First Peoples
The true pioneers of America, the first settlers to enter the pristine continent, are thought to have been nomadic mammoth-hunters from Siberia. Around 14,000 years ago, they gradually worked their way into Alaska, along the " land-bridge " that then followed the line of what is now the Bering Strait. The entire region was treeless tundra, no more appealing than it is today, but it supported sufficient quantities of large mammals to make hunting worthwhile. It's quite possible that only a small band of perhaps fifty individuals completed the journey; that could have been enough to spread and populate the entire continent. Their descendants advanced so quickly through the new territory that they had reached the southernmost tip of South America within a couple of thousand years. That may well be because everywhere they went, they swiftly drove the indigenous fauna - not just the mammoths, but also such defenseless creatures as giant ground sloths - to extinction, and they were forever obliged to press onwards in search of new sources of food. Behind them, several thousand years later, came at least two further groups, the Athapascans who made their way to the Great Plains, and the ancestors of the modern Inuit, who found their own niche in the frozen Arctic north. Distinct groups settled in specific areas, and adapted to the challenges of their local environment. The first definite signs of a human presence in the territory of the modern United States, dating back 12,000 years, have been uncovered at Meadowcroft in southwest Pennsylvania. Five hundred years later, the Southwest was dominated by what archeologists call the Clovis culture, whose distinctive arrowheads were first identified at Clovis, New Mexico. Subsequent subgroups ranged from the Algonquin farmers of what's now New England to peoples such as the Chumash and Macah, who lived by catching fish, otters and even whales along the coasts of the Pacific Northwest. Nowhere did a civilization emerge that could rival the wealth and sophistication of the great cities of ancient Mexico, such as Teotihuacan or Tenochtitlan. However, the influence of these far-off cultures does seem to have filtered north; the cultivation of crops such as beans, squash and maize made the development of large communities possible, and northern religious cults, including those that performed human sacrifice, are thought to owe much to Central American beliefs. The so-called Moundbuilders of the Ohio and Mississippi valleys developed sites such as the Great Serpent Mound in modern Ohio and Poverty Point in Louisiana. The most prominent of these early societies, now known as the Hopewell culture, flourished between around 1 and 400 AD. Later on, Cahokia , just outside present-day St Louis, became the largest pre-Columbian city in North America, centered on a huge mound topped by some form of temple, and reaching its peak between 1050 and 1250 AD. In the deserts of the Southwest , the Hohokam settlement of Snaketown, near what's now Phoenix in Arizona and complete with Central American-style ball courts, set about grappling with the same problems of water management that plague the region today. Nearby, the Ancestral Puebloan "Basketmakers" developed the art of pottery around 200 AD, and began to gather into the walled villages later known as pueblos, possibly for protection against the threat of Athapascan invaders, such as the Apache, who were arriving from the north. Ancestral Puebloan "cities," such as Pueblo Bonito in New Mexico's Chaco Canyon - a center for the turquoise trade with the mighty Aztec - and the "Cliff Palace" at Mesa Verde in Colorado, are the most impressive monuments to survive from ancient America. Although the Ancestral Puebloans are no longer identifiable as a group after the twelfth century - they probably dispersed after a devastating drought - many of the settlements created by their immediate descendants have remained in use ever since. Through centuries of migration, war and changes of government, the desert farmers of the Hopi Mesas in Arizona, and the pueblos of Taos and Acoma in New Mexico, have never been dispossessed of their homes. While estimates of the total indigenous population before the arrival of the Europeans vary widely, the figure of twelve million is generally thought to be reasonable
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