With a few important exceptions, includ-
ing tuberculosis, pneumonia, and possibly herpes and syphilis, human populations in
the western hemisphere seem to have been relatively free from major communicable
pathogens. Insofar as most major diseases emerge from domesticated animals, it is easy
enough to see why. Indigenous Americans domesticated turkeys, dogs, Muscovy ducks,
and Guinea pigs but raised only one large mammal—the llama or alpaca (breeds of the
same species).
This scarcity of domestic animals had more to do with available supply than with
the interest or ability of their would-be breeders. The extinction of most species of
megafauna soon after humans arrived in the Americas deprived the hemisphere of
80 percent of its large mammals. Those that remained, including modern-day bison,
elk, deer, and moose, were more or less immune to domestication because of peculiari-
ties in their dispositions, diets, rates of growth, mating habits, and social characteristics.
In fact, of the world’s 148 species of large mammals, only 14 were successfully domes-
ticated before the twentieth century. Of those 14, only one—the ancestor to the llama/
alpaca—remained in the Americas following the mass extinctions. Eurasia, in contrast,
was home to 13—including the five most common and adaptable domestic mammals:
sheep, goats, horses, cows, and pigs.
With virtually no large mammals to domesticate, Native Americans were spared the
nightmarish effects of most of the world’s major communicable diseases—until 1492.
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16 The First Civilizations of North America

After that date, European colonizers discovered the grim advantage of their millennia-
long dance with disease. Old-world infections that most colonizers had experienced as
children raged through indigenous communities, usually doing greatest damages to
adults whose robust immune systems reacted violently to the novel pathogens. Often
native communities came under attack from multiple diseases at the same time. Com-
bined with the wars that attended colonization and the malnutrition, dislocation, and
despair that attend wars, disease would kill native peoples by the millions while Euro-
pean colonizers increased and spread over the land. Despite their ingenuity and genius
at reshaping plants and environments to their advantage, native peoples in the Americas
labored under crucial disadvantages compared to Europe—disadvantages that would
contribute to disaster after contact.

Crisis and Transformation

With its coastal plains, arid deserts, broad forests, and vast grasslands, North America
has always been a place of tremendous diversity and constant change. Indeed, many
of the continent’s most dramatic changes took place in the few centuries before
Sudden Declines European contact. Because of a complex and still poorly understood combination
of ecological and social factors, the continent’s most impressive civilizations col-
lapsed as suddenly and mysteriously as had those of the Olmecs and the Mayas of
Mesoamerica. In the Southwest, the Mogollon culture went into eclipse around
the twelfth century, the Hohokam and the Anasazi by about the fourteenth. In the
Eastern Woodlands, the story was strikingly similar. Most of the great Mississippian
population centers, including the magnificent city of Cahokia, had faded by the
fourteenth century.

Enduring Cultures
The survivors of these crises struggled to construct new communities, societies, and
political systems. In the Southwest, descendents of the Hohokam withdrew to small
farming villages that relied on simpler modes of irrigation. Anasazi refugees embarked
on a massive, coordinated exodus from the Four Corners region and established new,
permanent villages in Arizona and New Mexico that the Spaniards would collectively
call the Pueblos. The Mogollons have a more mysterious legacy, but some of their
Trading City of Paquime number may have helped establish the remarkable trading city of Paquime in present-
day Chihuahua. Built around 1300, Paquime contained more than 2,000 rooms and
had a sophisticated water and sewage system unlike any other in the Americas. The city
included 18 large mounds, all shaped differently from one another, and three ballcourts
reminiscent of those found elsewhere in Mexico. Until its demise sometime in the fi f-
teenth century Paquime was the center of a massive trading network, breeding macaws
and turkeys for export and channeling prized feathers, turquoise, sea shells, and worked
copper throughout a huge region.
The dramatic transformations remaking the Southwest involved tremendous suf-
fering. Southwesterners had to rebuild in unfamiliar and oftentimes less productive
places. Although some of their new settlements endure even to this day, many failed.
Skeletal analysis from an abandoned pueblo on the Rio Grande, for example, indicates
that the average life expectancy was only 16.5 years. Moreover, drought and migra-
tions increased conflict over scarce resources. The most successful new settlements
were large, containing several hundred people, and constructed in doorless, defensible
blocks, or else set on high mesas to ward off enemy attacks. These changes were only
compounded by the arrival of Athapaskan-speaking peoples (known to the Spanish as
Apaches and Navajos) in the century or two before contact with Europeans. These
hunters and foragers from western Canada and Alaska moved in small bands, were
sometimes friendly, sometimes hostile toward different Pueblos, and eventually became
key figures in the postcontact Southwest.
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The First Civilizations of North America Chapter 1 17

In the Eastern Woodlands, the great Mississippian chieftainships never again at- Muskogean Peoples
tained the glory of Cahokia, but key traditions endured in the Southeast. In the lower
Mississippi valley, the Natchez maintained both the temple mound–building tradi-
tion and the rigid social distinctions of Mississippian civilization. Below the chief,
or “Great Sun,” of the Natchez stood a hereditary nobility of lesser “Suns” who
demanded respect from the lowly “Stinkards,” the common people. Other Muskoge-
an-speakers rejected this rigid and hierarchical social model and gradually embraced
a new, more flexible system of independent and relatively egalitarian villages that
forged confederacies to better cope with outsiders. These groupings would eventu-
ally mature into three of the great southeastern Indian confederacies: Creek, Choc-
taw, and Chickasaw.
To the North lived speakers of Iroquoian languages, roughly divided into a south- Iroquolans
ern faction including Cherokees and Tuscaroras, and a northern faction including the
powerful Iroquois and Hurons. Like Muskogeans to the South, these Iroquoian com-
munities mixed farming with a hunting/gathering economy and lived in semiperma-
nent towns. The distinctive feature of Iroquois and Huron architecture was not the
temple mound but rather the longhouse (some stretching up to 100 feet in length).
Each sheltered as many as 10 families.
The Algonquins were the third major group of Eastern Woodlands people. They Algonquins
lived along the Atlantic seaboard and the Great Lakes in communities smaller than
those of either the Muskogeans or the Iroquois. By the fi fteenth century, the coastal
communities from southern New England to Virginia had adopted agriculture
to supplement their diets, but those in the colder northern climates with shorter
growing seasons depended entirely on hunting, fishing, and gathering plants such
as wild rice.
Cultures of equal and even greater resources persisted and flourished during the
fi fteenth century in the Caribbean, particularly on the Greater Antilles—the islands Caribbean Cultures
of present-day Cuba, Haiti and the Dominican Republic, Jamaica, and Puerto Rico.
Although the earliest inhabitants of the ancient Caribbean, the Ciboneys, probably
came from the Florida peninsula, it was the Tainos, later emigrants from northern
South America, who expanded throughout the Greater Antilles and the Bahamas.
Taino chiefs known as caciques, along with a small number of noble families, ruled
island tribes, controlling the production and distribution of food and tools and ex-
acting tribute from the great mass of commoners, farmers, and fisherfolk. Attending
to these elites were the poorest Taino peoples—servants who bedecked their masters
and mistresses in brilliant diadems of feathers, fine woven textiles, and gold nose
and ear pieces and then shouldered the litters on which the rulers sat and paraded
their finery.

North America on the Eve of Contact

By the end of the fi fteenth century, North America’s peoples numbered between 5 and
10 million—with perhaps another million living on the islands of the Caribbean—and
they were spread among more than 350 societies speaking nearly as many distinct lan-
guages. (The total precontact population for all of the Americas is estimated at between
57 and 112 million.)
These millions lived in remarkably diverse ways. Some peoples relied entirely on Diverse Life-Ways
farming; others on hunting, fishing, and gathering; still others on a combination of the
two. Some, like the Natchez and the Iroquois, practiced matrilineal forms of kinship, in
which women owned land, tools, and even children. Among others, such as the Algon-
quins, patrilineal kinship prevailed, and all property and prestige descended in the male
line. Some societies, like those of the Great Plains and the Great Basin in the West, the
Inuit in the Arctic, and the Iroquois and Algonquins in the East, were roughly egalitar-
ian, whereas others, like many in the Caribbean and the Pacific Northwest, were rigidly
divided into nobles and commoners and servants or slaves. Some, such as the Natchez
and the Arawaks, were ruled by powerful chiefs; others, such as the Algonquins and the
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18 The First Civilizations of North America

INUIT
ARCTIC

TLINGIT
INUIT

TSHIMSHIAN

NORTHWEST
COAST KWAKIUTLS SHUSWAP
SUBARCTIC MONTAGNAIS

NOOTKIN CREE MICMAC

MAKAH KOOTENAY
SKAGIT BLACKFEET PENOBSCOT
COLVILLE ASSINIBOINE ALGONQUIN
SALISH CHIPPEWA ABENAKI
PUYALLUP PLATEAU CHEYENNE SIOUX
CHINOOK
WALLA FLATHEAD HIDATSA WAMPANOAG
UMATILLA WALLA NEZ SIOUX CHIPPEWA
TILLAMOOK CAYUSE PERCÉ MANDAN HURON MOHEGAN
ARAPAHO OTTAWA
CROW PEQUOT
KIOWA MENOMINEE IROQUOIS
NORTHERN NEUTRAL
KLAMATH PAIUTE APACHEAN WINNEBAGO ERIE SUSQUEHANNOCK NARRAGANSET
MODOC PAWNEE FOX
POMO IOWA LENNI
SHOSHONE POTAWATOMI LENAPE
SAUK
PRAIRIE KICKAPOO
MAIDU GOSHUTE
GREAT ILLINOIS
MOSOPELEA
KASKASKIA SHAWNEE
SHOSHONE PLAINS
COSTANO GREAT BASIN EASTERN
SOUTHERN
UTE WOODLAND PAMLICO
PAIUTE CHEROKEE TUSCARORA
CHEMEHUEVI APACHEAN WICHITA
HOPI
CHUMASH SERRANO
CAHUILLA
ZUÑI CHICKASAW ATLANTIC
LUISEÑO
DIEGUEÑO PUEBLO
CADDO
CREEK OCEAN
APACHEAN
CALIFORNIA YAMASEE
SOUTHWEST
CHOCTAW
PIMA JANO TIMUCUA
NATCHEZ APALACHEE

PACIFIC CONCHO
YAQUI
KARANKAWA
OCEAN LAGUNERO CALUSA

COAHUILTEC CARIBBEAN
NORTHEAST
ARAWAK
MEXICO
Main Subsistence Mode
Agriculture

Hunting and gathering Tenochtitlán MAYA

AZTEC
EMPIRE
Fishing

Indians of North America, circa 1500 The map shows approximate locations of some Native groups.

Pueblos, by councils of village elders or heads of family clans; still others in the Great
Basin, the Great Plains, and the far North by the most skillful hunter or the most pow-
erful shaman in their band. Those people who relied on hunting practiced religions that
celebrated their kinship with animals and solicited their aid as guardian spirits, while
predominantly agricultural peoples sought the assistance of their gods to make the rain
fall and the crops ripen.
When Europeans first arrived in North America, the continent north of present-
day Mexico boasted an ancient, rich, and dynamic history marked by cities, towns, and
prosperous farms. At contact it was a land occupied by several million men, women, and
children speaking hundreds of languages and characterized by tremendous political,
cultural, economic, and religious diversity.
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The First Civilizations of North America Chapter 1 19

But for most of our nation’s short history, we have not wanted to remember things this
way. European Americans have had a variety of reasons to minimize and belittle the
past, the works, even the size of the native populations that ruled North America for 99
percent of its human history. In 1830, for example, President Andrew Jackson delivered
an address before Congress in which he tried to answer the many critics of his Indian
removal policies. Although “humanity has often wept over the fate of the aborigines of
this country,” Jackson said, the Indians’ fate was as natural and inevitable “as the extinc-
tion of one generation to make room for another.” He reminded his listeners of the
mysterious mounds that had so captivated the founding fathers. “In the monuments and
fortresses of an unknown people, spread over the extensive regions of the West, we
behold the memorials of a once powerful race, which was exterminated, or has disap-
peared, to make room for the existing savage tribes.” Just as the architects of the mounds
supposedly met their end at the hands of these “savage tribes,” the president concluded,
so too must Indians pass away before the descendents of Europe. “What good man
would prefer a country covered with forests and ranged by a few thousand savages, to
our extensive republic, studded with cities, towns, and prosperous farms; embellished
with all the improvements which art can devise, or industry execute; occupied by more
than twelve millions of happy people, and filled with all the blessings of liberty, civiliza-
tion, and religion!”
Indeed, stories told about the past have power over both the present and the future.
Jackson and many others of his era preferred a national history that contained only a few
thousand ranging “savages” to one shaped by millions of indigenous hunters, farmers,
builders, and inventors. Yet every generation rewrites its history, and what seems clear
from this latest draft is the rich diversity of American cultures on the eve of contact be-
tween the peoples of Eurasia, Africa, and the Americas. We are still struggling to find
stories big enough to encompass not only Indians but all those who have forged this
complex, tragic, and marvelous nation of nations.

Significant Events
at least 15,000 B.C.E. First humans arrive in the Americas
ca. 10,000–2500 Distinctive regional cultures develop in the Americas
ca. 10,000–7000 Agriculture begins in the Western Hemisphere
ca. 2000 Agriculture spreads from Mesoamerica to the present-day Southeast
ca. 1700–700 Poverty Point flourishes in present-day Louisiana
ca. 1500 The Olmecs begin to build the first Mesoamerican cities
ca. 1000 Agriculture spreads from Mesoamerica to the present-day Southwest
ca. 500–100 Adena culture reaches its height in North America
ca. 100 The classical civilization of Teotihuacán emerges in the highlands of
central Mexico
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20 The First Civilizations of North America

ca. 100 B.C.E.–400 C.E. Hopewell culture thrives in the Ohio and Mississippi valleys
ca. 200–800 C.E. The Mayan empire flourishes on the Yucatán Peninsula
ca. 200–900 Mogollon culture flourishes in present-day New Mexico
ca. 650–950 The Olmecs, the Mayan empire, and Teotihuacán decline
ca. 800–1200 Mississippian civilization reaches its height
ca. 900–1100 Anasazi civilization reaches its height
ca. 1100 Mogollon culture declines
ca. 1300 Hohokam, Anasazi, and Mississippian civilizations decline; Apache and
Navajo peoples enter the Southwest from Canada
ca. 1325–1500 Aztec empire rises in Mesoamerica

Chapter Summary
During the thousands of years after bands of Siberian nomads • The native inhabitants of the Americas transformed their en-
migrated across the Bering Strait to Alaska, their descendants vironments in a variety of ways, from pioneering crops that
spread throughout the Americas, creating civilizations that ri- would eventually feed the world to terraforming mountains
valed those of ancient Europe, Asia, and Africa. and jungles.

• Around 1500 B.C.E. Mesoamerica emerged as the hearth of • Nonetheless, natural constraints would leave Native
civilization in the Western Hemisphere, a process started by Americans at a disadvantage compared to Europe. The
the Olmecs and brought to its height by the Mayans. continent’s north-south orientation inhibited the spread of
agriculture and technology, and a lack of domesticatable
—These Mesoamerican peoples devised complex ways of or-
animals compared to Europe would leave Native Americans
ganizing society, government, and religious worship and
with little protection against disease.
built cities remarkable for their art, architecture, and trade.
—Both commerce and migration spread cultural influences • For reasons that remain unclear, many of North America’s
throughout the hemisphere, notably to the islands of the most impressive early civilizations had collapsed by the
Caribbean basin and to North America, an influence that end of the fifteenth century. In their wake a diverse array of
endured long after these empires declined. cultures evolved across the continent.

• The adoption of agriculture gave peoples in the Southwest —In the Southwest, Pueblo Indians were joined by Athapaskan-
and the Eastern Woodlands the resource security neces- speaking hunters and foragers in an arid landscape.
sary to develop sedentary cultures of increasing complexity. —In much of eastern North America, stratified chiefdoms of
These cultures eventually enjoyed great achievements in the Mississippian era gave way to more egalitarian confed-
culture, architecture, and agriculture. eracies of independent villages subsisting on farming and
hunting.
• Inhabitants of the Great Plains, the Great Basin, the Arctic,
and the Subarctic evolved their own diverse cultures, relying • Although Americans in the nineteenth and even twentieth
for subsistence on fishing, hunting, and gathering. centuries have been slow to recognize the fact, the societies
of precontact America were remarkably populous, complex,
• Peoples of the Pacific Northwest boasted large populations
and diverse. Their influence would continue to be felt in the
and prosperous economies as well as an elaborate social,
centuries after contact.
ceremonial, and artistic life.
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The First Civilizations of North America Chapter 1 21

Additional Reading
The best descriptions of ancient American civilizations are axis alignment and of domesticated animals, see the captivat-
offered by Brian M. Fagan, Kingdoms of Gold, Kingdoms of ing work by Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates
Jade: The Americas before Columbus (1991); and, especially, of Human Societies (1998).
Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas be- For the cultures of precontact Mexico, see Michael D. Coe
fore Columbus (2005). For North America specifically, see Alice and Rex Koontz, Mexico: From the Olmecs to the Aztecs (5th ed.,
Beck Kehoe, America before the European Invasions (2002). For 2002). For exhaustive surveys of all regional cultures in North
the Southwest, see Stephen Plog, Ancient Peoples of the South- America, see William C. Sturtevant, general editor, Handbook
west (1997). For the Eastern Woodlands, see George R. Milner, of North American Indians, 20 volumes projected (1978– ).
The Moundbuilders: Ancient Peoples of Eastern North America Carl Waldman, Atlas of the North American Indian (1985), is
(2005). Roger G. Kennedy, Hidden Cities: The Discovery and also an excellent source of information, offering much more
Loss of Ancient North American Civilization (1994), gives a fas- than good maps.
cinating account of how white Americans responded to the For a fuller list of readings, see the Bibliography at www.
ruins of ancient American cultures. For the consequences of mhhe.com/davidsonnation6.
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A F TE R TH E FA C T

Historians Reconstruct the Past

Tracking the First Americans

What methods do historians use to discover the history of a bones home and soon realized that they must have belonged
past thousands of years before any humans knew how to write? to an extinct bison species. McJunkin failed to interest any
Archaeological research is key; and by carefully unearthing professional archaeologists in his find, and only after his death
layer after layer of soil, analyzing artifacts and their relation did New Mexican locals manage to convince scholars from the
to these layers, scientists and historians have been able to University of Colorado to come and investigate. When the team
discover a remarkable amount of information about the first finally began excavations in 1926, they found something that
immigrants to the Americas over 10,000 years ago. changed the course of modern archaeology: an exquisitely
But the deductions and inferences made—about a past crafted stone spear-point embedded in the bison’s ribs.
without words and barren of historical documents—are often The discovery rocked the scientific community, which for
contested. Archaeologists have continually argued with one the previous century had confidently declared that Indians
another over the scant available evidence. Even today the had first arrived in the Americas only about 4,000 years
debate continues over the nature of the earliest migrations. before. Eleven years later another shock wave followed when
And progress often depends on accidental discoveries, such archaeologists digging near Clovis, New Mexico, found a
as the one made by an African American cowboy, George different sort of projectile point near butchered mammoth
McJunkin. McJunkin, a former slave, was a talented rancher, bones. Finally, in 1949, scientists confirmed the great antiq-
not to mention a capable fiddler, amateur astronomer, and sur- uity of both finds by using “radiocarbon dating,” a method for
veyor. Old fossils also fascinated him, and he collected them. measuring decay rates of the radioactive isotope of carbon,
which exists in organic matter such as bone and starts to break
The Clovis Discoveries down immediately after an organism dies. Tests revealed that
the Indians whose hunting grounds were now called Folsom
Riding his horse one day in 1908 near Folsom, New Mexico, and Clovis had been turning ancient mammals into bones
Mc Junkin looked down and saw some very old and very large between 10,800 and 11,500 years ago.
bison bones eroding from a slope. He took some of the Those conclusions pointedly raised the question of exactly
how much earlier the first American ancestors of such hunters
had come to the New World. This tantalizing mystery puzzles
(and divides) archaeologists and anthropologists, geologists
and historians, right down to the present. Such men and women
devote their lives to the hard work of digging in remote sites
or exploring the ocean’s floor, to the harder work of analyzing
their finds in laboratories, and to the hardest work of all—trying
to make sense of what it all means. Their efforts have yield-
ed much new evidence and increasingly sophisticated tech-
niques for understanding its significance, but many important
questions remain unanswered.
Even so, almost all of them agree on a number of points.
First, whoever the first inhabitants of the New World were, they
came, originally, from Eurasia: scientists have found no fossil
remains to support the view that human beings evolved into
modern men and women in the Americas. Second, these first
Stone artifacts known as Clovis points found with the skeleton of Americans were almost certainly fully evolved human beings,
a mammoth. known as Homo sapiens sapiens—not their less-developed
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forerunners, the Neanderthals, or even earlier

ancestors. These Homo sapiens sapiens excelled at
surviving anywhere, armed as they were with the
intellectual ability to plan and cooperate and with
the technology to sew warm clothing, hunt large
animals, and store food. About 35,000 years ago,
these resourceful adapters came to predominate,
edging out the Neanderthals, whose more limited
skills had restricted their settlements to the tropical
and temperate parts of the world.

Evidence of Migration from

Siberia to North America
The new species multiplied rapidly, and the pressure
of its growing population pushed many into settling in
less hospitable regions—including the Arctic frontier
of Siberia in northeastern Asia. Indeed, a third point
of general agreement among scholars is that the
descendants of these migrants to Siberia continued
the wandering ways of their ancestors and somehow,
at some time, wandered into North America by way
of Alaska. The research of physical anthropologists
documents key biological similarities between
Siberians and most American Indians. Both groups
share not only certain genetic variants that suggest
their descent from common ancient ancestors but
also distinctive formations of the roots and crowns
of their teeth known as sinodonty.
But how did Asians get to Alaska—a region
now separated from Siberia by 50 miles of ocean known as They were able to do that because the Bering Strait is not a
the Bering Strait? It is not impossible that they sailed across, timeless feature of Arctic geography. On the contrary, geologists
for some Homo sapiens sapiens could build boats sturdy have discovered, submerged far below the Bering Strait lie traces
enough to navigate short stretches of open ocean. Archae- of a landmass that once connected Siberia to Alaska. Even in the
ologists have discovered that Southeast Asians floated across late nineteenth century, some naturalists suspected that such a
55 miles of ocean on rafts to reach Australia some 35,000 land bridge had once existed after noting that the vegetation
years ago. Could their contemporaries in northeast Asia, us- and wildlife of Siberia were nearly identical to those in Alaska.
ing bark canoes, have made a voyage of similar length over By the 1930s, scientists had enough information to speculate
the Bering Strait? Not impossible, scientists conclude, but not that what turned a waterway into an exposed, inhabitable
likely either, if only because navigating calm, tropical waters lowland plain was the coldest phase of the last Ice Age, which
of the southern Pacific is far less difficult than mastering the began about 30,000 years earlier, when plunging temperatures
Bering Strait, which even in summer is choked with ice floes. caused the world’s oceans to drop in depth by freezing great
Such an undertaking would have been even more daunting expanses of seawater into sheets of ice. Those climatic changes
to the earliest Siberians, who, as anthropologists have discov- formed “Beringia,” a land bridge between Siberia and Alaska that
ered, were land-based hunters, not seafaring folk. So most existed from about 25,000 B.P. until about 15,000 B.P. During
scientists now believe that Siberians did not sail to the New those millennia, most scientists now believe, Siberians gradually
World: instead, they walked. settled the length of this link to the Americas. Thereafter, when
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temperatures began to warm again and the seas rose and closed a less aggressive culture as arriving first, whose gentle people
over Beringia, some of its inhabitants strayed into Alaska. left little evidence of their presence. But they must also assume
that because these newcomers came earlier, they could not
An Even Earlier Arrival? have walked across the Beringia land bridge. They must have
sailed across the Bering Strait.
But even today, some scientists doubt this account. True, no one
A discovery in the state of Washington is also prompting sci-
has yet discovered an archaeological site in Alaska that can be
entists to wonder whether the first inhabitants of the Americas
positively dated to earlier than about 13,200 B.P. Yet two different
might have included peoples other than Asians. In 1996, the
archaeological teams claim to have found artifacts in rock shelters
sheriff of a small desert town, puzzled by a half-buried human
whose settlements, they assert, reach back 16,000 years—and
skeleton found along the shores of the Columbia River, showed
perhaps even to 30,000 years ago, though this evidence is less
the bones to an anthropologist, James Chatters. Like McJunkin’s
conclusive. One site, known as the Meadowcroft Rockshelter, is
find of almost a century earlier, this skeleton encased a stone
located in southwest Pennsylvania. The other is in the far reaches
spear point, and radiocarbon dating revealed it to be nearly as
of southern Chile at a site known as Monte Verde.
old (9,300 years) as the Folsom bones. Also like McJunkin’s speci-
The debates over the evidence produced from these exca-
men, this one has sparked debate within the scientific commu-
vations and its proponents have been harsh. When a team of
nity. Chatters and others who measured the skull discovered that
independent experts visited Monte Verde in 1997 to assess
it was far narrower than any Indian skull of similar antiquity. They
the evidence, the two sides got into a hot argument at the local
concluded—astonishingly—that the Kennewick Man, as he came
bar before the defenders of Monte Verde walked out in a huff.
to be known, was Caucasoid in appearance. It seemed to be evi-
(Or perhaps they did not; even this assertion was contradicted
dence that in addition to the Siberian migrations, some people of
by one of the skeptics.)
European stock may have somehow crossed to the Americas.
Beyond the operatic tales of bickering lie serious issues. The
But comparisons of the skull with all other known ethnic
advocates for the Clovis people as the first Americans are per-
groups led a panel of scientists to conclude that the Kennewick
suaded partly because of the deadly spearpoints they made.
Man is not a distant relative either of present-day Indians or
As one pro-Clovis advocate remarked, the spearpoints remind-
of Caucasians. The closest resemblance is to the Ainu people
ed him “of the deadly beauty of the Colt pistol and Winchester
of Japan’s Sakhalin Islands and to Polynesians of the South
rifle. Just as production of these weapons coincided with the
Pacific. If such a link were established, it would strengthen
demise of the buffalo and passenger pigeon, so does the Clovis
the hypothesis that some of the earliest Americans reached
period coincide with the extinction of America’s megafauna—
the continent by boat, either hopscotching along the Bering
the mammoth, mastodon, and other ice-age giants.” However,
Strait or even sailing across the Pacific. Both the Ainu and the
advocates of an earlier human presence in North America posit
Polynesians were maritime peoples.
So the debates about America’s first colonizers continue, and
if recent history is any guide, so too will the discoveries. This
part of the past, like every other, holds in store many surprises
for those in the present determined to probe its secrets.

Bibliography Keeping up with recent discoveries

in this field poses many challenges. New discoveries turn up
frequently, and most reports of those findings are written in
a highly technical language. Fortunately, a few well-written
books provide a guide to both the early Asian migration to and
throughout the Americas and the evolution of scholarly debate.
Brian M. Fagan, The Great Journey (London, 1987), is lucid, and
the same author has also written a more detailed textbook
To the left of the tag “F-9” is a fragment of deer antler from
on both ancient Native American archaeology and history,
excavations at Meadowcroft Rock shelter. Does this and other
evidence suggest that hunters were present in Pennsylvania more Ancient North America (1991). Recent debates are explored in
than 16,000 years ago? Archaeologists hotly debate the point. Charles C. Mann’s 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before
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The First Civilizations of North America Chapter 1 25

Columbus (2005). The long and tense relationship between excavations at Meadowcroft Rockshelter, in his account (with
archaeologists and Americas’ native peoples is the subject of Jake Page), The First Americans: In Pursuit of Archaeology’s
David Hearst Thomas’s excellent book Skull Wars: Kennewick Greatest Mystery (2002). Adovasio’s book is also of interest
Man, Archaeology, and the Battle for Native American Identi- to outsiders because it presents an unvarnished description
ty (2000). Students seeking more advanced and specialized of the actual practice of archaeology. “After twelve hours of
information should consult Stuart J. Fiedel, Prehistory of the troweling thin layers of dirt and dust,” Adovasio notes, “you go
Americas (2nd ed., Cambridge, 1992). crazy at night. Running, weight lifting, drinking, fornicating,
Fiedel is one of the skeptics of earlier claims of human en- staring off into space and babbling incoherently—you do
try into North America. He is treated with something less than almost anything for relief. It takes a truly bizarre person to live
cordiality by J. M. Adovasio, the archaeologist who led the that way for months on end, and we had tents full of them.”

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