Class notes
Hist 1305 Pre-Columbian Americas Outline
- Course
- History 1305
- Institution
- University Of Houston - Downtown
This is a comprehensive and detailed outline on Pre-Columbian Americas for Hist 1305. *Essential Study Material!!
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I. Pre-Columbian AmericaWhat is the relationship between food supply and societal development?
I. Peopling the Americas:
A. Planet Earth 225 Million Years Ago
1. one supercontinent
a. contained all of the world’s dry land
b. chunks of land began to drift away and form separate continents and
oceans
i. earth’s crust moves, shifts, pushes, folds
1) to form mtns, river basins, plains, etc.
2. Ice Age
a. ice ages every 100,000 years
i. might last for tens of thousands, even millions of years
b. ice sheets two miles thick moved from poles to cover parts of Europe,
Asia, Americas
c. enormous glaciers covered Canada and part of US
i. movement of glaciers led to digging, grinding, leveling,
pushing that created Great Lakes, Salt Lake and many minor
lakes
B. Wisconsin Glaciation (75,000 years ago until 10,000 years ago)
1. water drawn up from oceans into ice caps that spread over vast amounts of
land
a. Result: ocean levels lowered
2. Bering Strait:
a. water passage located between Siberia and Alaska
i. 56 miles across
b. dry during the ice age
i. ice and lowered sea levels
ii. Result:
1) created Bering Land Bridge
a) maybe as much as 1,000 miles wide
C. Paleo-Indians (12,000 BC – 7,500 BC)
1. Migration to the Americas:
a. Bering Land Bridge theory:
i. N. Am. peopled when tribes of Paleo-Indians followed animals
across the Bering Strait (30,000 to 20,000 B.C.)
1) animals such as wooly mammoths, yaks, and steppe
antelopes
ii. over a period of thousands of years ice melted and ocean
levels rose
1) eventually “land bridge” recovered with water
iii. as ice receded, Paleo-Indians traveled down through N. and
S. America
1)iii. traveled thousands of miles over a period of 100s
of years to spread across continent
2) arrived on E. coast of N.Am. and bottom of S.Am. by
8,000 B.C.
b. boat theory:
i. new discoveries have led to a newer theory that people came
to the Americas by boat before the land bridge formed
1
, 2. Lives of Paleo-Indians:
a. hunter-gatherers:
i. used stone-tipped spears to hunt wooly mammoths,
mastodons, giant beavers, giant sloths, big horn bison, smaller
animals
ii. gathered fruit and nuts
b. nomads:
i. wandered in small bands of 20-30 people
c. lives were short, and they were probably hungry and cold much of the
time
d. Result:
i. since their daily lives were a struggle to find food and shelter
in order to stay alive, they probably weren’t able to develop much
of a culture
c. Problem: ecological equilibrium disrupted
i. Why?
1) hunting methods improved over time
a) Paleo-Indians gained access to better stone
which led to the creation of sharper spear points
b) Result:
i) they became better hunters
ii) they began to kill too many animals
2) ice age ended, earth warmed and ice melted:
a) larger mammals began to die off
ii. Result:
1) big animals became extinct north of Mexico by 9,000
BC
a) big game was extinct in Europe by 10,000 BC
d. Solution: turned to agriculture
i. began to grow food and cultivate land (8,000 to 5,000 B.C.)
1) used stone tools to plant potatoes, squash, corn,
tomatoes
ii. Result:
1) less nomadic
a) began to settle in one place and build
villages in order to grow crops
2) population explosion
3) work was increasingly differentiated by gender:
a) men hunted, fished, prepared fields
b) women had babies, planted, weeded,
harvested
4) societies grew and became more sophisticated
a) developed culture:
i) religion
ii) language, ritual, myth
b) developed class systems
5) developed trade networks
2
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