1.1 The First Americans, to 1500

Migrations of people from other parts of the world into the Western Hemisphere probably began about 30,000 years ago. Many of the earliest people in North and South America shared their ancestry with Asians and probably crossed a land bridge at the Bering Strait—also called Beringia—or travelled the coastline by boat during the final Ice Age, which lasted from about 50,000 years ago until about 10,000 years ago. Enduring bitter cold, these peoples probably came in small hunting groups that followed large mammals such as the mastodon, bison, woolly rhinoceros, and a kind of antelope over long distances. Small hunter-gatherer bands of Paleo-Indians relied on these animals as rich sources of meat for sustenance, dung for fuel, and bones for tools. Their populations grew rapidly, and by about 12,500 years ago they had spread overland from the Aleutians to Montana; down to the tip of South America, called Tierra del Fuego; and throughout the eastern and southeastern portions of North America.

Another stream of migrants lived not on large animals as hunters, but rather on fish and small plants along the Pacific coastline of both continents. Ancient sites dating from as long as 35,000 years ago in Chile and Peru show that a different migration may have predated most of the North American hunters and come from some other part of the world than Beringia. These South American populations were probably established by peoples who settled in camps part of the year and during other seasons migrated northward to warmer climates along the coast of South America.

Then about 10,000 years ago, the hemispheric climate warmed, and the large animals either became extinct or drifted far from human populations. In North America, Indians were forced to hunt smaller and scarcer game, and these harsher conditions resulted in population declines. Over time, dispersed populations adapted to the deserts of the Great Basin, or turned to the resources of the forests around the Great Lakes, or pressed into the woodlands and plateaus of North America’s south and southeast.

As they became more settled in semi-permanent villages, these ancestors of modern Indians also began to cultivate certain plants. In central Mexico, many Indian societies began to cultivate maize, or corn, along with beans, squash, sunflowers, and herbal grasses. The requirements of tending these crops, and their abundant yields, stimulated a more highly organized political system and complex village culture, and populations grew beginning about 3,000 to 2,500 years ago. Gender divisions of labor became clearer, with men and women performing more specialized and defined tasks. Communities developed political systems that elevated some members to positions of leisure or prestige over others. By about 500 b.c.e., powerful centers of population grew up in several regions and were surrounded by tributary villages.

We can understand some of the ways Native American peoples developed from the knowledge contained in their legends. We can also study their stone tools and carvings, architectural remains, fragments of textiles, shards of pottery, and alterations to the land itself. Assembling this historical evidence has not given us a complete portrait of the Western Hemisphere over time, but it does allow us to reconstruct snapshots of a remarkably diverse part of the world. This evidence also shows that Native American cultures and systems of government underwent constant changes yet maintained remarkable continuity. Estimates of the Native American population in the Americas prior to European contact vary widely, mainly because scholars will never have complete data. But many agree that by about 1450 c.e., or shortly before the first European wave, 25 million to as many as 100 million people could have been living in the Western Hemisphere (compared with about 70 million people in Europe at that time). Between 4 million and 10 million lived north of the Rio Grande, which forms part of the border between the United States and Mexico today. Up to 25 million lived in the complex societies of Mexico and Peru. Between six hundred and eight hundred different languages were spoken throughout the Americas, pointing to a remarkable cultural diversity that Europeans had never experienced and often could not comprehend.

In North America, the forested and fertile areas around the Ohio and Mississippi rivers supported sophisticated Native American societies, sometimes referred to as the Eastern Woodlands cultures. From at least 3,000 years ago, hunting and gathering peoples began cultivating certain crops—tobacco and maize among them—along with their regular foraging activities. Along the upper banks of the Ohio River, the Adena culture flourished until at least the second century c.e. The Adena were probably the first mound builders in North America, a sedentary and complex society that constructed great burial mounds. Portions of these mounds survive as a testament to this society’s sophisticated organization of labor and hierarchical culture.

As Adena reached its peak and then began to decline, the Hopewell culture rose throughout the Mississippi–Ohio Valley, where its people also built enormous mounds for burials and other ceremonies. Artifacts discovered in and near the mounds suggest Hopewell societies traded with other peoples as far away as in the Rocky Mountains, along the Gulf and Atlantic coastlines, and around Lake Superior in the first centuries c.e.

By 950 to 1400 c.e., another mound-building civilization arose along the Mississippi River near present-day St. Louis, Missouri. The focal point of this Mississippian culture, Cahokia, had a population of perhaps forty thousand people, more than any other North American city until well after the American Revolution. Such density of population was probably possible because these early Indians adopted maize cultivation from sedentary populations to their south, used relatively sturdy planting tools such as the flint hoe, developed a vast trade network, and took regular tribute payments from subsidiary peoples. It is possible that Cahokia served as a ceremonial and distribution center for population sites around it and that a centralized political authority emerged by sustained warfare over generations. Certainly Cahokia supported pottery, metalworking, and toolmaking. A central ceremonial earthen temple rose nearly a hundred feet high and covered a base of about fifteen acres, and from its heights a commanding elite could issue decrees and receive tribute (see Figure 1.2). Cahokia collapsed suddenly in the early 1400s, perhaps because its large population depleted essential natural and cultivated resources, or perhaps because pathogens introduced from coastal populations hundreds of miles away had devastating effects. To the south of Cahokia, the Natchez people preserved Mississippian culture for many more generations.

In the semi-arid southwest of North America, the Hohokam, the Anasazi, and the Pueblo cultures also attained great complexity. The Hohokam (of present-day Arizona) built hundreds of miles of irrigation canals before 100 c.e., which enabled them to produce two crops of grains and cotton a year. They cultivated with hoes and wore woven cotton clothing instead of animal skins, as many Indians of forested areas did. Their intricately designed pottery was traded as far away as the central plains of Mexico.

The Anasazi of the Chaco Canyon in New Mexico built spacious apartments and religious meeting halls and developed seasonal calendars, sophisticated pottery, roadways, and extensive irrigation systems (see Figure 1.3). However, drought and the onslaught of enemy peoples greatly reduced the number of Anasazi during the late 1200s. During the 1300s, the Athapaskans, seminomadic migrants from much colder climates to the north, began to raid the farmlands of the Anasazi and forced them to flee south.

The Pueblo, descended from the Anasazi in subsequent centuries, settled along the Rio Grande in present-day New Mexico. Theirs was a rich culture of several languages, elaborate matrilineal clans (structured along the female kinship line), and religious societies. Pueblo agricultural techniques permitted the cultivation of plentiful crops in extremely arid conditions. These “cliff dwellers” were living in over fifty large settlements when the Spanish came to their area in the 1500s. Some surviving Pueblo towns contain the oldest continuously used dwellings in America. Athapaskans gradually settled around the Pueblo towns and turned to the farming methods Pueblos taught them. These people came to be known as the Navajo.

Far to the east, descendants of the Adena–Hopewell peoples settled in temperate and relatively wet climates stretching from the Great Lakes and Appalachian Mountains to the Atlantic coastline. Mainly composed of small villages, clustered as tribes, and based on shared kinship, rising cultures extended from today’s Florida through New England, across the southern Piedmont and Tidewater regions, and up into the valleys of the Hudson and Connecticut rivers.

By the late 1500s about 20,000 Algonquian-speaking peoples had migrated into the Chesapeake region. Many of them formed a confederacy under the powerful leader Powhatan. Toward the interior, the confederacies of Creek, Catawba, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Cherokee also took shape. These Eastern Woodland cultures were very different from the highly structured and centralized cultures of the Southwest and Ohio Valley. Eastern peoples based social and political authority on kinship lineages that made decisions about work, defense, integrating captives, and marriage alliances. They changed leaders frequently and allowed tribal members to participate in decision making. They also had minimal bureaucracies, with little specialization of jobs and services, and frequent travel and game playing among clans.

The slash-and-burn agriculture of these southeastern cultures would amaze Europeans. Having chosen a section of forest to cultivate, young Indian men and women burned off the underbrush and then mixed the ashes with decaying leaves to make a rich soil for planting. Often men and women “girdled” trees by slashing off a swath of bark and wood around the circumference of the trunk; in subsequent seasons, the dead tree trunks remained standing, but in the absence of shady leaf cover, Indians cultivated plants in the nutritious forest soil. Eastern peoples also kept their soil rich in nutrients and increased their crop yields by interplanting maize and beans together, and sometimes adding dead fish to the soil as fertilizer. All of these practices were startlingly new to Europeans.

Native Americans of the eastern coastal plain rarely wasted any products the forest offered. Houses were made of sapling poles and covered with layers of bark or leafy branches. Skilled craftspeople produced needles for sewing clothing and household goods, eating utensils and bowls, weapons, baskets, and small boats. In 1590 the English artist-turned-explorer Thomas Harriot would remark of the Algonquian in the southeastern woodlands, “the manner of makinge their boates . . . is verye wonderfull. For whereas they want [i.e., lack] Instruments of yron, yet they knowe howe to make them as handsomlye . . . as ours.” Indeed, Native American cultures did not mine mineral ores such as copper, tin, lead, and iron—which might have led to the production of kettles, knives, axes, and plows. Europeans frequently identified this shortcoming as the source of Native American inferiority. However, the absence of what Europeans presumed to be “advances,” or evidence of their own superiority, also had critical advantages for Native American cultures: since they did not mine ores, they did not devastate their forests for fuel to run forges and mills, or change the contours of the land to extract ores, or organize their families and villages to provide for dramatically different kinds of labor in metalwork. Native American alterations of the landscape were at a slower pace and of a different quality than in the European experience.

Along the eastern coastline and north of the St. Lawrence River, Algonquian-speaking peoples of over fifty different cultures formed semisedentary or nomadic bands that hunted and fished in seasonal territories. The Cree, Micmac, Chippewa, Montagnais, and others of northerly climates remained thinly populated and spread out over expansive hunting grounds. A chain of Algonquian-speaking peoples also inhabited virtually the entire Atlantic coastline, where they adopted agriculture in their seasonal productive cycles; the hoe and fishing spear became important tools for the Narragansett, Pequot, Delaware, and others.

Between these two Algonquian-speaking regions lay the territory of the other large language group of the Northeast, the sedentary Iroquoian-speaking societies which formed about 4,500 years before contact with Europeans. As elsewhere in the Western Hemisphere, success in growing corn, beans, and other edible plants led to rapid population growth. So dense were the various Iroquois settlements by the 1400s that fifty to sixty “longhouses,” often sheltering dozens of families each, spread out along the rivers of present-day western New York. By the 1570s, five great nations of the Iroquois were centered in what would become western New York: the Mohawk, Onondaga, Oneida, Cayuga, and Seneca. Together they created a confederacy called the Great League of Peace, which coordinated commerce and religious ceremonies, and demanded the allegiance of all its member villages. According to legend, the great orator Hiawatha carried the invitation to join the league from village to village, promising that even as all five nations claimed common descent from the same maternal line and spoke the same Iroquoian language, each nation could also keep its separate clan identity. Their goal, professed Hiawatha, was peace within the league and unified war against enemies such as the Erie and Huron.

In Mesoamerica and South America, a variety of cultures such as the Olmec, Maya, Toltec, Aztec, Inca, and others combined under powerful leaders. Seminomadic bands of hunter-gatherers and sedentary peoples organized into chiefdoms. But unlike in North America they often came under the domination of imperial rulers in large state societies. Like North America, the cultivation of new food crops supported much larger populations, which in turn required more complicated social structures. By about 2000 b.c.e. great temples and pyramids existed in Mesoamerica, as did bureaucracies dedicated to sustaining demanding gods, living rulers, and religious castes that enjoyed tremendous luxury. Each successive rising empire developed vast processing and craft enterprises that made tools, textiles, pottery, and weapons. To sustain such unparalleled prosperity and extend their societies, each empire developed diplomacy and waged regular warfare over great areas of the countryside. These empires also developed great urban centers, which were fed mostly by the subordinated countryside.

For example, between 1000 B.C.E. and about 650 C.E. the Olmec dominated central Mexico with a dense urban population near modern-day Mexico City. The powerful Olmec religious and political elite governed over the production of thousands of weavers, stonemasons, potters, and other craftsmen and gathered tribute from a great trading region that extended north into present-day Arizona. Descendants of the Olmec probably erected the great Pyramids of the Sun and Moon at Teotihuacán during the first century c.e. Elsewhere, around 900 c.e., loose migrating groups of northern peoples later known collectively as the Toltecs swept down toward the central plains of Mexico to conquer regions around Monte Albán and Teotihuacán—which may have grown to over 250,000 by then—and to overwhelm the Maya people of the Yucatan peninsula.

From about 300 c.e., the Maya’s sophisticated agriculture supported a leisured class and a culture that produced jewelry of gold and silver, hieroglyphic writing, a mathematical system with the number zero, and calendars more accurate than anything Europeans would know for centuries. But by the time the Toltecs arrived after 900 c.e., the Maya had been weakened by depleted agricultural soil and internal warfare in which captives were ritually sacrificed.

Then, around 1200 c.e., the Toltec mysteriously retreated from the edges of their empire and drew in around the central highlands of Mexico. Over the next century, the Mexica (Aztec) migrated into this area from drier northern climes. Consolidating their control, by 1325 they had founded Tenochtitlán (now Mexico City). By the time the Spanish approached this capital city in 1519, its population was about 300,000, making it one of the largest concentrations of people in the world. (London contained only 75,000 people in 1500.) Tenochtitlán supported thousands of craftsmen who produced both necessary and luxury goods. Massive pyramids to the sun and moon gods stood at the center of the metropolis, where high priests sacrificed captives of war and virgins to their sun god, Huitzilopochtli, at bloody public rituals (see Figure 1.4). They constructed wide and deep causeways from outlying regions into the heart of the city to carry resources and tribute from conquered peoples in outlying regions. An irrigation system brought fresh drinking water to the city; skilled craftsmen and important bureaucrats filled the streets; and everywhere markets packed with foods and household wares provisioned townspeople and traders.

Stretching along the Andes Mountains in present-day Peru, agriculturalists also flourished between 900 and 100 b.c.e. At amazing heights of over 10,000 feet, Andean peoples irrigated their rich soil and cultivated higher yields of potatoes than the best farming techniques in other parts of the world could produce. Like the Aztecs, this Chavin mountain culture built great temples and created an elaborate social structure that thrived until a drought decimated it around 300 c.e. In its place, two new Peruvian empires arose: the Mochicans of the north developed fine pottery and fabulous pyramids, and the Tiwanaku farther to the south adapted crops such as cotton, potatoes, and maize to elaborate terracing and irrigation systems. Both cultures, however, failed to survive the return of drought conditions.

Between roughly 1200 and 1400 c.e., the Inca (Quechua) peoples rose out of many warring farm populations in Peru to take control of the southern Andean highlands. After an epic battle in 1438, a young warrior leader named Pachakuti reorganized the surrounding population into a centralized state. In their creation legend, Andean peoples explained that their ancestors had come from nature and, upon death, had returned to the rocks, lakes, and trees. It was fitting, then, to honor and respect the land with many rituals and to take from nature only what was necessary. At the same time, Inca rulers aggressively extended their empire’s influence over 2,000 miles to the north and south of their Peruvian capital, Cuzco, a city of 250,000 people by the end of the 1400s. Fierce Inca warriors carried edicts and collected tribute on a system of roads that proved a marvel to Spanish conquistadors in the next century. Imperial leaders also drove their subjects relentlessly to mine silver and gold, a system that the Spanish would later co-opt. Neither the Aztec nor the Inca used wheels, but whereas North Americans had no large domesticated animals, the Andean peoples used the llama extensively for haulage as well as a source of wool and meat. By 1500 c.e., the Inca Empire included between 8 million and 12 million people.