Topic 1 · The First Americans
Study guide notes, academic vocabulary, and review questions with answers. Textbook pages 11–16.
What do we know about the first highly developed societies in the Americas?
That is the one question this lesson answers. Every note, every word, and every review question below comes back to it: farming came first, and everything built after it stands on the food farming made possible.
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.
The first plant food grown in the Americas was maize, a type of corn, and early farmers planted beans, squash, and pumpkins alongside it. Farming gave a more reliable food supply than hunting did, so people no longer had to move from place to place to find a meal. They built sturdy shelters out of clay, stone, or wood to live in year-round, and the earliest villages in North America date to about 5,000 years ago, or 3000 B.C.E. The spare time a steady harvest bought is what made pottery, cloth, and shared customs and beliefs possible.
Four civilizations grew in Middle America and South America: the Olmec on the Gulf Coast of what is now Mexico between 1200 and 800 B.C.E., the Maya in the rain forests of Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and Belize at their peak between 250 and 900 C.E., the Aztec in central Mexico from 1325, and the Inca in the Andes Mountains of South America at their peak in the 1500s. Each one controlled hundreds of square miles and held millions of people. The Maya were a theocracy, ruled by priests who studied astronomy and mathematics in order to predict eclipses and build a 365-day calendar. The Aztec and the Inca built empires by conquest: the Aztec made the peoples they defeated pay tribute in food and other goods, and the Inca held their lands together with thousands of miles of roads and one official language.
In central and eastern North America the Adena, the Hopewell, and the Mississippian peoples built thousands of earthen mounds, some to hold burial chambers and some to raise a temple above the ground. The largest known earthworks complex is Cahokia in present-day Illinois, where 20,000 or more people may have lived and where Monks Mound rose nearly 100 feet with a temple crowning its summit. In the dry Southwest, the Ancient Puebloans built great stone dwellings in the Four Corners region, including cliff dwellings set into the walls of steep cliffs for defense and for protection from extreme weather, and the Hohokam dug hundreds of miles of channels to bring water to their corn and cotton in the Arizona desert.
The dates run in two directions. The Olmec flourished between 1200 and 800 B.C.E. The Maya reached their peak between 250 and 900 C.E. Compare the bare numbers and 1200 looks bigger than 900, so the Olmec look like the later people. They are not. B.C.E. years count backward toward zero and C.E. years count forward from it, which puts 1200 B.C.E. about 2,100 years before 900 C.E. Every date in this lesson carries B.C.E. or C.E. for exactly that reason. Read the letters before you compare the numbers.
Spelling note: the reading for this lesson calls them Ancient Puebloans. Your workbook calls them Ancestral Puebloans. Same people.
Tap any word for a picture and the full definition. The bold part is the definition to write in your box.
Watch this one: civilization and empire are not the same word. A civilization is a highly developed society, and the Olmec, the Maya, the Aztec, and the Inca were all civilizations. An empire is what one people builds when it conquers its neighbors and rules them — and the two you meet here that did that are the Aztec and the Inca. So every empire in this lesson is a civilization, but not every civilization here is an empire. The second review question asks about empires for that reason.
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.
Growing crops and raising animals for food.
A maize field in Mexico today
The three crops early American farmers grew together.
Maize, beans and squash grown in one field — Mixtepec, Mexico, 2007
A highly developed society.
Temples of the Maya city of Tikal above the rain forest, Guatemala
Lands and peoples ruled by one government.
A society ruled by religious leaders.
A carved stela at Copán, Honduras, showing a Maya ruler
Writing that uses symbols or pictures to stand for things, ideas, and sounds.
The Hieroglyphic Stairway at Copán, Honduras. The sheet above it is a modern rain cover
A raised passageway across water or wetlands.
Detail of a map printed in 1524: a causeway crosses the water into Tenochtitlán
A broad platform of flat land cut into a slope.
Inca terraces at Moray, Peru
Bringing water to crops.
A working irrigation ditch at Pecos, New Mexico, today — not an ancient canal
Forced payment from a conquered people to its rulers.
A page from the Codex Mendoza, a 16th-century manuscript that lists the tribute towns owed the Aztec
A hill of earth built by people.
Monks Mound at Cahokia, Illinois. The staircase is modern
A mound built in the shape of an animal or a symbol.
The Great Serpent Mound, Adams County, Ohio, from the air
Farming gave a steady food supply, so people settled in permanent villages instead of moving. They built sturdy shelters of clay, stone, or wood to live in year-round, and the earliest villages in North America date to about 5,000 years ago. The spare time a reliable harvest bought is what made pottery, cloth, and shared customs and beliefs possible.
Pueblo Bonito, Chaco Canyon, New Mexico
Both conquered by force: the Aztec took tribute, the Inca absorbed neighbours into one state. Aztec tribute was paid in food and other goods. The Inca conquered those who refused their rule, and held their lands together with thousands of miles of roads and one official language.
Aztec warriors, from the Codex Mendoza, a 16th-century manuscript
The Andes are too steep to farm, so terraces made flat ground for crops. Stone walls held the soil and the plants in place.
Inca terraces at Písac, in the Andes of Peru
Tenochtitlán sat on an island, so the Aztec built raised causeways to the mainland. They also filled in parts of the lake to create fields for growing crops.
Tenochtitlán as a woodcut printed in Europe showed it in 1524: an island city joined to the shore by causeways
Some Mound Builder earthworks resemble the stone pyramids of the Maya and Aztec. Like those pyramids, some of the mounds were topped with temples. That resemblance is the reason scientists point to Mesoamerican influence.
El Castillo at Chichén Itzá, Mexico — a stepped pyramid with a temple on its summit
The Hohokam lived far inland, so seashells could only have reached them through trade. They were hundreds of miles from any ocean, in the Arizona desert. The trade was with coastal peoples.
Two seashells etched with designs, from a Hohokam site in Arizona
The Maya built temple pyramids, invented hieroglyphic writing, and used advanced mathematics and astronomy. They predicted eclipses and built a 365-day calendar. Their population grew to about 2 million. They were a theocracy, ruled by priests, and it was those priests who studied the stars.
Temple I at Tikal, Guatemala
Once farming let people settle, heavy clay pots were practical to own instead of carry. Farmers also needed sturdy containers to store their surplus grain and seed away from moisture and pests.
A Hohokam storage jar from Arizona, 10th–11th century. Cleveland Museum of Art
Look at what every one of those answers had in common. Farming came first. A steady harvest let people stop moving, and everything built after it — the Maya temple pyramids, the causeways running out to Tenochtitlán, the terraces cut into the Andes, the mounds along the Ohio and the Mississippi, the channels the Hohokam dug across the desert — was raised by people who had food enough to stay put and time enough to build. If someone asked you right now what we know about the first highly developed societies in the Americas, you should be able to answer in one sentence: they fed themselves first, and then they built. If you can name the four great civilizations of the south, say what the Aztec and the Inca each did to the land to make it work, and name three peoples who built mounds in North America, you have Lesson 3.
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