PERIOD 1, 1491 – 1606
FAST REVIEW
KEY POINTS
TIMELINE
38,000 – 12,000 B.C. Ancient hunters migrate to America
2500 B.C. Corn developed as a staple crop in central Mexico
1000 C.E. Corn cultivation reaches the Eastern Woodlands
900 – 1200 C.E. Hopi and Zuni build planned towns
1200 Cahokia city-empire along the Mississippi
1434 Portuguese explore coast of Sub-Saharan Africa
1492 Columbus’s first voyage to the Americas
1502 First enslaved Africans transported to Caribbean islands
1521 Hernan Cortes defeats the Aztecs
1542 Bartolome’ de las Casas’s A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies
1585 English colony at Roanoke Island
THE FIRST AMERICANS
1. By about nine thousand years ago, people could be found from Alaska to the southernmost tip of South America.
2. Native American populations settled across the vast expanse of North America. Over time, they developed distinctive complex societies by adapting to and transforming their diverse environments.
3. Native Americans spoke hundreds of distinct languages. They did not know they were a common category of people until named and treated so by the European invaders.
4. The early peoples of North America lived in families that were part of larger clans. They lived in village communities, divided labor by gender, and shared a strong sense of spirituality. They believed that every element in nature contained some measure of spiritual power.
5. Native peoples developed a mathematically based calendar, constructed irrigation systems, built multi-family dwellings, and lived in cities inhabited by 100,000 or more people.
6. The early peoples did not develop wheeled vehicles, waterwheels, or a tradition of private property rights. Native Americans viewed land and water as communal possessions that could not be owned or traded.
7. Indians living in central Mexico pioneered the cultivation of maize, beans, and squash. As these farming techniques spread northward, they enabled Native Americans to develop settled farming communities.
8. Between 700 and 1200 C.E., maize, beans, and squash became integral parts of the Native American diet.
9. The abundant natural resources of the Pacific Northwest supported a relatively
dense population. Waterways teemed with fish and dense forests supplied
game, berries, and wood for housing and boats. People such as the Kwakiutl
celebrated their abundance by carving magnificent totems as symbols of the
ancestral spirits that guided each family.
10. The Southwest was much drier than the Pacific Northwest. The Hop collected
rainwater in rock cisterns and carefully parceled it out to their fields. People
throughout the region lived in multi-story houses made of adobe. They coaxed
crops of corn, beans, melons, and squash, from the sun-parched but fertile soil.
11. The Great Plains are flat open grasslands extending from the Rocky Mountains
to the Mississippi River. Huge buffalo herds once roamed these grasslands. The
Pawnee were farmers who planted corn, squash, and beans. Once the plants were strong the entire Pawnee tribe packed up for the spring buffalo hunt. On the hunt, the Pawnee lived in tepees, portable, houses made of buffalo skins.
12. Hardwood forests dominated the Eastern Woodlands, a vast region stretching
from the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River in the north to the Gulf of Mexico
in the South. The tribes in this region lived in semi-permanent villages built in forest clearings. They blended agriculture with hunting and gathering.
COLUMBUS AND THE SPANISH CONQUISTADORES
1. Columbus and other Spanish sea captains hoped to chart a new ocean route to Asia. Instead, they discovered two vast new continents.
2. Spanish conquistadores like Cortez and Pissarro hoped to topple the Aztec and Inka empires in order to seize power and wealth.
3. Spanish missionaries came to the New World to promote Christianity.
THE COLUMBIAN EXCHANGE
1. The COLUMBIAN EXCHANGE refers to the exchange of plants, animals, microbes, and peoples between the New World, Europe, and Africa in the 150 years following the discovery of America in 1492.
2. The Columbian Exchange set in motion a series of profound changes that brought catastrophic population losses to Native Americans, immense suffering to West Africa, and unprecedented prosperity to Western Europe.
3. Nutritious New World foods such as maize, potatoes, and tomatoes improved European diets thus stimulating population growth and economic activity. At the same time, the influx of New World gold and silver facilitated economic growth. These powerful forces contributed to the rising prosperity of the merchant class in Western Europe.
4. European microbes caused epidemics that led to a catastrophic decline in Native American populations. Demographers estimate that 40 to 100 million people lived in the Americas in 1491. The figure plummeted to an estimated 8 million people in 1600.
5. The Columbian Exchange also impacted life in West Africa. The severe drop in New World population forced the Spanish to look to Africa for a new source of
labor. Between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, European slave traders
forcibly transported over 12 million Africans to the Americas.
THE ENCOMIENDA SYSTEM
1. An ENCOMIENDA was a license granted by the Spanish to royal officials to extract labor and tribute from native peoples living in specified areas.
2. The Spanish created the encomienda system to organize and exploit Native American labor. The encomienda system began in the Caribbean and spread to Mexico.
3. The encomienda system allowed Spanish colonial economies to marshal Native American labor to support plantation-based agriculture and extract precious metals.
4. Although the native peoples were legally not slaves, ruthless planters nevertheless created a brutal system of forced labor that led to many abuses. For example, sugar planters forced Native American workers to labor in boiling houses where the temperature reached above 120 degrees.
5. The inhumanity of the system appalled Dominican priest Bartolome’ de las Casas. He renounced his encomienda and wrote a series of essays denouncing the Spanish as “ravening wolves” who descended upon defenseless Native Americans.
NEW SPAIN
1. Spanish authorities attempted to exercise a significant degree of administrative control over New Spain. The royal council in Madrid divided their American empire into two immense regions known as viceroyalties. The king appointed a viceroy to govern each region. However, the great distance between Madrid and New Spain enabled colonial authorities to delay, frustrate, and sometimes evade royal orders.
2. As disease and warfare reduced their numbers, the native population could not meet the Spanish demand for a large body of captive laborers. By the early 1500s, the Spanish began to import enslaved Africans to labor on Caribbean sugar plantations and in Peruvian silver mines. About 300,000 enslaved Africans arrived in New Spain between 1500 and 1650.
3. Women comprised less than one-third of the total number of Spaniards who settled in the New World. As a result, many male emigrants married Native American women. Their racially mixed offspring became known as mestizos.
4. The Spanish developed a race-based society. New Spain’s high rate of intermarriage produced a racially mixed population of Europeans, Africans, and Native Americans.
5. Spanish colonists were devout Catholics. They did not leave Spain to seek greater religious freedom.
6. Jesuit and Franciscan priests waged a vigorous campaign to convert Native Americans to the Catholic faith.
7. The Spanish discovered and colonized Florida. The presence of the Spanish in this region illustrates the growing competition between European powers in the Americas.