Topic 1 · The First Americans
Study guide notes, academic vocabulary, and review questions with answers. Textbook pages 2–6.
How did Native American ways of life differ based on their surroundings?
That is the one question this lesson answers. Every note, every word, and every review question below comes back to it.
The lesson video is posted in Google Classroom. This page is the written material that goes with it, in the same order as your workbook: notes first, then vocabulary, then the review questions. Answers are hidden until you click Show answer. Try each one in your workbook before you click.
Early Native Americans developed extremely close connections with the physical environments and natural resources surrounding them. The climate, the landforms, the soil, the water, and the vegetation are different in different places, so people adapted differently — changing their housing, their tools, and their whole way of life in order to survive where they were. That is why North America held many diverse ways of life rather than a single, shared culture.
Ancestral Puebloans lived in dry desert environments. Clay was what the desert around them had to give, so they mixed sun-dried clay and straw into adobe and built the multistory insulated homes they lived in. Some of them also built dwellings into the walls of steep cliffs, which offered protection from extreme weather and a natural defense against military attack.
Plentiful forests allowed tribes to build dwellings from wood and bark, and around a village stood a palisade — a tall wall of sharpened tree trunks — built to protect the people inside. Where the desert gave clay, the forest gave wood, and the houses show it.
Extremely cold, snowy Arctic climates have permafrost: ground that stays frozen solid all year round. Nothing can be farmed in ground like that, so people turned to the water instead — hunting whales, seals, and walruses, and using the whole animal. The meat was food, the bones were carved into tools, the hides were made into warm clothing, and the skins were stretched over frames for shelter.
Same reason every time. Three regions, three different houses, and the reason is the same every time: people built with whatever the land around them gave them. Clay in the desert. Bark in the forest. In the Far North, where the ground stays frozen, the sea.
Spelling note: your textbook map labels this group Ancient Puebloans. Your workbook notes call them Ancestral Puebloans. Same people.
Your workbook table has five rows, one for each region. The groups below are examples — other peoples the map names for the same region also count.
| Region | Three peoples |
|---|---|
| The North | Inuit, Inupiak, Yupik |
| The West | Nez Perce, Chinook, Tlingit |
| The Southwest | Hopi, Navajo, Zuni |
| The Great Plains | Cheyenne, Comanche, Crow |
| The East | Southeast part: Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw · Northeast part: Iroquois, Algonquian, Susquehanna |
Why the numbers look different on the page. The reading names five regions, and it splits the last one, The East, into a Southeast part and a Northeast part. The map beside it shades ten finer regions: Arctic, California, Great Basin, Great Plains, Northeast Woodlands, Northwest Coast, Plateau, Southeast, Southwest, and Subarctic. Neither is wrong. The five are the big reading regions; the ten are the finer detail a map can show. Your table has five rows, so use the five.
Name spellings vary too. The map and the reading do not always match — Blackfoot and Blackfeet are the same people, and so are Dakota and Sioux. Use whichever spelling your page shows.
Tap any word for a picture and the full definition. The bold part is the definition to write in your box.
Watch these two: a cultural region is a place. A culture is what a group of people share. They sound alike and they are not the same. The last review question asks you to name five cultural regions and then the groups who lived in each, so it is asking about places first and peoples second.
Write the answer for each one in your workbook in your own words first. Then tap Show answer to see if you got it right.
The physical surroundings of a region — climate, landforms, soil, water, and vegetation.
Temperate rain forest, Olympic National Park
Materials found in nature that people can use to survive, build, trade, or make tools.
A bison herd on open prairie
Changing how you live in order to survive where you live.
An area where groups share similar surroundings and develop similar ways of life.
Culture areas of North America
The beliefs, traditions, and knowledge a group of people share.
The Pyramid of the Sun, Teotihuacán
Sun-dried clay and straw, used by Southwest peoples to build multistory homes.
The Hopi village of Oraibi, Arizona, 1898
A tall defensive wall made of sharpened tree trunks.
Ground that stays frozen solid all year.
Ice-wedge polygons over permafrost, Arctic Alaska
Apache, Cheyenne, Dakota, Pawnee, Kiowa, Comanche, Omaha, Osage, and Blackfoot. These are the peoples the map labels inside the Great Plains band. You are asked for at least two. Write three to be safe.
The Plains culture area
The Mississippi River. Trace the eastern edge of the Plains band on the map and the river is labelled right along it. The reading agrees: the Great Plains slope down from the base of the Rocky Mountains to the Mississippi River.
The Plains, bounded on the east by the Mississippi
Permafrost made farming impossible, so Arctic peoples hunted whales, seals, and walruses. They used them for food, tools, clothing, and shelter. The meat was a vital food source, the bones were carved into tools, the hides were made into warm clothing, and the skins were stretched over frames. Start your answer with permafrost — that one fact is why they turned to the sea.
A Pacific walrus on the Alaska coast
Cliff dwellings offered protection from extreme weather and defence against attack. A home partway up a rock face is hard to reach. Full credit needs both advantages.
A cliff dwelling at Mesa Verde, Colorado
The North, The West, The Southwest, The Great Plains, and The East. The table above gives three peoples for each. The reading splits The East into a Southeast part and a Northeast part. Your table has five rows, so use the five.
Culture areas of North America
Look at what every one of those answers had in common. People built their lives out of what was around them. Clay in the desert, so the Ancestral Puebloans raised multistory adobe homes and cut dwellings into cliff faces. Wood and bark in the Southeastern forests, so villages were built of timber and ringed with a palisade of sharpened trunks. Permafrost in the Far North, so nothing could be farmed and people turned to the sea — taking food, tools, clothing, and shelter from whales, seals, and walruses. That is what a cultural region is: an area where the surroundings are similar, so the ways of life turn out similar too. If someone asked you right now how Native American ways of life differed based on their surroundings, you should be able to answer in one sentence: people built their lives out of what was around them. If you can name the material each region built with and say why, you have Lesson 1.
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