Most of the tribes listed in this book existed when Europeans first reached the shores of the Americas, about 1500, or in the course of the following centuries, when non-Indians explored inland. But what about the ancestors of these tribal peoples? How did they live?
PREHISTORIC INDIANS are discussed as a whole under another entry. As seen in that section, Indian prehistory usually is organized into three periods: Paleolithic, Archaic, and Formative. During the Formative, from about 1000 B. C. to A. D. 1500, aboriginal life north of Mexico reached a high degree of organization and artistic expression among farming peoples. Those peoples east of the Mississippi River built mounds and sometimes are grouped together as MOUND BUILDERS as well as by different culture names. Those west of the Mississippi, in the Southwest, are known by a variety of culture names, such as Mogollon, Hohokam, and Anasazi. There were other cultures in the Southwest during the Formative period, such as Patayan, Sinagua, and Salado, but the Mogollon, Hohokam, and Anasazi cultures were the most organized and most widespread.
It was farming that shaped these three cultures and made them different from the hunting and gathering cultures of the same period. The cultivation of plants for food meant that people no longer had to travel to find wild foods. Village life led to the further development of tools, arts, and crafts, especially basketry and pottery. The earliest evidence of agriculture north of Mexico comes from Bat Cave, New Mexico, where archaeologists have found several cobs of corn from a primitive cultivated species, dating back to about 3500 B. C. The Indians who planted this corn are considered Archaic Indians, part of a culture known as Cochise. Yet farming did not become common in the region until centuries later—around A. D. 100, during the Formative period.
Why did farming flourish in this rugged and arid part of North America? Scholars suggest two reasons for this phenomenon. First of all, the peoples of the Southwest were close to the Mesoamerican civilizations of what is now Mexico and Central America. It was in Mesoamer-ica that farming originated in the Americas and reached a high level of development (see OLMEC); these skills could have been passed on to peoples to the north. Second, since the Southwest had scarce game and few edible wild plants, farming was a practical alternative for the Indians who lived there.
World History
