Essential question: How did indigenous populations in America relate to their environments prior to European contact? AP Theme: Geography and the Environment (GEO

Tenochtitlan (The Impossible City) 5:22
Tenochtitlan was a city-state located on an island in Lake Texcoco in the Valley of Mexico. Founded in 1325, it became the seat of the growing Aztec Empire in the 15th century, until it was captured by the Spanish in 1521. Today the ruins of Tenochtitlan are located in the central part of Mexico City.

By the time Europeans arrived in America in 1492, perhaps 54 million people inhabited the two American continents.  Over the centuries they split

into countless tribes, evolved more than 2,000 separate languages, and developed many diverse religions, cultures, and ways of life.

Incas in Peru, Mayans in Central America, and Aztecs in Mexico shaped stunningly sophisticated civilizations. Their advanced agricultural practices, 

based primarily on the cultivation of maize, which is Indian corn, fed large populations, perhaps as many as 20 million in Mexico alone.

Corn planting reached the present-day American Southwest by about 1200 B.C. and powerfully molded Pueblo culture. The Pueblo peoples in the Rio Grande valley constructed intricate irrigation systems to water their cornfields. They were dwelling in villages of multistoried, terraced buildings when Spanish explorers made contact with them in the sixteenth century. (Pueblo means “village” in Spanish.)

The Iroquois in the northeastern woodlands, inspired by a legendary leader named Hiawatha, in the sixteenth century created perhaps the closest North American approximation to the great nationstates of Mexico and Peru. The Iroquois Confederacy developed the political and organizational skills to sustain a robust military alliance that menaced its neighbors, Native American and European alike for well over a century (see “Makers of America: The Iroquois,” pp. 40–41).

How History used to be taught

#1 Indians walked across the Bering Strait 12,000 years ago

#2 Indians for the most part lived in small scattered bands

#3 Indians had so little impact on the environment that when Columbus landed the hemisphere was for all intents and purposes a wilderness

Current Scholarship

A way to summarize the last 30 or 40 years of research by ecologist anthropologists, archaeologists, geographers historians scholars of all sorts is to say that the vast majority of researchers believe that all three of these things are wrong

#1 Native peoples were here for far longer than previously believed nobody really knows how long but numbers that gets thrown around go from sort of twenty to thirty five thousand years

#2 They're here much greater numbers than previously believed again nobody really knows but typical numbers are 40 to 60  million and a much greater environmental impact