Native American History and Culture 3

before the arrival of Europeans. Now, this was a long time before Jamestown, long time before his Soto and his armored boots bunched along the soil, long before the maps marked these lands with the words America Indigenous nations in the Southeastern United States what would become I suppose Southeastern United States were anything but wild. This was an incredible land of population density. It's one of my most fascinating parts in my opinion of Native American cultures, the American Southeast.

That is, this was a land of towns, fields, and forests not untouched, but tended from the Gulf coast all the way up to the Piedmont Hills. The peoples of the Southeast lived in complex societies with deep historical roots and dynamic systems of governance, trade, and belief. Their story often buried unfortunately beneath the ashes of disease and conquest begins not with first contact with the Europeans, but with

first cultivation. That's one of the constant mistakes actually still in textbooks today, that Native American history, for whatever reason, begins in fourteen ninety two with the arrival of Europeans. Maybe some a little bit before that, if you came back to leef Erickson, but most people don't. So why is that a mistake? Because it misses out on the

reality of timing. Talked about it in a couple of episodes now where depending upon when Europeans arrived, if they would have arrived fifty hundred years earlier, they may have walked into a stronger civilization. Actually, because hopefully, as you've learned in this podcast, history isn't linear. Civilizations don't just get stronger over time. They ebb and they flow, and so what times a conqueror shows up goes a long

way in dictating how successful they're going to be. By the time the sun rose over the Southeastern woodlands around one thousand in our Common era, a cultural transformation had already swept through the region in the river valleys of today what we call Illinois, Missouri, Mississippi, Alabama, a civilization emerged that would later be known as the Mississippian culture, a network of towns and ceremonial centers that organize life

around maize, corn, agriculture, and religious hierarchy, as well as monumental earthworks. Kahokia, the great city near modern day Saint Louis, was the crown jewel of the Mississippian civilization. You have an opportunity to look up some images. It was a city of perhaps twenty thousand people, larger than London at the time, with massive mounds, wide plazas, and a radiating

network of trade and tribute. The largest of these earthworks, dubbed monks Mound, rose ten stories above the floodplain, dwarfing the surrounding countryside. Wasn't a tomb place for gods and kings. The influence of Khokia and its sister cities rippled outward south and east along the Mississippi, the Ohio, and the Yazoo Rivers. New ceremonial centers rose up Moundville and Alabama, Etowah and Georgia, and Spiro in what is today Oklahoma.

These were not crude constructions. They were expressions of astronomical precision, social order, and theological vision, much in the same way that the great pyramids of the Maya to the south of the Aztecs, and of course to the ancient Egyptians, societies were organized around elite lineages and priestly classes who mediated between the people the cosmos, life and death. But these cities did not stand alone. They were linked by

rivers and roads, by trade and shared belief. Copper from the Great Lakes, conch shells from the Gulf, obsidian from the Rockies. We know from archaeological digs. They all found their way to these great trade center cities, and across this land corn beans and squash planted and rhythmic rotating gardens fed millions, not tens of thousands, millions of people.

By the time Kahoki had declined around the thirteen hundreds, its people dispersing for reasons that historians and archaeologists still debate, Mississippian culture had now taken firm root. Elsewhere. The southeast was dotted with various chiefdoms ranked societies where power was concentrated in the hands of hereditary elites. As it was in Europe at the same time. These chiefdoms like Kosa, Talisi and Appalachi did not rule empires, but they wielded influence.

They could mobilize labor, wage war, and preside over rituals that re affirmed the cosmic balance. In towns laid out around central plazas and platform mounds, daily life revolved around the seasons and the soil. Of course, corn was king, as it was throughout North and Central America. Its planting and harvests were ceremonies onto themselves. The people of these societies span a wide variety of occupations. This was no

mere subsistence farming folks. There were artisans, builders, traders, and warriors. They carved effigy pipes from soft stone, wove cloth from mulberry bark, and even played a ritual game to today we call chunky, in which players hurled spears at a rolling stone disc. Actually sounds kind of fun, both sport and spectacle watch by hundreds of people, and of course, culturally,

this world is alive with meaning. The Southeastern ceremonial complex, a term coined by archaeologists, refers to a set of shared symbols and beliefs, the bird man, the great serpent, the sacred fire, the axis mundi of mound and sky. These weren't just decorative images. They were maps of existence, inscribed onto copper plates, tattooed onto human bodies, and buried with the dead. Now, of course, to the casual European i, as we talked about last time, this land probably looked

wild forests stretching endlessly, meadows thick with game. But the truth is more astonishing in the Southeast, especially because what the settlers mistook for wilderness was actually a landscape shaped by generations of careful tending. The peoples of the Southeast, like elsewhere, used fire as a tool. They burned the understory of the forest to clear paths and promote the growth of edible plants, and to make hunting easier. They

cultivated chestnuts, hickories, persimions, and plums. These were orchards, not accidental groves that stood at the outskirts of native towns. Game was abundant, not despite human presence, but because of it. As I mentioned before, these were not hunter gatherers roaming at random. Native societies of North America hadn't been that

for thousands of years. Though most of the Southeast remained untouched by Europeans until the sixteenth century, Ramrezo strain ships, and unfamiliar diseases drifted inland long before the first encounter. Spanish expeditions had touched the coast of Florida as early as fifteen thirteen. By fifteen twenty six, a failed colony called San Miguel dis Guadalupe had been established briefly on what today was probably the South Carolina coast. But then

came the game changer Hernando de Soto. In fifteen thirty nine, De Soto landed in Florida with an army of over six hundred men and began a four year march through the heart of the Southeast. He encountered complex societies at Appalachi, Cota, Fqui, and later Cosa, some of which received him as a god. Others he demanded food, porters and gold. He burned villages, he captured chief in return. His army was constantly harried by ambushes, ravaged by its own diseases, and ultimately lost

itself in a land that it couldn't understand. What De Soto left behind was more devastating than fire or steel. Smallpox, measles, influenza germs that spread well beyond his path of destruction, igniting pandemics and towns and villages that he never saw. By the time that the French and English arrived a century later, the great Mississippian chiefdoms had shattered, their populations, decimated,

their towns abandoned, and reorganized. The survivors remembered the old cities as myths, their mounds as haunted places were gods once walked. By sixteen hundred, the southeastern landscape still bore the fingerprints of the original caretakers, but the people had changed. New confederacies emerged from the fragments of the older polities.

The Musgogie will become the Creek, the Chickasaw, the Choctaw, and the Cherokee, whose ancestors had lived in the region for millennia, but now moved in new ways, forming new alliances. They traded with the Spanish, sometimes and sometimes resisted them. They adopted the horse and adapted to new patterns of power. Their societies were no less rich, no less complex, but they stood at the edge of a coming storm. European

empires would soon carve the land into pieces. Missionaries would press new gods into their tongues, and the trails worn smooth by generations of native feet would give way to rhodes pathed for conquest. But in the soil, in the stone, in the whisper of the pine trees, over old mounds, the past remained. The Southeastern peoples had not vanished. They had remembered, rebuilt, and reimagined themselves again and again, as they would continue to do so long after sixteen hundred.

Now let's turn our attention to the American Southwest that will be right after this. If you've ever been to the American Southwest, then you would know that the conditions there for growing crops are not particularly great. It's not waving waves of grain exactly now. It's more like arid desert and step. So the native peoples that lived in this region didn't have the opportunity to wait for the rain. Instead,

they built canals. Instead of depleting the earth, they worked with what they had Across the desert plateaus and river valleys. Indigenous engineers created systems of irrigation so advanced, so attuned to their environments that they rivaled and often actually exceeded the ingenuity of later colonial technologies. A walk through one such location, Chaco Cannon, reveals the traces of this mastery.

Here there are stone lined canals that are ancient as anything in America that stretch toward the horizon, water works that were designed to channel the seasonal runoff that does happen in the spring and in the fall into productive fields. These weren't accidental. They were acts of intense observation, rooted in a worldview that water was not merely a utility, it was a presence. Modern society, in contrast, often flips this wisdom on its head to its own detriment, as

I think we're seeing nowadays. As one critic I've read puts it, quote in California, water flows uphill toward money end quote. Not exactly positive. It's a haunting commentary on how political and economic power has now dictated the flow of rivers, the workings of water itself in the United States. And we've seen the consequences of this over and over again, and we will likely continue to see the consequences of

this over and over again. Groundwater today vanishes beneath almond groves and suburban lawns, while aquifers that took a millennia to fill by the indigenous peoples that lived here once were drained in one generation. But such a mindset would have been unthinkable to those who first shaped this land. To quote historian Stanley Rice quote, the Natives could not have settled America with that kind of attitude end quote. Survival for them meant harmony building within the constraints of nature,

not despite them. This respectful relationship with the environment extended far beyond irrigation. Next time, we'll talk about the far east, the forests at east the Great Lakes, and beyond there on the fringes of lakes Michigan Lake, Superior Lake, Erie, and so on and so forth, and deep into the Appalachian Hills, Native communities were quietly cultivating the land in

ways that settlers would continue to misinterpret for centuries. As we've talked about before, would look like wild forces where actually carefully manage orchards and groves and so on and so forth. But going back for a moment to the American Southwest, archaeological evidence places human habitation in the Southwest as far back as twelve thousand years ago, with Paleo Indians following the Last Ice Age megafauna through grassland corridors

and high land plateaus. Over time, these nomadic groups adapted to a changing climate, exchanging chase for settlement, as I talked about before, they had done in the American southeast and beyond. By the year two thousand BCE, corn maze, originally domesticated in meso America, had reached the Southwest, altering

indigenous lifestyles. The cultivation here as in the southeast, of corn beans and squashed the so called Three Sisters, allowed for a gradual shift from foraging to farming and gave rise to desert civilization that would later on astound Spanish explorers.

The land was not easy. Water, as I mentioned previously, was scarce rain unpredictable, but early peoples used how to use canals and irrigation and developed techniques of dry farming as well as floodplain irrigation to keep their lands abundant and keep their civilizations growing. By the first millennium of the Common era, three major cultural traditions emerged in the Southwest,

each one unique but interconnected. The ho Coam, the Mogolan, and the ancestor of Pulbloins, often referred to as the Anasi, though that term is actually increasingly avoided due to some negative connotations in native languages. The ho Coam, centered around what is today southern Arizona, became the great canal builders.

Along the Salts and Gila Rivers, which today formed the basis of Arizona's capital city, Phoenix, they created hundreds of miles of irrigation ditches capable of supporting large agricultural towns. They built ball courts that were actually reminiscent of those of the Maya in ancient Mexico. They traded for turquoise and parrots from far to the south, and crafted intricate shell jewelry from goods brought from the Gulf of California.

Their villages were laid out the surprising regularity marked by plazas and ceremonial spaces. The Mogolan inhabited the rugged mountains and canyonlands of southwestern New Mexico. In southeastern Arizona, they maintained a more dispersed settlement pattern. Early on, they lived in pitt houses, later transformed into surface pueblos with masonry walls. Their distinct brown paste pottery, often adorned with black geometric designs, provides a vivid record that can be seen today in

museums across the American Southwest. And beyond. Of their esthetic sensibilities and their spiritual world, the Ancestral Plebloans are probably the most well known, and they spread across the Four Corners region. These are the most visibly dramatic of all the Southwestern cultures. By nine hundred CE, they had begun constructing these massive, multi story stone dwellings in cliff alcoves

above canyon walls. Chico Canyon, which I mentioned before, in present day New Mexico became a ceremonial trade center unparalleled in its scale and size. At its height between eight fifty and eleven hundred CE, AD boasted monumental architecture, including the so called great houses like Pueblo Bonito. Aligned with the lunar and solar cycles. As Europeans had done, the

Ancestral Plebloans were not isolated desert dwellers. They had wide reaching trade networks we know today, importing, in fact, as one example, macaws all the way from Central America and turquoise from hundreds of miles away. Yet the height of these civilizations was followed by abrupt change between one thy, one hundred and thirty and thirteen hundred, a series of serious droughts struck the Southwest. Then came with those societal transformations.

Jack O'canyon was abandoned, and the Great Cliff dwellings at places like me Severity were soon emptied of all their populations. Scholars continued to debate the causes environmental collapse, social upheaval, warfare, maybe all of them. Rather than vanishing, these cultures continued to evolve. Many of the ancestral Puebloans moved southward, forming new communities along the Rio Grande in what is now

Mexico and Arizona. These new pueblos were smaller and more compact, better suited to a changing climate and more defensive posture. The Magolan and Hakoam cultures similarly disbursed and emerged into to a tribal identity that was forming across the Southwest. By fifteen hundred, the cultural landscape of the Southwest had been reshaped into a mosaic of distinct but interrelated peoples.

Among them were the Pavoan peoples such as now the Hope, Zuni, Acoma, and Taos, who maintained many of the traditions of their ancestors, including communal agriculture, religious ceremonies, and oral histories. Tracing their migrations to the west and north were the Humans speaking people along the lower Colorado River and then to the south where the Tahono dej the descendants of the hocoam They adapted to the desert with seasonal mobility and followed

Swagaro food ceremonies that honored the land's rhythms. Meanwhile, the Apache and Navajo, these were different types of linguistic groups who had migrated from the north during the late Prehistoric period, began to establish themselves in the region, bringing with them new traditions of raiding, mobility, and pastoral as. Now was into this new world that the Spanish finally arrived. In fifteen thirty nine, the Moorish scout Esponanzo entered Zuni territory,

only to be killed soon thereafter. A year later, Francisco Vasquez de Coronado led a grand expedition northward in search of the fabled seven Cities of Gold. He never found them. What he found were pueblos, impressive, yes, but not made out of gold, made of adobe and stone. The expedition brought horses, steel, and disease into a fragile ecosystem and a resilient, deeply rooted network of communities. Bough Coronado's expedition failed to find riches, it marked the beginning of sustained

European interest in the region. The peoples of the Southwest, adaptable, spiritual, and yes fiercely tied to their lands and traditions, would soon face an era of colonization, missionaries, and resistance, But as of the year sixteen hundred, they remained firmly in control of them their ancestral homelands, their history already long

and complex, and their future remaining to be written. Next time, we finish our story of the Native American cultures of the early New Americas before turning back to Virginia to talk about continued onrest in colonial America.