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Chapter One

ANCIENT INDIANS

Prehistory is a continuum of survival, countless generations of the human animal passing on a legacy of adaptation. The study of prehistory presents its own special problems, because specific dates, events, and individuals around which to structure the flow of time are not known. Yet in order to analyze and understand prehistoric Indian culture, a frame of reference is needed. Definitions, categories, and approximate dates applied by archaeologists and anthropologists, with help from geologists and other scientists, give shape to the long stretch of millennia leading up to the historic Native American.

    The system or systems used can be confusing, however. First, the reconstruction of prehistory is of course speculative, and scholars do not always reach the same conclusions. Second, even if they agree on concept, scholars do not always use the same terms. Third, dating techniques are far from exact; stratigraphy dating, radio-carbon, dendrochronology, archeomagnetism, obsidian dating, and other techniques must allow for a margin of error. Fourth, cultural stages overlap, with one gradually fading while another slowly becomes dominant. Fifth, there are regional variations in the pace of cultural development, making it difficult to generalize about all of North America; also, different systems of classification are used in different regions and at different archaeological sites. And sixth, exceptions to neat cultural groupings always exist: One particular group might have advanced in a different way and at a faster pace than others nearby.

    Despite the difficulties involved and the complexity of the subject matter, prehistory, because of the work of archaeologists and other scientists, is accessible. The story has shape and definition. And it has drama.

Arrivals

After decades of guesswork and unfounded theories of lost European tribes and lost continents, it is now held as near-conclusive that the first humans reached the Americas from Asia. The exact time that the first bands of hunters and their families arrived in North America is not known. The estimated time cited by scholars for years, based on archaeological evidence, is sometime before 11,200 years ago. More recent finds have led to a revision of the estimated date as sometime before 12,500 years ago. Other archaeological evidence in both North and South America has led some scholars to assign an estimated date of before 33,000 years ago.

    Other evidence corroborates the early time frame. In studies of modern DNA comparing Native Americans to other population groups, the number of random but distinct genetic mutations—three distinct families of mutations found only also in Mongolia and Siberia—indicate a separation as early as 30,000 years ago. Similarly, linguistic studies using computer projections indicate that too many native language families (as many as 143) exist in the Americas to have evolved so rapidly. According to these results, 35,000 years ago is a more likely approximation for the arrival of the first Americans.

    How might the first North Americans have arrived? An accepted view has been that of the Bering Strait land bridge, or Beringia. There were four glaciations in the million-year Pleistocene epoch, the latter part of the Cenozoic era, the Age of Mammals. The final ice age, the Wisconsin glaciation (corresponding to the Würm glaciation in Europe), lasted from about 90,000 or 75,000 to 8000 B.C. It is theorized that at various times during the Wisconsin, enough of the planet's water was locked up in ice to lower the oceans and expose now-submerged land. Where there now is 56 miles of water 180 feet deep in the Bering Strait, there would have been a stretch of tundra possibly as much as 1,000 miles wide, bridging the two continents. The islands of today in the region would have been towering mountains. The big game of the Ice Age could have migrated across the land bridge. And the foremost predator among them—spear-wielding man—could have followed them.

    At those times when Beringia existed, the Wisconsin glacier would have blocked further southern and eastern migration. Early humankind might have lived in the Alaska region, which was ice-free because of low precipitation, for generations before temporary melts, or interstadials, created natural passageways through the ice. As is the case with the land bridge, it is difficult to date these thaws. Yet geological and archaeological evidence points to an ice-free corridor for several thousand years in the early to middle Wisconsin glaciation along the spine of the Rocky Mountains. During another melt 10,000 years later, a second corridor probably formed farther east along the Alberta-Saskatchewan plains. And finally a third passageway very likely developed in the late Wisconsin along the Yukon, Peace, and Liard Rivers.

    From these routes early Indians could have dispersed eastward along the river valleys of the Great Plains, westward through the South Pass of the Rockies to the Great Basin, southwestward around the heel of the Rockies to southern California, or southward into Middle America all the way to Tierra del Fuego at the southern tip of South America. The dispersal probably took centuries or even millennia, as humankind followed the big game.

    Some Native Americans migrated to North America by boat. It is known that, long after the final submersion of Beringia, from about 2500 to 1000 B.C., Inuit and Aleut used wooden dugouts and skin boats to cross the Bering Sea. Growing archaeological evidence of ancient coastal cultures indicate earlier peoples might have arrived by boat as well. Seafarers possibly worked their way along the North Pacific Rim, following the coastlines from Asia along northern ice sheets, then southward along the Pacific coastline of the Americas. The fact that about 3 percent of Native Americans share a genetic trait occurring elsewhere only in parts of Europe indicates that some ancient Indians might have followed North Atlantic ice sheets as well from Europe (or at the very least that groups of Asians dispersed both east to the Americas and west to Europe).

    In any case, these waves of ancient Indians were the real discoverers of the Americas. And the cultures created by their descendants over the subsequent millennia were remarkable—no less so than those developed by ancient peoples on other continents.

Paleo-Indians

During the long stretch of centuries after human migration to the Americas until the end of the Ice Age, about 8000 B.C., and for a time afterward, big-game hunting was the dominant way of life. For the most part, nomadic hunters, wearing hide and fur, and taking shelter in caves, under overhangs, and in brushwood lean-tos, tracked the mammals of the Pleistocene epoch—woolly mammoths, mastodons, saber-toothed tigers, American lions, camels, bighorn bison, short-faced bears, dire wolves, giant beavers, giant sloths, giant armadillos, curve-snouted tapirs, musk oxen, native horses, and peccaries, in addition to some smaller game. Archaeologists and anthropologists have gleaned what they know of the first Native Americans from artifacts and bones found at campsites and kill sites. This period of cultural evolution is known as the Paleolithic and the ancient Indians are called Paleo-Indians or Lithic Indians.

    Before they developed stone points, ancient Indians crafted stone and bone implements for chopping, scraping, and other applications. The hunters probably used fire to harden the tips of their wooden spears, of which no traces remain. This phase has been labeled the Pre-Projectile-Point stage.

    With time, Paleo-Indians began using workable stone—especially flint, chert, and obsidian—as a material for making tools, such as knives, scrapers, choppers, and, most important for hunting, spear points. Techniques for shaping the stone included percussion-flaking, or removing chips by striking with a stone, and pressure-flaking, or removing chips by pressing with antler or bone. Paleo-Indian phases are determined by the type of spear point, which usually bears the name of the site where it was first found. The dominant cultures are Clovis, Sandia, Folsom, and Plano. The fact that points from these cultures are not found on the Asian side of the Bering Strait indicates that the technological evolution surrounding them occurred in the Americas.

    The Clovis culture (sometimes referred to as Llano), dominant from about 9200 to 8000 B.C., was widespread, as indicated by finds in every mainland state in addition to the original Clovis site in New Mexico. The slender lanceolate points, one and a half to five inches long, were beautifully crafted by pressure-flaking, with fluting (lengthwise channels) on both sides. Clovis points have been found predominantly with mammoth and mastodon bones.

    The Sandia culture, localized in the Southwest and named after a site in the Sandia Mountains of New Mexico, have been dated from about 9100 to about 8000 B.C. The lanceolate points, two to four inches long, have rounded bases with a bulge in one side where they presumably were attached to wooden shafts.

    The Folsom culture, after Folsom, New Mexico, and sometimes referred to as Lindenmeier, after a site in Colorado, was active about the same time as the Sandia. Folsom points are generally shorter than Clovis and Sandia—three-quarters of an inch to three inches long—with a leaflike shape and fluting on both sides that runs almost the entire length. It is not certain what purpose the long grooves served, since they make the Folsom points more breakable—probably for insertion into the split end of the wooden shaft, possibly to increase the flow of blood from the animal, or possibly to increase spear velocity. Evidence of Folsom hunters has been found over much of North America but especially in the Great Plains, and especially with bighorn bison remains since the larger mammals were already dying out. There also is evidence of new hunting techniques—cooperative group activity in stampeding herds over cliffs or into swamps and bogs for easy kills. Moreover, the atlatl appeared during the dominant Folsom period—a spear thrower consisting of a wooden stick about two feet long, with animal-hide loops to provide a firm grasp, a stone weight for balance, and a carved wooden hook at the far end to hold the spear shaft, all serving to increase the leverage of the hunter's arm.

    The Plano culture, sometimes referred to as the Plainview, after a site in Texas, like the Folsom, is associated primarily with the Great Plains and the bighorn bison. Plano hunters, active from about 8000 to 4500 B.C., made even greater use of organized stampeding techniques. Where there were no cliffs, they constructed corrals to trap animals. They also developed a primitive method of preserving meat, mixing it with animal fat and berries, and packing it in hut or hide containers. Unlike the Clovis and the Folsom Indians before them, Plano craftspeople did not flute their points.

    There are exceptions to the widespread cultural homogeneity of the late Paleolithic. Some regional cultural variations, as seen in the next section, overlapped with the dominant Paleo-Indian way of life, and sometimes are referred to as Protoarchaic, i.e., a bridge to the Archaic, the next stage. (Some scholars also group the Plano Indians in the Protoarchaic because they demonstrated a more varied economy than Clovis, Sandia, or Folsom people.)

    In the late Pleistocene, a warming period led to the final retreat of the northern glaciers, from about 10,000 to 8000 B.C. The Ice Age became the Watershed Age; the melting glaciers created a high level of moisture, with lush flora and abundant lakes, rivers, swamps, and bogs. Seasonal and regional variations gradually occurred. By about 8000 B.C., the climate was warm enough to support cone-bearing trees and, by about 6000 B.C., deciduous trees. North America evolved to its present climate and geography by about 5000 B.C. During these millennia, many of the large mammals that the Paleo-Indians depended on for sustenance disappeared, first in the lower latitudes, then in the north as well. This pattern of big-game extinction is one of the mysteries of the Paleolithic period, and there are various theories to account for it. The extreme climatic changes probably played a part. But the large mammals had survived other changes in the climate and earlier interglacial periods. Perhaps the difference this time was the presence of the new super-predator—the human animal, with his razor-sharp flint points, his atlatls, his guile, and his organization. The practice of driving entire herds to death unnecessarily is referred to by some scholars as the Pleistocene Overkill.

    Modern scientists have pieced together a few facts of Paleo-Indian life from archaeological evidence. There are of course gaping holes in our current knowledge, along with a great deal of assumption and hypothesis. For example, in an archaeological sense, the role of the Paleo-Indian woman is invisible because she tended to work in perishable materials rather than stone or bone. Nonetheless, the existence of the beautifully crafted spear points communicates much about the early Indians, both male and female, and their similarities to modern humankind. They sought food and shelter. They were social. They sought new technologies. They took pride in their work. They dreamed and they acted. And they survived.

Archaic Indians

Over the eons, the climate, terrain, flora, and fauna evolved from the Ice Age through the postglacial Watershed Age and into new regional patterns. The end of the Pleistocene epoch marked the beginning of the current geologic period known as the Holocene epoch. Generation after generation of Native Americans, gradually expanding their food base and devising new technologies, adjusted. The Archaic period, which was characterized by a foraging way of life—the hunting and trapping of small game, fishing, and gathering of edible wild plants—lasted from about 5000 to 1000 B.C. (i.e., during those millennia, the Archaic way of life was dominant but not exclusive; Plano hunters from the earlier Paleolithic period stayed active on the Great Plains until about 4500 B.C., for example).

    The Archaic or Foraging period, like the Paleolithic, essentially was characterized by a migratory existence for humankind. When the food sources ran out in one area, Archaic Indians moved to another. Yet Archaic Indians generally were more localized than earlier hunters. And archaeologists have even found some permanent Archaic sites, as indicated by sizable middens (refuse heaps), especially near lakes and streams.

    During the Archaic period, a variety of materials—wood, stone, bone, antler, shell, ivory, hide, plant fiber, and copper—were used to make a wide assortment of specialized tools and utensils that fit the requirements of regional lifestyles. Archaic peoples shaped spears, atlatls, bolas, knives, axes, adzes, wedges, chisels, scrapers, mauls, hammers, anvils, awls, drills, mortars and pestles, fishhooks, harpoons, pipes, and containers. Not yet having developed ceramics, they had pipes as well as cooking and storage pots made of stone. Cloths and baskets of woven plant materials were first crafted. Along with the many tools came new methods of food preparation and preservation. Heated stones were used for boiling water and roasting in pits. Baskets and skin containers were used to store food. Archaic Indians also constructed boats and domesticated the dog.

    Archaic Indians also found time to shape some of their rough materials into ornaments. And they developed intricate beliefs and rituals and went to elaborate means to bury their dead. The Archaic period is often discussed in terms of Eastern Archaic and Western Archaic, with the Mississippi as the dividing line between them. The East, with its lush, wooded landscape, gave rise to a denser population than the more barren West. The following descriptions of five of the many Archaic cultures will point up geographical variations in adaptation and invention.

The economies of the Old Cordilleran and Desert cultures generally are referred to as Protoarchaic. Even though they occurred as early as 9000 B.C. while typically Paleolithic cultures were dominant, their wide-based economies are an indication of regional variations to come during the Archaic.

    The Old Cordilleran (or Cascade) culture of the Columbia River Valley lasted from about 9000 to 5000 B.C., and it probably was the matrix culture for later Indians of the Columbia Plateau and Pacific Northwest. The Cascade spear point is willow-leaf-shaped without any fluting and was used for the most part to hunt small mammals. But old Cordilleran artifacts include fishhooks and tools for the preparation of edible wild plants.

    The Indians of the Desert culture, found in the Great Basin area of present-day Utah, Nevada, and Arizona, and existing from about 9000 to 1000 B.C., also possessed a primitive foraging society. At Danger Cave in Utah woven containers have been found (the earliest examples of basketry in North America), as well as grinding stones to process seeds. Desert Indians also made twine from hair, fur, and plant fibers, and with it, traps to capture small game.

    The Cochise culture in what is now Arizona and New Mexico was an off-shoot of the Desert culture of the Great Basin. It lasted from about 7000 to 500 B.C., leading up to the Formative cultures of the region—Mogollon, Hohokam, and Anasazi. A harsh environment defined the Cochise way of life. Lake Cochise once covered a large part of the terrain where Cochise Indians foraged. As it dried up over the millennia, succeeding generations had to cope with desert and cliff. Taking shelter in caves and under ledges, Cochise peoples ranged from mesa top to desert floor with the seasons. Food caches provided bases of operations. Cochise Indians hunted and trapped small mammals—deer, antelope, rabbits—as well as snakes, lizards, and insects. They gathered up the edible wild plants—yucca, prickly pear, juniper, piñon—whatever they had learned to use. Cochise millstones—manos and metates for grinding seeds, grains, and nuts—have been found throughout the region, evidence of the growing importance of plants in the Archaic Indian diet.

    Extensive use of plants led to a major breakthrough. At Bat Cave in New Mexico, archaeologists have found several cobs of corn from a primitive cultivated species about an inch long, the earliest evidence of agriculture north of Mexico (circa 3500 B.C.). Contact with Mesoamerican Indians out of the south perhaps spurred this revolutionary development. Cochise Indians also eventually learned to make pit-houses—brush structures over dug holes—and to shape crude pottery figurines, two more elements of later Formative cultures.

    In the Great Lakes region of the East, there existed from about 4000 to 1500 B.C. a foraging tradition known as the Old Copper culture. This was a typical Eastern Archaic tradition in that Old Copper people hunted, fished, and gathered food from a variety of sources. They also devised tools out of typical Archaic materials—stone, wood, bone, antler, and shell—to exploit the lush wooded environment. What is remarkable about these people is that unlike any other Archaic Indians north of Mexico, they made use of still another material, copper. On the south shore of Lake Superior and in Isle Royale, Old Copper Indians found and quarried deposits of pure metal, both sheets in rock fissures and float nuggets in the soil. At first they worked it as they did stone—by chipping—but then they learned to take advantage of the material's flexibility and used annealing techniques (alternate heating and hammering), crafting beautiful tools and ornaments. Old Copper artifacts have turned up at Archaic sites throughout the East, indicating the great demand for these unique objects and widespread trading connections.

    Another localized Archaic variation occurred in New England and the Canadian maritime provinces, where archaeologists have found numerous graves lined with ground-up red hematite. The symbolic use of red—the color of life-sustaining blood—lasted approximately from 3000 to 500 B.C. The Red Paint people also placed tools, ornaments, and effigies—beautifully crafted of slate, quartzite, bone, and antler—in their graves. At Port au Choix, Newfoundland, the northernmost Red Paint culture site, 100 burials have been located. In some of them, along with the hematite and typical Archaic artifacts, archaeologists have found firemaking kits of flint and pyrite, another example of advancing technology.

    During the later part of the Archaic period, from about 2500 to 1000 B.C., Inuit and Aleut crossed the Bering Sea in small boats and dispersed throughout Arctic regions. Some bands of these people, living in the northernmost and harshest regions of North America, would continue to live an Archaic-like existence into the 20th century.

Transition and Culmination

As difficult: as it is to devise a neat system of classification and a neat chronology for the Paleolithic and Archaic periods, the task becomes even more problematic with the later cultural stages. With cultural advancement comes diversification: Native Americans in different parts of the continent progressed in different ways. In archaeological terms, each region has its own cultural sequence and categories (cultures, stages, phases, traditions, etc.). In fact, scholars use varying systems of classification for different archaeological sites, making the study of Indian prehistory that much more confusing.

    The term most commonly applied to the Postarchaic period (circa 1500 B.C. until contact with Europeans) is Formative, the word itself implying transition. Broadly speaking, Formative refers to the following cultural traits: the spread of agriculture, settled village life, houses, domesticated animals, pottery, weaving, the bow and arrow, and ceremonies and beliefs.

    Yet other terms are needed to express degrees of development. In Mesoamerica, for example, where Indians reached the highest degree of organized life—even developing cities—the term Classic is used, implying a cultural culmination, which leads to subdivisions such as Preclassic and Postclassic. Preclassic Middle America, becomes interchangeable with Formative. Moreover, another phrase implying culmination, "golden age," is sometimes used with regard to certain phases of advanced cultures north of Mexico, such as the Anasazi, Hohokam, and Mogollon of the Southwest, or the Mound Builders of the East. Indeed, the terminology surrounding the Poverty Point, Adena, Hopewell, and Mississippian mound-building cultures is especially confusing. Some scholars refer to Poverty Point culture as Archaic, Adena and Hopewell as Formative, and Mississippian as Classic. Still others use the term Woodland to describe the latter three, as well as other cultures in the East. Woodland can therefore imply either transition or culmination. To add to the confusion, the term Woodland also is applied to the lifeways of eastern Indians in postcontact times.

    There are other exceptions to a unified classification system for prehistoric Indians. The spread of agriculture is the dominant Formative as well as Classic theme, but many Indians in the north, such as those of the Pacific Northwest, came to have many other of the period's typical cultural traits without agriculture—village life, complex social organization, and so on. These Indians also belie the generalization that cultural diffusion of either Formative or Classic elements was slower in the north. And of course other peoples, such as the Inuit and Aleut, who first arrived on the continent as late as 2500 B.C., with their unique hunting and fishing culture, continued their typically Archaic lifestyles into modern times. It might even be said that 19th-century Indians of the Great Plains, with their buffalo hunting, returned to a typically Paleo-Indian nomadic lifestyle similar to that of the Plano big-game hunters, who also tracked bison.

    One other cultural classification should be mentioned. Some scholars use the term Mesoindian, rather than Formative or Preclassic, to distinguish the period in Mesoamerica when agriculture was invented (circa 7000 to 1500 B.C.) from the Archaic culture elsewhere on the continent. (See "Subsistence Patterns and Cultural Evolution" in chapter 3.) Pottery also was developed in Mesoamerica during this phase and began to spread northward. Village life followed and eventually city-states. During the Mesoindian, the Formative or Preclassic, and the Classic periods, ideas generally flowed northward out of Mesoamerica, rather than the reverse, as was the case in the earlier Paleolithic period, and brought about widespread cultural change. Mesoamerica, along with the Andes region of South America, where agriculture also developed among the Inca and other peoples, therefore sometimes is referred to as Nuclear America.

    Because of the great diversity in Native American culture flowering during and after the Archaic, as well as the resulting complexity of terminology, it becomes necessary at this point in the Indian story to discuss particular cultures and civilizations in detail. The next chapter, "Ancient Civilizations," will be organized around particular cultures rather than around cultural phases, as this one is. In the third chapter, Indian lifeways as they came to exist at the time of contact with Europeans will be discussed. In later chapters concerning the postcontact historic period, the principal frame of reference will be provided by events, tribes, and individuals.