•Between 15,000 and 20,000 years ago an ice age caused sea levels to drop, in turn this created a land bridge connecting Asia and North American continents.

• Some believed that people from Asia used this land bridge to cross the Bering Strait into North America.

The First North Americans

Arctic and the Northwest: The Inuit• About 3000 B.C. the Inuit people moved into North America from Asia.

• They learned specific skills to survive in the harsh conditions of the environment they were now in.

• Most of the Inuit people settled along the coast of the tundra region which was the treeless region south of the artic.

•The igloo was only used as a temporary shelter during traveling.

Inuit throat singing

Eastern Woodlands: Mound Builders •One of the Eastern Woodland groups was the Hopewell people of the Ohio River Valley.

•These Hopewell people were also known as “Mound Builders” because they built large elaborate earthen mounds that were used as tombs or ceremonies.

•Some of the large elaborate mounds of earth were even built into the shapes of animals.

•Near St. Louis, archaeologist found a 98 ft. high burial mound called Cahokia .

• The base of this mound was larger than that of the Great Pyramid.

• Northeast of the Mississippian culture were people known as the Iroquois.

• The Iroquois people lived in villages that consisted of longhouses surrounded by wooden feces for protection.

• These longhouses were built of wooden poles, covered with sheets of bark, it was about 150-200ft in length and housed a dozen families.

Eastern Woodlands:The Iroquois

Peoples of the Southwest: The Anasazi• The Anasazi peoples established an extensive farming in the Southwest area.

•The Anasazi lived in present day area of New Mexico, Arizona, Utah and Colorado

•The conditions were very dry.

•It could not survive a series of droughts that occurred over a 50 year period, finally the Anasazi had to abandon the center.

• The culture of the Anasazi indeed did not die, to the north in Southern Colorado a large community of the religion had formed in Mesa Verde.

•The groups of Anasazi people there built a series of remarkable buildings into the cliff walls.

• However the Anasazi had to abandon the establishment in the late 1200’s, because of another long lasting drought.

Chaco Canyon

MESA VERDE

• The Olmec were the first Mesoamerican civilization.

•Mesoamerica was a name used for areas such as Mexico and Central America where ancient empires flourished.

• Excavations revealed that the Maya once lived in Mesoamerica, and later excavations revealed an even older society, the Olmec.

•The Olmec carved huge stone heads representing gods or rulers and were 10ft tall and weighed 20 tons.

• Around 400 B.C. the Olmec civilization declined and eventually collapsed.

THE OLMEC

The City of Teotihuacán• The first major city in Mesoamerica was the city of Teotihuacán, or “Place of the Gods”.

•This city occupied an area of 8 sq. miles and had nearly 200,000 inhabitants in the fertile valley northeast of Mexico City.

• The city was a busy center of trade, the city consisted of skilled artists and they made weapons, pottery and jewelry.

Teotihuacán

The Maya•To the east of Teotihuacán another civilization had risen called the Maya.

•The Maya civilization was made up of city-states, which were governed by a ruling class was hereditary.

•They had created a sophisticated writing system that was based on hieroglyphics.

•The Spanish made no efforts to decipher this writing system. Instead they decided to burn all of these Mayan books.

• The Mayans built temples and pyramids.

• They created a calendar in which we use part of it today.

The Toltec had reached its high point between A.D. 950 and 1150.

Much of what is known today of the Toltec's is known from legends.

They were builders of pyramids and palaces.

Important to their religion was a god known as Quetzalcoatl “Feathered Serpent”. This god would also be important to the later Aztec Empire.

The Toltec Empire began to decline in A.D. 1225 from internal fighting.

The Aztec

• The Aztecs took over the areas previously ruled by the Toltec’s.

•The Aztecs eventually established a capital at Tenochtitlan, known today as Mexico City.

•They ruled until the Spanish conquest in the 1500’s

•The new kingdom was not a centralized state but it was a collection of semi-independent territories that local lords governed.

•Aztec rulers supported these other rulers in return for tribute, which are goods or money paid by conquered people to their conquerors.

Aztec Political and Social Structures

• The empire was authoritarian, the monarch who claimed lineage with the gods, held all power.

• The male children in noble families were sent to temple schools which stressed military training.

• The rest of the population consisted of commoners, indentured workers, and slaves.

• The Aztec women could own and inherit property and enter into contracts.

• The Aztecs were polytheistic and believed in many gods.

• The religion of the Aztecs was based on a belief in an unending struggle between the forces of good and evil throughout the universe.

• They believed they could stop the destruction of their world by worshiping the god of sun who was Huitzilopochtli. Because of this the Aztec practiced human sacrifice, in order to delay the final destruction of the world.

• At the dedication of the great pyramid of Tenochtitlan, the priests sacrificed more than 20,000 people. Most of the sacrifice victims were prisoners who had been captured from enemy tribes.

• For this purpose, Aztec warriors were trained to capture, rather than kill, their enemies.• One god was Quetzalcoatl who had a direct impact on the lives of the people. The

Aztecs initially accepted the Spanish, because they believed that they were representatives of Quetzalcoatl who had returned to triumph over the Aztecs.

• The Spanish rode in on horses, which the Aztecs had never seen before, this reinforced their belief that Quetzalcoatl had sent them.

AZTEC SACRIFICE

• Around 200 B.C. the Nazca culture appeared in Peru.

•The Nazca culture existed in South America before the Inca came to power.

• The Nazca religion prospered from around 200 B.C. to A.D. 600.

•The Nazca culture didn’t build any great temples.

• The Nazca people practiced their religion by designing the ancient formations known as the Nazca Lines.

• The Nazca Lines were grooves etched into the rocky soil of Southern Peru.

•Many of them were made into images of animals.

• The Nazca Lines were so large that they could only be seen from a plane. It was as if they were trying to communicate with the gods.

THE NAZCA

THE NAZCA LINES

• The word Inca means “ Ruler”.

•The Inca developed a Well-organized militaristic empire with a highly structured society.

•In the late 1300s the Inca were only a small community in the area of Cuzco, which was located in the mountains of modern day Peru.

•In the 1440’s the Inca launched a campaign of conquest.

•The Inca leader, Pachacuti ,and his successors, extended the empire as far as Ecuador, Central Chile and the edge of the Amazon basin.

•Also the empire included up 12 million people.

• The army to this empire had some 200,000 people and was the largest and the best in the region.

• Men and women were required to select a marriage partner within their own social groups.

• After marriage women were expected to care for children and weave cloth.

• There was only one alternative of work, for women instead of working in the home young girls were chosen to serve as priestesses in the temples.

• The Incan people were great builders, they were the best engineers among all of the other Native American groups.

• These people built roadways and tunnels through the mountains.

• Nothing will ever show the architectural genius of the Inca more than the ruins of the abandoned city of Machu Picchu.

• The city of Machu Picchu, sits at an elevation of 8,000 ft built on lofty hilltops surrounded by mountainous peaks.

• The city of Machu Picchu only contained about 200 buildings.

• A long set of stairways leads to a elegant stone known to the Incans as the “Hitching Point”.

• The Incas had no writing system so they used a system of tied knotted strings called the quipu, however this didn’t stop the Incas from high levels of cultural achievements.