US History › Section A · Worlds meet › Topic A.1
The Americas before 1492
Long before 1492, the Americas were home to hundreds of nations, from small hunting bands to empires with cities larger than any in Spain. This topic surveys who those peoples were, how they lived, and why historians still argue about how many of them there were.
A hemisphere of nations
When Columbus reached the Caribbean in 1492, people had lived in the Americas for at least 15,000 years. They spoke hundreds of languages and lived in tribute empires, farming towns, fishing villages and seasonal bands. How many there were is one of the most debated questions in early American history. Estimates for the whole hemisphere run from under 10 million to over 100 million, and many scholars today favour roughly 40 to 60 million. For the lands north of Mexico, estimates range from about 1 million to 18 million.
The first Americans
Many Native nations hold that their people have always lived in their homelands, and those traditions carry meanings archaeology does not replace. Most scientists conclude that the ancestors of Native Americans came from northeast Asia during the last ice age, across Beringia, a land bridge where the Bering Strait lies today, and probably also by boat along the Pacific coast. Monte Verde in Chile was occupied about 14,500 years ago, and footprints at White Sands, New Mexico, have been dated to over 20,000 years ago, a finding still debated. About 9,000 years ago, farmers in southern Mexico began breeding a wild grass, teosinte, into maize.
Mesoamerica: Olmec, Teotihuacan and the Maya
Mesoamerica, from central Mexico into Central America, shared maize farming, a ritual ball game, a 260-day sacred calendar and pyramid temples. The Gulf Coast Olmec, flourishing from about 1200 to 400 BCE, carved colossal stone heads; scholars debate whether theirs was a 'mother culture'. Teotihuacan, near modern Mexico City, held perhaps 100,000 people around 500 CE. The Maya built city-states such as Tikal and Copán, with the best-understood writing system of the ancient Americas, a precise calendar and a symbol for zero. Many southern Maya cities emptied between about 800 and 900 CE amid drought and warfare, but millions of Maya people live in the region today.
The Mexica and Tenochtitlan
The people often called Aztecs called themselves the Mexica. By tradition they founded Tenochtitlan in 1325 on an island in Lake Texcoco, and from 1428 a Triple Alliance with Texcoco and Tlacopan dominated central Mexico, taking tribute in cloth, food, cacao and captives. By 1519 the city held an estimated 150,000 to 250,000 people, among the largest in the world. Causeways linked it to the shore, aqueducts carried fresh water, and chinampas, raised fields built from lake mud and plant matter in the shallows, helped feed it. Mexica religion included human sacrifice; its scale is debated, because Spanish writers had reasons to exaggerate it.
The Inca: an empire in the Andes
The Inca built the largest state in the Americas, Tawantinsuyu, 'the four parts together'. From Cusco, rulers such as Pachacuti expanded it rapidly from about 1438, until it ran some 4,000 kilometres from southern Colombia to central Chile and governed an estimated 6 to 14 million people. About 30,000 kilometres of roads, with rope bridges and relay runners called chasquis, held it together. Officials kept records on khipu (quipu), cords of coloured, knotted string, instead of alphabetic writing. Households owed labour, the mit'a, on roads, farms and storehouses. Machu Picchu, built in the 1400s, was probably a royal estate.
The desert Southwest
Three farming traditions grew up in the arid Southwest. The Hohokam, around modern Phoenix, dug hundreds of kilometres of irrigation canals. The Mogollon of the New Mexico and Arizona mountains painted striking black-on-white Mimbres bowls. The Ancestral Puebloans, once called Anasazi, a Navajo-derived name many Pueblo people object to, built multi-storey great houses in Chaco Canyon between about 850 and 1150, and later cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde. By about 1300, drought and conflict led them to migrate south and east. Their descendants include the Hopi, Zuni and Rio Grande Pueblos; the O'odham trace ties to the Hohokam.
Mound builders of the eastern river valleys
The Hopewell tradition, centred in the Ohio valley from about 100 BCE to 500 CE, built geometric earthworks and burial mounds and traded copper from the Great Lakes, shells from the Gulf Coast and obsidian from the Rocky Mountains. Later Mississippian societies farmed maize intensively and built towns around plazas and flat-topped mounds. The largest, Cahokia, near modern St. Louis, peaked between about 1050 and 1200 with perhaps 10,000 to 20,000 people; its Monks Mound is the largest earthen mound north of Mexico. Cahokia was largely empty by about 1350, but other Mississippian chiefdoms were still active when Spanish expeditions arrived in the 1540s.
Woodlands, Plains and coasts
In the Northeast, the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga and Seneca formed the Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy, its founding dated anywhere from the 1100s to the 1500s. Among them, and among the Cherokee and Muscogee (Creek), descent was matrilineal, traced through the mother, and Haudenosaunee clan mothers chose and could remove chiefs. Women usually farmed the 'Three Sisters', maize, beans and squash. Algonquian-speaking nations such as the Lenape, Wampanoag and Powhatan lived along the Atlantic coast. Plains peoples hunted bison on foot; horses came only with the Spanish. Most nations held land as shared territory with rights of use, not as private property to sell.
Worked example: why population estimates differ
1. No census exists for 1492, so every figure is an inference. 2. Early low estimates, such as A. L. Kroeber's in 1939 (about 8 million for the hemisphere), leaned on counts Europeans made long after contact. 3. But epidemics often spread ahead of Europeans themselves, so those counts recorded populations that had already crashed. 4. High estimates, such as Henry Dobyns's in the 1960s (about 90 to 112 million), worked backwards from early counts, assuming very steep losses to disease. 5. Others use archaeology: house sites and how many people the farmland could feed. 6. Conclusion: the spread reflects different methods. Most historians agree populations were large and fell catastrophically after contact.
Worked example: reading a conquistador's description
Bernal Díaz del Castillo, a soldier with Cortés, likened his first sight of Tenochtitlan in 1519 to the enchanted cities of Spanish chivalric romances. Weigh it as evidence. 1. Date: an eyewitness, but he wrote decades later, mostly in the 1550s and 1560s. 2. Purpose: he wanted credit for ordinary soldiers, not only Cortés. 3. Reliable: the city's scale amazed hardened soldiers, which fits the archaeology. 4. Limits: old memories and a comparison from fiction show how Spaniards saw the city, not how the Mexica did. 5. Cross-check: the Florentine Codex, compiled by the friar Bernardino de Sahagún with Nahua scholars and completed around 1577, gives a Mexica view.
Common mistakes to avoid
First, calling the Americas an empty wilderness: millions lived there, on landscapes long shaped by farming. Second, treating 'Indians' as one people rather than hundreds of nations. Third, quoting one population figure as settled fact. Fourth, saying the Maya disappeared: their southern cities emptied, but the people endure. Fifth, picturing Plains peoples on horseback before 1492. Sixth, claiming Native peoples had no idea of land rights; most held and defended territory collectively but did not treat it as a commodity.
Key takeaways
People reached the Americas at least 15,000 years ago, and estimates of the 1492 population run from under 10 million to over 100 million. Mesoamerica produced the Olmec, Teotihuacan, the literate Maya and the Mexica of Tenochtitlan. The Inca ruled millions through roads, khipu and labour service. North of Mexico, desert farmers, mound builders such as Cahokia's, and nations such as the Haudenosaunee and Cherokee, where women held real power, shaped a varied continent.
Flashcards
Flashcard
The ice-age land bridge between northeast Asia and Alaska
Test your understanding
Question 1 of 5
Which statement best describes estimates of the population of the Americas in 1492?
Question 2 of 5
What were the chinampas that helped feed Tenochtitlan?
Question 3 of 5
Why did early low estimates of Native population tend to undercount?
Question 4 of 5
Which society kept its records on khipu, cords of coloured, knotted string?
Question 5 of 5
What role did clan mothers play among the Haudenosaunee?