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Some of the Inuit of today live very much the way their ancestors did. For
food, clothing, weapons, tools, and fuel, they rely on the fish they catch and the
caribou, seals, whales, and walruses they hunt. In winter, the Inuit live in houses
made of sod, wood, and stone, and in summer, they use tents made of animal
skins. Igloos, shelters made of blocks of snow, are used only when the Inuit go on
hunts and then only rarely.
Kayaks and dog sleds are their means of transportation. Much of the Inuit religion revolves around the sea and animals. The Inuit are noted for their carvings in
soapstone, ivory, and bone, which often use characters from their religious lore.
Anasazi (Pueblo Builders and Cliff Dwellers)
By about 2,000 years ago, the Anasazi had settled in what is known today as
the four corners area of the Southwest, that is, where Arizona, New Mexico,
Colorado, and Utah meet. Originally hunters and gatherers, the Anasazi turned to
farming by around 1000 CE. Their crops were primarily maize (corn), beans, and
squash.
The first houses of the Anasazi were pithouses constructed below ground. By
1100 CE, however, the Anasazi were building cliff dwellings, multistoried stone
apartment buildings with many rooms, set into mountainsides. By the late 1200s,
for unknown reasons, the Anasazi began to abandon their cliff dwellings. Possible
reasons include drought, disease, pressure from invading groups like the Apache,
and internal dissension among villagers. Archaeologists have found no proof of
any of these.
By the mid-1500s, when the Spanish arrived in the Southwest, there was no
trace of the cliff dwellers. In their place were descendants who lived in villages of
adobe houses. These houses were built with a type of sun-dried brick made from
clay. Both the clay and the bricks themselves are called adobe. The Spanish called
these houses pueblos, and applied the name to the villagers as well; hence, the
Acoma, Zuni, and Hopi became known as the Pueblo Indians.
Mound Builders
There are three different cultures that prospered at three different times that
are classified as Mound Builders: the Adena (1000 BCE–200 CE), the Hopewell
(100 BCE–700 CE), and Mississippian (500 CE–1600 CE). There are thousands of
their mounds throughout the eastern part of the United States. The mounds are
just that—huge, high domes of dirt or long, narrow mounds of dirt, like ribbons,
that wind across the landscape in twists and turns. Building such huge
structures required thousands of workers and some form of government to organize and direct them.
The Adena culture developed in the Ohio River Valley and spread through
what are now the states of Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia, and Kentucky. The
Adenans may have been farmers, or they may simply have harvested wild grains.
Much of what we know of the Adenans is based on archaeological analysis of their
mounds. Archaeologists speculate that the mounds were built as graves and also
as sites for religious observances. There are no traces of the Adenans after about
200 CE, and archaeologists do not know what happened to them.
Hopewell Mound ceremonial site
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I. The Earliest Americans
The Hopewell culture also developed in the Ohio River Valley and spread
from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico and west to the Mississippi River. In
the east, the culture penetrated as far as the western slopes of the Appalachians.
The largest mound that has been found is 40 feet high and 100 feet in diameter.
The Hopewellians were hunters and fishers as well as farmers, raising corn, beans,
and squash. Some of the people were also traders; Hopewellian trade goods have
been found in distant parts of the continent, and trade goods from as far away as
the Rockies have been found among Hopewellian artifacts. Archaeologists speculate that the Hopewellian trade network stretched from the Rockies to the
Atlantic, and from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico. The Hopewell culture
began to decline sometime between 500 CE and 700 CE.
The Mississippian culture did not penetrate quite as far north, west, or east
as the Hopewell Mound Builders, but it was a more complex society. In addition
to burial mounds, the Mississippians built city-states surrounded by villages and
farms. Each city included temple mounds, homes, workshops, and marketplaces.
While the northern city-states died out sometime in the 1500s, the southern centers were still functioning in the 1600s when the French and Spanish explored the
Gulf coast area. European diseases decimated the population of these people. The
Cherokee and Choctaw are two cultures that are descended from the last Mound
Builders.
B. Native Americans
Background
Teaching Idea
Different Native American groups lived
in different types of homes. Using
Instructional Master 27, Native
American Homes, familiarize students
with the types of homes associated
with the Southwest, Eastern
Woodlands, and Southeast culture
regions. As a homework extension of
this activity, you could ask students to
make a model of one type of home with
their caregivers and then bring it in to
show the class.
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Grade 3 Handbook
Scholars differ on how to group culture regions. Recent research has
resulted in the difference between the Sequence grouping of Native American
cultures and how they are presented here.
Most anthropologists have classified Native American peoples into culture
regions in order to study and understand them, in the same way that anthropologists study members of other ethnic groups, such as the Serbs in the former
Yugoslavia or the Zulu people in the Republic of South Africa. A culture region
is a geographic area in which different groups have adapted to their physical
surroundings in similar ways. However, even within culture regions, groups still
retain certain individualized characteristics. The following profiles attempt to
describe the characteristics of both a culture region and of specific peoples within those regions. The Southwest, Eastern Woodlands, and Southeast culture
groups are featured because they were the areas of first encounters between
Europeans and Native Americans. In teaching about these peoples, point out
that, for the most part, these groups are present in American life today.
Southwest
The native peoples of the Southwest lived in what are today Arizona, western
New Mexico, and parts of Utah, Colorado, and Texas. The area has a very dry climate with little rainfall. There are a variety of physical environments: plateaus,
mountains, valleys, and desert. Where irrigation was possible, Native Americans
raised squash, corn, beans, cotton, tobacco, and gourds. Where annual precipitation was inadequate for farming, the people were hunters and gatherers. Those