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Mound-builders, cliff cities, and confederacies before European contact.

Use the timeline below to navigate through major events and milestones.

Pre-Columbian North America · Before 1492
Turtle Island · Before 1492

Pre-Columbian North America

From the first peoples who crossed into a continent shaped by the Ice Age, through the mound-building cultures of the Mississippi, the cliff cities of the Ancestral Puebloans, and the great confederacies of the Northeast, to a land of many nations on the eve of European contact. Slide across the millennia to explore the deep history of Indigenous North America.

15000 BC
Peopling of the Americas
1 / 8

First peoples enter North America

Bands of hunter-gatherers cross from Siberia into Alaska, spreading south along the Pacific coast and through an ice-free corridor as the last glaciers retreat.

15000 BC

Peopling of the Americas
  • Event

    First peoples enter North America

    Bands of hunter-gatherers cross from Siberia into Alaska, spreading south along the Pacific coast and through an ice-free corridor as the last glaciers retreat.

8 milestones
Full Chronicle

Pre-Columbian North America

From the first peoples who crossed into a continent shaped by the Ice Age, through the mound-building cultures of the Mississippi, the cliff cities of the Ancestral Puebloans, and the great confederacies of the Northeast, to a land of many nations on the eve of European contact. Slide across the millennia to explore the deep history of Indigenous North America.

  1. Peopling of the Americas

    • First peoples enter North America

      Bands of hunter-gatherers cross from Siberia into Alaska, spreading south along the Pacific coast and through an ice-free corridor as the last glaciers retreat.

  2. Clovis and Big-Game Hunters

    • Clovis culture and the great hunters

      Toolmakers craft distinctive fluted Clovis spear points to hunt mammoth, mastodon, and bison across the grasslands of a continent still shaped by the Ice Age.

  3. Woodland Cultures

    • Farming and the first mounds

      Across the eastern woodlands peoples begin cultivating squash, sunflower, and eventually maize, and raise earthen burial mounds that mark a settling, ceremonial way of life.

  4. Hopewell Exchange

    • The Hopewell trading networks

      Ohio Valley societies build vast geometric earthworks and trade obsidian, copper, and seashells across half the continent, linking distant peoples in a shared ceremonial world.

  5. Ancestral Puebloans

    • Cliff cities of the Southwest

      In the arid Four Corners the Ancestral Puebloans build multi-storied stone towns at Chaco Canyon and later cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde, mastering dryland farming and astronomy.

  6. Mississippian Cities

    • Cahokia, the great city on the Mississippi

      Near modern St. Louis, Cahokia grows into the largest city north of Mexico, home to perhaps twenty thousand people around vast platform mounds and a central plaza.

  7. Confederacies

    • The Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) Confederacy

      Five nations — Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca — bind themselves under the Great Law of Peace, forming a durable confederacy that will shape the politics of the Northeast.

  8. On the Eve of Contact

    • A continent of many nations

      On the eve of European arrival, millions of people speaking hundreds of languages live across North America — farmers, fishers, hunters, and city-builders whose worlds are about to be transformed.