The Earliest Americans

Agriculture, especially corn growing, accountant for the size and sophistication of the Native American civilizations in Mexico and South America.

About 5,000 B.C.E Hunter-Gatherers in highland Mexico developed a wild grass into the staple crop of corn, which became their staff of life and the foundation of the complex, large-scale, centralized Aztec and Incan civilizations that eventually emerged.

Cultivation of corn spread across the Americas from the Mexican heartland.

Everywhere it was planted, corn began to transform nomadic hunting bands into settled agricultural villagers, but this process went forward slowly and unevenly.

Corn cultivation reached other parts of North America considerably later. The timing of its arrival in different localities explains much about the relative rates of development of different Native American people.

Throughout the continent to the north and east of the land of Pueblos, social life was less elaborately developed— indeed "societies" in the modern sense of the word scarcely existed.

No dense concentrations of population or complex nation- states comparable to the Aztec Empire existed in North America outside of Mexico at the time of the Europeans' arrival—one of the reasons for the relative ease with which the European colonizers subdued the native North Americans.

The mound builders of the Ohio River Valleys, the Mississippi 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 into their ways of life during the first millennium C.E. The Mississippian settlement at Cahokia, near present day east St.louis, was at one time home to as many as 25,000 people.

The Anasazi built an elaborate pueblo of more than 600 interconnected rooms at chaco Canyon in modern day New Mexico. But mysteriously, perhaps due to prolonged drought, all those ancient cultures fell into decline by about 1300 C.E.

The cultivation of Maize, as well as of high-yielding strains of beans and squash, reached the southern east Atlantic seabored region of North America about 1,000 C.E.

These plants made possible Three-sister Farming, with beans growing on the trellis of the corn stalks amd squash covering the planting mounds to retain moisture in the soil.

The rich diet provided by this environmentally clever farming technique produced some of the highest population densities on the continent, among them the Creek, Choctaw, and Cherokee peoples.

The Iroquois in the northeastern woodlands, inspired by a legendary leader named Hiawatha, created in the 16th century perhaps the closest North American approximation to the great empires of Mexico and Peru. The Confederacy developed the political and organizational skills to sustain a robust military alliance that menaced its nabors, Native American and European alike, well for over a century.

But for the most part, the native peoples of North America were living in small, scattered, and impermanent settlements on the eve of the Europeans' arrival.

In more settled agricultural groups, women tended the crops while men hunted, fished, gathered fuel, and cleared fields for planting.

This pattern of life frequently conferred substantial authority on women, and many North American Native peoples, including the Iroquois, developed matrilineal cultures, in which power and possessions passed down the female side of the family line.

Unlike the Europeans, who would soon arrive with the presumption that humans had dominion over the earth and with the technologies to alter the very face of the land, 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.

Yet they did sometimes ignite massive forest fires, deliberately torching thousands of acres of trees to create better hunting habitats, especially for deer.

This practice accounted for the open, park-like, appearance of the Eastern woodlands that so amazed early European explorers.

But in the broad sense, the land did not feel the hand of the Native Americans heavy open it, partly because they were so few in number. They were so thinly spread across the continent that vast areas were virtually untouched by a human presence.

In the fearful 1492, probably no more than 4 million Native Americans padded through the whispering, primeval forests and paddled across the sparkling, virgin waters of the continent north of Mexico. They were blissfully unaware that the historic isolation of the Americas was about to end forever, as the land and the native peoples alike felt the full shock of the European "discovery".