Native American societies before contact

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Native American societies before contact발음듣기

[Instructor] Often when we think about the beginning of American history we think 1776, with the Declaration of Independence or maybe 1492, when Columbus arrived in the Americas.발음듣기

But the history of America really begins about 15,000 years ago when people first arrived in the Americas.발음듣기

In this video, I want to provide a very brief overview of native societies before contact to give you an idea of just how diverse and complex these societies were as native groups adapted to and interacted with their environments.발음듣기

Now there's recently been a scholarly debate about how people first arrived.발음듣기

We know that maybe 12,000 years ago during an ice age, the sea level was lower and so a spit of land in between the Americas and Asia was exposed over which people may have traveled.발음듣기

But recent archeological evidence suggests that people were perhaps already in the Americas at the time of this ice age so it's possible that they may have come earlier in boats.발음듣기

Now however it was that they arrived they spread north and south and east throughout the Americas so that by the time that Europeans arrived in the late 1400s there were perhaps 50 million people.발음듣기

That's kind of a mid-range number for the estimates that historians have made living in the Americas.발음듣기

And of those, four to six million were living in North America.발음듣기

So how did these societies develop?발음듣기

Well, a really big moment was around 5000 BCE, when people in Mexico domesticated corn maize, as it's also known.발음듣기

And domesticating maize meant that people who had originally been hunters, gatherers following herds of animals could partake in settled agriculture.발음듣기

So they could develop villages, complex societies.발음듣기

This isn't to say that they stopped hunting or gathering but they began staying in one place.발음듣기

So let's zoom in a little bit and take a look at some of the major societies in these regions.발음듣기

Native American societies developed around their natural environments using the resources that were available to them.발음듣기

For example, the Southwest, Plains, and Great Basin quite dry it's a lot of desert and so societies in these regions adapted to the dry climate in several ways.발음듣기

For example, Native American groups that lived on the Great Plains continued their hunting and gathering way of life hunting bison and following the herds of animals in teepees which were dwellings that were easy to set up and then take down.발음듣기

People in the Southwest, like the Ancestral Puebloan people dealt with this dry environment by creating very complex irrigation projects so that they could water their maize crops using what little moisture there was.발음듣기

The Puebloans lived in large cave complexes as agricultural allowed them to grow their population.발음듣기

In the Northwest, fishing in the Pacific Ocean gave Native Americans a plentiful source of food while farming allowed the Mississippian peoples to develop large settlements, like Cahokia near modern day St. Louis, which, at its peak may have had as many as 25 to 40 thousand residents.발음듣기

The Mississippians and other East Coast native peoples relied a lot on what's known as three-sister farming in which people would plant corn beans, and squash together which was mutually beneficial to all three plants as the corn served as a trellis for the beans and the squash protected the root system of the corn.발음듣기

All three together create a very nutritious diet which allowed for a relatively high population density on the East Coast.발음듣기

So by the time that Europeans began to arrive in the late 1400s and 1500s native societies had been evolving for over 14,000 years but the introduction of European people, pathogens plants, and animals would introduce an unprecedented amount of change in the Americas.발음듣기

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