Europeans Were The First Civilized People To Arrive In North America

As any society does when two cultures are put together, there is assimilation and anguish. This is shown by the Native Americans and the Europeans, when the latter came to the Americas in hope of land and wealth, which did not belong to them. The Europeans encountered great diversity when stepping foot into the Americas. Cultures of the Indians had them shocked; while they regarded them as “noble savages,” the Indians had a society much more complex than any European society. They had language, government, social organization, and intellect skilled in mathematics, astrology, and astronomy. Civil interaction between the two only occurred when the Europeans needed something, such as gold, fur and land. Although they helped the Europeans as much as possible, with food and shelter, these Native cultures found themselves disrupted, if not destroyed, by the European’s arrival. In this essay, I hope to analyze the relationship between the Native Americans and the British, French, Spanish, and Dutch and how they affected one another.

The peopling of the Americas “was the last great human migration, the final leg of our journey out of Africa” (Bawaya, M. How the west was won). Precisely how and when this migration occurred is presently up for debate. Accepted archaeological wisdom stated by Hetherington “suggests that the first Americans were large game hunters who migrated from northeast Asia across the Beringian land bridge ca. 12000 years BP, spreading southward through a continental ice-free corridor” (R. Hetherington et al.). Gugliotta says that archaeologists called these pioneers the Clovis, after distinctive stone tools that were found at sites near Clovis, New Mexico, in 1929 (Gugliotta, The first Americans).

Europeans lived a much more modern way of life than the primitive lifestyle of Native Americans. Europeans referred to themselves as “civilized” and regarded Native Americans as “savage,” “heathen,” or “barbarian.” Their interaction provoked by multiple differences led to misunderstanding and sometimes conflict. These two cultures, having been isolated from one another, exhibited an extensive variation in their ideals. Europeans and Native Americans maintained contradictory social, economic, and spiritual practices.

"The Colonization of North America." In Modern History Sourcebook. April 1999- [cited 17 September 2002] Available from http://www.fordham.edu/halsall.mod/modsbook.html., http://curry.eduschool.virginia.edu.

American history frequently centers on the issues of ethnic diversity and resource allocation. In the contemporary, we begin to see the experiences of the Native inhabitants of the Americas in contrast to European settlers and colonizers, is a prime example of this process in motion. When European settlers first arrived to the New World in the 15th century, firstly the Spanish, they brought with them a material cultural based upon an economic standard of resource exploitation, which in a sense was hostile to most of the Native peoples of the Americas. For instance, as Blackhawk notes that, Europeans built permanent settlements consisting of immovable structures, whereas many of the Great Basin peoples were semi-migratory in nature. Additionally, as Europeans claimed possession over the land, its resources, and began a process of territorial delimitation, Native peoples whose lives

The first Europeans arrived in North America in the fifteenth century CE. Native cultures included the Olmec, the Maya, the Aztecs, the Incas, the Mound Builders of the Mississippi region, and the Anasazi of the American Southwest. The first metropolis in Mesoamerica, was the city of Teotihuacan, capital of an early state about thirty miles northeast of Mexico City that arose around the third century B.C.E. and flourished for nearly a millennium until it collapsed under mysterious circumstances. Among the groups moving into the Valley of Mexico after the fall of Teotihuacan were the Mexica. Folk legend held that their original homeland was the island in the lake called Aztlan, from that is why today they are known as the Aztecs. The Aztecs were excellent warriors. They set out to bring the entire region under their domination. For the remainder of the fifteenth century, the Aztecs took control over much of which is known as modern Mexico, from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean and as far south as the Guatemalan border. The Chimor kingdom was eventually succeeded in the late fifteenth century by an invading force from the mountains far to the south. The Inka were a small community in the area of Cuzco, a city located at an altitude of ten thousand feet in the mountains of southern Peru. In the 1440s, under the leadership of their powerful ruler Pachakuti, the Inka launched a campaign of conquest that eventually brought the entire region under their authority. Under his

The Salisbury Essay’s main purpose for being written was to show the reader how the certain patterns of the early Natives of North America shaped the continent into what it is today. Before the contact of Europeans, the Natives were a very intelligent and organize group of individuals that started trading goods and riches before the Europeans ever thought they could be able to. Archaeologists believe that the first main group of Natives that started all of the beginning patterns of the Natives and even 10 thousand years before Columbus landed was the Cahokia Indians.

The migration of European settlers and culture to North America is an often examined area. One aspect of this, however, is worthy of deeper analysis. The conquest of North America by Europeans and American settlers from the 16th to 19th centuries had a profound effect on the indigenous political landscape by defining a new relationship dynamic between natives and settlers, by upsetting existing native political, economic and military structures, and by establishing a paradigm where the indigenous peoples felt they had to resist the European and American incursions. The engaging and brilliant works of Andres Rensendez and Steve Inskeep, entitled respectively “A Land So Strange” and “Jacksonland”, provide excellent insights and aide to this analysis.

Anthropological theories concerning the peopling of North America is a topic that is widely debated. By far, Western scientists seem to agree that: “As a result of the vast amount of water that was locked up in glacial ice toward the end of the Pleistocene era, there was a worldwide drop in sea level of as much as 400 feet” (Sutton 19), creating a land link, known as the Beringia, between Asia and Alaska. Starting from this point about the land link, we find that Elias’s article “First Americans Lived on Bering Land Bridge for Thousands of Years,” is the most agreeable theory about the peopling of North America.

The Native Americans once thrived on the rich land of the Americas, and they built a long-lasting civilization with the help of nature, gods, and organized roles within the tribes. However, the thriving population plummeted after their encounter with diseases and forced labor brought upon them by the Spanish and Portuguese conquistadores. Although at first the conquistadores mistreatment of Native Americans seem shallow and unethical, their conquest of the Americas only partially reflects the claims of the English Black Legends..

1) The book, 1491, by Charles C. Mann gives readers a deeper insight into the Americas before the age of Columbus, explaining the development and significance of the peoples who came before us. Moreover, Mann’s thesis is such; the civilizations and tribes that developed the Americas prior to the discovery by Europeans arrived much earlier than first presumed, were far greater in number, and were vastly more sophisticated than we had earlier believed. For instance, Mann writes, regarding the loss of Native American culture:

#1:The Black Legend, Native Americans, and Spaniards • Pre-Columbian North America o Native North Americans ♣ Population • About 2-10 million ♣ Didn’t metalwork, had no gunpowder ♣ Networks • social, political, trade ♣ No classical civilizations, monuments, architecture • 1200 CE-developed civilizations o collapsed from environmental degradation such as drought ♣ Zuni-Southwest ♣ Hopi-Southwest ♣ Organized as confederacy made by tribes • Tribes were matrilineal • Iroquois o Great League of Peace • Different lifestyles by region o West coast ♣ Fished, hunted sea mammals o Great Plains ♣ Hunted buffalo • European discovery of North America o

It has been thought for many years that the Americas were a vastly unpopulated land until Columbus came. However new evidence disputes this previously thought notion. Archeologist, who have been studying the remains of Native American culture, have found evidence suggesting that the Indians were in the Americas for much longer and in greater numbers than what was believed. This new evidence shows us the impact the Europeans had on the New World and gives us insight into what the Americas were like before the Europeans and what they may have been had the Europeans never settled here.

In the 16th century Spaniards Herman Cortes and Christopher Columbus set out on endeavoring journeys in search of new worlds. Christopher Columbus encountered, in the Caribbean islands, a group of extremely simplistic Native Americans. Herman Cortes however encountered a much more advanced Native American group in Meso America; we formally know this area to be Mexico. In my essay I will be comparing and contrasting several aspects between both of these Native American Civilizations including sophistication, technology, housing, weapons, religion and their reaction to the Spaniards. Letters written by Columbus and Cortes will be used to make these comparisons.

In modern America, we often take for granted the natural world that surrounds us and the American culture which is built upon it. For many of us, we give little thought to the food sources that sustain and natural habitats that surround us because when viewed for what they are, most people assume that they have “simply existed” since the country was founded. However, the documentary ‘America Before Columbus’ provided this writer an extremely interesting record of how the America we know came to exist. In the documentary, one of the most interesting discussions centered on the fact that it was not merely the arrival of conquistadors and colonists that irrevocably changed the landscape of the Americas, but that it was also the coined term known as the “Columbian Exchange” that afforded these travelers the ability to proliferate so successfully. The basic definition of the Columbian exchange is one that defines the importation of European flora and fauna. It could also loosely represent other imports, both intended and unintended, such as tools, implements, and even disease. Armed with this definition, it takes little imagination to envision how differently the Americas might have developed had any significant amount of the native European flora, fauna, or other unintended import not been conveyed to the Americas through the Columbian Exchange. Beyond the arrival of explorers, settlers, and colonists to the New World, the breadth of what the Columbian Exchange represented to