American History · Chronicle I of X
Turtle Island · Before 1492
Mound-builders, cliff cities, and confederacies before European contact.
Peopling of the AmericasEvent
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.
Whether they came chiefly by land across the Bering land bridge or by boat along the coast is still debated, but by roughly 15,000 years ago people had reached the heart of the continent and, within a few thousand years, its southern tip.
Clovis and Big-Game HuntersCultural
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.
Woodland CulturesCultural
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.
Hopewell ExchangeCultural
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.
Ancestral PuebloansCultural
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.
Mississippian CitiesPolitical
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.
The Mississippian world stretched across the Southeast, its chiefdoms bound by maize agriculture, a shared iconography, and towering earthen pyramids. Cahokia declined by the fifteenth century, its causes still uncertain.
ConfederaciesPolitical
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.
On the Eve of ContactCultural
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.
