1.2 Native American Societies Before European Contact

Native peoples in the Southwest began constructing these highly defensible cliff dwellings in 1190 CE and continued expanding and refurbishing them until 1260 CE before abandoning them around 1300 CE. Andreas F. Borchert, Mesa Verde National Park Cliff Palace. Wikimedia. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Germany.

The marker of 1491 serves as a division between the Native American world and the world that came after European exploration, colonization, and invasion. In 1491, both North and South America were inhabited by flourishing and highly complex civilizations. In particular, North America was home to hundreds of tribes, cities, and societies. First Nation Peoples in North America are often grouped by similarities in their adaptations to the environments (desert vs arctic vs woodland societies). 

Indigenous societies in North America before Europeans were vastly more complex than College Board requires for the exam, which focuses on the major tribes and societies within seven identified geographical areas and some basic components of their lifestyles. The intricacies missing from this curriculum are political, social, and cultural:

• What were the languages spoken?
• Where were the regional trade centers?
• How were conflicts resolved among different societies, and what were those conflicts?

While some of these details are lost to history due to the events that unfold on this continent after contact with Europeans, there are many, many more histories that are still preserved by indigenous people and communities today, even if they are not covered in the APUSH curriculum.

Permanent Settlements

The spread of maize cultivation from present-day Mexico northward into the present-day American Southwest and beyond supported economic development, settlement, advanced irrigation, and social diversification among indigenous societies. Through farming corn, beans, maize, and squash, tribes like the Apache, Navajo, and Pueblo built permanent settlements into the ledges of Mesa Verde.

Along the Northwest coast and in California, tribes developed communities along the ocean to hunt whales and salmon, building wooden lodgings, totem poles, and canoes from surrounding forests. These tribes included the Tlingit, Chinook, Coos, and Chumash.

In the Northeast, the Mississippi River Valley, and along the Atlantic seaboard, some indigenous societies developed mixed agricultural and hunter-gatherer economies that favored permanent villages.

Nomadic Hunting and Gathering Tribes

In contrast to the fixed societies of the Southwest, Natives in the Great Plains and surrounding grasslands retained mobile, nomadic lifestyles. Based on the aridity, or dryness, of the conditions, the Great Plains was more suitable for hunting and gathering, with food sources consisting of rabbits, snakes, birds, nuts, and insects. The Shoshone lived in cone-shaped huts built with wooden poles, covered with dried grasses and brush that could be packed and transported as the tribe moved. 

The major groups and regions of First Nations Peoples to know for AP US History are: