Native Peoples of the Americas

Table of Contents

Introduction: First Peoples of Two Continents The Peopling of the Americas: Migrations and Origins The Archaic Period: Early Adaptations Mesoamerican Civilizations: Overview The Olmec: Mother Culture of Mesoamerica The Maya: City-States, Astronomy, and Writing The Aztec Empire: Tenochtitlan and Expansion South American Civilizations: Overview The Inca Empire: Roads, Quipus, and Administration Amazonian Peoples: Diversity of the Rainforest Peoples of the North American Southwest Peoples of the Mississippi Valley: Cahokia Peoples of the Great Plains: Buffalo Culture Peoples of the Eastern Woodlands: Iroquois Peoples of the Pacific Northwest Peoples of the Arctic: Inuit and Aleut Peoples of the Caribbean: Taino and Arawak Peoples of the Great Basin and Plateau Native American Spiritual Traditions Art, Music, and Oral Tradition Trade Networks Across the Americas European Contact: Disease, Conquest, and Collapse Resistance and Survival Legacy of the Native Peoples of the Americas Languages of the Americas Agriculture and Ecological Knowledge

Introduction: First Peoples of Two Continents

Long before Europeans set sail across the Atlantic Ocean, two vast continents teemed with human life, ingenuity, and civilization. From the frozen shores of the Arctic to the windswept tip of Tierra del Fuego, from the sun-baked deserts of the United States Southwest to the dense, humid expanse of the Amazon basin, the peoples who had made these lands their home over thousands of years had built societies of extraordinary richness and variety. They spoke hundreds of distinct languages, organized themselves into everything from small nomadic bands to vast empires of millions of souls, and developed spiritual, artistic, agricultural, and philosophical traditions that rank among the great achievements of human history. These are the Indigenous peoples of North America tribes and cultures — the first architects of the Americas.

The story of the Native peoples of the Americas is not a single story. It is thousands of overlapping stories, each rooted in a particular landscape, shaped by particular challenges, and expressed through particular ceremonies, artworks, and ways of knowing the world. The Inuit hunter reading the wind on the Bering Sea ice, the Maya astronomer charting the movements of Venus from a limestone observatory in the Yucatan, the Iroquois diplomat negotiating the terms of an alliance in the longhouses of what is now New York State, the Inca engineer directing the construction of a mountain road at fifteen thousand feet — all of these were Native Americans, yet their worlds were as different from one another as Athens was from Tang Dynasty China.

What unites them is priority. These peoples were here first. Their ancestors arrived in the Americas at least fifteen thousand years ago, and possibly far earlier, crossing from northeastern Asia at a time when a land bridge connected the two continents. In the millennia that followed, they spread across every ecological zone the Western Hemisphere had to offer, adapting with remarkable creativity to each new environment. By the time European ships first appeared on American horizons in the late fifteenth century, the combined population of the two continents may have been as high as fifty to one hundred million people — figures that are still debated by scholars but that remind us that these were not empty lands awaiting discovery.

This article is a comprehensive account of the Native peoples of the Americas: their origins, their civilizations, their spiritual lives, their arts, their trade networks, and their encounters with European colonizers. It covers the full sweep of pre-Columbian civilizations of the Americas and traces the catastrophic consequences of contact, the long centuries of resistance and survival, and the enduring legacy that Indigenous traditions continue to contribute to the modern world. It encompasses the great empires — Aztec, Maya, and Inca — as well as the equally significant but less-celebrated cultures of the North American plains, forests, coasts, and deserts.

Understanding the Native peoples of the Americas requires setting aside the myths and distortions that have accumulated over five centuries of colonial historiography. These were not primitive peoples frozen in a timeless past. They were dynamic, innovative societies that changed over time, engaged in complex diplomacy, waged wars, made peace, adapted to environmental shifts, and made choices that shaped their own destinies. Their histories did not begin with European contact, and — crucially — they did not end there either.