History of america
The history of America can be roughly divided into the areas of history of North America , history of Central America and history of South America .
Cultures before 1500
The colonization of America took place in several waves of immigration that spanned at least 16,000 years. The main route of the groups known as Paleo-Indians led from Siberia via Beringia to Alaska and from there to the south. Very old archaeological finds (approx. 13,800 BC) come from Chile with the Monte Verde site , which could support the thesis that the west coast was first settled and from there the Indians moved east. The discussion about the earliest immigrants and the routes they took within the continent has been in flux again in recent decades.
North America
For a long time, the oldest culture was the Clovis culture , but at the latest the finds in the Paisley Caves , which are around a millennium before the Clovis finds, and in 2011 the publication of the Buttermilk Creek Complex in Texas with an age of 15,500 to 12,300 years Before Present , showed that there were predecessors known as pre-Clovis on the American continent and that the technologies of the Clovis culture were developed locally and not already brought with them from Asia. The oldest human remains came from the Buhl woman from Idaho , who is over 10,500 years old . This early phase, which had to be discussed again by the Kennewick man , was followed by the Archaic Period . At its end between 2000 and 1000 BC The use of ceramics, agriculture and various forms of gradual settlements developed far into the north. Hunting techniques were significantly improved by atlatl and later by bow and arrow . While hunting cultures existed in the north, where caribou and bison herds provided food, hunting played an increasingly minor role in the south. Population densities occurred around the Great Lakes, on the Pacific coast around Vancouver Island , on the Mississippi and on the Atlantic coast, and in the southwest.
In North America, complex communities ( Templemound cultures ) existed in the catchment area of the Mississippi and Ohio ( Adena culture , Mississippi culture ), but they perished shortly before the arrival of the first Europeans. In the southwest, earth building settlements, the so-called pueblos , arose . This culture went back to the basketmakers who were already growing corn. Large villages with palisades and permanent confederations developed around the Great Lakes. As in the west, these groups cultivated corn and pumpkin, as well as an extensive long-distance trade - for example in copper and certain types of rock that were important for hunting weapons and jewelry - which continued in British Columbia until 8000 BC. Can be proven.
Central America
The first agricultural activities began in Central America around 8000 BC. A. The inhabitants of Oaxaca grew pumpkins, which were not intended for food, but for water transport from the rivers to their caves in the mountains. The actual procurement of food initially continued through hunting and gathering.
In the arid regions, an irrigation economy developed, which in turn allowed higher population densities and more complex forms of organization. In Yucatan , from around 3000 BC, arose BC a culture based on larger settlements, which is counted as part of the pre-classical Mayan era.
The origins of the culture of the Olmecs , who were often regarded as the bearers of the mother culture of Mesoamerica, go back to around 1500 BC. BC back. The earliest evidence of the use of a script is ascribed to the Olmecs, as evidenced by the discovery of a cylinder seal with written symbols dating back to 650 BC. Is dated.
Around 500 to 100 BC The Zapotecs founded their capital Monte Albán ( Spanish: white mountain). Many of the city's buildings, such as temples, pyramids, tombs, etc., have been preserved to this day. Monte Albán is a UNESCO World Heritage Site .
One of the most important metropolises of the Maya was Chichén Itzá, which flourished for the first time between the 5th and 7th centuries . A network of interconnected cities was created. After the unexplained collapse of the Mayan culture in the 10th century, Toltecs culturally dominated the city. With the Maya, Tulúm now assumed a leading role on the coast.
Between 100 and 600 AD, Teotihuacán was the cultural, economic and dominant center of Mesoamerica . Its population is estimated to be up to 200,000 for the period between 450 and 650, and its area is over 20 km². Large buildings such as the Pyramid of the Sun or the Ciudadela , a kind of closed rulership, were built. The economic base of the city was, in addition to irrigated agriculture, an extensive obsidian trade ; it reached at least as far as today's border with the USA. However, by 750 the metropolis was deserted. The remaining power vacuum was only filled again in the 10th century by the Toltecs .
These immigrated to southern Mexico from the 9th century and formed an urban culture for two centuries, which, however, was threatened by the more militarily organized Chichimecs , who also came from the north.
At the end of the 14th century the Aztecs , who called themselves Mexica , managed to conquer a great empire. Its roots go back to the 11th century. The capital Tenochtitlán may have had 150,000 inhabitants.
South America
Apart from the finds from Monte Verde , the finds from Los Toldos , in the Argentine province of Santa Cruz , are probably the oldest in South America. They go back at least 12,000 years. Similar to the North American sites, the remains point to the hunting of large mammals, in this case giant sloths and horses, as well as guanacos and llamas. Something similar was found in Chile, such as in the Cueva del Milodón . The Casapedrense culture (approx. 7000 to 4000 BC) was considered the forerunner culture of the Tehuelche, or Patagonians , whose oldest finds, however, now date from 9400 to 9200 BC. To be dated.
The oldest stone tools in South America date back to around 10,000 BC. BC, similar to the cave paintings near Ayacucho in Peru and in the Lauricocha caves at the source of the Marañón . The first cultivation of pumpkins and beans and the breeding of llamas is dated to 4000 BC. Dated.
In the Guitarrero Cave in the Andean highlands of Peru, on the other hand, remains of crops such as beans, which are estimated to date from as early as 7500 BC, were found. Come from BC.
The oldest ceramics belong to the Ecuadorian Valdivia culture and are dated to the 4th millennium BC. It already brought about an urban organization with cults, rites and offerings.
The pyramid of Sechín Bajo could be dated 3200 BC. And is to be assigned to the Norte Chico culture . The Pyramid of the Sun at Caral , north of Lima, dates back to 2627 BC. To be dated. The town had houses for at least 3,000 residents. Temple complexes, artificial irrigation systems and long-distance trade with the inhabitants of the coast and the Amazon region point to an already highly developed civilization.
On the coast of Ecuador there existed around 1600 BC. The Machalilla culture . Ceramic vessels with handles, which are also typical of the Chavín , Mochica and Chimú, go back to them. The subsequent Chorrera culture brought about 1200 to 500 BC. Ceramics in human and animal form emerged. The houses were grouped around a large square and built on artificial embankments.
The Chavín culture (around 800 to 300 BC) had close ties to that of the Olmecs , which suggests the use of the symbolic clusters of jaguar , puma , bird and snake . The contemporary Paracas culture in the Lima area was known for its cult of the dead.
The Herrera culture existed in the highlands of Bogotá (before 4th century BC to 2nd century AD), on the western side of the Andes the Calima culture (4th century BC to 2nd century AD) .). Tombs from the 4th century go back to the San Agustín culture .
Between 300 BC And after AD 600, the Nazca culture existed around 500 km south of Lima, which built irrigation canals. The Mochica culture developed similar irrigation systems in the desert strip on the Pacific coast. In addition to precious metals, copper was also processed.
Around Lake Titicaca existed from the 1st century BC. BC to around 1000 AD, the Tiahuanaco culture. The Wari culture (600 to 1100) followed to the north . Both cultures were dominated by large capitals.
The Mochica (100 to 800 AD) were very good craftsmen who worked with gold and silver as well as copper. They mass-produced ceramic vessels and built the largest structures in ancient South America with two pyramids. Long, heavy rainfall, followed by an equally severe drought, presumably led to its demise.
The Chimu developed the first large empire between 1000 and 1470 with the capital Chan Chan in the Trujillo area . From around 1200 to 1532, the Inca created an empire that reached its greatest extent in the 15th century. Cusco was the capital at times.
The history of the groups living on the eastern edge of the Andes and in the forest areas of the Amazon is much less researched. However, numerous finds point to considerably older cultures (approx. 2450 BC), which may have arisen before those of the Andean highlands. Little is known about the Chachapoya , who lived on the eastern edge of the Andes from around 800 to 1600. They built rock graves on steep cliffs.
Between 1000 BC BC and 500 BC BC the Arawak migrated down the Orinoco . They built canoes and lived from fishing, hunting and growing corn , beans, sweet potatoes, pumpkin and cassava . There were also peanuts , pepper , pineapple , tobacco and cotton .
Colonial history
After the discovery of America - more precisely: the rediscovery of America in 1492 - the double continent was gradually taken over by European states. The different forms of colonization and settlement had serious effects on the cultures found there. While trade prevailed in the north for a century and permanent colonies only emerged on the east coast after 1600, the Spaniards conquered the great empires of Latin America within a few decades. While more than three quarters of the Indians lived in the Spanish area, Portugal with Brazil and France and England with the north received the more sparsely populated regions.
Collapse of the Indian population
Wars played a role, but introduced diseases, resettlements and mass forced labor decimated the population to a much greater extent. Many groups disappeared as a result of introduced epidemics without a European even having seen them.
Around 1940 the anthropologist Alfred Kroeber estimated the population of the continent in 1492 at just eight million and north of the Rio Grande at one million people. Since then, new, extremely different estimates have been made on the most varied of methodological bases. They range up to over 110 million. More recent estimates assume a very rough approximation of 50 million inhabitants, around half of whom lived in Mesoamerica and a quarter in the Inca Empire.
The densest population certainly existed in the advanced cultures of Latin America. Hernán Cortés succeeded with around 500 soldiers and numerous allied Indians in destroying the Aztec empire , Pizarro that of the Incas . In the Caribbean , the population was almost completely wiped out within a few decades. Hernando de Soto brought devastating diseases to the area between Mississippi and Florida.
The reasons why the contact between the Indian population and the Europeans who had arrived due to transmitted pathogens was devastating for the former, but which did not happen in the other direction with a few exceptions , is the subject of a biogeographical debate. According to the thesis advocated by Jared Diamond , the Eurasian populations of humans, with their domestication of animals to a greater extent and the resulting close human-animal contact, had undergone a more intensive coevolution of transmitted pathogens and developed resistances than with the Population of pre-Columbian America was the case. As a result, the Indian population fell victim to pathogens that the arriving Europeans carried with them, but only showed moderate effects on them.
The Iberian states, which had agreed in the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494 on the division of the continent, sent numerous men overseas, where they allied with Indian women. The number of descendants, called mestizos , grew rapidly . The ruling class was made up of Spaniards and Portuguese, the lower class mestizos and Indians.
In North America, the Native American population collapse is largely due to diseases such as smallpox , measles, and flu . Organized and unorganized persecution by immigrants also contributed to this. In the British colonies in North America , the Scalp Proclamation of 1756 offered a premium on killed Indians. Similar regulations had existed on a smaller scale in Halifax and the French since 1749 - and in some US states such as Massachusetts (1744). Despite the impact of the epidemics and, in some areas, of the slave hunt, which cannot be overestimated, that of the wars should not be underestimated.
What part of economic exploitation and desolate social conditions, neglect and attempts at genocide actually played in this demographic catastrophe - the low point was only reached in the first decades of the 20th century - and how they related to one another can hardly be clarified precisely. What is certain is that numerous peoples along with their culture and language have been destroyed - the largest demographic and probably also cultural catastrophe in human history, measured in terms of the number of victims.
State, feudal system, church and slavery as factors of colonization
On the question of the treatment of the Indians, a comprehensive conflict arose between the exponents Bartolomé de Las Casas as "general defender of the Indians" and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda , the mission orders and the Council of India as well as the local feudal lords. The crown tried to keep the grandees , who from the beginning tended to make their rule independent , under control through an alliance with the petty nobles, the Hidalgos , and the church. The administration was to be carried out from Seville , no one was allowed into the colonies without a permit. At the same time, the Indians should be proselytized, grouped together in encomiendas since 1503 and protected from excessive violence ( Laws of Burgos , 1512). They were intended as workers.
In 1512/13 the laws of Burgos stipulated that although the Indians were handed over to the feudal lords - hence the term encomienda - they should not be considered slaves. However, they could be forced to work for wages. Through the law of India , Madrid tried to build up a certain protection against the brutal harassment of the Indians and the collapse of the population by the encomienda system.
As a result of the Mita system , the provinces in the Inca Empire were already forced in turn to make workers available for public works for a certain period of time. The Repartimiento followed on from this system from 1549, although, as in Chile, for example, the encomienda system continued until after 1650. The Repartimiento- or "allocation system" served above all to provide forces for field work and life-threatening work in gold and silver mines ( Potosí ). It was only superseded after independence from Spain, but still represented a mitigation compared to the encomienda.
In contrast, the so-called Paulistas or bandeirantes , slave hunters from São Paulo , supplied the slave market with Indians. Successful efforts to protect the Indians from slave hunters, such as in the Jesuit state of Paraguay , where Indians like the Kazike Nicolás Neenguirú fought real battles against the slave hunters, were the exception.
Even where Spanish conquistadors could not go, apart from the epidemics, they caused massive changes. They had introduced horses , some of which fled and spread across the North American Great Plains . They formed the basis of the widespread equestrian nomadism at the end of the 18th century. The horses made hunting and transport much easier and changed the balance of power among the peoples.
The northern colonial powers triggered completely different remote changes by trading in fur . In doing so, they not only changed the societies trading with them, but also had an impact on their near and distant neighbors, be it through trade in arms and the associated shifts in power, be it through the development of trade monopolies in the vicinity of the trade bases (forts). storing tribes, be it by triggering migrations.
Post-colonial history
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In North America, the Indians quickly became a minority due to epidemics and in the course of the Indian wars, as their number rapidly declined, while that of the whites increased sharply, especially due to immigration to the colonial areas and the later USA . Individual tribes and large coalitions, such as those under Pontiac and Tecumseh , fought in vain against the advance until the last resistance was broken in 1890.
The states tried to cover the costs of the settlement, ie the construction of an infrastructure, for example through the construction of transcontinental railways, administration and defense, police and courts in various ways. In the USA, the settlers simply appropriated the lands that were regarded as untreated (squatting) and later paid small sums for them, a procedure that was steered in Canada into more orderly channels (cf. economic history of Canada ). Ultimately, however, this also resulted in the majority of the land being taken over by settlers from all over Europe, whose immigration was encouraged.
In South America, the colonial land grants were dissolved and went to large landowners who continued to run them mainly as haciendas or as fazendas (Brazil).
Resistance was broken by force of arms, and hunger, the Indians had in the US even in 1830 all the land east of the Mississippi leave ( Indian Removal Act and Trail of Tears ) in Canada have been reserves set up mostly in the traditional area ( reserves ), as well as in the USA (reservations). By the end of the 19th century, this process in the north was largely complete, the number of Indians reduced to a fraction.
While proselytizing in the south was mainly carried out in the 16th and 17th centuries by Catholic orders, many tribes in the north only became Catholic in the course of the 19th century or joined one of the Protestant denominations. However, this was only the first step in assimilation , which would result in the eradication of cultures that were viewed as inferior by both North American states.
At the same time, the reservations in the USA were converted into private property, which the impoverished residents often had to sell. From 1953 to 1961 attempts were made to dissolve the tribes and reservations and to induce the Indians to migrate to the cities (Termination Policy). Alaska, which only became a state in 1959, took a different turn. Here the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act created a system of holdings and cash flows, against which most of the indigenous people gave up their reservations.
In North America, the struggles of Indian peoples against submission continued until the late 19th century. In South America, they started much earlier, such as in the Mixtón War (until 1542) and lasted until the middle of the 20th century. The Mayan resistance was sparked by the execution of several Mayan leaders on July 30, 1847. The rebellion known as the caste war - although Casta can also mean race, family or tribe - spread throughout the Yucatan and lasted until 1901. The last cruzoob , like the insurgents called, signed a peace treaty with the government in 1935, which allows them to self-govern their villages to this day. The uprising of the Zapatistas , which can be traced back to Emiliano Zapata , and which began in the province of Chiapas in 1994, is also based on the resistance of the Indians, but at times made use of Western ideologies and guerrilla tactics .
In Bolivia, the only country in which the majority is made up of Indians, an Indian president has ruled since the election on December 18, 2005. Evo Morales , who has had an absolute majority since 2005, was confirmed in 2008 with 67% of the vote.
See also
Web links
- Native Americans have only 70 ancestral research team calculated how many immigrants from Asia settled America
Individual evidence
- ↑ In detail: George Weber: Los Toldos sites (Santa Cruz, Argentina) ( Memento of the original from May 5, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ Christine Papp: The Tehuelche. An ethnohistorical contribution to a centuries-long non-encounter , Diss. Vienna 2002, p. 75.
- ↑ Berthold Seewald: German researchers find huge pyramids in Peru , in: Die Welt, October 19, 2006 and Peru: Oldest building in South America exposed .
- ↑ See Horst Pietschmann: State and State Development at the Beginning of the Spanish Colonization of America , Münster 1980 and Hans-Jürgen Prien: The History of Christianity in Latin America, Göttingen 1978
- ↑ Massimo Livi Bacci provides an overview: Conquista: La distruzione degli indios americani. Il mulino, Bologna 2005, ISBN 88-15-10549-2 .
- ↑ Cortés, Hernán: The Conquest of Mexico. Three reports to Emperor Charles V p. 85.
- ↑ This is by no means intended to give the proponents of relativizing the Shoah or the Holocaust a handle to re-assign blame. Unfortunately, this is already happening, albeit without this intention, through publications such as David E. Stannard: American Holocaust: The Conquest of the New World , Oxford University Press 1993 or Russell Thornton: American Indian Holocaust and Survival: A Population History Since 1492 , University of Oklahoma Press 1987, who probably wanted to sharpen the understanding of the significance of the Indian losses and compared them to the extermination of European Jews . Lilian Friedberg does this explicitly in Dare to Compare: Americanizing the Holocaust , in: American Indian Quarterly 24.3 (2000) 353-380.
- ↑ On the role of the Church, cf. Hans-Jürgen Prien: The history of Christianity in Latin America , Göttingen 1978.
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