HY 101 Lecture Notes - Lecture 1: Bartolomeu Dias, Mound Builders, Mississippian Culture
29 May 2018
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Chapter 01 - New World Beginnings
I. The shaping of North America
1. Earth’s continent took their positions slowly; they used to all be one giant mass-continent.
• Shifting caused mountain ranges to form
2. About 2 million years ago a great chill covered the planet beginning the Great Ice Age
When the glaciers receded and melted they scraped away topsoil and the great lakes were
formed and filled.
II. Peopling the Americas
1. The Great Ice Age did more than change the environment, it contributed to the origins of
the continent’s human history.
• As the sea level dropped, it exposed a land bridge connecting Eurasia with North America
in the area of the present-day Bering Sea.
• Across that bridge, probably following migratory herds of game, ventured small bands of
nomadic Asian hunters. They spread to all parts of America in over 2,000 years.
1. Incas in Peru, Mayans in Central America, and Aztecs in Mexico shaped stunningly
sophisticated civilizations.
III. The Earliest Americans
1. Corn growing helped the population grow and quickly became a staple crop.
2. Everywhere it was planted, corn began to transform nomadic hunting bands into settled
agricultural villagers.
• Corn cultivation reached other parts of North America considerably later. The Mound
Builders of the Ohio River valley, the Mississippian culture of the lower Midwest, and the
desert-dwelling Anasazi peoples of the Southwest did * sustain some large settlements
after the incorporation of corn planting.
• But mysteriously, perhaps due to prolonged drought, all those ancient cultures fell into
decline by about 1300 c.e.
3. Maize, Beans and Squash made possible three-sister farming.
4. The Iroquois in the northeastern woodlands, inspired by a legendary leader named
Hiawatha, created in the sixteenth century perhaps the closest North American
approximation to the great empires of Mexico and Peru.
• But for the most part, the native peoples of North America were living in small, scattered,
and impermanent settlements.
5. In more settled agricultural groups, women tended the crops while men hunted, fished,
gathered fuel, and cleared fields for planting.
• The Native Americans had neither the desire nor the means to manipulate nature
aggressively. They revered the physical world and endowed nature with spiritual
properties.
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