1.1: The First American Settlers

• At the beginning of the 16th century, Europeans represented over 2,000 different cultures, spoke several hundred different languages, and lived in severaldenseran southwest’odhamnt environments in the western hemisphere.

  • Just as there are many nations involved in the term 'European,' so also there is an immense diversity between the peoples of the Americas.

• While most of them were straight, black, and dark, almond-shaped, their colors ranged from cacahuete to pale brown.

  • Few fit the descriptions of the "redskins" of 18th and 19th-century North American colonists.

  • Only when European peoples compared Indians with people from other continents, such as Africans, seemed sufficiently similar to be classified as a group.

• Acosta was the first person to propose a generally accepted Asian hypothesis of migration.

• A large subsoil of ice-free, treeless grasslands, which geologists named Beringia

• The north-western Pacific Haida people talk about when the offshore islands were much broader long ago but the oceans were rising, they said, and "flut tide woman" forced them to move upwards.

• Traditions of hunting The stress on the big game animals, that best suits the Ice Age environment, was one of the main effects of this huge climate shift.

  • Archeologically, thirty-two classes of great New World mammals are extinguished.

• Culture of Desert: The warming trend in the Great Basin created a desert where enormous seas once existed.

  • Here Indians have developed a way of life-based on a small game and intensifying foraging of plenty of plant food, which is what anthropologists call 'desert culture.'

• The efficiency of forests: In Eastern Mississippi, there were similar trends.

  • The whole of eastern North America was a vast woodland in the centuries before colonization and settlement by Europeans.

• Indigenous communities have achieved a safe and comfortable life, developing the sophisticated knowledge of the rich and diverse resources available, a principle of "forest efficiency" for anthropologists.

1.2: The Development Of Farming

• By the 14th century, migrants from the North known as the Aztecs had settled in the Valley of Mexico and started a dramatic development into a formidable imperial power.

• With the development of sophisticated tool-making traditions, agriculture was a further phase in economic intensification which maintained a balanced population and resources available.

1.3: Farming In Early North America

• In the same centuries, in the region along with the Salt and Gila floodplains in southern Arizona the culture known as Hohokam flourished.

  • The Hohokam, who lived in farming villages, builds and maintains the first irrigation system in North America of Mexico, which channels water to water fields of maize, beans, squash, tobacco, and cotton through 500 miles of channels.

• Hohokam culture shared several characteristics, including platform mounds for religious celebrations and big courts for balls, with Mesoamerican civilization south.

• Mound Construction was also a typical activity during this time for the people of the Ohio Valley.

• In the first millennium, the people of an area called Adena lived in a semi-permanent village and built large funeral hills.

  • A culture named Hopewell succeeded them.

• Heads of Hopewell mobilized an extensive trade network, acknowledging Rocky Mountains obsidians, copper from the Great Lakes, Appalachian mica, and Gulf Coast shells.

1.4: Cultural Regions Of North America On The Eve Of Colonization

• California also continued to hunt and gather, although its population grew wider and more dense due to the natural abundance of the region.

• In the Pacific Northwest, large populations concentrated in permanent villages supported abundance of salmon fishing.

  • The Plateau people also lived through fishing, although they were not that large or concentrated in their communities.

• On the eve of European settlement, Indian farmers cultivated their fields in the south-west for almost three thousand years.

• The people of Yuman worked small, irrigated fields along the Colorado River and on the floor of the Grand Canyon.

  • In the Gila and Salt River flood plains, there lived the Pimas and Tohono O'Odhams.

• The South has a mild, humid climate, short winters, and long summers, perfect for agriculture.

  • This rich land, fishing or hunting of local fauna in the sixteenth century, supplemented the food supplies by a large population of Indian people.

  • They lived in communities from villages of 20 or more residences to big cities of a thousand or more people.

• Northeastern coastlines and mountain highlands, large river banks, lakes and valleys are part of the colder region of the eastern forests.

• In the first millennium, agriculture became the principal support of the Indian economy where the growing season was long enough to make the maize crop mature.