1. Toward Convergence: America
and Europe Before 1492
History 3037
History of the United States I: To 1877
J202 Tuesday and Thursday 1500-1615
Professor Donald Bellomy
Office Hours J905 Tuesday and Thursday 1330-1445, 1630-1745
dcbellomy@sogang.ac.kr
March 7, 2013

2. Today’s Lecture
 We will begin by focusing on the
evolution of Indian societies in
North America, most of which
derived from a migration of hunting
tribes with genetic roots in the area
around Mongolia that occurred
when Asia and North America were
linked during the last Ice Age.
 We will then examine the changes
in Indian societies from their origins
in small hunting groups. In
Mesoamerica (central Mexico down
to Panama), extensive agriculture
led to cities and powerful military
and religious castes, just as in
Eurasia. However, while Indian
societies in modern New Mexico and
Arizona partially imitated their
southern neighbors by farming and
building permanent towns,
elsewhere agriculture was less
crucial (e.g., on the Eastern Coast)
or nearly non-existent (the Great
Plains in the center of the
continent, which kept to hunting).
“Indians Fishing,” a watercolor
by John White of Indians at
Roanoke, c. 1585-86

3. Today’s Lecture (Continued)
 We then turn to events in Europe.
The first European incursions into
North America by Scandinavian
seamen had little impact. By 1500,
though, we will find that a
combination of economic, political,
and religious factors converged to
awaken interest in other parts of
the world, especially Asia.
 The desire to reconnect with Asia
stimulated the so-called Age of
Discovery as European ships
reached Africa, Asia, and eventually
the Americas. Portugal remained at
the forefront of oceanic discovery
until the end of the 15th century.
A fanciful portrayal of the arrival of
Christopher Columbus in the “New World”

4. Across the Bering Strait
 José de Acosta (c.1540-1600), a
Spanish missionary to the Indians
around Lake Titicaca between what
are now Peru and Bolivia, wanted to
show that Indians were fully human
and therefore worthy of conversion
to Christianity. This meant
convincing other Christians that
they could be linked to one of the
three sons of Noah. To make that
connection, Acosta was apparently
the first European to hypothesize
that the Indians had come to the
Americas across a land bridge
either to the far north or the far
south.
 Acosta could only hypothesize,
because the site most historians
and anthropologists believe to have
been the migration point of most
Indians – the 55-mile-wide (88 km)
Bering Strait between Siberia and Physical map of modern Siberia, Alaska, the
the Seward Peninsula in Alaska – Aleutian Islands, and the Bering Strait
was only discovered and named in (Source: Geoatlas)
1728 by Vitus Bering, a Danish-
born explorer in the Russian navy.

5. Across the Bering Strait
(Continued)
 Between 28,000 and 14,000 years
ago, the last Ice Age put so much
of the oceans’ water into the polar
ice caps that they spread deep into
Europe, Asia, and North America as
glaciers, and ocean levels fell as
much as 400 feet (122 meters).
This drop created a large land
bridge between Asia and the
Americas at the site of what is now
the Bering Strait; “Beringia,” as this
temporary land mass is called, in
effect made western Alaska part of
Asia, since Canada was completely
glaciated. Some emigrants might
also have used island-hopping
across the Aleutians, which would
then have extended all the way
from southern Alaska to Asia.
 The genetic link between ancient
Beringia (the name given to the Asian peoples and American Indians
exposed land spanning what we now has now been confirmed by DNA
call the Bering Strait) and other evidence, including the
existence of the blue “Mongol spot”
birthmark on some Indian babies.

6. The Issue of Dating
 The only problem was how to
get to the land bridge, and how
to get out of Alaska, if part of
Siberia and all of Canada were
covered with glaciers at the
height of the Ice Age.
 Until the past few years almost
all sources assumed that this
could have happened only
when the glaciers had begun
receding, around 15,000 years
ago, but the sea level was still
low enough that the land bridge
remained intact. However, over
the past decade evidence has
been mounting that at least
some of the ancestors of the
native Americans arrived
earlier.
Coverage of glacial ice sheets at the height of
the last Ice Age, c. 18,000BCE

7. The Issue of Dating
(Continued)
 Much of that evidence comes
from mitochondrial DNA testing.
As a result, many researchers
now believe that some ancestral
stock of Indians came over at
least 30,000 years ago, at the
start of the Ice Age when the
same convergence of low enough
oceans and open enough land
would have existed.
 However, physical and biological
evidence suggests that the great
majority of migrants would have
used the later convergence to
cross over, and it seems likely
that only a small minority of the
original settlers in North America
would have survived the Ice Age
to intermarry with the later
arrivals.
Mammal cell, including mitochondria; the mitochondria, the cell’s energy sources, have DNA and genes that, for
functional and evolutionary reasons, derive (from the female’s egg) and propagate separately from other
genetic material. As a result, investigators can more easily track a direct genetic lineage and estimate
evolutionary divergences through mitochondria as it picks up less genetic static than regular DNA.

8. The Great Migration
 Archaeological finds suggest that
the glaciers kept the ancestral
Indians bottled up in eastern Alaska
for several centuries, but eventually
they broke out, either along the
coast or in the wake of the
retreating glaciers.
 Very similar human encampments
have been found from California to
Florida dating back 12,000-10,000
years, showing the spread of the
later migrants through North
America, then downward to South
America, reaching from Alaska to
Patagonia at the tip of South
America (some 8,000 miles, or
12,900 km) by 9,000 years ago.
 Nor did migration end with the land
bridge. Just as some apparently
arrived earlier, others left Asia after
the Great Migration.
Estimates of the migration paths of
the ancestors of North American
Indians

9. The Great Migration and After
 A group speaking a different
language and, as their DNA seems
to reveal, showing the
characteristics of a more Asiatic
racial stock, may have taken small
boats to Alaska 10,000-8,000 years
ago and reached as far south as the
American Southwest by 1400 AD.
Although some anthropologists and
archaeologists dispute the existence
of a separate, later migration,
almost all scholars agree that these
tribes, now known as Navaho and
Apache, were late arrivals into what
is now the United States.
 And a final group of migrants –
hunters of sea mammals – crossed
from Siberia to Alaska beginning
5,000 years ago, and eventually
spread eastward to Labrador and
Greenland by 2,500 years ago.
These were the Inuit (so-called
“Eskimos”).
Top, Edward Curtis, “A Navaho Boy” (photogravure,
1904); bottom, nine Inuit posing for a photographer in
1913 (Library of Congress Prints and Photographs)

10. The Hunting Years
 People didn’t cross over to Alaska
for sightseeing, but for better
hunting, typically, from the
evidence of early settlement sites,
in small bands of 15-50 people. One
sign of their hunting roots would be
the continuing hold of shamanistic
religion, typical of hunting societies.
 Hunting was easy as the Ice Age
receded, as humans had their pick
of woolly mammoths, mastodons,
horses, camels, and beavers as
large as bears – all these species
would later go extinct in North
America, due both to climate
changes and to over-hunting.
Horses would return to North
America only with the Spaniards –
Indians would have had access to
horses for only about 200-250
years when their horsemanship
became celebrated in 19th-century Researcher examining mammoth bones at early
paintings and written accounts. “Paleo-Indian” site near Colby, Wyoming

11. The Hunting Years (Continued)
 The extinction of large mammals
typically forced a transition to a
hunting-gathering existence, with
the development of weapons to kill
from a distance (not yet bows and
arrows) to bring down smaller,
faster prey like deer and antelope.
 At this point the lives of early
Indians began to diverge in accord
with different climactic and
geographical conditions. On the
upper US west coast, for instance,
rising oceans enticed salmon to
spawn in the rivers, leading local
Indians to a sedentary existence
around the waterways. On the
Great Plains Indians would join to
stampede herds of bison (buffalo)
over cliffs to their deaths.
 Usually changes in living conditions
led to semi-permanent villages and
larger populations, as well as sexual
differentiation in tasks (men would
hunt and fish, while the women
would harvest plants and berries).
So-called “Folsom points,” flint spear heads, used
by paleo-Indians between 9000-8000 BCE, have
been found at many sites across North America

12. The Entry of Agriculture
 Agriculture developed by trial-and-
error from efforts to care for and
increase the yield of wild plants;
the Native American development
of agriculture represents one of
several independent inventions of
farming economies in world history.
 As in the Middle East, agriculture in
the Americas developed where
climate required more effort to
develop and maintain plants, in this
case in the semi-arid plateaus of
central Mexico. By 1500 BCE, they
had developed “Indian corn” –
maize – by crossing the original
plant with wild grasses to create
hybrids with multiple ears per plant,
multiple rows of kernels on a cob,
and husks to protect the kernels.
Soon they were growing the three
crops that became agricultural
staples across much of the
Americas – maize, squashes, and
beans. Centeotl, the maize god of the ancient Aztec
Indians

13. Agriculture and Mesoamerican
Social Development
 As in the Middle East, the emergence
of agriculture then fostered the
development of cities and complex
social arrangements in the area of
Central America from central Mexico
down to Panama known as
Mesoamerica (Middle America).
 For example, archaeologists have
recently traced the development of
religion and class stratification in the
Oaxaca Valley in Mexico. In the
beginning (c. 7000 BCE) the Indians
in the Oaxaca Valley were hunter-
gathers living separately but
congregating occasionally for ritual
dances and cannibalistic feasts.
 The first villages in 1500 BCE show
the introduction of agriculture. In the
villages “men’s houses” had become
the center of religion, possibly
The major Mesoamerican cultural areas revolving around clan ancestry, but
the social structure remained fairly
undifferentiated.

14. Agriculture and Mesoamerican
Social Development
(Continued)
 By 1150 BCE, though, control
had shifted to a hereditary
aristocracy, and “men’s
houses” had become elaborate
temples.
 By 500 BCE, the society had
become a military state, and
religion had become the
exclusive province of a new
special caste of priests,
completely segregated from the
rest of society.
 This pattern seems to have
repeated itself numerous times
in Central and northern South
America by the time that
Europeans first encountered
Indian cultures.
Pyramid of the Mayan Indians of Tikal, eastern
Mexico

15. The Spread of Agriculture
 By 1500 BCE early agriculture had
spread up from Mexico to the
American southwest, where in
imitation of Mexican lifestyles people
lived in “pueblos” (Spanish for
villages), and so came to be called
Pueblo Indians (this is not a tribe or
language, but a mode of living used
by a number of tribes)
 Agriculture was slower to reach
further east, apparently because the
climate was so advantageous that
the commitment to agriculture was
not necessary, but by 900-1100 CE
the “Mound Builders” in the
Mississippi Valley had not only
adopted agriculture but also cities
and pyramids, though with only a
few exceptions, notably the area
around Moundville, Alabama, the
cities and pyramid-like mounds had
The pueblo (“village”) near Taos, New Mexico, in 1891. fallen into disuse by the time
At that point Indians had already been inhabiting this Europeans and local Indians first
pueblo continuously for more than 800 years. encountered one another.

16. The Spread of Agriculture
(Continued)
 By 1200 agriculture had also spread
into the eastern US and as far north
as Canada just above the Great
Lakes. Any further north would not
have allowed the minimum 120
continuous frost-free days that
were a prerequisite for agriculture
as practiced by the Amerindians.
Native American women farming on the east
coast of North America

17. Economic Diversity
 But agriculture never completely
dominated economies and societies
among North American Indians.
There is no natural sequence of
economic and social structures that
societies must follow. Instead, they
will do whatever is easiest to do to
get the maximum result.
 Among Amerindians this meant that
the Indian societies of the eastern
US, while incorporating agriculture,
never committed themselves as
wholeheartedly to farming as the
Mesoamerican Indians – it was
never men’s work, as it was in
Mexico, but was left to the women
while the men hunted.
 In addition, north-south migration
of agricultural innovations is far
more difficult than the east-west
migration of crops, tools, and social
innovations across Asia, Europe,
and northern Africa, due to the
sharper differences in climate.
Obverse (back side) of a 2009 $1 coin showing a
Native American woman planting seeds in a field with
maize (corn), squash, and beans

18. Economic Diversity (Continued)
 Also, perhaps due to the lower
importance of farming as well as
the different crop mix, Indian
societies differed in other ways
from Euro-asian cultures: plows
were unknown in the Americas,
fertility gods and rites were of
minor importance, related
technologies (e.g., wheeled carts)
did not develop, and few animals
were domesticated as beasts of
burden (only llamas in South
America) or food sources (no cattle,
no pigs).
 As a result, even though both East
Coast American Indian and
European cultures had agricultural
bases, they had difficulty
recognizing the utility and validity
of the other group’s approach.
 In the Great Plains, with infrequent Plains Indians hunting bison (buffalo)
rainfall and rivers difficult to use for
irrigation, Indians largely ignored
agriculture and remained hunters,
mostly for bison (buffalo).

19. Economic Diversity (Continued)
 Consequently the popular
image of Indians hunting
buffalo and surrounding white
intruders on horseback really
only fits the Plains Indians –
and even then, only after
European brought horses with
them and Plains Indians
learned how to exploit them.
 From California to the Rockies,
agriculture never took hold,
and Indian societies kept to
hunting and gathering.
 In the American Northwest and
Canadian Southwest as well as
areas bordering on the Great
Lakes, the Gulf of Mexico, and
parts of the US East Coast,
This map actually undercounts the economic diversity economies revolved primarily
of North American Indians, since the mixed hunting- around fishing.
agricultural societies in what is now the eastern United
States would have been very different from the
overwhelmingly agricultural social and economic
structures in the US Southwest and central and western
Mexico

20. And All Other Types of Diversity as
Well
 By 1492 the best “guesstimate” is
that there were some 50 million
Indians across North and South
America, with only 10% of them (5
million) living north of Mexico.
 They spoke at least 375 different
languages, although many were
clearly related (notably the
“Iroquoisian” family of languages).
They practiced a wide variety of
local customs and beliefs, and often
clashed with one another.
 There is some evidence that, just as
the Aztecs dominated Mexico and
the Incas controlled northwestern
South America, a similar cohesion
would have been forced on at least
parts of North America. The
Confederacy of the Iroquois in the
16th century, before Europeans
settled in Northeastern America,
was a step in this direction. But it Depiction of the legendary founding of the Iroquois
never happened, because Confederacy, 16th century
something happened first: the
arrival of Europeans.

21. North American Native Peoples:
The Big Picture

22. Meanwhile, in Europe….
 “Norsemen” or “Vikings” from
Scandinavia, especially Denmark,
raided throughout Europe in the 8th
and 9th centuries, establishing
offshoots as far south as Sicily. They
also pushed west, exploring and
colonizing Iceland and Greenland in
the 10th century. Around 1000, they
reached the far northeastern corners
of North America: Labrador and
Newfoundland in Canada, and may
have gone as far south as New York.
 But it didn’t matter. They were too far
from their base in Greenland, and
provoked hostilities with the local
Indians, whom they called
“Skraelings” (loosely translatable as
“ugly good-for-nothings”). The
settlement was given up after a
generation, recalled only in a few
Norse sagas. No one else knew or
cared, and by 1492 the descendants
of the Vikings had abandoned even
Greenland to the expanding Inuit.
Viking explorations in “Vinland”
(northeastern North America) c. 1000 C.E.

23. The 15th-Century Convergence
 What did eventually matter was the
relatively rapid development of
Western Europe after the era of the
Viking raids, from 1000 on, and the
intersection of economic ambition
and religious fervor in 15th-century
Europe.
 By 1450 it was not yet clear that
Europe would dominate the next
half millennium of world history,
but in retrospect we can see a
newly confident civilization building
up steam, not unlike republican
Rome in 200 BCE or Islam in the 7th
and 8th centuries. Contributing
factors included:
 Merchant-based trade in what
had become for the first time
since the Roman Empire a
continent-wide money
economy, leading to a push for
more trade and more money.
 Significant urbanization as Europe in 1400
towns developed along key
trade routes.

24. The 15th-Century Convergence
 The rise of universities and the
spread of learning, much of it
relearned from the Greeks and
Romans through the medium,
ironically, of Islamic culture.
 A shift in the political center of
gravity toward militarily and
economically powerful nation-
states, in France, Britain, and
Spain.
 A brief lull in the conflict
between Christian and Muslim
states created by the fall of
Baghdad to the Mongols that
allowed the consolidation of
Christianity in Europe.
Moslems were gradually
expelled from their foothold in
Spain.
 At this time Europeans began
Henry Bolingbroke (1366-1413) laying claim to getting a direct (rather than
the throne of England as King Henry IV in 1399, through Middle East intermediaries)
a claim he made good on by defeating Richard II
taste of trade with Asia, because
the Mongols opened easy routes to
in 1400 the East that were pioneered by
Italian merchants like Marco Polo.

25. The 15th-Century Convergence
(Continued)
 The rise of the Ottoman Turks to
replace earlier Turkish groups in the
Middle East accelerated the decline
of the Mongol-dominated khanate in
Baghdad. The shift in the balance of
power in western Asia then required
new responses in Europe.
 First, Turkish military
successes closed the easy
trade routes to Eastern Asia.
 Second, as the Ottoman Turks
finished mopping up the
remnants of the Christian
Byzantine Empire and began
moving toward Vienna, they
represented a new Islamic
thrust when memories of a
Christian presence in the Holy
Land after the First Crusade
were still fresh.
 Europeans reacted to these Empire of the Ottoman Turks in 1521
developments out of a mixture of
motives, part religious, part
economic.

26. The 15th-Century Convergence
(Continued)
 Almost all European seafaring
activities in the 15th and 16th
centuries during what would be
called the “Age of Discovery,” which
would initiate the European
presence in Asia, including the early
Spanish, Portuguese, and Dutch
colonies, as well as the first
contacts with the American
continents, derived from this blend
of motives, sometimes favoring the
religious side of the equation,
sometimes the economic.
The Cantino World Map, copied in 1502 from a
Portuguese source that summarized what was
known from the early decades of the Age of
Discovery: a lot about Africa, some about India
and southern Asia, little about East Asia, and,
for the Americas, only pockets of disconnected
information about Columbus’s voyages to the
Caribbean and recent Portuguese explorations
of Greenland and Newfoundland to the north
and Brazil to the south

27. Beginning of the Age of Discovery
 Typical of the mixed religious and
economic motivations for sea-based
exploration, though more to the
religious side, was Henry the
Navigator of Portugal, in many
respects a pre-modern figure who
“lived like a monk and died a
virgin.” Henry of Portugal
nevertheless helped usher in
European modernity and its
worldwide expansion, even though
his goal was to re-ignite the
Crusades . He wanted to link with
the mythical figure of Prester John
somewhere in Africa or India to
launch a two-pronged attack to
recover the Holy Land from the
Ottoman Turks.
 He put his faith in ocean routes to
get there. He had access to crews
of experienced Portuguese sailors
and fishermen, and sponsored the
redesign of caravels – local boats –
into the first European ships
capable of sustained ocean
voyages.
Statue of Henry the Navigator (1394-
1460), New Bedford, Massachusetts

28. The African Years
 Henry secured bases in the island
groups off the African coast and out
in the Atlantic (Madeira, Canaries,
the Azores). As Portuguese ships
pushed down the African coast, the
first expedition bearing a cargo of
black slaves returned to Portugal in
1441.
 The new island possessions in the
Atlantic and the start of the slave
trade almost immediately created a
new economic institution: the slave
plantation organized to grow a
single commercially attractive crop,
initially sugar (by the late 15th
century Madeira was the sugar
capital of the world). This economic
institution would soon be imitated
by the Spanish, French, and British
The Azores and Madeira islands shown in in the Americas.
relation to Portugal and the northwestern coast  After reaching the point where the
of Africa
north African hump pulls back
eastward, a temporary lull in
exploration occurred after Henry’s
death in 1460.

29. The African Years (Continued)
 However, activity gradually picked
up again due to profits from the
new slave trade – a hope that
sailing east would allow ships to
round Africa and gain entry to India
– the fact that (despite widespread
fears) all Europeans didn’t suddenly
die after crossing the Equator – and
Portugal’s growing rivalry with
Spain, which was beginning to show
some interest in competing with its
neighbor in the Iberian peninsula.
 There were even continuing hopes
of linking with Prester John as some
natives were released at each
landing to an attempt to reach him.
Portuguese expansion into Africa, early 15th
century

30. The Asian Years
 A new phase opened in 1488, when
Bartolomeu Dias rounded the
South African coast and could
report back that the way was now
clear to reach India by sea. On his
way back he named what would
become the most famous of the
southern points of South Africa the
Cape of Storms; the king of
Portugal at the time rejected the
proposal as too pessimistic and
renamed it the Cape of Good Hope,
meaning the “good hope” both of
reaching Prester John and of getting
rich by trading with India.
 After other Portuguese navigators
began to explore the eastern coast
of Africa, in 1498 Vasco da Gama,
sailing on behalf of the Portuguese,
reached a site near the southern
Indian city of Calicut, and initiated
the European presence in Asia.
Later (1838) representation of Vasco da Gama (c.1469-1524) by
Antonio Manuel de Fonseca (1796-1890), now in the Greenwich
Hospital Collection of the National Maritime Museum, London

31. The Asian Years (Continued)
 Eventually the Portuguese would
claim various cities in India and
most of the East Indies, the spice
islands comprising what is now
Indonesia. They would lose most of
their Asian possessions, usually to
the Dutch, and would find other
competitors, including the Spanish
who claimed the Philippines, but
their overall success was stunning
for a country so small – Portuguese
is still, depending on who’s
counting, either the 7th or 8th most
spoken language in the world.
The principal Portuguese settlements in east
Africa and southern Asia by the early 1600s

32. Spain Enters the Picture
 Even as the Pope awarded Portugal
with trade monopolies and conversion
rights in the lands it was reaching, its
major European competitor and next-
door neighbor was picking up speed.
 Spain was completing a seven-
century-long reconquest of its part of
the Iberian peninsula from the
“Moors” (i.e., Islamic invaders from
North Africa); the piecemeal
reconquest meant that different
kingdoms had been set up at different
times.
 The marriage of Ferdinand of Aragon
and Isabella of Castile in 1479 was
engineered so that each could be
monarch of the other kingdom,
establishing (for all intents and
purposes) Spain as we know it. In
January 1492, Ferdinand and Isabella
entered Granada on the southern
coast, the last outpost of Moslem
control in Spain. All of Spain was now
under Christian rule.
Ferdinand and Isabella entering
Granada, 1492, from a relief
sculpture