Essential QUESTIONS:
1. Give some background about how the first people arrived in america. What events do you think may have made this traverse possible?
2. Who were some of the first northern american peoples, and what is each of these societies known for?
3. What were some examples of the peoples of the great plains and southwest? How did these societies differ from the people of the north?
4. How did each group of people discussed decline? Be sure to indicate if it was an internal or external factor that contributed to the civilizations unpropitious demise.
5. What characterized the Maya, Toltec, and Aztec civilizations? How were they alike and different?
2. Who were some of the first northern american peoples, and what is each of these societies known for?
3. What were some examples of the peoples of the great plains and southwest? How did these societies differ from the people of the north?
4. How did each group of people discussed decline? Be sure to indicate if it was an internal or external factor that contributed to the civilizations unpropitious demise.
5. What characterized the Maya, Toltec, and Aztec civilizations? How were they alike and different?
BACKGROUND:
How did the earliest people even wind up here in America? Let me rewind. During the last ice age, a natural land bridge emerged that conveniently and advantageously connected the Asian and North American continents. Early hunters, fraught with hunger, audaciously crossed the land bridge when they followed herds of bison and caribou, where the soon found themselves in unexplored and uncharted territories. The prevailing conjecture crossing points is that the people crossed from Siberia to Alaska.
North American Peoples
HOPEWellsAt approximately the time of 1000 B.C., farming villages emerge in the Easter Woodlands, encompassing all land in eastern North America between the great lakes and the Gulf of Mexico. They had various methods of gathering food, including the hunting and gathering of wild plants for food, but they likely preferred the growth of crops stable and immutable nature of the food source. The Hopewell peoples are one of the best-known peoples of the Eastern Woodlands. They resided along the Mississippi river. Ingeniously resourceful, these people constructed elaborate earth mounds that were used for tombs or ceremonies. In fact, there architectural expertise was so advanced that they could make the earth mounds to resemble animals. However, soon they shifted to complete farming in the year of A.D. 700, which lead to the prosperous culture in the Mississippi River valley. They grew corn, squash, band beans to as these crops provided sufficient nutrition for the Hopewell people and were pretty trouble-free and manageable crops. Soon cities began to materialize at the site of Cahokia, and between A.D. 850 and 1150 Cahokia served as a primitive seat of government. For unascertained reasons, Cahokia collapsed during the 1200s.
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IroquoisThe Iroquois people were denizens to the Northeast of the Hopewell’s people. They lived in villages where they diligently manufactured and assembled their longhouses. The longhouses were massive dwellings that could easily accommodate about a dozen families. The Iroquois were avid hunters, and these huntsmen typically hunted deer, bear, caribou, and small animals likes rabbits and beaver. They were robust and indomitable warriors who protected the community. The women, however, maintained the dwellings, gathered edible plants, and grew crops. Most central to their crop growth was the cultivation of the “three sisters” crops: corn, squash, and beans. Wars were common in the Iroquois people, and the alleged folk tradition is that during the 1500s, the people were nearly torn apart by such rancorous and spiteful warfare. To restore the peoples to a state of harmonious concordance, Deganawida, a sagacious leader, preached for peace. Of the crowd Deganawida preached to the amenable and open-minded Hiawatha who joined with Deganawida to demand efforts of great peace. Their efforts proved efficacious, and eventually the peace created an alliance of five groups called the Iroquois league. These people had a council of representatives, and the clan mother appointed male members to serve on the grand council, a prestigious and honorary role.
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Peoples of the Great Plains and SOuthwest
Plains PeopleWest of Mississippi river basin resided the plains people. They, as the others did, tilled and plowed the land to yield the standard sister crops along the river valleys of the eastern great plains. The buffalo were of paramount importance to the plains people, and in the summer the men left their villages to hunt buffalo. Although a fairly callous practice, the custom was for a group of men to perturb or disconcert a group of buffalo, and in their disoriented dismay, the buffalo would stampede over a cliff. The plains people used the buffalo in many inventive and newfangled ways. Obviously, the meat was used for eating and the skins were used for clothing. Additionally, they meticulously whittled tools from the bones and used wooden sticks as support beams for their circular tents, called tepees, that were crafted of buffalo skins. These tepees provided excellent shelter and helped insulate the people from the caustically biting cold in the winter.
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AnasaZI PEOPLEThe Anasazi people lived in the territory of present day New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, and Colorado. While the conditions were generally disadvantageous as the land was so parched and shriveled, there was sufficient rain in some areas for farming. The Anasazi people perspicaciously took advantage of these areas and established a bounteous farming society. As rain was dubiously volatile in terms of how often it occurred, the Anasazi people had to find an alternative. The used canals and earthen dams to water the desert. They used sun dried bricks to construct their pueblos or multistoried structures that housed many people. These people built an elaborate center for their civilization at the heart of the Chaco Canyon, and at the heart of this civilization was Pueblo Bonito.While it was a resplendent and vast community with a complex of 800 rooms, the people, incensed by the incessant drought, abandoned the masterpiece.
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THE MAYA and TOLTEC peoples
The MAYAOn the Yucatan Peninsula, a trailblazing and sophisticated civilization arose, and it was the civilization of the Maya. The Maya are recognized for their imposingly tremendous temples and pyramids. They are also deferentially revered for their having composed a complicated calendar. The vast civilization included much of Central America and parts of southern Mexico. However, In A.D. 800, 500 years preceding the establishment of the Maya, the civilization began to decline. Many speculate about the cause of this odd plummet, and of these the most feasible include invasion, tumultuous turmoil from within, volcanic eruption, or overused land that led to the diminution of crop success. Whichever really happened, it is indubitable fact the Maya cities were abandoned and covered with dense jungle growth, not to be rediscovered until the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Mayan cities were constructed in a specific configuration so that they encircled a central pyramid topped by a shrine. Mayan civilizations were organized in city-states, where one central unit governs the surrounding territory, and rule is determined by hereditary succession. Not ones to embrace serene tranquility, the disputatious city states were often at war with each other. They had standard procedures for captives. If ordinary, undistinguished individuals were captured, they would be nonnegotiable committed to slavery. If illustrious or salient people were arrested, they would be sadistically used for human sacrifice which they unstintingly believed would help to appease the gOds.
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THE TOLTECAround A.D. 1000, a new group of people ascended the ladder of power and rose to affluence in central Mexico. The power of this empire, the Toltec empire, culminated between A.D. 950 and 1150. The Toltec were concentrated around the central point of Tula, a place built on a height ridge approximately 43.5 miles northwest of present-day Mexico city. A farming society, the Toltec had a tenacious grip on the success of their crops, so they irrigated their field with water from the Tula River. The crops they yielded included beans, maize, and peppers, and their bounteous harvest was enough to sustain a population of approximately 60,000 individuals. Like the Iroquois, the Toltec were pugnacious warlike people. The Toltec resided in much of northern and central Mexico, and they extended their territory into the Maya lands of Guatemala and northern Yucatan. However, because the Toltec people were truculently fighting in Tula over superficial matters, the Toltec empire began on its lamentable downhill trajectory, and, now impotently susceptible to attack, the city was sacked and burned in 1170. The demolition of the Toltec peoples left this area desolate and untenanted. In fact, there was no single ruling group for nearly 200 years until the Aztecs emerged.
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THE AZTECS
The origin of the Aztec people is still widely debated amongst connoisseurs of this topic, but it remains enigmatically unclear. They conjecture that sometime during the twelfth century, they began a long migration that brought them to the Valley of Mexico, where they established a capital at Tenochtitlan, a destination we now know as Mexico city. According to the accepted legends, when the Aztec peoples finally arrived in the Valley of Mexico, hostile and belligerent opponents drove them into a snake-infested region, fraught with inimical peril, but the Aztec’s survived. Their god of war and of the sun, named Huitzilopochtli, had explicitly commanded that when they saw an eagle perched on a cactus growing out of a rock, they would end their journey. While under the ferocious attack of another group of people, the Aztec claimed to have seen an eagle standing on a prickly pear cactus that protruded from the rock, just as their god had allegedly prognosticated. At that time, there were in the midst of the swamps and island of Lake Texcoco. Devoutly religious and with trust in their steadfast and staunch god, the people tractably settled, and there they built Tenochtitlan. The Aztec erected sumptuously splendid temples, and they built roadways of stone across the lake to linking the island to the mainland for logistical purposes. The Aztec people, very persuasive and eloquent in their negotiations, formed a triple alliance with other city states that enabled them to dominate a massive empire. After this alliance dismembered, the Aztec was no longer a centralized state but rather a coherent collection of semi-independent territories that local lords governed. By the 1500s, the monarch, narcissistically claiming to be in the lineage with the gods, held all power. The nobility held positions in government, and the general population of uncouth commoners were farmers. The Aztec built chinampas, swampy islands crisscrossed by networks of channels. As far as religion, the Aztecs were devoutly fervid believers in divine interventions from the gods, such as signs. While this proves the ardently firm nature of their fate, it also, in my opinion is a testament to their basic ideologies of compulsive reliance upon someone. This, in my opinion, could point to their lack of self-sufficiency. Ometeotl was their supreme God, who embraced all of the omnipotent forces of the heavens. Aztec religion was founded in the idea that was a truculently interminable battle between the forces of good and evil. This struggled had allegedly created and extirpated four worlds, otherwise known as suns, and they were now living in the fifth sun, whose demise had also been preordained. Using any remotely tenable strategies to evade their infernal obliteration, they practiced human sacrifice, trying to conciliate or mollify the god of sun.
http://www.dandebat.dk/eng-klima5.htm
https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://cdn.history.com/sites/2/2013/11/Mayan-Empire-Hero-AB.jpeg&imgrefurl=http://www.history.com/topics/maya&h=250&w=334&tbnid=2eO0PJmaIRTUUM:&tbnh=150&tbnw=200&usg=__TfS0mJw4u8NiLyCtSAKymTvBPvU=&vet=10ahUKEwjnmajbybvTAhVhw4MKHSdnAm4Q_B0IgAEwCg..i&docid=shEBKhs1aFnBVM&itg=1&client=safari&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjnmajbybvTAhVhw4MKHSdnAm4Q_B0IgAEwCg&ei=yyP9WKeIB-GGjwSnzonwBg#h=250&imgdii=2eO0PJmaIRTUUM:&tbnh=150&tbnw=200&vet=10ahUKEwjnmajbybvTAhVhw4MKHSdnAm4Q_B0IgAEwCg..i&w=334
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Toltec
https://www.thinglink.com/scene/713464675886432257
https://geopolicraticus.wordpress.com/2009/11/04/civilization-a-rope-or-a-broom/
http://demiseofcomplexsocieties.blogspot.com/2011/12/tree-mendously-accurate.html
https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://cdn.history.com/sites/2/2013/11/Mayan-Empire-Hero-AB.jpeg&imgrefurl=http://www.history.com/topics/maya&h=250&w=334&tbnid=2eO0PJmaIRTUUM:&tbnh=150&tbnw=200&usg=__TfS0mJw4u8NiLyCtSAKymTvBPvU=&vet=10ahUKEwjnmajbybvTAhVhw4MKHSdnAm4Q_B0IgAEwCg..i&docid=shEBKhs1aFnBVM&itg=1&client=safari&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjnmajbybvTAhVhw4MKHSdnAm4Q_B0IgAEwCg&ei=yyP9WKeIB-GGjwSnzonwBg#h=250&imgdii=2eO0PJmaIRTUUM:&tbnh=150&tbnw=200&vet=10ahUKEwjnmajbybvTAhVhw4MKHSdnAm4Q_B0IgAEwCg..i&w=334
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Toltec
https://www.thinglink.com/scene/713464675886432257
https://geopolicraticus.wordpress.com/2009/11/04/civilization-a-rope-or-a-broom/
http://demiseofcomplexsocieties.blogspot.com/2011/12/tree-mendously-accurate.html