NATIVE NORTH AMERICAN SOCIETIES BEFORE 1492

In 1492 perhaps 70 million people nearly equal to the population of Europe at that time lived on the continents of North and South America, most of them south of the present border between the United States and Mexico. They belonged to hundreds of groups, each with its own language or dialect, history, and way of life.
From the start, the original inhabitants of the Americas were peoples in motion. The first migrants may have arrived over forty thousand years ago, traveling from central Siberia and slowly making their way to southern South America. These people, and subsequent migrants from Eurasia, probably traveled across a land bridge that emerged across what is now the Bering Strait. During the last Ice Age, much of the earth s water was frozen in huge glaciers.
This process lowered ocean levels, exposing a 600-mile-wide land bridge between Asia and America. Recent research examining genetic and linguistic similarities between Asian and Native American populations suggests that there may also have been later migrations.

Hunters, Harvesters, and Traders

The earliest Americans adapted to an amazing range of environmental conditions, from the frozen Arctic to southwestern deserts to dense eastern woodlands. At first, they mainly subsisted by hunting the mammoths, bison, and other large game that roamed throughout North America. Archaeologists working near present-day Clovis, New Mexico, have found carefully crafted spear points some of which may be over thirteen thousand years old. Such efficient tools possibly contributed to overhunting, which, along with climate change, led to the extinction of many big-game species. By about 9000 B.C.E. the world s climate began to grow warmer, turning grasslands into deserts and reducing the animals food supply. Humans too had to find other food sources.
Between roughly 8000 B.C.E. and 1500 B.C.E. the Native American societies changed in important ways. Native populations grew and men and women assumed more specialized roles in their villages. Men did most of the hunting and fishing, activities that required travel. Women remained closer to home, harvesting and preparing wild plant foods and caring for children.
Across the continent, native communities also developed complex networks of trade. They not only exchanged material goods, but also marriage partners, laborers, ideas, and religious practices. Trade networks sometimes extended over great distances. Ideas about death and the afterlife also passed between groups. So too did certain burial practices, such as the placing of valued possessions in the grave along with the deceased person s body. In some areas, the increasing complexity of exchange networks, as well as competition for resources, encouraged concentrations of political power. Chiefs might manage trade relations and conduct diplomacy for groups of villages rather than for a single community.

The Development of Agriculture

No Native American adaptation was more momentous than the domestication of certain plants and the development of farming. Native Americans may have turned to farming when population growth threatened to outrun the wild food supply. Women, with their knowledge of wild plants, probably discovered how to save seeds and cultivate them, becoming the world's first farmers.
Wherever agriculture took hold, important social changes followed. Populations grew, because farming produced a more secure food supply than did hunting and gathering. Permanent villages appeared as farmers settled near their fields. In central Mexico, agriculture eventually sustained the populations of large cities. Trade in agricultural surpluses flowed through networks of exchange. In many Indian societies, women s status improved because of their role as the principal farmers. Even religious beliefs adapted to the increasing importance of farming.
The adoption of agriculture further enhanced the diversity of Native American societies that developed over centuries within broad regions, or culture areas. Within each area, inhabitants shared basic patterns of subsistence and social organization, largely reflecting the natural environment to which they had adapted. Most, but not all of them, eventually relied upon farming.

Nonfarming Societies

Agriculture was impossible in the challenging environment of the Arctic and Subarctic. There, nomadic bands of Inuits and Aleuts moved seasonally to fish or hunt whales, seals, and other sea animals, and, in the brief summers, gather wild berries. Along the Northwest Coast and the Columbia River Plateau, one of the most densely populated areas of North America, abundant natural resources permitted native peoples to prosper without farming. Local rivers and forests supplied fish, game, and edible plants. Farther south, in present-day California, hunter-gatherers once lived in smaller villages, which usually adjoined oak groves where Indians gathered acorns as an important food source. Nomadic hunting bands in the Great Basin, where the climate was warm and dry, learned to survive on the region s limited resources.

By David Goldfield and others in the book "The American journey:A History of the United States", Pearson-Prentice Hall, U.S.A.,2011, excerps p.5-6. Adapted and illustrated to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.