The First North Americans: An Archaeological Journey

by Fagan, Brian M.

• ISBN13: 9780500289419
• ISBN10: 0500289417
• Edition: Reprint
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2012-02-07
• Publisher: Thames & Hudson

Summary

Who were the original North American settlers some fifteen thousand years ago, and where and how did they arrive? What kind of landscape did they find and how did their societies develop? This is the compelling and little-known history that Brian Fagan recounts, drawing on cutting edge research in many disciplines, ranging from archaeology and ethnohistory to climatology, chemistry, and physics. Fagan describes the controversies over the first settlement, which probably occurred via Siberia toward the end of the Ice Age, and the debates over the routes used as humans moved south into the heart of the continent. A remarkable diversity of hunter-gatherer societies evolved in the rapidly changing North American environments, and the book explores the ingenious ways in which people adapted to every kind of landscape imaginable, from arctic tundra to open plains and thick woodland.

Author Biography

Brian Fagan, Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, is recognized as one of the foremost living archaeological writers and as an authority on world prehistory. He is the author of numerous bestselling textbooks and historical works for the general reader, including the highly successful Ancient North America.

Table of Contents

Preface	p. 7
Chronological Table	p. 10
Foundations
The Earliest Americans	p. 13
Chronological table	p. 12
Ultimate origins: genetics, teeth, and languages	p. 14
The pre-Clovis question	p. 18
Beringia and a tale of microblades	p. 21
Moving south	p. 26
The world of Clovis	p. 26
Mass extinctions	p. 30
After Clovis	p. 33
Hell Gap	p. 33
Bison hunting on the Plains	p. 35
The western interior	p. 37
The Eastern Woodlands	p. 43
Restricted mobility	p. 47
The issue of sedentism	p. 48
Burials and the lands of the ancestors	p. 52
The Far North: West to East	p. 55
Chronological table	p. 54
The Paleoarctic tradition	p. 55
Coastal adaptations: Ocean Bay and Kachemak	p. 57
The Aleutian tradition	p. 59
The Arctic Small Tool tradition	p. 62
First settlement of the eastern Arctic	p. 64
Foraging the West Coast	p. 71
Chronological table	p. 70
A diverse coastal world	p. 71
Early settlement of the Northwest Coast	p. 73
The Northwest: salmon, food surpluses, and exchange	p. 74
South of the Klamath River	p. 78
Before the Pueblos	p. 93
Archaic societies	p. 93
Maize comes to the Southwest	p. 95
The beginnings of village life	p. 102
Fremont farmers in the Great Basin	p. 107
People of the Plains	p. 111
Chronological table	p. 110
The Plains Archaic	p. 113
Bison jumps	p. 114
Protohistoric times	p. 117
Village farmers on the Plains	p. 119
The Eastern Woodlands: Nuts, Native Plants, and Earthworks	p. 127
A container revolution	p. 127
Cultivating native plants	p. 128
Late Archaic societies	p. 130
Exchange and interaction	p. 134
Cemeteries and burial mounds	p. 137
Poverty Point	p. 138
Apogee
The Far North: Norton, Dorset, and Thule	p. 142
The Norton tradition	p. 142
The Thule tradition in the west	p. 143
The Dorset tradition of the eastern Arctic	p. 147
Thule expansion in the eastern Arctic	p. 152
Classic Thule	p. 155
Post-Classic Thule	p. 157
The West Coast: Not a Garden of Eden	p. 158
The Late Period Northwest Coast	p. 158
Links to historic peoples	p. 159
The interior plateau	p. 162
The California coast	p. 165
The Medieval Warm Period	p. 166
Northern and central California	p. 167
Southern California coast	p. 169
The Southwest: Villages and Pueblos	p. 175
Chaco Canyon	p. 176
Hohokam: the desert irrigators	p. 181
Mesa Verde	p. 193
Katcinas and warriors	p. 198
Paquime (Casas Grandes)	p. 200
The Eastern Woodlands: Moundbuilders	p. 203
Chronological table	p. 202
Burial mounds and the Adena complex	p. 203
Hopewell	p. 208
Earthworks and cosmos	p. 212
The Hopewell decline and effigy mounds	p. 218
The Mississippian: Eastern Woodlands Climax	p. 220
A triad of cults	p. 221
Subsistence and exchange	p. 223
Cahokia: a great chiefdom	p. 225
Moundville	p. 228
What were these complex chiefdoms?	p. 231
Fertility and duality	p. 231
European contact	p. 233
The Northeast: Algonquians and Iroquoians	p. 234
Algonquian and Iroquoian	p. 234
Terminal Archaic	p. 235
Woodland societies	p. 236
Northern Iroquoian origins: Early Iroquoian	p. 237
Middle Iroquoian	p. 240
To European contact and beyond	p. 245
Epilogue	p. 250
The holocaust of disease	p. 250
Furs and wampum	p. 251
The Spanish borderlands	p. 253
Further Reading	p. 258
Sources of Illustrations	p. 263
Index	p. 265
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