The Americas to 1500

THE AMERICAS TO 1500

I. Methodology in the History

This period, which deals with the world the Indians knew before the arrival of European explorers, poses difficulties flowing mostly from the lack of the usual evidentiary foundation for doing history: written documents (for example, letters, speeches, treaties, constitutions, laws, books, newspapers, magazines, almanacs). This lack need not be a major obstacle to historical study, however. Indeed, one of the most important things we can accomplish in teaching this period is devising ways to give students a sense of the spectrum of methods that historians use to investigate and understand the past. We can give students a sense of the breadth and depth of the historian's task and the remarkable array of tools and techniques available to the historian to find out about the past.

In seeking to understand the first human beings who settled North and South America either 15,000 or 40,000 years ago (the dates are a matter of vigorous historical dispute), historians use some or all of the following:

archaeology (digs for artifacts, examinations of burial sites, close study of ancient constructions such as the cliff dwellings of the western United States, or the mounds left by the mound-builder peoples of the southeastern United States); comparative religion and folklore -- the study of creation myths, legends, and folktales told by Indian peoples; medicine -- tracing such biological factors as human bloodtypes to show how different peoples (the Aztec, the Comanche, the Seminole, the Kwakiutl) may well share a common ancestry, or studying the differing responses of Indian and European peoples to diseases to illustrate how contact between the cultures occasionally proved fatal to the indigenous culture; geology, climatology, and ecology -- to reconstruct the land as the Indians found it, to identify the ways they lived off the land and in harmony with it, and to provide a basis for comparison between Indian and European understandings of the relationship between human beings and the natural world;

linguistics -- to trace the origins and development of Indian languages and the genealogy of Indian language families; anthropology -- to identify shared cultural elements and cultural distinctions between Indian peoples; and even "conventional" techniques of history -- e.g., close interpretation of such histo...

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..., and that technological insights such as the wheel are not inevitable.)

Indian economies were shaped by their geography, climate, and ecology. As noted above, some Indian peoples were primarily hunters and grazers, while others were primarily agricultural, and still others possessed complex, sophisticated, and successful mixed economies that rivaled European economic systems.

One last point: Again, all these areas remain controversial in the extreme, implicating as they do such disputes as whether Indian peoples are "primitive" and whether the concept of "primitive" is useful or even appropriate in analyzing a different people's culture and way of life.

Further, as we see in essay II, a complicating factor in the study of the Americas before the arrival of European explorers and settlers is the idea -- widely circulated and discussed during the 500the anniversary of Columbus's arrival in the "New World" -- that the Europeans dispossessed the rightful inhabitants of these continents, and that all later American civilization and history, however notable and estimable its achievements and ideals, is based on a colossal series of acts of expropriation, fraud , and genocide.