1. Native American societies before contact

• People first arrived in the Americas


  15,000 years ago
• By the time Europeans arrived in the late 1400s and 1500s, native societies had been evolving for over 14,000 years
• Scholarly debate about how people first arrived in the Americas


  Possible they came by land during an ice age when sea levels were lower, or possible they came earlier by boat
• By the time Europeans arrived, there were perhaps 50 million people living in the Americas, with 4-6 million in North America
• Native American societies


  • Developed around their natural environments, using the resources available to them
• Domestication of maize (corn) around 5000 BCE in Mexico


  1. Allowed people to transition from hunters/gatherers to settled agriculture

  2. Enabled development of villages and complex societies
• Native American societies in different regions

  • Great Plains - Hunting bison, living in teepees
  • Southwest - Ancestral Puebloans, complex irrigation projects for maize crops
  • Northwest - Fishing in Pacific Ocean
  • East Coast - Mississippians, three-sister farming (corn, beans, squash)
• The introduction of European people, pathogens, plants, and animals would introduce an unprecedented amount of change in the Americas