Chapter 1 Pages 3 10 As settlement spread, early peoples began to adapt themselves to their surroundings Gradually they developed substantial

l civilizations some of them of vast size and power The most elaborate of these societies emerged in South and Central America and in Mexico In Central America, the Mayas build a sophisticated culture with a written language, a numerical system similar to the Arabic, an accurate calendar, and an advanced agricultural system They were succeeded by the Aztecs, who also developed a harsh religion based on human sacrifice The economies of these societies were based primarily on agriculture, but there were also substantial cities Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital build on present-day Mexico city, had a larger population than any European city of that time The peoples north of Mexico did not develop empires as large or political systems as elaborate as those of the Incas, Mayas, and Aztecs Societies that subsisted on hunting, gathering, fishing or some combination emerged in the north Another group of tribes spread through relatively arid regions of the Far West and developed successful communities based on fishing, hunting small game, and gathering Others were primarily agricultural, building large irrigation systems and constructing substantial towns that became centers of trade, crafts and religious and civic ritual The eastern part of the United States had the greatest food resources of any region of the continent Many tribes lived there, and most of them engaged simultaneously in farming, hunting, gathering and fishing The agricultural societies of the Northeast were more mobile than those in other regions Farming techniques were designed to exploit the land quickly, such as setting forest fires to clear land, then they planted crops among the dead or blackened trunks When the land became exhausted, they moved on and established themselves elsewhere The enormous diversity of economic, social, and political structures among the North American Indians makes large generalizations about their cultures difficult In the last centuries before the arrival of Europeans, Native Americans were experiencing an agricultural revolution Tribes were becoming more sedentary and were developing new sources of food, clothing, and shelter and experiencing significant population growth Native Americans worshipped many gods, whom they associated variously with crops and other nature The societies of North America tended to divide tasks according to gender All tribes assigned women the jobs of caring for children, preparing meals, and gathering foods

Among others, women tended the fields, while men engaged in hunting, warfare, and clearing land Women tended to control the social and economic organization of the settlements and played powerful roles within families The American Population Before Columbus Throughout the nineteenth century, Native Americans spoke of the great days before Columbus when there were many more people of the tribes Its estimated that there had been 16 million Indians before the Europeans came Others claimed Indian civilization was too primitive, and could not have been as large as a million In the 20th century, James Mooney set out to find a mother of estimating the early North American population that would be more scientific than previous estimations He drew from early accounts of soldiers and in 1928 came up with the implausibly precise figure of 1.15 million native who lived north of Mexico Later, Alfred Kroeber concluded in 1934 that there were 8.4 million people in 1492 Almost all scholars now accept that much of the native population was wiped out by disease (smallpox, measles, tuberculosis, and other plagues) before white settlers began efforts to count Europe Looks Westward Europeans were almost entirely unaware of the existence of the Americas before the fifteenth century A few early wanderers, Leif Eriksson, an eleventh-century Norse seaman, had glimpsed parts of the New World and had demonstrated that Europeans were capable of crossing the ocean to reach it Europe in the Middle Ages was not an adventurous civilization Real power was for the most part widely dispersed; only rarely could a single leader launch a great venture Two important and related changes provided the first incentive for Europeans to look toward new lands One was a result of the significant population growth in Europe The Black Death had decimated Europe, killing more than a third of the people of the continent and debilitating its already limited economy, but the population had rebounded With that growth came a rise in land values, a reawakening of commerce, and a general increase in affluent landlords becoming eager to purchase goods from distant regions, and a new merchant class emerged to meet their demand As trade increased, and as advances in navigation and shipbuilding made longdistance sea travel more feasible, interest in developing new markets, finding new products and opening new trade routes rapidly increased The rise of new governments that were more united and powerful than the feeble political entities of the feudal past, ambitious kings and queens consolidated their power and increased their wealth, becoming eager to enhance the commercial growth of their nations As the maritime capabilities of several western European societies increased an as Muslim societies seized control of the eastern routes to Asia, there began to be serious talk of finding a faster, safer sea route to Asia The first to do so were the Portuguese

Prince Henry the Navigators own principal interest was not in finding a sea route to Asia, but in exploring the western coast of Africa He dreamed of establishing a Christian empire there to aid in his countrys wars against the Moors of northern Africa, as well as to find new stores of gold In 1486, Bartholomeu Dias rounded the southern tip of Africa; and in 1497 and 1498, Vasco da Gama proceeded all the way around the cape to India But another man, in the service of another country, had already encountered the New World