AP United States History

By 1491 the Americas held tens of millions of people, divided into hundreds of societies with distinct languages, economies and political systems. Historians do not agree on a single population figure for North America north of Mexico, and estimates run from a few million to well over ten million, but they agree that the continent was densely settled in many regions and that the peoples of the Americas had developed complex ways of using their environments. The first migrants had arrived from Asia many thousands of years earlier, probably across the land bridge called Beringia during the last Ice Age and perhaps also along the Pacific coast, and over the following millennia their descendants spread across both continents.

Agriculture as the basis of complex societies

Societies that grew maize (corn) could support larger populations, permanent towns and specialized work. Maize was first domesticated in central Mexico thousands of years before European contact, and its cultivation spread north and south, usually alongside beans and squash. Where these crops could be grown, people lived in villages and cities, built monumental architecture and developed religious and political hierarchies. Where agriculture was impossible or poorly suited to the climate, people usually lived in smaller groups that hunted, fished and gathered, and moved with the seasons.

The Aztec (Mexica) empire in the Valley of Mexico, with its capital Tenochtitlan on an island in a lake, and the Inca empire in the Andes were the largest states in the hemisphere. Both extracted tribute and labor from conquered peoples, which later helped Spanish conquistadors, because many subject peoples resented their rulers and allied with the invaders. The Maya of Mesoamerica had built city-states and a written language centuries earlier, although the great classic-period cities had been abandoned long before the Spanish arrived.

Societies of North America

The societies of what became the United States adapted to widely different environments, and the way each fed itself shaped its settlements, its politics and its beliefs.

The Southwest

In the arid Southwest, the Pueblo peoples, including the Hopi and Zuni, grew maize, beans and squash using irrigation and dry-farming techniques, and built multistory stone and adobe villages. Earlier societies in the region, such as the Ancestral Puebloans who lived at Chaco Canyon, had built large planned settlements, although these had declined well before 1491. Pueblo religion was organized around farming cycles and rainfall.

The Mississippi valley and the Southeast

Mound-building cultures, the best known being the Mississippian, built earthen platform mounds and large towns. Cahokia, near modern St. Louis, was the largest, with perhaps ten to twenty thousand people at its height around 1100, but it had declined (it was largely abandoned by about 1350) by the time Europeans reached the interior. The Mississippian peoples farmed maize and organized themselves into chiefdoms in which a ruling elite held religious and political power. The societies of the Southeast that Europeans met in the 1500s, such as the Creek, Cherokee and Choctaw, descended from these traditions.

The Eastern Woodlands

In the Northeast, peoples such as the Algonquian-speaking nations of the coast and the Iroquoian-speaking nations of the interior combined farming with hunting and fishing. The Iroquois (Haudenosaunee) lived in longhouses and, in the centuries before European contact or soon after it (the date is debated), formed a confederation of nations, often called the Iroquois League, which settled disputes among its members by council. In many Woodlands societies women farmed and held considerable authority over land and household decisions, and descent was traced through the mother's line (matrilineal).

The Great Plains and the West

Peoples of the Great Plains followed bison herds on foot, since horses had not yet arrived, and some, such as the Mandan, lived in earth-lodge villages and farmed along river valleys. In the Pacific Northwest, rich salmon runs and abundant timber let peoples such as the Chinook and Kwakiutl build permanent villages and elaborate societies without farming. California's mild climate and abundant acorns supported some of the densest populations north of Mexico, again without agriculture. In the Great Basin people lived in small bands and moved often because resources were scarce.

Ideas about land, belief and exchange

Native societies generally understood land as something that groups used rather than something individuals owned and sold. A village might hold hunting and farming rights over a territory, and these rights could be shared or negotiated, but land could not be bought outright and held forever as private property. This difference in assumptions later produced misunderstandings and conflicts when Europeans arrived with treaties and deeds that they took to transfer ownership permanently.

Most Native religions saw the natural world as filled with spiritual forces, and many tied their ceremonies to hunting, planting and harvest. Societies traded over long distances, exchanging goods such as obsidian, shells, copper and food, so that European goods would later enter existing networks quickly. Warfare and alliance among Native nations were common, and these rivalries would shape how each nation responded to Europeans, who were sometimes treated as potential allies against an enemy rather than as a common threat to all.