Hello there students. Welcome to this lecture on the Americas before Columbus. So the next couple lectures, this one and the one after, are going to focus on parts of the world that we just don't discuss very much. So as you've probably become aware as the semester has rolled along, our class is essentially focused on the Eurasian societies.
We're looking at Europe and Asia. you know, places like the Mediterranean Basin or the modern Middle East. And basically, you know, not at the rest of the world.
And a lot of this has to do, well, this has to have a few factors. And these will become clear in these two lectures here. So this lecture, again, will be on the Americas. The next lecture is going to be on Africa, particularly medieval Africa. And when we say Africa as historians, we usually mean sub-Saharan or Africa below the Sahara.
Whereas Africa above the Sahara, in the ancient period, we would include as part of the Mediterranean. And then in the modern period, say today, we would consider that part of the Middle East, like places like Algeria or Egypt. So when we say Africa, even though technically Morocco and Egypt are in Africa, when historians say Africa, we're not talking about Egypt or Morocco. We're talking about places like the Congo or Namibia or Kenya.
the horn of Africa, places like that. So that's what the next lecture will be on. Anyway, the reason that we don't focus on these two areas in particular, in our class, the Americas and sub-Saharan Africa, has to do with the nature of two things.
So one is the way that history has played out. That's the second most important. The most important reason, however, has to do with source material. So as you'll see as we talk about the Americas and about Africa, even into the late medieval period, we're dealing with societies that didn't leave writing or written records.
And as we discussed way back at the very beginning of the semester, right, in the first week of classes, we discussed sort of why writing is so crucial to historians. And sort of why for historians history begins with writing, right? Because it's writing that allows us to ask how and why questions, which are almost always the most interesting and useful questions to ask. And again, the Americas and Africa, they don't really allow us to ask those kinds of questions because they don't have writing.
So that's one reason that they get short shrift in this long survey of Ancient and medieval history the other reason and this one's more arbitrary so like that one's real right that first limitation It's a historical methodology Limitation and you know, there's just only so much we can know about the Americans, right? And that's just true and it sucks But that's the fact the second reason we don't talk as much about the Americas or about Sub-Saharan Africa is a little more arbitrary I will admit Namely, that is because now that we're here alive in the 21st century, when we look back at the course of human history, it just seems obvious that what's happening in Eurasia is of more, I don't want to say more importance. It's not more important.
It's of greater consequence. Again, it sucks to admit Spain has a larger effect on... You know...
the course of world history than Senegal or, you know, Ecuador, right? And, I mean, that's just true. It's not always good, right?
I mean, Spain committed, you know, absolute, you know, atrocities, right? Millions of atrocities in giving itself that big role in history, right? But it's still the fact that, you know, Spain does have a larger role in history.
And so in a history survey course like this one, where the whole point of this course is for the professor to guide the students through world history in such a way that students will have a broad understanding of historical currents, historical trends, and the way that history has played out. Because that's the goal of the class, and again, I didn't set that goal. That goal was set by the university. Because that's the goal of our class, then...
I sort of have to talk about Eurasia a lot more than I talk about the Americas. I personally would like to talk more about the Americas, as I mentioned at the beginning of the semester when I introduced myself, and some of you may even remember this. My expertise is actually in the Americas. I'm a Latin American historian.
My expertise is in particularly Nicaragua and El Salvador and Honduras in the 1960s and 1970s. And so I would love to talk more about Nicaragua. But the truth of the matter is, is in the ancient and medieval period, we know almost nothing about what's going on in Nicaragua. And Nicaragua just isn't really as important to world events as the Greeks, right?
It's just not, right? I mean, when you go to college today, you're going to read Plato and Aristotle. You're not necessarily going to read, you know, well, you won't read ancient Nicaraguans because we don't have any. You probably won't read any Nicaraguans at all, right?
But if you did, I can make recommendations if you want to read some Nicaraguan's anyway. So with that out of the way, I just thought it's a necessary preamble to these two classes because it's reasonable for students to feel like the Americas and Africa are getting shortchanged in coverage. But there again, there are fairly good, really good and fairly good reasons why.
Again, both methodological and then related to sort of the broader purpose of a survey course. So hopefully you buy that answer. If you were to take the second half of this course, we'd talk about the Americas in particular a lot more and about Africa slightly more as well.
Because once you get into, like, say, the 16 and 1700s, then obviously the Americas and Africa. play a much more prominent role in world history and we also know more about them, right? We have written records from the people who lived there then, right? And so we, you know, our knowledge base is also higher. So I always like to give that little preamble before I start the sort of little mini unit of two lectures.
So with that out of the way, let's dive into the Americas before Columbus. And before we start looking at specific American societies, When I say American here, I don't mean American in the sense that people in the U.S. say American to refer to the United States. I will never use that language.
I never call the U.S. America. I never call people who live in the U.S. American.
I always say the U.S. or I say U.S. American because America goes from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego in Chile. So America goes from the very north, you know, again, Alaska.
All the way down through Canada, the U.S., Mexico, Central America, Columbia, Peru, Chile, Argentina. That's America. So when I say, in this class in particular, when I'm saying American history, I'm talking Alaska to Chile. The entire North and South America, Central America, you can throw the Caribbean in there.
That's all American history in the ancient and medieval period. So as I've already alluded to, the history of the Americas prior to 1492. It's quite difficult to study and there are several reasons for this, some obvious and some less obvious. So the obvious is that there are no written records outside of Maya-dominated Central America, right? So basically, southern Mexico, the modern-day Mexican states of Quintana Roo, Yucatan, Campeche, and Chiapas, and in the country of Guatemala, there's a little bit of writing there from the Maya that predates. Columbus's voyage in 1492, but otherwise we have no written records and therefore our only sources of information are archaeology, oral tradition, and observation, and both oral tradition and observation are quite suspect in many ways.
People change the oral tradition for specific reasons. Observation is necessarily limited. Think about it like just let's do a thought experiment.
Close your eyes. pretend you're in a science fiction novel you know it's the year 3275 uh we somehow saved the we saved human life on earth from global warming uh and we developed the ability to travel in space to exoplanets that have life right and you're sent as an explorer to a new exoplanet no one's ever been here and there are human-like life forms that live on this planet or let's just call them human right they are human so Go to this exoplanet. There are humans who live there.
We want to know what their culture is like. We stick you in the middle of them, and you're going to observe them and tell us about their culture, right? You can imagine that there are lots of issues with your observation.
One, you're going to be looking through earth-collared glasses, right? So you're going to be comparing them to your culture back here, right? Another is they may not trust you, right? So they might be performing for you. They might be pretending.
that their cultural rituals are A, B, and C, but really their cultural rituals are X, Y, and Z. You don't know what they do when they go behind closed doors. At first, you won't know their language, so you already know what they're saying. Again, they might lie to you even if you do know their language.
So observation is fraught with lots of... You know, lots of issues, right? Again, there can be observational errors by the observer, and then the people being observed, because they are being observed, will behave differently.
If you don't believe me, just, you know, film yourself doing something, right? You'll behave differently because there's a camera watching you, right? So observation changes what is observed. So because these are our only sources of information, right, unreliable, unreliable. limited, right?
So our sources of information there are limited and or unreliable, and so the amount of knowledge we can know about the history of the Americas prior to 1492 is necessarily limited. Another major difficulty of studying American history is that the American indigenous population was obliterated by the arrival of Europeans. This is something we do not address enough in the United States.
I'm recording this lecture the week of Columbus Day, which I don't call Columbus Day. Obviously, I call it Indigenous Persons Day because, you know, I'm human. But in the U.S., on the week of Columbus Day, we do not address properly the unbelievable destructive legacy caused by contact with Europeans, right? When Europeans come to the Americas, they destroy the American indigenous population, usually indirectly, right?
We call it the demographic collapse, right? Within one century of Columbus's arrival. So by the year 1600, more than 90% of all of the indigenous peoples of the Americas are dead. More than 20 million people die in a century.
So again, historians using clinical, relatively neutral language call it the demographic collapse. Indigenous rights activists who have no need to sound objective instead call it the great dying, which to me is a much more accurate name because demographic collapse, again, sounds like I'm talking about a spreadsheet, whereas great dying sounds like I'm talking about living things, which we're talking about people, so yes, it's more appropriate. The great dying was a result mostly of disease. rather than overt war or direct murder. So it's not like the Europeans came and just murdered everyone.
They didn't really do that. They did murder some people, right? There were wars.
And so some of the indigenous were killed directly in exchanges of warlike violence with Europeans. But most of the indigenous people who die within that first century of contact with Europe die of disease, particularly smallpox and influenza, which... were unknown on the American continents, and therefore the people had no natural immunity to them whatsoever. Smallpox killed a lot of people in Europe too, but if you reached, say, the age of six or eight, and you were still alive, then smallpox was probably not going to kill you.
You had some kind of genetic mutation that allowed your immune system to fight it. And people in the Americas, having had no exposure to smallpox or influenza, they did not. And so they were killed in droves by those illnesses and other illnesses too.
And to me, this is just utterly terrifying. So again, if you're and when Europeans come in, they're coming into modern-day Haiti, modern-day Dominican Republic, modern-day Cuba, modern-day Puerto Rico at first. And then they would reach modern-day Venezuela and then Mexico and then basically like Alabama and Florida and Texas, and then they slowly spread from there.
But within a century, Native tribesmen in modern-day Washington State or modern-day British Columbia, Canada, were dying of European diseases, but they had never seen a European. I mean, can you imagine what this does to one's worldview? This is why the oral tradition is suspect.
If you get an oral tradition from an indigenous person who lives in British Columbia about what the 1500s were like, well, the 1500s in British Columbia had to be incomprehensible because people in British Columbia are dying of smallpox and influenza, which they don't know exist. They don't have germ theory. Europeans didn't have germ theory either. They don't know what disease is, but they just know you get sick and die.
They'd never seen these diseases. They have no idea where these diseases came from. Because in British Columbia, nothing has changed.
No Europeans have been to British Columbia. None. Zero.
By 1600, there has never been a European in British Columbia, and yet the indigenous peoples who live in British Columbia are dying of European diseases. The diseases hopped across the continent using old trade networks, and it hopped from tribe to tribe to tribe. So you can imagine the oral tradition that comes out of the people who live in British Columbia in the 1500s.
The gods must be crazy. Why are the gods punishing us? None of our records, none of our stories, none of our legends, none of our mythology has there ever been anything like smallpox. And yet we have smallpox.
Did we anger the gods? Where did the smallpox come from? They have no idea.
Imagine how horrifying that must be. This is the legacy of Columbus that no one grapples with. Everyone knows that Columbus was a bloodthirsty psychopath, right? Even the people at the time knew he was, right?
Even in the year 1500, the people of Europe knew that Columbus was a bloodthirsty psychopath, a genocidal murdering machine who only cared about his own greed. And I feel like in the U.S., we do a good job of grappling with that part of Columbus's legacy. And I think most, at least mature or reasonable adults in the U.S. will... admit that Columbus wreaked a lot of havoc and violence in the Caribbean, because that's where he was arriving, in the Caribbean, and that Europeans were very damaging in Mexico or in Peru in the 1500s where they pulled down these enormous American empires, the Aztec and Incan empires.
But no one grapples with what it means for those diseases to spread to California or North Dakota. and kill people there, which they did. Again, people in North Dakota are dying of smallpox 100 years before white people ever get to North Dakota. How horrifying it must have been to be a Lakota Sioux on the North Dakota, out in the badlands of North Dakota and seeing your friends and family dying of influenza and having no idea what that means.
So because of these issues of American history, again, that our sources of information are limited or suspect. and that most of the people who live there get obliterated by European disease, and so we never even meet them, right? We're only left to interpret basically physical remains in the Americas, much like we would in the Neolithic era in the old world, right?
We talked about places like Polnibron Dolmen in Ireland or Stonehenge in England. It's basically the same sort of stuff that we're left with in the Americas, right? Pyramids, mounds, roads, a lot of the American peoples were...
expert road builders. We get a lot of pottery. Way back in lecture two, right, the very first real lecture of the class, we looked at cave paintings, right, of the Costco Rock Art District from the nuclear test site in California, right, so we have some stuff like that, but again, it's all physical remains.
We don't have, you know, any written records. Again, before we dive into a few case studies of various American peoples, let's look at sort of broad principles of American history. So we can't think of America or what Europeans will come to call the new world within the frameworks that we use for Eurasia, right? It just doesn't fit, right?
Like so such as the ages, right? Where you know in Europe we have the Stone Age which is the Paleolithic and Neolithic eras, right? That's the Stone Age when tools were made from stone. And then we have the Bronze Age, where tools were made from bronze.
And then we have the Iron Age, where tools are made from iron. Those ages don't make any sense in the Americas. Most Americans were still in the Stone Age in 1492, including the Aztecs. The Aztecs had one of the most complex and sophisticated societies in the whole world in 1492. Just unbelievable levels of commercial...
and religious and architectural sophistication, right? Far advanced of a lot of what the British or the Spanish had at the same time. But they used stone tools, right? They didn't have metalworking.
They didn't need metal, right? The Aztec weapons and tools were made from obsidian stone, which if you're a fan of the Game of Thrones TV show, right, that's dragonglass in Game of Thrones. It's extraordinarily sharp obsidian.
In fact, obsidian can often be sharpened to be sharper than iron, and it often holds its edge better than iron. In other words, if you have obsidian, you would never bother making iron weapons because obsidian are already superior. So again, Aztec society is in the Stone Age, but again, extremely complex and sophisticated. The same would be true of the Maya. The Maya probably have a greater level of scientific knowledge in the year 1400 than any other society in the world, except maybe China.
And even then it would be arguable. But the Maya, they're Stone Age. They don't need, again, they don't need iron weapons. Another thing we can't do is compare technological level. For instance, Americans don't have the wheel.
The Spanish could not believe it when they're going down the broad avenues of the capital city of the Aztec Empire. The Aztec Empire, the capital city is Tenochtitlan. It's the last slide of this lecture will be about Tenochtitlan. Tenochtitlan is the Aztec capital. It is one of the greatest cities in the world in the 15th century.
Maybe the greatest city in the world just in terms of the complex. level of the construction and the enormous population and the way that uh trade and agriculture worked within tenoctitlan it was an absolutely remarkable city the spanish could not believe it like holy hell where are we who are these people how did they do this but the aztecs didn't have the wheel the spanish they couldn't believe it how can you build a city like this and not even have a wheel well the thing is is the american peoples don't need wheels right you What's a wheel good for? Think about it.
Wheels basically have two functions. One is to allow you to make carts or wagons. What makes a cart or a wagon useful? An animal to pull it.
So you take a cart or a wagon and you hook it to a donkey or a horse or an ox, or if you're in parts of South Asia, a water buffalo, and it pulls the cart. And then you can haul more goods than you could without wheels. That all makes sense, right? And then you can also make it a military technology and have a war cart, right, with a horse.
And you can throw javelins or shoot arrows out of your war cart. So that all makes sense, right? So that's a really good use for wheels. But here's the thing about the Americans.
They don't have any draft animals. Horses don't live in the Americas. Oxen don't live in the Americas.
Cattle don't live in the Americas. Donkeys, nope. So they don't need wheels. Who cares if we could, you know, like they don't need them.
The second use for wheels is to grind grain into flour to be baked into bread. And the Americans, they don't use, they didn't need wheels for that either. They used mocahetes. And mocahetes were fine.
They weren't quite as good as a wheel. But, you know, windmills that drove grinding wheels, the Europeans didn't really get those until about the 13th or 14th century anyway. right so you know for most of uh european and eurasian history people had grinded their grain using handheld stones right in europe these what's called a mortar and pestle right a mortar and pestle it's like a bowl and then like a big grinding stone right and you the grain sounds about the size of a big potato and you smash the grain into the bowl that's a mortar and pestle that's what europeans used before they invented the the water wheel or the windmill right to turn a big wheel They would grind corn with a big stone.
The Americans, again, they didn't have the wheels, so they couldn't grind their grain with it, but Americans used a molcajete, which is kind of like a sloped, it's kind of like a U-shaped stone. So it's kind of like a bowl, but if it only had two sides instead of four. So basically they cut a bowl in half, but keep the bottom and the sides from one half, and you kind of cut off both edges. That's the molcajete, so that's how they would grind it. So they don't need, in other words, they don't need a wheel.
And again, they don't have iron working, but again, they have obsidian. The Inca did, in fact, have bronze, I should have mentioned. As I've already alluded to, right, the American indigenous peoples are master builders, they're fantastic engineers, they're really good at planning, they're really good at like urban planning, logistical planning, like they were definitely ahead of most Eurasian peoples on those fronts.
Their cities were very complex. Again, their road networks were set up very well, particularly the Inca. The Inca had probably the second best roads in the world of any pre-modern people.
It would be the Inca or the Romans were the two great road builders. And then most American societies demonstrate true brilliance at math and astronomy, again, particularly the Maya, who, again, in the year 1400 are probably... If they're not number one, they're number two in terms of scientific knowledge and level of sophistication. So overall the American people have complex trade networks enormous cities and sophisticated agriculture They were expert metallurgist right they just didn't use they just didn't make tools or weapons out of iron or bronze But they're really really good particularly the people who lived in the valley of Mexico Which is where the Aztec peoples were right particularly the people in the valley of Mexico were experts Working with gold and silver gold and silver melt at a much lower temperature than iron And so you don't need much of a fire to melt gold.
And they were experts at making gold jewelry and shaping gold for various things. And most of the American peoples that we know anything about had very complex religions. Again, particularly those in the Valley of Mexico. You could spend your life studying the religion of the native peoples of the Valley of Mexico and never learn all there was to know about it, right? It's an extremely complex religion.
And it's actually, it's a really cool one to study. especially if you're into like human sacrifice. So when you look at the Americas in terms of ages, again they look way behind. If you look at them in terms of technology, they look way behind. But if you just look at them and forget all your existing frameworks, you can see the complexity that's there.
You can see how advanced they were. So that's just some broad principles to keep in mind about American history. Now the rest of this lecture I'm going to go through various individual American indigenous societies.
I just hand-picked a few of the ones that I like the most. I picked ones that were primarily ancient or medieval. So I'm not picking like the Comanche.
The Comanche are awesome. If you know anything about American indigenous peoples, then you probably know who the Comanche were. They lived in basically modern-day Texas and Kansas, and they were horse warriors. We talk about steppe nomads.
In class a lot, right? The Comanche are the step nomads of the Americas. And once they got horses and rifles, they were an unbelievable sort of conquering force, right? And so they're really cool, but they don't really emerge as a distinct people with a distinct history until like 1700. And that's beyond our class. So the groups I've picked them are ones that you wouldn't study in any other context, right?
So if you were to take the next... This is the first half of a world history survey. If you were to take the second half of the world history survey, you would talk about various American indigenous groups. You'll definitely talk about the Aztecs and the Inca.
You'd probably talk about the Maya. And then depending on your professor, you might talk about one of the Native American groups. If you were to take my class for the second half of this world history survey, I talk about the Comanche.
I have a whole lecture on the Comanche and the Apache, but I focus on the Comanche. So I'm not going to talk about any of them because, again, If you take the second half of the survey, you'd get some of them. I will at the end mention the Aztecs because the Aztecs are too important and also just too damn interesting to ignore completely.
So in other words, I'm talking about sort of lesser known, lesser discussed, North American, I'm focusing on North America, North American indigenous groups, particularly ones that sort of were dead and gone by around the year 1500. Before we get into that, it's probably worth talking about how people come to the Americas. So most, or perhaps all, I think historians lean to the all, but at least most of the people in the Americas, the indigenous people who are there when Columbus arrives, that is, entered the region, entered the Americas via a land bridge across the Bering Strait in about 18,000 BCE. This is called the Beringia Land Bridge Theory. So the Bering Strait is between Alaska.
Russia today. It's a pretty narrow little bit of ocean and basically the Beringia Land Bridge theory argues that in around 18,000 BCE we were in a period called a glacial maximum. A glacial maximum is so called because the glaciers were at their maximum extent.
It was a very very cold time. It was like a peak ice age. And because there was so much water and glaciers, the ocean level was much lower than it is today, right?
And so there was land exposed in this time period that is not exposed today, right? Because the ocean is much higher today than it was then. And the ocean was low enough that the very shallow ocean between Russia and Alaska was exposed land, right? Today it's a shallow ocean, but in this time period it would have just been exposed land.
That's what they're calling the land bridge. And so humans who were hunter-gatherer, because 18,000 BCE, we're in the Paleolithic ages, are hunter-gatherer humans, are nomadically chasing animals in Russia. The animals, not knowing this is a land bridge.
The humans also don't know this is a land bridge. To them, it's just land. They crossed the land bridge from Russia to Alaska, and now they're in the Americas.
Now, the land bridge would have only been open for a brief period, because prior to 18,000 BCE, there was even more glaciers, and so the glaciers would have blocked it. So it's kind of like a Goldilocks moment. It can't be too hot or it can't be too cold.
Because when the Ice Age was at its true peak... the Beringia Land Bridge would have been blocked by glaciers that were basically impassable. I don't know if you've ever been hiking somewhere where there are glaciers like the Swiss Alps. I've been hiking in the Swiss Alps.
I went hiking on the 4th of July, and I got caught in a snowstorm on a glacier. It was 80 degrees when I left my hotel, and I nearly died of hypothermia. Glaciers are hard to cross, even in the 21st century with 21st century technology. and you know that you're about to cross the glacier. These people wouldn't have known any of that.
So they couldn't cross the glaciers for most of the Ice Age. There was a brief window. As the glaciers begin melting, the glaciers had melted enough that the land bridge would have been passable, but they hadn't melted so much that the ocean would rise and cover it with water.
Again, there's like this Goldilocks, like a little sweet spot. And so a few thousand hunters would have crossed this, again, in a period called the Last Glacial Maximum. Within about 4,000 years, we know that humans had made it all the way down to southern Chile and southern Argentina in the region called Patagonia. There are several alternative theories for how people came to be in the Americas. A lot of them are very religious or ideology inflected, and so we're going to ignore those because they're not very convincing.
There are two plausible alternative theories. So one theory, because basically this is kind of difficult to explain. It only takes 4,000 years for humans to settle the entire Americas.
I don't know how long it would take you when it was really cold and you're on foot, and your only motivation is chasing animals. I don't know how long it would take to go from Alaska to Chile. And it's not like they had just ventured there. There were people groups who lived, who just stayed basically in Patagonia. We're on the...
Argentine Pompous or in the Pentanol. The Pentanol is like a swampland, it's like the Everglades of South America, right? It's sort of on the border between Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil today, right? But there are people who are living in the Pentanol, right, by 14,000. So by 4000 BCE a few thousand hunter-gatherers had spread out into distinct people groups over the entire width and breadth of the Americas and that does seem like a pretty short window of time.
for people to spread so far so quickly. And so one of the two alternative theories that seem plausible is that the Beringian land bridge settlers weren't the first settlers, that others had come first, right? So the 18,000 BC, again, is this like Goldilocks moment where there were still a lot of glaciers that keep the ocean down, but not so many as to block the Beringian land bridge, right? So similarly, it was near the end of this last glacial maximum. In 40,000 BCE, we are near the beginning of that glacial maximum, and there would have been the same Goldilocks moment as the glaciers are building up.
So the glaciers are coming and coming and coming. The ocean is dropping and dropping and dropping, and there would have been a moment where the ocean had dropped enough that the land bridge was there, but the glaciers hadn't built up enough to block it. So there's a similar Goldilocks moment in 40,000 BCE that would have allowed people to cross. Just recently, like a month ago, there was an article, a month ago as of October 2021, I had to date this lecture, some of you are probably watching this for a spring semester, 2022, a little peek behind the curtain.
Anyway, about a month ago, an article came out showing that, lending more credence to this idea, that a group had come first around 40,000 and then a second group came around 18,000. Another plausible theory is that a lot of settlers came by boat. following the shoreline, right? Because they would have lacked the sort of navigational ability to navigate open ocean, and they lacked the ship building ability to build a boat that could withstand storms, and so they wouldn't have ventured into open ocean, but they might have followed the coastline. All of the theories, all of the plausible theories anyway, agree that the very first settlers in the Americas came from modern day far eastern Russia, whether via land or via boat.
and genetic tests, bone density analyses, and basically anything else that's open to archaeological investigation suggests that... This is also the case, that the people who settled in the Americas first come from modern, far eastern Russia. Alright, so much like in Eurasia, American peoples have been agriculture.
They likely did so around 6500 BCE, but most Americans would not have transitioned to agriculture until about 1000 BCE. The reason this is such a big gap is that the cereal grain they domesticate in the Americas is maize, or corn. depending on what part of the world you're from.
In the U.S. we say corn, basically everyone else says maize. So they domesticate maize around 6500 BCE, and maize is an extremely adaptable crop, but it takes a while to adapt it. And so basically it took 5500 years to make it so that maize could be spread throughout most of North and Central America.
And then in South America, the main crops were quinoa and potatoes. It similarly took a while for them to spread. The agricultural revolution has much the same results as it did in Eurasia, right? The rise of towns, the rise of property, people owning things, collecting things, the rise of government, of organized religion, and increase in warfare. And the basic crop, particularly in North America, which would include Central America, right?
So basically everything from Panama up, basic crop. is maize or corn, but also peppers and squash and tomatoes and amaranth. And then in the South, potatoes and quinoa were the primary crops. Around 4000 BCE, various South American groups began making copper items, right?
So they're in the Chalcolithic Age, and then they quickly transitioned to bronze. Some of the unique archaeological evidence from early American societies are earthen mounds, which we'll talk a lot about in the lecture, and shell middens. Shell middens are cool.
It's like, so I don't know if you know what the word midden means. A midden is basically a garbage heap, but it's a special kind of garbage heap. I mean, it's sort of, it's interchangeable with the word garbage heap, right? Like, you could look at, like, a pile, like, you just... go out, look in your garbage can, it's technically a midden because it's a pile of garbage.
So it's basically what the word midden means. But usually if we use it as historians or if archaeologists use it, they mean much more like it's usually organic materials and they're often made on purpose. And so shell middens would have been made on purpose.
And they were by people groups who live along the ocean and they would eat shellfish of various kinds. And it was... they would pile up the shells and they would do so for specific reasons again because we can't ask how or why questions with archaeology it's hard to know what the specific reasons were did it have religious or ritual significance was it for protection you know who knows but there are a lot of shell middens along the coast all over the americas all right so now let's look at some individual societies the first one we'll look at are the hohokum The Hohokam were a distinct culture group in modern-day Arizona and northern Mexico, the Mexican state of Sonora. They existed from about 300 to 1500 CE, and they were really good at trading. Their towns were built along major trade routes, and they had lots of immigrants living with them.
A lot of trading societies attract immigrants, and this is something we'll talk about more in the next lecture on Africa, even more so. If you think about long-distance trade, it means interacting with strangers. If you think about today, when you buy something on Amazon, you're trusting a stranger to deliver you that item.
You've never met the person at Amazon. Amazon's a big faceless, corporate, conglomerate, monster thing. But you've never met Jeff Bezos. You've never met the person who processed your order.
You've never met the person who works in the... in the Amazon warehouse who pulls your order off a shelf. You've never met the person who puts it in a box. You've never met the person who sends that box to your local post office.
And then it's 50-50 of whether you've met the local post person who brings that box to your house, right? So you trust a lot of strangers to get that item to you. All long-distance trade works that way. Even in the ancient era, you had to trust strangers. But people don't like to trust strangers, particularly in the ancient or medieval eras.
And so trading societies... came to host a lot of immigrants because if you wanted to trade with someone you would send a representative from your group right so like if the ho-hocum wanted to trade with the Aztecs because they existed roughly at the same time right the Aztecs might send someone to live with the ho-hocum and the ho-hocum might go send someone to live with the Aztecs that way the ho-hocum don't have to deal with a stranger they can deal with one of their own people they don't have to translate languages and they don't have to trust a stranger And again, we'll see this in... the same kind of logic play out in a different way in Africa where trade has a lot to do with um the sort of the societies in Africa we know the most about were ones that were involved in a lot of trade.
The Hohokam may have been politically united but they may not have been um we're just the archaeological record can't really tell. They were outstanding canal builders which is how they farmed in the desert right Arizona and Sonora that's the desert it's even called the Sonoran desert. By around 800 CE they have large thriving cities predicated on maize farming, in particular maize and chili peppers. And they also served as, again, a major regional center of trade. Anyone who wanted to trade anywhere in northern Mexico, they would deal with the Jojo.
And so they connect California to Mexico to the Great Plains. Again, you can move goods from San Francisco. to Omaha to Monterey, Mexico. And you, basically where those modern cities are, right?
And the Hohokam control the whole trade network. Around 1400, for various reasons, their canals dry up and their culture collapses. So here's a Hohokam building site. This is one of their canals to give you a sense of scale.
Next society we'll talk about are the Hopewell. The Hopewell were loosely connected communities who lived all over the eastern U.S., particularly in the Ohio River Valley, again where I live. So these are kind of the people who lived where I live now thousands of years ago. And they were also famous for their extensive trade networks.
So I'm giving you this lecture from Louisville. The Hopewell group who lived in Louisville are called the Crab Orchard Group. There are very few artifacts left of them, but if you know where to look in Louisville, you can occasionally find one.
It's usually better in the winter when there's not as much ground cover. They exist from about 100 BCE to about 500 CE or so. They had a very rigid hierarchy based on a great deal of social stratification, which basically means there's really wealthy people and really poor people. Today, they're most famous for their mound building.
This is basically what remains of them. They have some pretty spectacular mounds. On the next slide, I have a picture of a really good Hopewell mound that I actually went on a field trip to in high school because it's only about 20 miles from where I grew up. We don't know exactly why they built the mounds.
Similar to Polnibron Dolmen, you can excavate a mound and try to figure it out, but you're just guessing. So there were some burials in some of the mounds, but some of the mounds didn't have burials, and none of them are completely buried up. So it's not like if you excavated a 21st century graveyard, it would be buried up.
There'd just be people everywhere. The mounds weren't like that. So maybe they didn't even use them for burials, and someone went and buried people in there later. It's the same sort of discussions we had about Paul and the Brom Dolman. A mound can't talk to you, so you can figure out a lot of things about it, but you can't really answer those how or why questions.
We do know that most of the mounds align with various astronomical phenomena. So maybe they align with the sunrise on the fall equinox, which would tell you it would be a good time to harvest. So you basically have someone who watches sunrise every day when the sun rises in alignment with the mound.
Oh, it's the beginning of harvest. So they could have been used as calendars, but again, they could have made less complex calendars. So they probably had more extensive use than that.
Many of them also contain some burials. Around 500 CE, the Hopewell declined precipitously. We're not precisely sure why, but we figure that war had to have something to do with it because the Hopewell flee from the small scattered communities into bigger, more concentrated cities with much better defensive works. And again, you don't build defensive works unless you fear war because defensive works are hard and expensive to build. But...
So we don't know if warfare broke them apart or if they had other population pressures. Like, for instance, they began using bows and arrows around 300 CE. So maybe they hunted up all their food supply. And so they basically ran out of animals to eat.
And then as they got hungry, they started going to war with one another. So we don't know. But there's some kind of societal collapse. And most societal collapses historically do lead to violence.
Right, but we don't know if violence caused the societal collapse or just was a result of it. Violence was definitely a result of the societal class, but it might have also been the cause. But so might have been the adoption of bone arrow.
Again, we just don't know. So this is the Serpent Mound near Peebles, Ohio. You know, if you're ever up in the Cincinnati area, it's only about a half hour, 45 minute drive from most of Cincinnati. It's shaped like a serpent.
It's pretty cool to visit. I don't know if you can get a sense quite of the scale, but this is a normal sidewalk. You know, it's like six feet wide. Right.
That's just a normal staircase. So it's very large. You can see it's even consuming something up here.
So it's pretty cool that they were able to build that. They obviously didn't have helicopters, but yet they were able to build it in this perfect serpentine design. Pretty cool. The next society we'll talk about are the Mississippian.
They're often also called the Cahokia people. As you might guess, they were based along the Mississippi River Valley, particularly in the southern half of the Mississippi River Valley, modern-day Missouri, Arkansas, Tennessee, and Illinois. They...
cross the river freely and spread throughout the whole river valley but again we're concentrated sort of in that region they arise around 800 ce and they last until about 1600 right if they last until 1600 you know what that means it means they're wiped out by european disease or at least partially by european disease because by 1600 we're into the time of the great dying they have large cities based around maize cultivation they were also mound builders but their mounds are very different They build their mounds for height rather than sprawl. The Hopewell mounds are never more than 20 feet high, but they're often hundreds of feet long. Mississippi mounds are basically the opposite.
They might be 60 or 80 feet high, but they're never that long. We'll have a picture of one in a moment. And they usually build buildings atop their mounds, and we're not sure why. It might have been for defense. It might have been for religious ritual.
It might have been a combination. Flood control, again, we don't really know. They had a very stringent government. There was a chiefdom and a very hierarchical religion.
They were a very rigid hierarchical society, kind of pyramid-shaped. So at the top, there's only one or two people who are really wealthy and powerful. And at the bottom, you've got sort of the poor and oppressed masses.
So it probably wasn't the most pleasant society to live in. They seemed like they were fairly cruel. They're often called the Cahokia people, as I mentioned, because that was their capital city.
or at least their biggest city. It was obviously a major religious center because there's lots of signs of religious rituals in a lot of the buildings, which would lead archaeologists to believe they were temples, and that Cahokia had way more temples than any other Mississippian city, so it was likely a major religious center. Again, these are all assumptions, but archaeology is pretty good at making assumptions like that, and the Cahokia today are probably most famous for the variety of beans they grew. If you ever go to a farmer's market and you see beans that are like white with a bunch of red speckles or white with black speckles or like blue and green and orange, right? Those are Cahokia beans that they grew.
They're just, who knows why they made beans, why they genetically selected beans like that. Maybe it's just for fun. Maybe it's for religion.
I think it was for fun because I like people to be whimsical, but that's just me. But they are famous for their beans. Again, they have... quite a bit of social inequality. There were specialized professions.
Their decline is caused by the Little Ice Age and by deforestation. The Little Ice Age is a tricky subject. So around the year 1590 and going all the way up until about 1750, the world is what's called the Little Ice Age.
It's just much colder than usual. And this had effects all over the world. It was a global climate phenomenon.
And the causes of it are debated. So part of it seems to be just natural climatic cycles. But historians today figure that the demographic collapse that we get after Columbus arrives and 90% of the indigenous people in America die, we figure that has a lot to do with it too. So basically, it's kind of the opposite of global warming, right? Global warming is caused basically by human activity, right?
cuts down trees and releases carbon into the air via fires, right? So basically, because so many indigenous people in the Americas died, their farm fields turned back into forest, and then they weren't burning anything, right? They weren't... Didn't have cook fires or anything. And so we estimate that all those new trees sort of acted as a carbon sink, which pulled carbon out of the atmosphere, which caused cooling.
And then again, they weren't contributing any new carbon to the air. So the demographic collapse helped cause the Little Ice Age. And of course, Little Ice Age plus the climate collapse helped bring down the Mississippian people, plus local deforestation. So deforestation around Cahokia. help bring them down.
And again, as their society collapsed, they got increasing levels of warfare and violence because people began to get desperate. Again, you know, your society collapsing, everything you took for granted is gone. You're probably very hungry and suffering and scared. And so violence tends to break out during times of societal collapse. So the end of the Mississippian culture is quite ugly.
So this is what their mounds look like. This is Cahokia today. You can see the Mississippi River.
That's actually not the Mississippi, but it's like right there. And you can get the scale, a sense of scale, because that's a highway, right? Four-lane highway. And this is probably what it looked like.
This is an archaeology artistic rendition. Let's look at the Puebloans. So the Puebloans live in Four Corners area of the U.S. since about 1000 BCE.
Today they're famous for their cliff cities which date to 900 to 1200 CE. and also from their pottery, which is from the same period. They live in very large cities, again based on agriculture and trade. By the way, four corners, that's New Mexico, Utah, Colorado, Arizona.
They use petroglyphs and pictographs. There are thousands of Puebloan sites where they have, these are cave paintings, sort of the popular parlance, probably for religious purposes. Some of their houses are so large that today we call them great houses because they had more than 200 individual rooms. A lot of Puebloan cities show signs of great wealth and stratification because some houses have a lot of expensive stuff and some houses have very little.
Or you can think of a modern house. You go into a really large house in the U.S. today and have like a 100-inch 4K TV and a PlayStation 5 and seven iPads and four laptops. You go into another house and they eat only canned food and they barely have a TV.
So you can tell a lot about wealth and social stratification just by looking at what's in people's homes. And the Puebloans were master road builders, one of the great road builders in all of the world. Just these enormous roads that connected their cities together and were often more than...
30 feet wide even though they didn't have any wheeled implements right we have roads today that are way more than 30 feet wide but we have you know semi trucks right the peblones didn't even have wheels so they were probably for pilgrimage routes or big festivals or parades right kind of like you would see in modern day india right during a big hindu religious festival so these are the white house ruins in northeastern arizona here on the right this is the horseshoe canyon gallery you The Holy Ghost panel. The Horseshoe Canyon Gallery is under threat. A uranium mine wants to build a mine there. It's currently a national monument. Donald Trump was really tempted to give up the mining rights, but he was pressured and decided not to.
So hopefully it stays protected. We'll close with the Valley of Mexico just because the richest and most powerful societies in all of the Americas emerge in the Valley of Mexico. This is the area where they were the first to domesticate maize.
They invented what's called the Mesoamerican ballgame. Mesoamerican ballgame is a really cool sport. It's basically like a combination of basketball and tackle football, and the losing side gets executed via human sacrifice to the gods.
So not a sport I'd want to play. to play anyway. And the Aztecs were famous, well, the people in the Valley of Mexico in general, but the Aztecs in particular were famous for their ferocity in warfare and again, for their obsidian weapons. Most of the societies in the Valley of Mexico share a religion and a religious pantheon, or they all worship the same gods, even though they were different societies, they were enemies to one another.
They had all kinds of very rich diplomatic exchanges, including warfare. Lots and lots of warfare because the religion was based on mass human sacrifice. And so you basically go to warfare to capture prisoners so that you could execute them to the gods.
And so warfare was sort of endemic to the Valley of Mexico. And again, the religion was a very bloodthirsty religion. It is really cool, though. But basically, for instance, the Aztecs made most of their human sacrifices to the sun god to keep the sun god appeased because if the sun god didn't get enough human blood, the sun wouldn't rise.
The peoples of the Valley of Mexico also shared a language, the Nahuatl language. It's very fun to say because there's a glottal stop in it. Nahuatl. You should try it. Nakwadl.
I'll pause for a second, try it. Nakwadl, yeah, it's just fun. By 1300, the Valley of Mexico has an enormous population.
There are defined social and professional roles. There are various economic classes. The valley consists of thriving city-states, much like you would see, say, in Bronze Age Greece or Iron Age Greece, with Athens and Sparta and whatnot.
And these... City-states have all kinds of complicated and ever-changing alliances and hatreds and rivalries. And again, the biggest and most spectacular city is Tenochtitlan, which is the Aztec capital.
By the time the Spanish arrive around 1510 or so, well, really 1520 is when they get to the Valley of Mexico. By the time the Spanish arrive, the Aztecs have conquered most of the Valley of Mexico and are existing in their own empire. Because they have conquered all the other city-states, the people in these city-states hate the Aztecs and therefore collaborate with the Spanish. Again, not understanding that getting rid of the Aztecs but making friends with the Spanish was a really terrible choice. So this is a map of what this is what the Spanish drew to describe Tenochtitlan.
It's a city on a lake connected by causeway. to the mainland. They would farm on the lake with floating crops.
This is the main center district. It's on a big island and then little islands have little neighborhoods. Again, just a really cool city. You can imagine what this would have been like for the Spanish to see this. These huge pyramids and just the city looks like it's floating on a lake.
I really would have liked to have seen it with Spanish eyes. in the year 1500, you know, like with the world view of the Spanish. I can't imagine anything like that. All right, well, we're going to end it there.
Again, if you were to take the second half of the World History Survey, you would probably talk a lot more about the Aztec. You definitely would if you were in my class. Anyway, next lecture is on Africa.
I will see you then. Bye.