Native American Societies Before Contact

The Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, Chickasaw, and Seminole peoples were called the “Five Civilized Tribes” by Anglo-European colonists. Why did they deem these five groups of people ‘civilized’, and not others?

• They adopted elements of European colonial culture like Christianity, literacy, and slavery

• They were thought to have the best food and most elaborate art practices

• They had the most advanced weaponry prior to European contact

Monk’s Mound in Cahokia is an enormous earthwork very near to the Mississippi River. What do archaeologists believe it was used for?

• It was most likely a concert venue for huge Mississippian dance recitals

• Archaeologists believe it was used to store surpluses of corn

• It’s believed to have been a temple or chief’s residence

Why is it important that the Three Sisters agricultural system combined beans, corn, and squash?

• Those three crops together provided complete nutrition; no single plant can provide all the nutrients a human body needs to survive

• Beans, corn, and squash were the three cash crops that the Iroquois harvested and sold to England in order to fund the operations of their Confederacy

• Those three crops attracted wild turkeys to Mohawk communities, making hunting much more convenient

Chaco Canyon, in modern-day New Mexico, is almost 600 miles from the Gulf of California and the Pacific Ocean. What does the presence of California seashells in archaeological digs tell us about the people who lived in Chaco Canyon 1000 years ago?

• Their empire extended to the Pacific Ocean

• They used seashells to temper their pottery

• They had elaborate trade routes with societies that lived on the coast

Mississippian cultures were vast and complex, but which of these is the most accurate brief description of their societies?

• Mississippians were hunter-gatherers and nomads who followed the migrations of bison herds up and down the river valley

• Mississippian peoples cultivated corn on Mississippi Valley floodplains and created pottery and immense earthworks

• Mississippian peoples lived in cliff dwellings along the Mississippi River, building structures in the shadows of cliffs to escape the punishing Midwestern sun

What’s a Clovis point, and what does it tell us about the way the North American continent was settled by human beings?

• It’s a sharpened stone tool, and it tells us that humans have been on the North American continent for at least 13,500 years

• Clovis points are the name archaeologists gave to small coin-like tokens made of shells; it suggests that ancient North Americans used trade currencies

• Clovis Point is a mesa in New Mexico that functions as a giant sundial; it tells us that ancient North American peoples used the sun to navigate

Iroquois-speaking peoples lived in structures called longhouses. What did they tend to be made out of?

• Wooden struts covered in tanned animal skins

• Bent saplings for supports, leaves for thatching, and bark for shingles

• Sun-cured bricks made from mud and straw

Where’s the Bering Strait, and what does it have to do with the history of the North American continent?

• It's the shortest distance between the North American continent and Denmark; medieval vikings made their way to Vinland across the straight in the 10th century CE

• It's the isthmus that connects Central and South America; anthropologists and paleontologists summarize that humans originated there

• It is a waterway that separates present-day Siberia from present-day Alaska; historians theorize that humans made their way across a now vanished land bridge from Asia to North America

The Oneida, Mohawk, Seneca, Tuscarora, Cayuga, and Onondaga peoples of the Northeast formed a political group known as

• The Comanche Empire

• The Iroquois Confederacy

• The Mohawk Trading Union

Cahokia, the largest of the settlements of the Mississippian culture, is renowned for

• Monks Mound, an enormous structure similar in size to the Great Pyramid of Giza

• It's precarious perch at the very edge of the Grand Canyon

• The extremely precise and sharp tools created from the volcanic rock that the city was built upon