6.8 America: 1500 to 1000 b.c.

America

Back to America: 3000 to 1500 B.C.

North america

The far north and canada

The Arctic Small Tool tradition continued across northern Canada to Greenland and the Pacific coast Indians continued their salmon fishing, without attempting cultivation. By 1,000 B.C. they were building villages along the Snake, Columbia and Fraser rivers south of the Snake, there were large oval dwellings with floors and a timber frame, usually about twenty-five by thirty feet. (Ref. 209 )

The united states

The Indians of North America originally had lived by hunting game and gathering wild foods, but about 3,000 years ago they began making clay vessels, an innovation that accompanied the appearance of agriculture in many areas. The pottery found in various excavation sites in the United States has a distinctive gritty temper and is often decorated with fabric or cord impressions. One village, called the Baumer site, in southern Illinois, covered more than ten acres and was made up of houses about sixteen feet square. The use of local strains of corn, beans and squash after 1,500 B.C. gave people the surplus of food and time needed to engage in some communal activities. The first signs of mound building appeared in the middle west about 1,000 B.C. as some villages began to bury their dead under low earth mounds. In the southwest the Cochise continued their gradual transition from hunter-gatherers to true farmers. (Ref. 215 , 210 )

Mexico, central america and the caribbean

Village life in Mexico continued to show more advanced societies. In the Oaxaca Valley there were villages with agriculture dominant by 1,300 B.C. Each village contained ten to twenty houses which were single family units made of wattle and daub, all opening into a common plaza. By 1,200 in San Jose Mogote in the same valley, the people began to build large platforms with limed walls and floors. (Ref. 45 , 209 ) Recent excavations at Dzibilchaltun in northern Yucatan indicate that this site, which contained one of the largest of the Mayan cities of the late post-classic period of A.D.600 or later, had been continuously occupied since 1,500 B.C., so that in all probability pre-Mayan or Mayan people lived there with an ever increasing level of civilization for over 2,000 years.

The big story of this period, however, is that of the Olmecs who had developed a civilization in the humid, low-lying, forest region of southern Veracruz and western Tabasco by 1,200 B.C. Most authorities agree (with a few dissenters) that this remarkable society appeared suddenly , without known antecedents. They were the first Meso-Americans to handle large masses of stone in monumental sculptures and they may have been responsible for extending the growth of maize in that area, chiefly by example or leadership, as they were not the basic inhabitants of the region. The latter were ethnically Huastec while the Olmecs were apparently an hereditary ruling class who promoted efficient farming techniques, long distance trade net-works, large temples and public buildings, fine art, an official state religion and social stratification. The question of pre-Columbian contacts with America has been brought up time and again, particularly regarding this advanced, suddenly appearing Olmec civilization, but the nature and method of such contact and whether or not it occurred at all, continues to be debated.