Preconquest America

The Americas

Agricultural Diffusion

• Unlike Eurasia, which stretches along an east-west axis, the Americas run north-south. As a result, the Americas are broken up by tremendous geographic and climactic diversity, making agricultural technology transfer far more difficult. Had American innovations spread as quickly as in Eurasia, Native Americans would likely have been more advanced than they were when Europeans first arrived.

Civilization vs. Savagery

• Without bothering to understand those they encountered, Europeans claimed to be civilized while arguing that non-whites were simplistic and violent savages. They used this language to justify the expulsion, enslavement, and extermination of non-white Christians.

Tenochtitlán

Cahokia, 700-1500.

• Prior to Columbus’s voyage across the Atlantic, the Aztec people had succeeded in conquering much of central Mexico
• They maintained their dominance by requiring defeated tribes to supply them with tribute
• In turn, they used this wealth to construct Tenochtitlan, in the center of Lake Texcoco.
• The Aztec’s ceremonial center, Tenochtitlán, was an engineering and architectural masterpiece arguably more advanced than any city in Europe.

Natives of North America

• The Mississippian people of Cahokia created a complex society, built enduring monuments, and traded extensively with other natives throughout North America.
• Near present-day St. Louis, Monk’s Mound is 100 feet high and 15 acres.
• Until the 1900s most Anglo-Americans refused to believe that Native Americans could have created such monuments.

Trading Networks

• The mounds disprove the notion that Native American peoples lived in isolated communities.
• Archeologists have found obsidian from the Far West, seashells from the Gulf Coast, mica from the Atlantic seaboard, and copper from the Great Lakes. This proves that these people traded goods over very long distances.
• Mississippian cultures declined prior to the arrival of Europeans as a result of population pressures, famine, warfare, and disease

What You Need To Know

Beringia

If continents were separated, how was the Americas populated?

• Beringia: a land bridge created by cold climactic conditions which connected the Asian and North American continents about 12,000 yrs ago
• Paleo Indian hunters were the first discoverers of the Americas when they crossed

Is this fact?

• Chilean settlement 1000 years prior to the existence of the Beringean ice bridge

Deloria argues that Native Americans may have originated in the Americas, or reached them through transoceanic travel, as some of their creation stories suggested

Paleo Indian hunters

• Beringia
• Agricultural Revolution
• Cahokia
• Tenochtitlan
• Agricultural Diffusion
• Civilization vs. Savagery

Pangaea

• 240 million years ago: North and South America were attached to Europe, Asia, and Africa
• Super continent
• The continents drifted apart 10 cm each year
• Final separation resulted in oceans isolating the Western Hemisphere

Agricultural Revolution

• 12,000 years ago: large animals died out, people adapted by hunting, foraging, and fishing
• Soon began making weapons
• When native cultures in central Mexico discovered how to cultivate maize, beans, and squash about 10,000 years ago, migratory groups were able to establish permanent urban centers with increasingly larger populations
• Called the tres hermanas