The Great Native Societies
Bering Strait
Ancient land bridge where Native Americans traveled from Asia to America between 20,000 and 40,000 years ago
Encomienda system
Spanish system of granting land to colonists in the new world; exploited natives and resources; eventually, Natives were replaced with African slave labor
Beaver Wars
A series of battles in competition for hunting grounds/ dominance over the fur trade between the French, their native allies, and the Iroquois
Ancestral Pueblo people had a thriving agricultural society, as opposed to more nomadic societies. What's the big trade-off for prioritizing agriculture over hunting?
Agriculture-based societies have a more reliable source of calories, but are more vulnerable to drought
Powhatan Confederacy
Alliance of Native Americans tribes living in the region of the initial Virginia settlement. Powhatan, the leader of this alliance, tried to live in peace with the English settlers when they arrived in 1607 and even helped the colonists learn how to farm
"Three Sisters" farming was an agricultural system of companion planting innovated by the Iroquois-speaking peoples of the Northeast; farmers planted corn, beans, and squash together. The beans used the cornstalks as a trellis to grow on, but how did beans benefit the other two plants in the system?
Bacteria on the roots of beans 'fix' nitrogen from the atmosphere into the soil, fertilizing the earth for the benefit of the corn and squash
Iroquois-speaking peoples lived in structures called longhouses. What did they tend to be made out of?
Bent saplings for supports, leaves for thatching, and bark for shingles
Maize
Corn; cultivated in present-day Mexico and spread to the SW portion of the US; Native American societies were built around maize
Small pox
Disease spread by Europeans in the Americas; led to the deaths of millions of Native Americans in North and South America
Conquistadors
Early-sixteenth-century Spanish adventurers who conquered Mexico, Central America, and Peru (Examples Cortez, Pizarro, Francisco)
What's a Clovis point, and what does it tell us about the way the North American continent was settled by human beings?
It's a sharpened stone tool, and it tells us that humans have been on the North American continent for at least 13,500 years
Role of the Spanish and Portuguese traders
Settled heavily in South America, reached West Africa and contributed to the development of the African Slave Trade
Bartolome de Las Casas
He debated Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda in the Valladolid Debate; Spanish priest that wrote about the atrocities the Spanish committed against the Native Americans and sought to end the encomienda system; his writings were later used by the British to perpetuate the "Black Legend"
Age of Discovery
Historical period between the 15th and 18th century during which Europeans made contact and sought to explore and colonize the "New World"
Where's the Bering Strait, and what does it have to do with the history of the North American continent?
It's a waterway that separates present-day Siberia from present-day Alaska; historians theorize that humans made their way across a now-vanished land bridge from Asia to North America
Great Plains and Great Basin
Located in the central/western portion of the US; a lack of natural resources led Natives to live a nomadic lifestyle in these regions
Mississippian cultures were vast and complex, but which of these is the most accurate brief description of their societies?
Mississippian peoples cultivated corn on Mississippi Valley floodplains and created pottery and immense earthworks
Cahokia, the largest of the settlements of the Mississippian culture, is renowned for
Monks mound, an enormous structure similar in size to the Great Pyramid in Giza
PreColumbian Era
Period before Christopher Columbus's arrival in the New World, when North America was populated by Native Americans
Mestizo
Racial categorization developed to address children of mixed Spanish and Native American ancestry as part of the casta
The Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, Chickasaw, and Seminole peoples were called the "Five Civilized Tribes" by Anglo-European colonists. Why did they deem these five groups of people 'civilized', and not others?
They adopted elements of European colonial culture like Christianity, literacy, and slavery
Chaco Canyon, in modern-day New Mexico, is almost 600 miles from the Gulf of California and the Pacific Ocean. What does the presence of California seashells in archaeological digs tell us about the people who lived in Chaco Canyon 1000 years ago?
They had elaborate trade routes with societies that lived on the coast
Why is it important that the Three Sisters agricultural system combined beans, corn, and squash?
Those three crops together provided complete nutrition; no single plant can provide all the nutrients a human body needs to survive
