In A. D. 1500 North America was a diverse land that required distinct adaptations to regional resources. Woodlands covered much of the eastern half of the continent. The grasses of the central prairies and plains fed vast herds of bison, and in the far west, forests of giant spruces and cedars stood along the northern coast, while ancient redwoods grew just to the south. Much of the interior of the west was arid or semiarid. North America was less crowded with human beings than it is today, but even then the land was widely settled by people who spoke numerous languages and lived quite varied ways of life in the many different environments of the continent.

At the time the first Europeans arrived in the Americas, there may have been as many as ten million people already living in the land north of Mexico, or there may have been as few as one million. We have no way of determining exact population estimates for that time. What we do know is that some areas, such as central California, the Northwest Coast, and the Southeast, had quite dense populations -- the result of abundant natural resources or of an adaptation to agriculture -- while populations in some of the desert regions, including the Arctic, were very sparse. There was great linguistic diversity, with at least three hundred distinctive languages spoken. We also know that populations in all areas were rapidly decimated when the European conquerors and colonists or their diseases swept through beginning some 500 years ago.

In A. D. 1500 native peoples had been living in North America for thousands of years. Their ancestors had walked out of Asia, passing over a now submerged land bridge into what is today Alaska, at some time in the late Pleistocene. Just how early these first settlers came into the Americas is still a topic of debate in American archaeology. One group of scholars, primarily North American archaeologists, accepts only evidence dating after approximately 15,000 years ago. The other side, mainly archaeologists who work in Mesoamerica and South America, believe there is evidence for a much earlier entrance, perhaps as early as 40,000 years ago, and surely by 25,000 years ago.

All Americanist scholars, however, do agree essentially on the following: Human beings did not evolve in the Americas. The first settlers were fully modern Homo sapiens. The biological and linguistic evidence supports an Asian origin. And, the ancestors of Native Americans walked across Beringia, that land bridge that tied Siberia to Alaska during certain periods of glaciation in the late Pleistocene. Most also agree that the evidence points to at least three, and possibly more, waves of people who gradually and successively spread into the farthest reaches of the two American continents.

At the time the first people entered North America, the land looked quite different from the way it looks today or from what it was like 500 years ago. About 18,000 years ago, the climate was cooler and moister, and there were large ice sheets over great parts of the continent, reaching down into what we now call the Midwest. During some periods, an ice-free corridor existed between major sheets of ice, allowing free travel by human beings. People also probably moved south by following the western coast of the continent.

By the time the Pleistocene ended some 10,000 years ago, the glaciers were gone, climates had changed, and the environments were different. Throughout the eastern half of the continent, large deciduous forests grew. To the north, in the area that includes most of modern Canada, coniferous forests developed in areas once covered by ice, but now dotted with lakes and coursed by rivers. The Great Plains became a sea of semiarid grassland. In the west, where the late Pleistocene had seen moister and cooler grasslands inhabited by large grazing animals -- such as the mammoth, giant bison, and even the horse -- the climate became hotter and drier. The areas we know as the Great Basin and the Southwest perhaps began to look much as they do today.

The North American continent is a mass of land covering some nine and one half million square miles and including more than one-eighth of the total land of the earth. The physical surface of the land is highly varied, but there are a few major physiographic features that should be noted, as they affected the way of life people developed in ancient times.

In the west there are very high, geologically young, and active mountain ranges that run parallel from north to south. The major chains are the Rocky Mountains and the Mexican Sierra Madres, but to their west, running parallel and closer to the Pacific coast are other active mountains, such as the Sierra Nevada of California and the Cascades of the Northwest. In between these ranges lie high plateaus and desert basins, for example, the Great Basin. Far to the east, ranging northeast by southwest is another major chain of mountains, the Appalachians. The Appalachians are more ancient in geological terms, and as they have been much eroded, they are not nearly so high as the mountains of the west. In between the two groups of mountains -- the Rockies in the west and the Appalachians in the east -- lies the area known as the Great Plains, a generally flat expanse of land, except for the hill country of the Ozark and Ouachita Mountains. Wrapping around the eastern seaboard and the coast of the Gulf of Mexico are coastal plains, and in the interior of the Northeast is the lowland zone surrounding the large inland waterways we call the Great Lakes. There are a number of river systems that drain to the sea on both east and west coasts, and the large region of the central plains is drained by the great system formed by the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers and their tributaries.

All of the world's major climatic zones, ranging from the polar in the north to the tropical in the south, can be found in the North American continent. The climate of an area is determined in part by the physical surface of the land, but is even more dependent upon its distance from the equator and the movement of warm and cold air masses through it. The natural vegetation is determined by all of these things, in addition to the soil types that underlie the area, and soils, in turn, are affected by the climate and the physical structure of the land.

In a very general way, we can divide North America into several major geographic zones, each defined by certain physiographic and climatic features, although it is important to note that there is diversity, sometimes fairly great, in land form and climate within each of these major areas. These areas are (1) the arctic lands of the far north, defined by the polar climate; (2) the subarctic zone of coniferous forests, encompassing most of modern Canada; (3) the northwestern coastal area, defined as a temperate rain forest; (4) the semiarid to arid intermontane plateau area of the Northwest, which includes the contiguous parts of the modern states of Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Montana, and Canada's British Columbia; (5) the arid intermontane basin just to the south of the Plateau, commonly known as the Great Basin; (6) the central area of the Pacific coastal range, including great valleys, with a dry-summer, subtropical climate, and which makes up most of the present state of California; (7) the generally arid, but physiographically varied zone of the American Southwest; (8) the highly variable, great central Plains that lie between the Rocky Mountain range and the Mississippi River; (9) the northeastern corner of the United States, including the high country of the Appalachians and the lowland area about the Great Lakes, in addition to coastal plains; and (10) the southeastern corner of the United States, an area of mixed coastal plains, fertile rivers valleys, and the southern mountains of the Appalachians.

As anthropologists studied the many native populations of North America, they noted that in major geographic areas, the societies, although linguistically and culturally diverse, appeared to share some similarities in overall patterns of life and environmental adaptations. Thus, the term culture area came to be used as a way to organize, describe, and discuss the many varied cultures of the native peoples of North America. As you will see, these culture areas more or less correlate with the above geographic regions.

This concept of the culture area was first developed by the early American anthropologists Clark Wissler (1917) and Alfred Kroeber (1939), and has been revised and refined by other scholars over the rest of this century. It is still the best way to organize systematically the numerous data that we have for the indigenous American cultures and to relate them to one another. A good definition of a culture area is that used by Harold Driver (1961): "A culture area is a geographical area occupied by a number of peoples whose cultures show a significant degree of similarity with each other and at the same time a significant degree of dissimilarity with the cultures of the peoples of other such areas." These similarities may be apparent in any number of widespread cultural elements -- from material culture and technology to subsistence strategies, social organization, and religious ideas.

A geographic region is separated from other such regions by physical boundaries or features, for example, a mountain range or a major body of water. It only stands to reason that people living within the same region will have more contact with one another than they will with people in other regions. They will borrow more from one another, and no doubt they will make very similar adaptations to their environments. Thus, they will appear to be more like one another than they will be like people in other regions who share a different history and environmental adaptation.

There are two things that students must be aware of insofar as the culture area concept is concerned. First, although the overall way of life may be very similar from group to group, and although some degree of common history may be shared, the individual cultures within the area may be quite discrete. There may even be many different languages spoken by people who appear superficially to live a very similar way of life. For example, the people who lived on the Great Plains in the early 19th century may have ridden horses, hunted bison, lived in tipis, and worn similar clothing, but the Cheyenne were not the same as the Crow, who were not the same as the Blackfoot, who were not the same as the Lakota, and so on. And in the Southwest, the Apache hunter-gatherers were definitely distinct from the settled Pueblo farmers they raided.

The other point to remember about the culture area concept is that it really represents a moment "frozen in time," and that the frozen moment will vary chronologically from area to area. Our defining description for each of the North American lndian culture areas is based upon our first good eyewitness accounts of the way of life in those areas, and those reports do not date to the same time period for all areas. For some people, the time may have been in the 16th century when the first Europeans arrived, but for others this may have been in the 19th century, after much

culture change had occurred as a result of contact with European cultures. For example, the peoples of the Eastern Woodlands are best known from descriptions made in the 17th century, but the best accounts of the cultures of the horse nomads of the Plains date from the early to middle 19th century. Thus, if the Plains tribes had been adequately described in the 16th century, before they had acquired horses, our view of their way of life would be quite different.

Today the great eastern forests are greatly diminished, supplanted by urban centers and cropland, and newer, same-species forests. The prairie grasses that survive in the Great Plains are endangered ever increasingly by agriculture and expanding populations. The land is scarred in both the east and the west where ores and minerals are being stripped out, and the forests of the Northwest are disappearing. The human population of today's North America exhibits some cultural and regional diversity. There are still American lndian peoples. There are Afroamericans, Euroamericans, and Asian Americans, and there are northerners, southerners, westerners and the like. But generally, no matter where one lives - whether along the Northwestern Coast, in the prairie country of the Midwest, or in the Arizona desert -- we all share a fairly common existence and major cultural tradition. But that is not the way it was 500years ago, or even only 150 years ago. The North American continent was inhabited by many varied people who coped with their diverse natural environments in a myriad of ways. On the following pages we will define in a summary fashion these major culture areas of the native peoples of North America.

Most of us picture the arctic lands as perennially cold and snow-covered. While this image may not be completely accurate, it is true that this northernmost area is one of the harshest and most inhospitable of the earth through much of the year. Yet, peoples like the Eskimo and the Aleuts have successfully adapted and survived there for millennia.

Geographers call this region the tundra. It is a treeless, sparsely vegetated, rolling plain that has a permanently frozen layer of soil known as permafrost below the surface. Winters are very cold, with sub-zero temperatures, strong, violent winds, and long nights. The polar climate is characterized by dry, cold air, thus precipitation is actually light. What snow there is may be whipped about by the winds into blizzards. The Arctic Ocean freezes solid, and the non-human animal life generally hibernates or migrates south, except for some species of seals, which remain active year around by making use of breathing holes in the ice.

When the Arctic summer temperatures rise above freezing, the uppermost layer of soil thaws for a few inches, but it remains a muddy slush as the water cannot drain through the permafrost. Although tundra vegetation is generally sparse, during the short summer season, there grow several types of small tenacious plants - mosses and lichens, stubby grasses, and shrubs such as dwarf willows. Herds of muskoxen and caribou migrate north to feed on this tundra vegetation, and mammals such as voles, mice, wolves, foxes, weasels, and wolverines make their appearance. The numerous ponds teem with fish and waterfowl. The whales and salmon return.

The Eskimo and their relatives, the Aleuts, adapted well and in a variety of ways to this area of long, hard winters and short summers. We have a stereotypical image of Eskimo life based primarily upon the early observation of people in the central (Canadian) Arctic, but as the Eskimo occupied aboriginally an area some 3000 miles wide from northeastern Siberia through Alaska and Canada and into Greenland, there were several local adaptations to the various Arctic conditions. Populations along the coast were primarily marine mammal hunters; some interior populations relied mostly on the caribou, while other groups hunted each equally. Fishing was of varying importance from area to area. But, underlying all was and is a common cultural tradition that dates back more than 5000 years and ties the Eskimo to ancient Siberian cultures. There is but one Eskimo language, but there are several dialects, and both the linguistic and biological evidence also links these Arctic people to northeastern Asians.

The word, "Eskimo," is actually not an Eskimo word. It comes from one of the Algonkian languages spoken by lndians in the Hudson Bay area and means something such as "eaters of raw meat." It is what these Indian neighbors of the Eskimo called them, and it became the common name by which outsiders refer to them. The Eskimo, on the other hand, have various names for different groups, and in general call themselves, Inuit, which means "humans." But, as 'Eskimo" is in the common parlance today, we'll continue to use that term.

One can distinguish two major groups of Arctic cultures - the western, which includes the Alaskan and Siberian Eskimos, in addition to the Aleuts of the Aleutian Islands, and the central-eastern group, which includes the Eskimos from the region of McKenzie Bay eastward into Greenland. All subsisted by hunting, and the seal was universally important for its meat and skin. There was more emphasis on hunting whales and walruses in the west than in the eastern area, however, and in central Canada, some Eskimos specialized strictly in caribou hunting. It should be noted, though, that marine mammals were hunted wherever they appeared along the Arctic coast, and any Eskimo who had contact with any amount of caribou made use of their meat and hides. In addition, fish and waterfowl played secondary roles as food resources in some areas. With their great dependence upon the hunt and the eating of meat, Eskimos generally did not exploit the limited vegetable foods that did grow seasonally.

Technologically, the Eskimo developed excellent tools for hunting both sea and land mammals, and perfected several types of skin garments that made life in the Arctic possible. Boats such as the kayak and dog-pulled sleds transported them, depending upon the season. Houses were made of sod, stone, driftwood, and/or ice, and varied from area to area. For example, in Alaska houses were often semisubterranean driftwood and sod-covered domes, and in the central and eastern area, the famous ice house called the igloo and various types of skin tents were used.

Traditional Eskimo socioeconomic organization was what anthropologists call the band. Bands are small, autonomous kin-based groups, usually nomadic, occupying a common territory. Members of a band are related through blood and/or marriage ties. Among the Eskimo, the main social-household unit was a nuclear or extended family which was generally nomadic and dispersed from similar families in the summer months, but which congregated in semipermanent or permanent villages with other related families in the winter. Eskimo society was egalitarian and "leaders" were such only based on their own individual merit and personal charisma.

At various distances south of the Arctic Circle, the land gradually changes from treeless tundra to coniferous forest. The Subarctic lies in one of the world's intermediate climatic zones, called the taiga, an area characterized by long, very cold winters and short, warm to hot summers. The interior of the Subarctic during the winter often has lower temperatures than the Arctic due to the cold polar air that moves from the Arctic south through Canada toward the east. Storms in the winter bring deep snow and harsh conditions. In the summer warmer subtropical air masses move north from the Great Lakes area into the Subarctic bringing violent rainstorms. Warm though the summers may be, they are far too short for agriculture. Thus the native peoples of the area based their subsistence primarily on hunting and fishing, and as food plants are limited, they did not rely greatly upon them.

Through most of the Subarctic the trees are evergreen conifers, but in the southeastern zone, the conifers are mixed with species of oak, birch, and maple. There are numerous lakes and rivers with plentiful fish and migratory waterfowl. Woodland mammals abound. There are caribou, moose, deer, muskoxen, and bear, in addition to many smaller species, such as the wolf, fox, rabbit, squirrel, beaver, and wolverine.

The several distinctive languages spoken by the native peoples of the Subarctic are classed in two major language families. In the western half of the area, most of the languages belong to the Athapaskan family, while in the east, they belong to the Algonkian group. There were, of course, cultural variations from region to region and among the many local groups within a region, yet, there were some very similar general lifeways and environmental adaptations ranging across the entire Subarctic.

As did the Eskimos to the north, the peoples of the Subarctic lived in small nomadic bands of kinsmen, dispersing into family groups in the summer and coming together in slightly larger groups at semi-permanent winter villages. Caribou was the most important resource for many, but other large and small game, fish, and waterfowl were also utilized. Life was precarious, particularly in the winter, and travel was hard. The toboggan was pulled by dogs in some areas, and the snowshoe was developed for movement by foot over the snow. In the summertime birchbark canoes and coracles (raft-like boats made of an animal hide) of moose skin were used in the rivers and lakes. Population estimates for the area in pre-European times range from 60,000 to twice that number. The eastern Algonkian speaking people were rapidly decimated by the European diseases, but many Athapaskan populations remain in western Canada today.

There is a narrow strip of land, rarely more than 100 miles wide at its greatest point, that is bounded on the east by mountains and on the west by the Pacific Ocean and runs from the southeastern part of Alaska south for approximately 2000 miles to the northernmost tip of California. It is characterized by a temperate climate, heavy annual rainfall, and a virtual rain forest of evergreen trees.

There are two basic features that create this region of temperate rain forest: the coastal mountains and the ocean currents. The Kuroshio (Japanese), North Pacific, and California Currents flow clockwise in the northern Pacific. The Kuroshio moves warm tropical waters past Japan where it then becomes the North pacific Current, which flows east, bringing warm water and air to the northwestern coast of North America. As the warmed westerly winds hit the mountains, they drop frequent and heavy rain. At the same time, the mountain ranges also keep the colder air of the interior of the continent from passing into the coastal zone.

This is a rugged coastal zone of fjords and islands, where the mountains are steep and often come right to the sea. Travel is best done by boat. There are numerous rivers and streams that run east-west through the mountains to the ocean. The coastal forests of red and yellow cedars, spruces, fir, and yew are dense and support abundant animal life: bear, mountain lion, wolf, fox, deer, elk, mountain goat, and many smaller species of mammals, including several fur bearing types - beaver, mink, and otter. Riverine and ocean fish abound, as do marine mammals such as sea lions, seals, and whales. Tidal flats provide shellfish, and migratory waterfowl are plentiful.

This land of abundant resources provided a rich sustenance for the native peoples of the Northwest Coast. They were fishermen, hunters, and gatherers, existing solely on the natural wild resources. Yet, food was so abundant that, unlike the Eskimo and the Athapaskan hunters to their north and west, they did not have to focus most of their activities simply on getting enough food. Here along the Northwest Coast, a fairly dense human population could be supported in permanent coastal communities by the collection of wild resources alone. There were some local specializations, but fishing was universally the most important occupation for these maritime cultures of the Northwest. Several types of salmon made a number of different runs each year, providing the main food for most people, but in addition, herring, smelt, halibut, sturgeon, and oulachon (the candlefish) were eaten. Fish generally were split and dried for long term storage. Sea mammals and land animals were hunted as secondary resources, as were waterfowl. Shellfish were collected and plants such as berries, clover, and skunk cabbage were important in the diet.

Dependent upon the seas and rivers for food, they were equally dependent upon the forests for building materials. The great trees provided wood, bark, and roots that were used for the large plank house, sea-going canoes, implements, heraldic woodcarvings, textiles, and baskets. The native cultures of the Northwest Coast are noted for their spectacular art, particularly that done in wood.

With their surplus of food, the peoples of the Northwest Coast also developed a type of sociopolitical system that anthropologists call the chiefdom. Chiefdoms, unlike the bands of the Eskimos, are non-egalitarian societies. There is an emphasis on ranked social positions and hereditary rights in and ownership of resources. There is a centralized authority - the chief - and a hierarchy of authority under the chief. Northwest Coast chiefs, as chiefs everywhere, had the right to control and redistribute the surplus economic resources. Here social ranking was determined by an individual's genealogical ties to the chief.

Aboriginal population may have been as high as 250,000. There was great linguistic diversity, with at least eight language families represented in more than twice that many languages.

Between the Rocky Mountains on the east and the Cascades on the west, where the neighboring parts of present-day Montana, Idaho, Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia meet, is an intermontane plateau. This area is high and somewhat level, but has mountains and hills that run north to south in the east, and is drained by several rivers, the most important of which are the Fraser and the Columbia. The Plateau is semiarid to arid with very low annual rainfall, but the rivers make it fairly well watered. The mountainous areas, particularly those in the north, have coniferous forests, while lower areas, as in the south, have scrubby desert-type vegetation, including sagebrush and cactus. It is a land of cold winters and hot summers.

The native cultures of the Plateau subsisted by fishing, hunting, and gathering. Salmon was the primary staple in the diet, stored in dried form. Other fish were also eaten, and larger mammals such as mountain sheep, deer, and elk were hunted, as were smaller game such as the rabbit. Seeds, nuts, roots, and bulbs were gathered. Permanent villages of earth lodges or mat-covered houses were occupied during the winter, but summer was the time that bands dispersed to live a more nomadic life, going to favored fishing grounds and other areas to harvest ripening plant foods.

Plateau peoples generally were organized politically into tribes. Tribes are egalitarian, non-centralized groupings of bands, villages or other such units, that share a common language and culture. Bands or villages of a tribe are autonomous, but are integrated with one another by the idea that they are the same people and usually by some pan-tribal features, such as associations or cross-cutting clans. The Plateau village was the main sociopolitical unit, and villages were loosely tied together into tribes. Each village had its own headman or chief, but these leaders were chosen based on a man's personal charisma and leadership abilities. Among some linguistic groups, the Nez Perce, for example, there were also "councils" composed of prestigious or able men who advised the chief. Decisions generally reflected a consensus of all the adults of the local group. There were no "chiefs" or headmen overall for any of the Plateau tribes, and this is typical of tribal organization everywhere.

We have no good pre-European contact population estimates, but linguistic diversity was great, with some two dozen distinctive languages recorded for the area. One last point to remember about the Plateau is that it was also diverse environmentally and culturally. It is best seen as a "transition" zone lying between the Northwest Coast and Subarctic culture areas to the north and west, California to the southwest, the Great Basin to the south, and the Plains to the east. Plateau cultures individually reflected their relationships with these other populations. For example, the Nez Perce of the eastern Plateau were greatly affected by the horse culture of the Plains, whereas the Klikitat of the west were more like Northwest Coast cultures.

The Great Basin culture area covers most of the present states of Nevada and Utah and the contiguous parts of California, Idaho, and Wyoming. It is a high, arid, intermontane area, bounded by ranges to the north, west, and east. Here is the hot desert climate, with less than 10 inches of rain falling in a year, and daytime summer temperatures of well over 100 degrees. Winters are cold. There is no outlet to the ocean, thus the few mountain rivers drain directly into the basin, where they deposit their waters into shallow lakes or swampy sinks which become saline as the water slowly evaporates. The Great Salt Lake of Utah developed in this way. As arid and uninviting as the Great Basin may appear, it offered a remarkable, even if limited, assortment of food resources for the aboriginal inhabitants. The vegetation, though dominated by the inedible sagebrush and greasewood on the valley floors, includes a number of seasonal grasses that produce edible seeds and several types of plants with juicy roots. On the slopes of the mountains grow pinon trees that produce the pine nut that became the staple for most of the Great Basin peoples. The plentiful animal life which provided food for the human inhabitants includes jack rabbit, mice, squirrel, gopher, pronghorn antelope, deer, bighorn sheep; insects, birds, and small reptiles.

The nuclear or extended family was the basis of Great Basin bands. These small family groups moved seasonally over a wide territory, ranging from valleys to mountain slopes, and intensively foraged all available resources. On some occasions a few bands would come together to take part in an activity, such as a communal rabbit hunt, but most of the time each family group was on its own.

Population density was always low, and total site estimates for the beginning of the 19th century range from a low of 25,000 to as many as 75,000. All but one of the seven recorded languages belong to the Shoshonean group of the Uto-Aztecan family.

The California culture area encompasses much of the present day state of California, excepting the southeastern part, which was aboriginally part of the Great Basin and the Southwest culture areas. The area is geographically diverse, but in general is characterized by a mild, temperate climate and abundant natural resources. The Sierra Nevada range runs north-south through much of the eastern part of the area, while the Coast Mountains parallel it, running closer to the Pacific ocean. In between the two ranges is the great central valley, while numerous smaller valleys lie scattered in other areas. There are active volcanoes and earthquake faults throughout. Several local environmental zones exist, but there are three basic ones that cut the state crosswise - the northern, the central, and the southern. The people of each subregion had their own distinctive adaptations, but all shared certain common cultural patterns that allow us to class them within the same culture area. For example, all were food collecting societies. People hunted and gathered the plentiful plant and animal resources, and many of the groups used seeds such as the acorn as a staple. Native California was densely populated as a result of the natural food supply and people lived in permanent to semi-permanent village communities. Another widespread cultural feature was the elaboration of certain ceremonies and "rites of passage," particularly those dealing with death and the puberty of girls.

There was great linguistic diversity in the California culture area. At least one hundred languages (or distinctive dialects of languages) classed in six different language families were found there. It is estimated that some 200,000 people inhabited the area, and it seems to have been one of the most densely populated regions of North America in aboriginal times. Sociopolitical organization centered .about permanent villages. Each village was more or less independent from every other and controlled the natural resources of its territory. In some cases larger villages formed smaller settlements nearby the original village, and the term "tribelet" has been used to describe them.

It is the central California area that most exemplifies the culture area, and it was here that the densest populations lived. Among the rolling hills, the valleys, and the coastal zones were local groups that inhabited permanent villages and controlled the resources of particular areas. Local environments varied from redwood forests to grassy meadows interspersed with oaks to rugged coastlines. The abundant animal life that was collected or hunted included fish, shellfish, deer, rabbit, quail, and various waterfowl. Wild plants formed the mainstay of the diet, of course, and the acorn was the staple.

The northern California area is one of greater annual rainfall, redwood and other evergreen forests, and swiftly running rivers full of salmon and other fish. The native peoples of this region, influenced some by the Northwest Coast Cultures adjacent to them, emphasized fishing, but also harvested the acorns from the oak trees that grew in the valleys. In southern California, there is less rainfall, less thick forests, fewer rivers, and a warmer climate through most of the year. It is a desert environment with accompanying vegetation such as mesquite, sagebrush, and chaparral, but oaks grow naturally in the valleys and on lower slopes of mountains. Here the native Californians emphasized the collection of wild seeds - from mesquite beans to acorns - and hunted the smaller mammals that inhabited this more arid region.

The predominant feature of the American Southwest is an arid climate, but as a result of the diverse landforms and extreme variations in altitude, there are several local environments in which water resources vary greatly. There are some areas, such as the southern Arizona desert, where as little as 4 inches of rain may fall in a year, and others in which annual rainfall may reach almost 20 inches. But, generally, the region overall is classed as arid. The modern states of New Mexico and Arizona lie at the center of the culture area, joined by contiguous parts of Colorado and Utah to the north, southeastern California to the west, and northwestern Mexico to the south.

The Rocky mountain range continues its run south through this area. In the north there are tall peaks covered with evergreens, many high, flat-topped plateaus (known as mesas), and spectacular deep canyons. The central region of the Mogollon Mountains is better watered, but is even more rugged, with streams that have cut deep canyons through pine forested slopes. In the south are the low, flat lands of the Arizona desert, interspersed with rivers that provide water in an otherwise very dry environment.

The native peoples of the Southwest were as varied culturally and linguistically as the physical landforms. Six major language families were represented in the area by as many as two dozen languages or distinctive dialects of languages. When the Spaniards first entered the area in the 1540s, they distinguished among three basic lifeways. There were those they called the "rancheria" peoples, such as the Pima and Papago. They lived in dispersed household groups, rather than compact villages, farmed river valleys, and supplemented their diet with hunting and the collection of wild plants. There were also full-time agriculturalists who lived in permanent villages. The Spaniards called them the "pueblos," and we still use this term today, dividing these people generally into the "Eastern Pueblos," whose villages lie within the oasis-like valley of the Rio Grande in New Mexico, and the "Western Pueblos," such as the Hopi of Arizona and Acoma and Zuni in western New Mexico. And, finally, there was a third way of life based on hunting and gathering and the raiding of the settled agricultural people. These were the Athapaskan-speaking people we call the Navajo and the Apache. The Navajo learned farming from the Pueblos and took up pastoralism after the introduction of Spanish sheep. The band and the tribe were the two main types of political systems found in the Southwest culture area at the time of the first European contact, but many scholars believe the ancient cultures - the Anasazi and the Hohokam - at their height may have been representative of chiefdoms or formative state systems.

The cultivation of food plants, whether full time or part time, lies at the heart of the basic subsistence pattern that defines this culture area, but the Southwest agricultural complex of maize (corn), beans, and squashes actually had its origins to the south in Mexico some seven to eight thousand years ago. Maize (Zea mays) was domesticated in the southern Mexican highlands by approximately 5000 B.C., either from a now-extinct wild corn ancestor or from teosinte, a relative of maize that still grows wild in Mexico today. Earlier than maize, however, were domesticated pumpkins and other squashes (Cucurbita species), beans (Phaseolus species), and chili peppers (Capsicum), in addition to several other plants, such as the avocado and amaranth .

Maize, which is a grass, evolved into numerous local varieties (races) and became widespread in pre-European times in the Americas from New England in the north to southern South America. It seems to have reached the Southwest from Mexico perhaps as early as 1500 B.C and surely by 1000 B.C. Although the remains of squashes and beans are not dated at archaeological sites in the Southwest until between 1000 and 500 B.C., they may well have diffused into the area along with and at the same time as maize. This trilogy of plants - maize, beans, and squashes - if eaten together, provide an excellent diet with the necessary protein and nutrients for human beings.

In the Southwest farming can be precarious, but the native peoples developed a number of methods for utilizing all available water, and varieties of corn, beans, and squashes that are adapted to the arid nature of the area evolved locally. For at least a thousand years maize, and perhaps the other food plants as well, was grown by semi-sedentary populations, and it was not until about A.D. 200 that permanent, settled village life developed. The ancient cultures we call the Anasazi, the Hohokam, and the Mogollon have their beginnings about that time. The modern native peoples of the Southwest, with the exception of some late-comers such as the Navajo and Apache, apparently are descendants of these early settled farmers, and the historically known Pueblo cultures no doubt owe much to the prehistoric Anasazi.

The vast expanse of flat to rolling land between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains, extending as far north as southern Canada and as far south as southern Texas, is the North American Plains. What unites this huge region is the nature of the landscape itself - flat or slightly rolling surfaces covered with grasses and interspersed by rivers and streams along which grow trees. The region lies in an intermediate climatic zone known as "dry grassland," which is by definition semiarid. Overall, however, the area varies climatically as a result of the different latitudes and elevations it encompasses. The eroded, rugged lands of the western Plains lie at higher elevations than does the flatter, more softly rolling country of the eastern Plains. Typically, the Plains have cold winters and hot summers, but in the north it is colder, especially in the winter, than it is in the south. Tornadoes and such windstorms occur more commonly in the southern and eastern Plains than in the north. The east has a greater annual rainfall than does the west, which is more arid and often receives only half the amount of rain that falls in the east. The higher, drier western Plains are covered with shallow-rooted short grasses, while the better watered eastern Plains - the American Prairies - are home to tall grasses.

Although the primary drainage system is that of the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, there are many west-east flowing rivers and streams in the Plains. Wherever rivers cut the grasslands, trees grow. Native species found through much of the area include oak, elm, cottonwood, and willow, and on the far western edge of the Plains, in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, are some coniferous species. In aboriginal times the grasses of the Plains provided a rich food source for grazing mammals, the most prolific of which was the American Bison (Bison bison). Numerous other mammals (including bear, wolf, elk, deer, coyote, rabbit, and prairie dog) also inhabited the grasslands and forested waterways, along with several species of birds, such as eagles, grouse, and various waterfowl.

Two basic Plains cultural traditions had developed by five hundred years ago. In the west were tribes of nomadic hunter-gatherers who lived in small bands and moved across the Plains gathering roots, seeds, and berries, and hunting the bison, deer, antelope and other mammals. Their way of life was very ancient, dating well back to 10,000 years ago when the grasslands developed at the close of the Pleistocene. In the eastern Plains dwelt semi-sedentary, part-time farmers/part-time bison hunters. They cultivated corn, beans, and squashes, among other plants, in the fertile river valleys of the prairies where agriculture had diffused by about A.D. 1000 from cultures to the east. The eastern Plains people lived in permanent villages of grass houses or large earth lodges for most of the year, and seasonally took off on bison hunts. In either tradition - sedentary farming or full-time nomadic hunting - the bison played a central role, providing food and material for clothing, utensils, and shelters.

The Plains culture area was typified by linguistic diversity: Five language families were represented by same 21 distinctive languages. Yet, there are many underlying cultural features and adaptations that tied these diverse people together from subsistence patterns and technology to widespread religious concepts such as the Sun Dance, guardian spirits, and vision quests. The most common political form was the tribe, and overall there was an emphasis on warfare for personal glorification of Plains males.

An outside element entered the Plains traditions in the 16th century and forever changed them. This was the horse. In 1541, Spanish explorers under the leadership of Francisco de Coronado traveled from the Southwest into the southeastern Plains area where they saw herds of bison and met Plains cultures. They no doubt left horses behind them, as did subsequent explorers. Within a hundred years, Spanish horses had become widespread over much of the region, and by the early 1700s the horse had become a prime element of Plains lndian culture as we know it from historical accounts. The introduction of the horse brought several important changes in native life. With the horse people had the ability to move greater distances faster, to hunt bison more efficiently, to live in larger groups, and to carry more possessions. If tribal political organization did not exist before, it certainly did after the adoption of the horse, and the horse no doubt gave even greater impetus to the development of the Plains warrior tradition. The western hunters quickly accepted the horse. The prairie farmers of the eastern Plains readily made use of horses on their seasonal bison hunts and in the proliferation of warfare with the nomads to the west. And, some eastern prairie farmers, the Cheyenne and Lakota, for example, moved permanently upon the western Plains and became full-time equestrian nomads. The "heyday" of Plains culture dates between approximately A.D. 1740 and the 1860s, and by the 1880s, the westward expansion of the United States under the policy of "Manifest Destiny," and the resultant Indian Wars," had reduced the magnificent Plains cultures to the confinement of reservation life.

The Northeast culture area is sometimes called the Eastern Woodlands, as its natural environment is one of forests. Geographically, the area more or less includes the northeast corner of the present day United States: from New England on the northeast through the adjacent parts of southern Canada, westward to the Great Lakes area, and from there south through Kentucky and back toward the east to the MidAtlantic states of Maryland and Delaware. It is a varied landscape. The Appalachian Mountain range runs in a northeast-southwest direction through the eastern half of the area. The land surrounding the Great Lakes is generally flat; there are fertile river valleys in the rolling low hills between the mountains and the lakes, and all along the Atlantic are coastal lowlands. The area lies within the temperate climatic zone, at mid-latitudes, where warm air from the subtropics and tropics meets the colder air from the polar area. Thus, it has a changeable weather pattern year around, and rainfall is evenly distributed throughout the year. There are four recognizable "seasons;" winter is cold, summer is hot, and spring and fall have temperatures that fall in between the two extremes.

Although winter can be harsh, summer is long enough, especially when combined with the milder temperatures of spring and fall, to provide a good growing season for cultivated plants. Archaeological evidence from the Ohio River valley for the cultivation of several native plants (sumpweed, sunflowers, gourds, and squashes, for example) dates between 1500 and 500 B.C., but it appears these plants were cultivated to supplement the main foods which were gathered and hunted in the forests of the region. Sometime between A.D. 400 and 700 maize agriculture spread into the area, and greater dependence was placed on this new crop with resulting population growth. Thus, at the time of our first historical descriptions of the Northeast cultures, maize cultivation was a major defining feature of subsistence. Hunting and the gathering of wild foods continued to be important also.

Agriculture in the Northeast was of the type called "shifting" or "slash-and-burn" cultivation, in which gardens were prepared by cutting and burning a section of forest. Within a few seasons, the fertility of the land was gone, and a new field had to be cleared. After several years people found themselves traveling longer and longer distances from their village to their fields, and thus it became necessary to move the village closer to the cultivatable lands. At this time, if a community also had increased greatly in population, the group would splinter and form two new settlements of related people.

The village was the basic unit of the tribe, the primary political organization of the aboriginal Northeast. Sometimes independent tribes of people speaking the same language organized themselves into alliances that have been called "confederacies" for short time periods and for specific purposes (such as warfare against the Europeans). The most famous and best documented of these alliances was the League of the Iroquois, composed of the Mohawk, Seneca, Onondaga, Oneida, and Cayuga, all speakers of the Iroquois language.

Three language families - Iroquoian, Algonkian, and Siouan - and at least two dozen distinctive languages or dialects of languages were found in the Northeast. The Algonkian speakers of New England were among the first Native North Americans to meet the European colonists, and the early relationships between the lndians and the Pilgrims form the basis of legends and tales, at the accuracy of which we can only guess. All of the Northeast cultures, especially the Algonkian speakers, were hard hit by European colonization, and their populations rapidly diminished. As with other culture areas, population estimates are difficult to make, as populations were greatly decreased by the spread of European-introduced diseases, such as small pox, sometimes even years before the actual physical contact.

The Southeast culture area is a continuation of the Eastern Woodlands, but it lies in the subtropical climatic zone and has somewhat higher temperatures year around than does the temperate zone Northeast. It is a varied land that includes the Blue Ridge Mountains of the southern Appalachians, the Carolina Piedmont (a plateau), Gulf and Atlantic coastal lowlands, and the fertile valley of the southern Mississippi River that lies west of the mountains. Winters are short and generally mild through much of the region, but frost, snow, and ice storms do occur. Only on the Gulf Coast and in the southern half of Florida does warm winter weather prevail. Humidity is always high, summers are long and hot, and rainfall occurs year around in plentiful amounts.

The forests of the Southeast include many native species of both deciduous and evergreen trees: oak, poplar, hickory, chestnut, gum, sassafras, cypress, pine. The numerous edible fruits, nuts, and roots, in addition to an abundant animal life, made the region a desirable habitat in prehistoric times. Cultivation of native plants, including some of those mentioned above for the Northeast, no doubt occurred equally as early, but it was the diffusion of maize agriculture, probably via northeastern Mexico, which laid the subsistence base for the cultural pattern of the Southeast. As in the rest of the Eastern Woodlands, slash-and-burn agricultural methods were used.

Maize, beans, and pumpkins provided the staple of the diet, but many wild foods were also gathered, and meat, such as deer and rabbit, was provided through the hunt. Populations were dense as a result of the abundant resources, and settlements were most often located along rivers. Villages and towns usually had a central plaza, which was the ceremonial heart of the community, surrounded by houses and various public structures. Earthworks, including burial and temple mounds were still in use by some people at the time of the first European contact in the 1500s, and towns often had wooden palisades for defense. The early European descriptions of Southeast cultures indicate that most, if not all, had the chiefdom political system, with centralized authority and power in the hands of hereditary chiefs, and a society of ranked social classes. Their ancestors, whom archaeologists have called the 'Mississippians" and who constructed numerous ceremonial earthworks in sometimes large communities, may have also developed formative state political structures.

The majority of Southeast populations were speakers of languages in the Muskogean family, but five other language families were also represented in the area, including a couple of interesting language "isolates" - Natchez and Catawba - neither of which has other close relatives in the region.

Although we cannot accurately estimate pre-European contact population figures, it is apparent from early historical descriptions that these farmers of the Southeast lived in large, dense communities. After European colonization, many of the native people became readily acculturated to some elements of European culture, and by the early 19th century the Cherokee, Creek, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and the Seminole (a group derived from the Creek) had come to be known as the 'Five Civilized Nations." Although they had maintained their lndian identification and culture, they had adopted just enough of the White culture so that the United States government thought of them as "civilized." Unfortunately for these five nations, their native lands were very desirable to the increasing numbers of White settlers moving into the area, and in the 1830s, under President Andrew Jackson, they were forcibly removed to lndian Territory (now the state of Oklahoma). This sad chapter in American history is known as "The Trail of Tears," as large numbers of people died on the journey west. Some Cherokee refused to leave their homes, and hid out for several years, as did some Choctaw. Their descendants still live on their ancient lands in North Carolina, Tennessee, and Mississippi. At the time of Indian Removal," the Seminoles scattered into small communities in central and south Florida, where they remain today. And, in modern Oklahoma, the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Creek nations continue to survive in an adopted land, alongside lndian nations whose ancestors came from the Northeast and the Plains.