Pre-Columbian era

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The pre-Columbian era spans from the first peopling of the Americas in the Upper Paleolithic all the way to 1492, when Christopher Columbus first sailed to the Caribbean. In Brazil the same stretch of time carries a different name, the pre-Cabraline era. The label sounds like a single tidy chapter, but it covers tens of thousands of years across two continents. Within it, peoples built cities, raised earthen mounds nearly a mile across, charted the stars, and farmed crops that now feed the world. Some of those societies had already faded by the time Europeans planted their first permanent colonies in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. Others were still standing, and European chronicles caught them mid-stride. So how do we know any of this happened, when the Maya were keeping written records that men like Diego de Landa burned as pagan, even as he tried to preserve native histories? Who walked across a land bridge to fill two empty continents, and how long ago did they arrive? And why do so many of these civilizations end the same way, vanishing not by conquest but by disease that ran ahead of the conquistadors themselves?

• 2. Reading The Silence

  ›

  Diego de Landa destroyed Maya written records because he saw them as pagan, yet he also sought to preserve the histories of the people he was helping to erase. A handful of original documents survived the burning. Others were transcribed or translated into Spanish, and those copies became a lifeline for modern historians trying to reconstruct ancient knowledge. Before archaeology matured in the 19th century, scholars of this period had little else to work with. They leaned almost entirely on the records of European conquerors and the accounts of early travelers and antiquaries, sources written by the very people doing the conquering. That changed with figures like John Lloyd Stephens, Eduard Seler, and Alfred Maudslay. Institutions joined them, among them the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University, and together they began to question and criticize those early European sources. The study of pre-Columbian cultures shifted onto scientific and multidisciplinary footing. Genetics added a second kind of testimony that no chronicler could forge. The Y-chromosome haplogroup most associated with Indigenous Amerindian ancestry, Q1a3a, has been traced in South America for at least 18,000 years.

• 3. The Long Walk South

  ›

  Asian nomadic Paleo-Indians are thought to have entered the Americas across the Bering Land Bridge, the strip now drowned beneath the Bering Strait, and possibly along the coast as well. The founding population did not simply pass through. Genetic reconstruction suggests an initial layover of some 20,000 years on Beringia before the move south began. After crossing, they followed the Pacific coast and an interior ice-free corridor, and over millennia spread across both North and South America. Exactly when the first people arrived remains hotly debated. The Clovis culture is one of the earliest identifiable, with sites dating back roughly 13,000 years, but older sites of perhaps 20,000 years have been claimed. Two broad models compete. The short chronology theory holds that the first movement beyond Alaska came no earlier than 14,000 to 17,000 years ago, with later waves following. The long chronology theory pushes the first entry back to perhaps 30,000 to 40,000 years ago or earlier. Artifacts dated to 14,000 years ago in both North and South America suggest people may have reached Cape Horn at the southern tip by then. The Inuit, by contrast, arrived separately and far later, probably no more than 2,000 years ago, crossing the ice from Siberia into Alaska.

• 4. Mounds Before Farms

  ›

  Watson Brake rewrote a long-held assumption. This complex of eleven platform mounds in the Lower Mississippi Valley was begun around 3400 BCE and added to over the following 500 years. The surprise was who built it. Late-twentieth-century dating revealed that hunter-gatherers, occupying the site only seasonally, raised these earthworks long before agriculture, permanent settlement, or ceramics took hold. As early as 5500 BCE, people at Monte Sano and other sites in present-day Louisiana, Mississippi, and Florida were already building complex earthwork mounds, probably for religious purposes. Poverty Point, once thought the oldest such complex, was built around 1500 BCE. Its earthworks form six concentric half-circles split by radial aisles, the whole design stretching nearly a mile across, and it anchored a culture spanning over 100 sites on both banks of the Mississippi. The Woodland period carried the tradition forward from roughly 1000 BCE to 1000 CE. The Adena culture and the Hopewell tradition raised monumental earthworks and ran trade networks across the continent, while their tools, textiles, and crops developed steadily without sudden upheaval. Some Woodland people kept using spears and atlatls until bows and arrows replaced them near the period's close.

• 5. Cahokia And Its Heirs

  ›

  Cahokia, near modern East St. Louis, Illinois, may have held a population of over 20,000. At its peak between the 12th and 13th centuries it was the most populous city in North America, though larger cities existed in Mesoamerica and the Andes. Its Monks Mound remains the largest earthen construction of the prehistoric Americas. The Mississippian culture that produced it spread from the Atlantic coast to the edge of the plains, from the Gulf of Mexico to the Upper Midwest, growing maize intensively within a stratified society and a trade web that reached the Great Lakes. It peaked around 1200 to 1400 CE and was already in decline in most places before Europeans came. Then Hernando de Soto's expedition arrived in the 1540s, and the encounter went badly for everyone. Unlike the Spanish campaigns that toppled vast empires in Mesoamerica with few men, de Soto's party wandered the Southeast for four years, shedding men and equipment, limping into Mexico a fraction of its original size. The local peoples suffered far worse. Diseases the expedition carried devastated their populations and shattered their societies. When Europeans returned a century later, nearly all the Mississippian groups had vanished and their lands lay largely empty.

• 6. Cities Of The Desert

  ›

  The Cliff Palace of Mesa Verde in Colorado and the Great Houses of Chaco Canyon in New Mexico are the work of the Ancestral Puebloans, a complex Oasisamerican society of the Four Corners region. They built kivas, multi-story houses, and apartment blocks of stone and adobe, and laid a road system running from Chaco Canyon to Kutz Canyon in the San Juan Basin. They are also called Anasazi, a term present-day Pueblo peoples consider derogatory, since it traces to a Navajo word meaning ancestor enemies. The Hohokam dug a series of irrigation canals in the Sonoran desert that later underpinned the founding of Phoenix, Arizona through the Salt River Project, and built trading hubs such as Snaketown before their society collapsed after 1375 CE, likely from drought. At the village of Paquime, the Mogollon kept pens for scarlet macaws brought up through trade from Mesoamerica. The Salado of the Tonto Basin, active from 1150 CE into the 15th century, traded so widely that seashells from the Gulf of California and macaw feathers from Mexico turn up in their dwellings. Further east, the Wichita built a city called Etzanoa with a population of 20,000, abandoned around the 18th century after Spanish conquistadors Jusepe Gutierrez and Juan de Oñate reached it.

• 7. The Mesoamerican Inheritance

  ›

  The Olmec set a pattern that every later civilization in Mexico would follow. Consolidating power between 1600 and 1500 BCE at San Lorenzo Tenochtitlan near the coast in southeast Veracruz, they pushed forward new ideas of government, pyramid temples, writing, astronomy, mathematics, and religion. Their achievements opened the road for the Maya and the civilizations of central Mexico. Teotihuacan rose from the power vacuum left by the Olmec decline. First settled around 300 BCE, by 150 CE it had become the first true metropolis of North America, its influence reaching into Maya cities like Tikal, Copan, and Kaminaljuyu and founding new dynasties there. It declined in political power about 650 CE yet held cultural sway for nearly a millennium, to around 950 CE. Between 250 and 650 CE the Maya flowered, building elaborate cities and a script of pictographs and syllabic signs inscribed on stone, pottery, wood, and bark-paper books, though their many city-states never unified politically. The Mexica came late and from the desert, one of seven groups once called Azteca after Aztlan. Through political maneuvering and martial skill they led a Triple Alliance with Tetxcoco and Tlacopan, ruling much of central Mexico by about 1400. Their capital Tenochtitlan, on the site of modern Mexico City, grew to an estimated 200,000 to 300,000 people, and its market astonished the conquistadors on arrival.

• 8. The Oldest Cradle

  ›

  Norte Chico emerged on the north-central coast of present-day Peru around 3200 BCE, the same moment cities were rising in Mesopotamia. Known in Peru as Caral-Supe, it is the oldest known civilization in the Americas and counted among the cradles of civilization in the world. It built large urban settlements, the Sacred City of Caral in the Supe Valley among the largest, yet it never developed pottery or machinery. Its hierarchical society traded cotton and dehydrated fish and leaned on farming and coastal fishing. The Andes kept producing such states. The Tiwanaku empire ruled from western Bolivia into Peru and Chile from 300 to 1000 CE, serving as a ritual and administrative capital for roughly five hundred years near the southeastern shore of Lake Titicaca. The Inca came last and reached furthest. Holding their cougar-shaped capital at Cusco, they dominated the Andes from 1438 to 1533. They called their realm Tawantinsuyu, the land of the four regions, binding some 9 to 14 million people across nearly a hundred linguistic or ethnic communities with a 40,000-kilometer road system. They cut precise stonework over terraced mountain levels, worked metal with skill, and left evidence of successful brain surgery. By the 15th century the maize first bred from wild teosinte in Mexico had spread north to southern Canada and east to the Atlantic coast, the quiet harvest of a hemisphere that fed the world long before the world knew its name.