L Anse Aux Meadows

Early settlements in North America - prior to Columbus [generalization of what they were like]

According to the standard accepted theory, the Clovis people were the first inhabitants of the Americas. The Clovis people crossed the Beringia land bridge during the period of the last ice age, from there they spread across the Americas through an ice free-corridor. However, recent finding have suggested that the first people did not walk to America but came by boat. This paper will examine evidence found in Haida Gwaii and other sites along North and South America that supports a different view of human migration to the Americas, the coastal migration theory.

About 225 million years ago, according to the theory of “Pangaea,” the world was once a single supercontinent that contained all the dry land. Approximately 10 million years ago, North America was shaped by the majestic Canadian Shield. About 2 million years ago, in North America, the grand glaciers laid the land of Canada and the United States, southbound as far as from Pennsylvania all the way to the Pacific Northwest. Recently, about 135 million to 25 million years ago, four massive ranges—the Rockies, the Sierra Nevada, the Cascades, and the Coast Ranges, arose in western North America. About 35000 years ago, the ancestors of the Native Americans, the nomadic Asian hunters, first

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.

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.

How the first Native people arrived has always been shrouded with mystery, yet there have been theorists to suggest they came in one way or another. “Heavily glaciated during the Pleistocene epoch (Ice Age), the early prehistory of Canada mirrors the withdrawal of the Ice” (Lightfoot 2009: 249). The Laurentide sheet and the smaller Cordilleran ice sheet had created floors of the Chukchi and the Bering Sea, creating a bridge between Asia and Alaska. This bridge has been presumed to be the route in which our long ago ancestors first entered the New World. It was then though Beringa, humans then begun to create settlements all over

Similar to the United States, Canada has a significant portion of their population that is native to the land. The indigenous people that live in Canada have lived there for thousands of years before the colonization of Canada occurred. The major groups of modern indigenous people are the Inuit and the Metis. The Intuits lived in Canada and Greenland for hundreds of years without European contact. Their first European contact came from Norse settlers in Greenland; however, these Norse settlers disappeared and left the Inuit mostly isolated until more widespread colonization in the future. The Metis is a group that refers to people who are descendants from both native people and European settlers. Their history goes back to the mid

Norwegians are credited with being the first Europeans to discover North America. Live Eriksson cam to America in A.D. 1000, which was nearly five centuries before Columbus. The Norwegian immigration to America began in 1825 in which several dozen Norwegians left Stavanger headed for America on the sloop Restauration,

“Annals of the Former World” puts four of John McPhee’s books on the geology and geological history of North America together. They bring up the scientists who found the information that explains the history of North America. McPhee had joined some of them on expeditions, and described the work they did, as well as recorded the ideas they had.

Significant changes occurred in the North American landscape as a result of European settlers. Many of these changes were due to the fundamental differences in which the land was viewed, and thereby treated, by the Native Americans versus the incoming European settlers. Although both groups made significant impacts on their surroundings, the novel Changes in the Land argues that the actions of those inhabiting the English colonies caused much more dramatic and long-lasting alterations. The author of Changes in the Land, William Cronon, attempted to dispel the myth of the first English settlers stumbling upon “virgin land.”

Beginning in the mid sixteenth century, French explorers were able to establish a powerful and lasting presence in what is now the Northern United States and Canada. The explorers placed much emphasis on searching and colonizing the area surrounding the St. Lawrence River “which gave access to the Great Lakes and the heart of the continent”(Microsoft p?). They began exploring the area around 1540 and had early interactions with many of the Natives, which made communication easier for both peoples when the French returned nearly fifty years later. The French brought a new European desire for fur with them to America when they returned and began to trade with the Indians for furs in order to supply the European

Archaeologists believe the first groups spanned the entirety of North America in barely five hundred years, which is an astonishing accomplishment when considering the ever-changing landscape caused by the glacial movements (Meltzer 5). Recent archaeological discoveries support the idea that settlers colonized North America far before Christopher Columbus, and that many parts of the continent were actually vegetated and not covered in vast sheets of ice (Dye par.16). The realization that plant and animal life existed in places archaeologists had initially thought to be affected by the Ice Age lends itself to the fact that settlers would have had access to the entirety of North America much earlier than previously thought. Therefore, the time frame shifts and supports a pre-Columbus, even pre-Clovis, settlement (Dye par.

Another way historians know that the Vikings were the first Europeans to discover the New World is by archeological evidence that has been discovered. Archeological evidence of a small village was found in the 1960s on the northernmost tip of Newfoundland. The small village

European explorers typically viewed Native Americans and Inuit (formerly called “Eskimo”) peoples as uncivilized savages who could be ignored, treated as curiosities, or manipulated to meet the goals of businessmen, clerics, scientists, or politicians. Civil interaction with native peoples was pursued only when it was critical to the success of European ventures such as procuring gold, silver, fur, and land. These exploitative or antagonistic relationships with native groups arose from ethnocentric attitudes which to some degree still persist in both public and private arenas. But today, we understand the importance of looking at primary sources, both written and archaeological, for a richer and more complete narrative about what such earlier encounters meant to the participants.

As of right now it is strongly believed that the Norse did not discover Maine. There is actually no hard evidence or specific geographic reference points that prove that they had ever visited Maine at all. There was at one point a Norse penny that was found in Maine but it is believed to have come from Northern Indians who brought it with them when they traveled south to Maine.