Name: Native American societies
Uploaded: 2017-10-19T10:38:20.000Z
Duration: 5 min 25 s
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we think 1776, with the Declaration of Independence,

or maybe 1492, when Columbus arrived in the Americas.

when people first arrived in the Americas.

In this video, I want to provide a very brief overview

Now there's recently been a scholarly debate

during an ice age, the sea level was lower,

But recent archeological evidence suggests

that people were perhaps already in the Americas

that they may have come earlier in boats.

so that by the time that Europeans arrived in the late 1400s

That's kind of a mid-range number for the estimates,

Well, a really big moment was around 5000 BCE,

And domesticating maize meant that people

who had originally been hunters, gatherers,

So they could develop villages, complex societies.

This isn't to say that they stopped hunting or gathering,

So let's zoom in a little bit and take a look

at some of the major societies in these regions.

using the resources that were available to them.

For example, the Southwest, Plains and Great Basin

adapted to the dry climate in several ways.

continued their hunting and gathering way of life.

People in the Southwest, like the Ancestral Puebloan people,

by creating very complex irrigation projects

so that they could water their maize crops

The Puebloans lived in large cave complexes

as agriculture allowed them to grow their population.

In the Northwest, fishing in the Pacific Ocean

gave Native Americans a plentiful source of food,

while farming allowed the Mississippian peoples

to develop large settlements, like Cahokia,

near modern day St. Louis, which, at its peak,

may have had as many as 25,000-40,000 residents.

The Mississippians and other East Coast native peoples

relied a lot on what's known as three-sister farming,

in which people would plant  corn, beans and squash together,

which was mutually beneficial to all three plants,

as the corn served as a trellis for the beans,

and the squash protected the root system of the corn.

All three together create a very nutritious diet,

which allowed for a relatively high population density

So by the time that Europeans began to arrive

native societies had been evolving for over 14,000 years.

But the introduction of European people, pathogens,

an unprecedented amount of change in the Americas.