Pre-Columbian era

This era encompasses the history of Indigenous cultures prior to significant European influence, which in some cases did not occur until decades or even centuries after Columbus's arrival.

During the pre-Columbian era, many civilizations developed permanent settlements, cities, agricultural practices, civic and monumental architecture, major earthworks, and complex societal hierarchies.

Some of these civilizations had declined by the time of the establishment of the first permanent European colonies, around the late 16th to early 17th centuries,[1] and are known primarily through archaeological research of the Americas and oral histories.

For instance, the Maya civilization maintained written records, which were often destroyed by Christian Europeans such as Diego de Landa, who viewed them as pagan but sought to preserve native histories.

Despite the destruction, a few original documents have survived, and others were transcribed or translated into Spanish, providing modern historians with valuable insights into ancient cultures and knowledge.

It was not until the nineteenth century that the work of people such as John Lloyd Stephens, Eduard Seler, and Alfred Maudslay, and institutions such as the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology of Harvard University, led to the reconsideration and criticism of the early European sources.

The vastness of the North American continent, and the variety of its climates, ecology, vegetation, fauna, and landforms, led ancient peoples to coalesce into many distinct linguistic and cultural groups.

[36] In general, Arctic, Subarctic, and coastal peoples continued to live as hunters and gatherers, while agriculture was adopted in more temperate and sheltered regions, permitting a dramatic rise in population.

Until the accurate dating of Watson Brake and similar sites, the oldest mound complex was thought to be Poverty Point, also located in the Lower Mississippi Valley.

The Adena culture and the ensuing Hopewell tradition during this period built monumental earthwork architecture and established continent-spanning trade and exchange networks.

The Iroquois League of Nations or "People of the Long House" was a politically advanced, democratic society, which is thought by some historians to have influenced the United States Constitution,[42][43] with the Senate passing a resolution to this effect in 1988.

[44] Other historians have contested this interpretation and believe the impact was minimal or did not exist, pointing to numerous differences between the two systems and the ample precedents for the constitution in European political thought.

These can include the following: Numerous pre-Columbian societies were sedentary, such as the Tlingit, Haida, Chumash, Mandan, Hidatsa, and others, and some established large settlements, even cities, such as Cahokia, in what is now Illinois.

Mesoamerica is the region extending from central Mexico south to the northwestern border of Costa Rica that gave rise to a group of stratified, culturally related agrarian civilizations spanning an approximately 3,000-year period before the visits to the Caribbean by Christopher Columbus.

This refers to an environmental area occupied by an assortment of ancient cultures that shared religious beliefs, art, architecture, and technology in the Americas for more than three thousand years.

[49]These Indigenous civilizations are credited with many inventions: building pyramid temples, mathematics, astronomy, medicine, writing, highly accurate calendars, fine arts, intensive agriculture, engineering, an abacus calculator, and complex theology.

The Maya also developed the only true writing system[citation needed] native to the Americas using pictographs and syllabic elements in the form of texts and codices inscribed on stone, pottery, wood, or perishable books made from bark paper.

Out of all the civilizations in its area, the Tarascan Empire was the most prominent in metallurgy, harnessing copper, silver, and gold to create items such as tools, decorations, and even weapons and armor.

Nicānāhuac ("Here Surrounded By Water" in Nahuatl)[60] was the geographical endonym used by the Nicarao, an offshoot of the Pipil people from El Salvador, to refer to western Nicaragua.

The Muisca of Colombia, postdating the Herrera Period, Valdivia of Ecuador, the Quechuas, and the Aymara of Peru and Bolivia were the four most important sedentary Amerindian groups in South America.

Since the 1970s, numerous geoglyphs have been discovered on deforested land in the Amazon rainforest, Brazil, supporting Spanish accounts of complex and ancient Amazonian civilizations, such as Kuhikugu.

A diffusion by human agents has been put forward to explain the pre-Columbian presence in Oceania of several cultivated plant species native to South America, such as the bottle gourd (Lagenaria siceraria) or sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas).

[76] A 2007 paper published in PNAS put forward DNA and archaeological evidence that domesticated chickens had been introduced into South America via Polynesia by late pre-Columbian times.

[77] These findings were challenged by a later study published in the same journal, that cast doubt on the dating calibration used and presented alternative mtDNA analyses that disagreed with a Polynesian genetic origin.

From the remains that have been found, scholars have determined that Valdivians cultivated maize, kidney beans, squash, cassava, chili peppers, and cotton plants, the last of which was used to make clothing.

Next to the Quechua of Peru and the Aymara in Bolivia, the Chibcha of the eastern and north-eastern Highlands of Colombia developed the most notable culture among the sedentary Indigenous peoples in South America.

Tiwanaku is recognized by Andean scholars as one of the most important South American civilizations before the birth of the Inca Empire in Peru; it was the ritual and administrative capital of a major state power for approximately five hundred years.

Archeologists have discovered evidence of the earliest known inhabitants of the Venezuelan area in the form of leaf-shaped flake tools, together with chopping and plano–convex scraping implements exposed on the high riverine terraces of the Pedregal River in western Venezuela.

While it is possible Orellana may have exaggerated the level of development among the Amazonians, their semi-nomadic descendants have the odd distinction among tribal indigenous societies of a hereditary, yet landless, aristocracy.

Intentional burning of vegetation was taken up to mimic the effects of natural fires that tended to clear forest understories, thereby making travel easier and facilitating the growth of herbs and berry-producing plants that were important for both food and medicines.