1. The New World Before 1492

2. Learning Objectives The Peopling of North America
The Diverse Communities of the Americas in the 1400s

3. Coming to America Conventional Thinking – “Land Bridge”
Generally Accepted – Viking Sea Route from Europe
Some Evidence – Sea Route to Northwest
Gaining Popularity – Polynesian Sea Route Across the Pacific

4. The Anasazi and Cahokia
Anasazi – “Ancient Ones” existed at least 700 years before Columbus.
Agriculture with an urbanized community in New Mexico and Arizona.
Abandoned Chaco Valley after a prolonged drought in the 1100s, spreading out across the Southwest.
Cahokia, or Mound Builders, flourished between 900 and 1350 in the Mississippi River Valley.
Cahokia was probably the largest settlement in what is now the United States.

5. The Anasazi and Cahokia
A series of wide mounds made up the center of the city.
They were burial places for the most prominent leaders.
The central mound was topped by a grand temple and wide plaza.
The Cahokians practiced astronomy and a kind of agricultural feudalism.

6. Pueblo People of the Southwest
In place of abandoned Anasazi centers, Pueblo and Hopi peoples built canals, dams, and terracing to allow agriculture to flourish in the arid southwest.
They spread out over Arizona and New Mexico; some of their settlements are still populated.

7. Tribes of the Mississippi Valey
In the mid-1300s, Cahokia began to disappear.
Their most direct descendants, Creek, Chocktaw, and Chickasaw, settled between the river and the Appalachian Mountains.
Other tribes – Cherokee, Tuscarora, lived further to the east, in the Piedmont of the Carolinas.
Their numbers were small – 500 to 2,000 at most.

8. The Pacific Coast
In the northwest, the Shasta tribes lived in elaborate long houses, and relied on the abundant salmon in the rivers for food.
Farther to the south, the Yokut, Miwok, Maidu, and Pomo represented 10% of all the Natives north of Mexico.
Living in clans rather than tribes, they relied on abundant gathering and hunting and fishing.

9. The Iroquois Confederacy and the Atlantic Coast
The Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca banded together into the Iroquois League for their common defense.
Several families would live in a single longhouse, but the house and land belonged to the community.
Legend told of a great peace- maker, Dekanawidah, who convinced them to live peacefully.

10. The Iroquois Confederacy and the Atlantic Coast
The Algonquian-speaking tribes lived along the Atlantic coast.
They lived in permanent large villages and hunted, fished, and farmed.
The largest of the tribes, the Powhatans, may have included some 60,000 people.

11. Aztec, Maya, and Inca
The Aztec city of Tenochtitlan, with a population of 200,000, was one of the largest cities in the world.
It rose from an island in the middle of Lake Texcoco in
Led by an emperor, their highly stratified civilization included 10 to 20 million people.

12. Aztec, Maya, Inca
The Mayan civilization encompassed most of the Yucatan, including much of Honduras, Belize, and Guatemala.
Their civilization had peaked hundreds of years before European arrival.
With a population of some 800,000, they were a strong presence in western Mexico and Central America into the 1400s.

13. Aztec, Maya, Inca
The Incan civilization was even more powerful than the Aztec, with an empire of 32 million people, from Columbia to Chile.
They ruled from their mountain capitol of Cuzco and religious center of Machu Picchu.
They had a vast bureaucracy, standing army, and 25,000 miles of roads and bridges that rivaled ancient Rome.