Around 1300, Hohokam farmers in the Salt River valley of present-day Arizona were watering their maize through hundreds of miles of hand-dug canals. A few hundred miles north, Shoshone and Paiute families in the Great Basin were walking a yearly circuit from marsh to mountain, gathering seeds, pine nuts and rabbits, and never planting a crop. Neither way of life was more "advanced." Each was a working answer to a particular environment. Native peoples north of Mexico built very different societies because they adapted to, and actively reshaped, very different lands.
Why maize changed everything it reached
Maize was domesticated in southern Mexico about 9,000 years ago (Topic 1.1). Over thousands of years, farmers bred varieties that could survive shorter seasons and drier ground, and the crop spread north. It reached the present-day American Southwest roughly 4,000 years ago and the Eastern Woodlands around 2,000 years ago, becoming the main food there only after about 900 CE.
Maize did more than add a food. Follow the causal chain:
- Surplus. Dried maize stores for a year or more, so a good harvest feeds people through winter and drought.
- Settlement. Fields, stored grain and irrigation works are investments that cannot be carried, so farmers stay put. Permanent towns follow.
- Specialization and hierarchy. A surplus can feed people who do not farm: priests, craftworkers, traders, warriors. Whoever controls the stored grain or the water gains power, so societies become ranked, with elites and commoners. Historians call this social diversification.
- Population growth. More food supports more people, which in turn requires more farmland and more organization.
The Southwest: farming in the desert
The Southwest gets little rain, so maize there depended on water engineering. The Hohokam (about 300 to 1450 CE) dug canals from the Salt and Gila Rivers, some more than 10 miles long, which together irrigated tens of thousands of acres. Building and cleaning a canal system took the coordinated labor of many villages, which helps explain the platform mounds and ball courts (a design borrowed from Mesoamerica) at their larger towns. Their descendants include the Akimel O'odham (Pima) and Tohono O'odham.
The Ancestral Puebloans (sometimes called Anasazi, a Navajo word many Pueblo people reject) built multistory stone and adobe "great houses." Pueblo Bonito in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, had about 650 rooms. Chaco sat at the center of a network of straight roads, and archaeologists have found macaw feathers and traces of cacao there, both traded up from Mesoamerica. Elite burials with turquoise show sharp differences of rank. When severe droughts struck in the 1100s and again from 1276 to 1299, people left Chaco and the cliff dwellings of Mesa Verde and regrouped in villages along the Rio Grande and at Hopi, Zuni and Acoma, which has been inhabited since about 1150. The Spanish later called these communities pueblos ("towns").
The Mississippi Valley: maize-fed chiefdoms
In the Mississippi Valley, maize supported Mississippian chiefdoms from about 900 CE. Cahokia, near present-day St. Louis, peaked around 1100 with 10,000 to 20,000 people, a planned plaza, and Monks Mound, a platform about 100 feet high on which the ruling elite lived. Chiefdoms traded copper from the Great Lakes and seashells from the Gulf of Mexico. Cahokia had emptied by 1350, possibly from deforestation, flooding and warfare, but smaller chiefdoms still ruled the Southeast when Hernando de Soto's army marched through in 1539 to 1542.
Mobile lives in the Great Basin and the Plains
Where maize could not grow reliably, staying in one place meant starving. Moving was the rational strategy, and it was carefully planned rather than aimless wandering.
The Great Basin (most of Nevada and Utah and parts of neighboring states) is a high desert whose rivers drain into lakes and sinks instead of reaching the sea. Many areas get under 10 inches of rain a year, and food is scattered and seasonal. The Shoshone, Paiute and Ute lived in small family bands that followed a seasonal round: seeds and roots in spring and summer, fish and waterfowl at lakes and marshes, pinyon pine nuts harvested in huge quantities in the fall and cached for winter, and communal rabbit drives with long nets. Small, flexible groups fit a land that could not feed a large one in any single place.
The western Great Plains is a short-grass country with too little rain for reliable farming, but it held millions of bison. Before horses, people hunted on foot: they drove herds into corrals or over cliffs (Head-Smashed-In in present-day Alberta was used this way for thousands of years) and moved camp with dogs pulling loads on two trailing poles, a frame called a travois. Men from Coronado's expedition met such dog-using bison hunters in 1541. On the Plains' eastern edge, where rivers gave water and fertile bottomland, peoples such as the Mandan, Hidatsa and Pawnee lived in earth-lodge villages and farmed maize, then left on seasonal bison hunts.
Horses do not belong in this picture. They had died out in the Americas thousands of years earlier and returned with the Spanish; the horse-mounted Plains cultures familiar from later history developed in the late 1600s and 1700s, in Period 2.
Farms and forests: the Northeast, Mississippi Valley and Atlantic coast
East of the Mississippi, rainfall was ample and forests were rich in game, so many societies combined farming with hunting, fishing and gathering. This mixed economy supported permanent villages, though "permanent" needs a qualification: Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) towns of several hundred to about 2,000 people moved every 10 to 20 years as nearby soil and firewood ran out.
The core crops were maize, beans and squash, which the Haudenosaunee called the Three Sisters, planted together in the same mounds. The combination works for reasons farmers learned by experience: maize stalks give the bean vines something to climb; bean roots host bacteria that add nitrogen to the soil, partly replacing what maize uses up; squash leaves shade the ground, holding moisture and smothering weeds. Eaten together, maize and beans also provide a more complete protein than either alone.
Work divided by gender. Women owned and farmed the fields and controlled the harvest; men cleared land, hunted deer, fished, traded and made war. Many eastern societies were matrilineal, tracing descent and clan membership through mothers. Among the Haudenosaunee, extended families related through women shared longhouses, and senior women, the clan mothers, chose and could remove the men who sat on the confederacy's council.
Eastern peoples also transformed their land. They regularly set controlled fires in the woods to clear underbrush, which opened the forest floor, created meadow and edge habitat for deer, and made travel and hunting easier. English colonists who praised the "park-like" eastern woods were looking at managed landscapes. Along the Atlantic coast, Algonquian-speaking peoples such as the Lenape, Powhatan and Secotan moved between farming towns in summer and hunting or fishing camps in other seasons.
The Pacific coast: settled without farming
The Pacific Northwest and California break the rule that only farming produces large, settled societies.
On the Northwest Coast, from present-day Oregon to southern Alaska, peoples such as the Chinook, Tlingit, Haida and Kwakwaka'wakw fed themselves from enormous annual salmon runs, along with shellfish, sea mammals and, among some groups, whales. Salmon dried or smoked in summer fed people through the winter, a storable surplus that did the job maize did elsewhere. Giant western red cedars supplied planks for permanent houses that held several families and logs for ocean-going dugout canoes. These societies were strongly ranked into nobles, commoners and enslaved war captives, and chiefs displayed and redistributed wealth at potlatch feasts. The Chinook, at the mouth of the Columbia River, were traders whose network reached far inland.
California may have held around 300,000 people, among the densest populations north of Mexico, without farming. The staple was the acorn, which is bitter and toxic raw; women ground it and leached out the tannins with water, then stored the meal. The Chumash of the Santa Barbara coast built plank canoes to fish and trade with the Channel Islands and used shell beads as money. California's many small, settled communities spoke dozens of distinct languages.
Worked examples
Explain how the spread of maize cultivation into the Southwest led to social diversification among the Hohokam.
Show solution
Maize produced a surplus that could be stored, but in the dry Salt and Gila River valleys it grew reliably only with irrigation. The Hohokam built canals more than 10 miles long, which required organized labor from many villages and someone to plan the work and divide the water. Control of water and stored grain gave some families and leaders authority over others, and the surplus fed people who did not farm full time. The platform mounds and ball courts at larger Hohokam towns are evidence of that ranked, specialized society.
Why this works. "Explain" means showing the links, not naming the endpoints. Each sentence moves one step (maize, irrigation, organized labor, control of resources, hierarchy) and the last sentence supplies evidence.
Explain ONE similarity and ONE difference between the societies of the Pacific Northwest and the Haudenosaunee of the Northeast before European contact.
Show solution
Similarity. Both lived in permanent villages of large, multi-family houses (cedar plank houses on the Northwest Coast, bark-covered longhouses among the Haudenosaunee) because each had a storable food surplus, dried salmon in one case and maize in the other, that let people stay in one place through the winter.
Difference. The surplus came from different sources. The Haudenosaunee farmed the Three Sisters, with women controlling the fields, while Northwest peoples did not farm at all and relied on fishing, hunting and gathering. The Northwest societies were also more sharply ranked, with hereditary nobles and enslaved captives, while Haudenosaunee clan mothers and councils spread authority more widely.
Why this works. A comparison needs a specific point of contact on both sides and a reason. Saying "both were settled" earns little; saying both were settled because each had storable surplus is an explanation.
The ground they neuer fatten with mucke, dounge or any other thing; neither plow nor digge it as we in England, but onely prepare it in sort as followeth. . . . First for their corne, beginning in one corner of the plot, with a pecker they make a hole, wherein they put foure graines . . . and couer them with the moulde againe . . . By this meanes there is a yarde spare ground betwene euery hole: where according to discretion here and there, they set as many Beanes and Peaze . . . an English Acre . . . doeth there yeeld in croppe or of come of corne, beanes, and peaze, at the least two hũdred London bushelles . . . When as in England fourtie bushelles of our wheate yeelded out of such an acre is thought to be much.
Thomas Hariot, English scientist with Sir Walter Raleigh's Roanoke colony, describing the Algonquian peoples of present-day North Carolina, A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia, 1588 (text of the 1590 edition, original spelling; "pecker" means a digging stick)
a. Briefly describe ONE way the farming practices in the excerpt reflect an adaptation to the environment.
b. Briefly explain ONE way Hariot's purpose in writing could affect how a historian uses this source.
c. Briefly explain ONE difference between the economy described in the excerpt and that of a Native society in another region of North America before 1492.
Show solution
a. The farmers planted maize in widely spaced holes and set beans and other crops between them, so several crops shared the same plot. Interplanting used the ample rainfall and fertile soil of the coastal plain without plows or manure, and the beans helped renew soil the maize depleted.
b. Hariot wrote to promote Raleigh's colony to investors and future settlers; the book is addressed to the "adventurers" (investors) and supporters of the Virginia enterprise. He had reason to make the land look as productive as possible, so his yield figure (200 bushels against England's 40) may be exaggerated; a historian should check it against other evidence, while trusting his descriptions of planting methods more, since he had no motive to invent them.
c. Shoshone and Paiute bands in the Great Basin did not farm, because their desert environment was too dry for crops. They lived by a seasonal round of gathering seeds and pinyon nuts and hunting small game, moving camp through the year, while the Algonquians in the excerpt lived in farming towns.
Why these earn the points. Part (a) names the specific practice and ties it to the environment. Part (b) moves from purpose to a concrete consequence for evidence, which is what "explain" requires. Part (c) names a specific region and people and states the difference directly.
Where students lose points
On the exam
Questions on this topic can set a map, an image, a passage from an early European observer or an archaeological description, and ask you to identify a development, compare regions, or explain an adaptation. When the source is European, as nearly every written source on pre-contact Native life is, be ready to say how the author's position limits what he saw or why he wrote.
Check yourself
Question 1
Which factor best explains why peoples of the Great Basin lived in small, mobile bands before European contact?
- A
Spanish settlers had pushed them out of farming regions.
- B
Their arid environment offered food that was scattered and seasonal, so no single place could support a large group year-round.
- C
They depended on horses to follow bison herds across the region.
- D
Their religious beliefs forbade building permanent houses.
Show answer
B
Mobility was a strategy for a dry land where seeds, nuts and game ripened in different places at different times. Choice A puts a post-contact event before contact, and C is an anachronism: horses returned only with the Spanish.
- A
Question 2
Societies of the Pacific Northwest and the Mississippian chiefdoms both developed permanent settlements and ranked social classes. Explain what these two very different economies had in common that made this possible.
Show answer
Both had a large, storable food surplus: dried salmon on the Northwest Coast and maize in the Mississippi Valley. A surplus lets people stay in one place through lean seasons, supports people who do not produce food, and gives those who control it power over others.
The comparison shows that farming itself is not the key variable. What matters is food that can be stored in quantity, whether it is grown or caught.
Question 3
Which of the following is the best evidence that Native peoples in the eastern woodlands transformed their environment rather than only adapting to it?
- A
They traced descent through the mother's line.
- B
They hunted deer and fished in rivers.
- C
They set regular controlled fires to clear underbrush and create open woods and meadows.
- D
They lived in villages of several hundred people.
Show answer
C
Burning reshaped the forest itself, creating habitat for deer and easier travel. Hunting and fishing (B) use the environment as it is, and matrilineal descent (A) and village size (D) are social facts, not environmental change.
- A
Question 4
Ancestral Puebloan communities left Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde between the 1100s and about 1300. Identify the most likely environmental cause and explain why it hit these communities especially hard.
Show answer
Severe, prolonged droughts. Their maize farming in an already arid region depended on scarce rain and runoff, and their large, permanent towns concentrated many people who needed a steady surplus, so repeated crop failures made the sites impossible to sustain and people moved to the Rio Grande, Hopi, Zuni and Acoma.
The same settled, maize-based way of life that let these towns grow left them exposed when the water failed. Moving was itself an adaptation, and Pueblo communities continued in new places.