America (for individual work)
America
People in the highlands of Mexico had corn (sometimes called maize), beans, peppers, tomatoes, and squash as their staple foods.
Nowhere is there now firm evidence of thoroughgoing domestication before about 5500 BP. This is the date of the earliest sample of domesticated maize found so far, from the Tehuacán Valley of Mesoamerica, southeast of modern Mexico City. Maize is descended from a wild species known as teosinte; together with beans and varieties of squash, it was to become the most important of all American plant domesticates. They also cultivated peanuts and cotton. The only animals that could be domesticated were dogs and turkeys.
South America was the only region of the Americas in which animal domesticates played a significant role. Here, guinea pigs, llamas, and alpacas were domesticated at least by ca. 4000 BP, at about the same time as quinoa and potatoes. Animal domesticates were less important in the Americas, because the most promising potential domesticates, including horses and camels, had become extinct there at the end of the last ice age, probably because of human overpredation. Indeed, it is possible that the long gap in American prehistory before early forms of domestication and settled agriculture can be explained in part by the small number of potential animal domesticates that survived the first wave of human migrations to the region.
The founding culture of Mesoamerica appeared along the southwestern curve of the Gulf of Mexico, near the present-day city of Veracruz. This culture emerged in a series of river valleys. Called the Olmecs (the “rubber people”), this culture lasted from about 1400 BCE to 100 BCE. It produced nearly imperishable art, notably large carved heads of volcanic rock, the largest weighing some 20 tons and standing about 10 feet tall. Monumental sculptures or tombs are typically indicative of a civilization with powerful leaders, but this culture probably ranks more as a chiefdom than as a state with extensive coercive power. The last Olmec site, Tres Zapotes, declined by about 100 BCE for unknown reasons. Was it volcanic eruptions? A shift in the flow of rivers? Scholars believe that the Olmecs may have deliberately destroyed their capital. Was there civil unrest? Class strife? No one knows.
Nowhere else in the Americas did civilization, as we have defined it, emerge. Many wonderful cultures and chiefdoms arose, but none achieved the surplus of food necessary for highly dense populations. The cultivation of tobacco and corn spread widely. Even the basin of the Amazon River may have been more densely populated than previously suspected. People farmed, but everywhere they needed to supplement their agriculture with hunting and gathering.
The Americas did not develop many of the technological innovations present in Afro-Eurasia. For example, Americans did not use wheels, probably because they had no large domestic animals to pull wheeled devices.
How much long-distance trade and travel occurred in the Americas? Not much. The Americas stretched north and south, with huge changes in climate. Crops could not be carried or exchanged because they would not grow at different latitudes without time to adapt. Americans built large canoes but not sailing vessels, and they stayed close to the shore and in calm waters. They made north-south connections, but these were not much frequent.
Questions for expert groups
1. What factors influenced the appearance of the first agrarian civilization in the region?
2. What plants and animals were domesticated? When and why did the domestications happen?
3. What were the main problems of the early agrarian civilizations in the region?
Questions for the mixed groups
1. Put the agrarian civilization in the sequence of their appearance.
1 agrarian civilization (the time of appearance; domesticated plants and animals) à 2 agrarian civilization (the time of appearance; domesticated plants and animals) à 3 agrarian civilization (the time of appearance; domesticated plants and animals) à 4 agrarian civilization (the time of appearance; domesticated plants and animals)
2. Find the differences between the agrarian civilizations.
3. Find the similarities between the agrarian civilizations.
4. Conclusive questions: what factors played the major role in the development of the agrarian civilizations? Which of them were more important and less important for the development of agriculture?