The Untold Story Of The Americas Before Columbus | 1491: Full Series | Timeline

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hit Network we are the First People of the Americas we have been here from the beginning our ancestors sailed by the wind and starved Crossing vast oceans and mountain ranges in search of new lands for thousands of years our ancestors They became astronomers and architects philosophers scientists artists and inventors we created distinct societies and built vast trading systems that covered two continents in 1492 our world changed forever but we did not disappear today the languages ​​and teachings of our ancestors remain and these are the Stories not told about America before Columbus, when did the first people arrive in America?

Indigenous creation stories tell how our ancestors emerged as humans from the earth, water, sky and earth beneath. Some people believe we entered America on foot across an ancient land bridge that once connected Asia and North America, others say we paddled here in canoes along the Pacific coast. There is one thing that all of these visions of arrival have in common. They all begin with a journey in

1491

. Tens of millions of indigenous people lived in In every part of America, from the high Arctic to the southern tip of South America, there were countless indigenous nations, each with its own language and way of life, but this did not happen overnight;

It took thousands of years to build this diverse world from a very small founding population. Since 1492 we have shared our traditional territory with people from all over the world. Today we continue our search for the origins of our ancestors and the roots of our cultural identity as foreign indigenous peoples we have two different types of dates we have the archaeological date that says that probably between 18 and 20,000 years ago the first non-native human arrived in this hemisphere in terms of indigenous perspectives we saw that we have always been here philosophically we have never been in Nowhere else does each indigenous nation have its own creation

story

.

The stories have been passed down from generation to generation for thousands of years. Creation stories form a powerful part of every nation's identity and our sense of who we are as a people. Initially there was a big flood a few years ago. Animals and birds survived by clinging to a log, among them was the small muskrat. The creatures decided they needed to find land, but the world was covered in water. One by one, they took turns diving deep into the water in search of some dirt to bring back to the surface but each animal returned empty-handed.

Finally the little muskrat dove under the water when he returned he had a paw

full

of dirt. and placed it on the back of a turtle's shell. This is how North America became known as Turtle Island in the In the beginning there was only the sea and the sky the gods created the earth and populated it with animals and birds but the animals could not worship them so they decided to make humans the first humans were made of clay but they crumbled too easily then the gods made humans out of wood but they had nothing in mind so they destroyed them in a flood finally the gods made humans out of corn dough they had intelligence and knowledge and they could worship the gods so They became the first people in the beginning people lived in the sky and the only creatures they knew were birds.

A young hunter set out one day to look for a rare and beautiful bird, when he finally found it, he shot his arrow and when he went to retrieve it he discovered a hole at the bottom of the sky. Through it he saw forests, rivers and wild animals. He asked the other hunters to travel to this world with him, but they refused, so he made a rope, lowered it through the hole and went down to the world below, shot a deer and brought it back. to the sky world, but the others also wanted to hunt deer, so they went down the rope.

The last person to pass through the hole in the sky was a woman. She got stuck preventing people from returning to her house. She can still be seen in the sky. Like the Morning Star, historians have long supported the theory that our ancestors walked to America across an ancient land bridge connecting Asia and North America during the last ice age until about thirteen thousand years ago. Great ice sheets kilometers thick covered much of the north. sections of North America, Europe and Asia, but there were some ice-free regions in the northern hemisphere where people lived. One of these regions was known as boreia.

This thousand-kilometer stretch of land that connects the two continents arose when glaciers locked up large amounts of water, causing sea levels to fall by more than 100 meters. Evidence is seen that people crossed a land bridge. Evidence that a land bridge existed in the past is seen in the northern parts of North America, Alaska, the Yukon, even in northern British Columbia, we have a collection of a few. one of the oldest sites on the entire continent and of course that would be in an area that archaeologists refer to as baringia and you know, those people who managed to cross the land bridge all they had was their wits and some stone tools and yet they managed to explore, discover and colonize two continents, so it is a pretty amazing achievement in the annals of human history and they did it by being very aware of their surroundings and able to manipulate their environment to For its own benefit, the water between the two continents falls so that Bajo exposed the seabed, this arid, prairie-like landscape remained ice-free, and the abundant birds and mammals provided the people with food and materials for clothing and take refuge, but the Bordia was a temporary landscape.

About twenty thousand years ago, the world's climate began to change. warm and the glacier began to melt fifteen thousand years ago the rising sea level had covered the Beringian land bridge and the people who lived there had to return to Siberia or stay in North America the melting of the glaciers and the rise of the sea ​​level created major environmental changes in the In the Northern Hemisphere, the land between the two North American ice sheets widened about 12,000 years ago, providing an ice-free corridor for people to travel. Historically, in archeology it was believed that the southern expansion of the continent occurred between Lauren Hyde and Cordiller ice sheets and this is known as the ice-free corridor hypothesis and many researchers say that this was the gateway to the Americas.

Taking this route south through such harsh terrain would have involved tremendous risk if they had people in Alaska. and they see this opening between two sheets of ice, they're taking a big leap of faith to say, "Well, maybe we'll go a thousand miles south of here and find better land." The ice burner would have been a very dynamic landscape. terrible winters like harsh and cold winters and not much better in the summer, the summers would have been cold and rainy so there wasn't much opportunity for people to find stable lands that they could colonize. The end of the last ice age marked the beginning. stage for the movement of people overland to North America, the indigenous people who traveled to the continent on foot from Beringia could not have known it at the time, but they were not the first to settle south of the ice sheets, in fact, Humans had already been living in North and South America for thousands of years before the glaciers melted and opened up.

Southern Roots through the Ice-Free Corridor Glaciers covered much of the Northern Hemisphere until about 12,000 years ago, temperatures warmed around the world, ice melted and sea levels began to rise. These changes in the environment led to the migration of animals, birds and humans across North America, Asia and Europe. Tens of thousands of years ago the climates and parts of the Asian subcontinent were much wetter than they are today in India. The Tsar Desert was once a vast fertile grassland. Hunters who followed the herds eventually settled permanently in the region as the glaciers receded, the warm climate creating new agricultural areas in the northern hemisphere.

Early farmers cultivated new food resources in the fertile soils of the Middle East and this led to the formation of agricultural settlements and eventually. Cities during the last ice age sea levels were 100 meters lower than today and this created a thousand-kilometer-wide land bridge that appeared between Siberia and Alaska. It became one of the migratory routes that humans took to the Americas. Changes in climate over the millennia. has influenced the migratory routes and hunting practices of humans around the world. When they began to carry out their studies in what would be the ice-free corridor, the observation they made was that the sites became younger as they advanced. towards the north, which is contradictory.

I would expect the oldest sites to be in the north and might be progressively younger in the south, so it seemed like people were moving north rather than south. This has always been very paradoxical and the only way to explain it is that there were people. They already live south of the ice sheets and where did those people come from. The recent discovery of an ancient village and camps in the Americas that are more than 14,000 years old supports a new theory that people first arrived by boat along the North Pacific coast. and South America in the 70's researchers proposed an alternative hypothesis to say that the coastal route was also viable and this sparked a huge debate in archeology that it had to be one or the other which was now we are coming to an understanding that it was probably both. happened, however, archaeologists lean more towards the coastal route, since the previous alternative, any journey along the Pacific coast during the Ice Age would have been treacherous.

Note that the west coast at that time would have been choked by icebergs and many others. of ice flows, so for people to travel that way they would certainly require some good ocean navigation skills and that's not out of the question because we know from the archaeological record in East Asia that as far back as 40,000 years people were able to make trips on the open sea when people make trips like this, their destination is usually unknown to them. We may never know what compelled the indigenous people to embark on this treacherous sea journey. What is the history of humanity in North America?

We have signs that humans were here. They were producing culture, they were burying their dead, they were becoming part of the landscape, they were taking possession of the landscape in their own way. Once they reached land, these sailors would have found themselves in a strange and alien world

full

of danger and promise. unknown. When people travel to unknown countries, they really have to rely on the skills they bring with them, so if they know how to live off the land and what seafood they can consume, this will give them a better than average chance of surviving in any given country. situation. new country or a new terrain in which they are beginning to settle abroad the idea of ​​where we come from is extremely important it gives us that sense of place it tells us the places to which we are linked as a people and individuals it is the part of the landscape that continues residing in our bones in our blood but particularly in our minds it is not known how many indigenous peoples came to the Americas by water but the evidence suggests that this was not an isolated event archeology continues to find more and more localities that Add pieces to the puzzle when the Looking at them all in a very broad picture gives us that deeply complex story about the first people to arrive in North America.

You know they are so foreign, foreign, foreign, whether our ancestors came overland from Bordia. or by water along the Pacific coast soon people began to live in all corners of America. Native Americans were at the southern tip of South America more than 14,000 years ago, so the hypothesis is that they took a coastal route simply because traveling over land would have been very difficult at the time, we have a much greater understanding of the fluctuation in sea levels, so it is easier for us to locate those older sites along the coast that extends to California and of course to places like Monteverdi and South America Monteverde is an ancient site of village located in Chile about 50 kilometers inland from the Pacific coast that was occupied at least 14,800 years ago.

The village was discovered in the 1970s beneath a stream and was largely preserved within the humid environment. The village consisted of 12 small huts that would have supported about 20 or 30people. The huts were made of wood, animal skin and woven ropes. There were two large homes and several smaller ones in the village. The people of Monteverde gathered plants in the mountain grasslands and in the southern coastal regions. Chile suggests that they traveled widely to collect food and building materials along with mammoth and llama remains. Ten types of algae and crab and crab shells were found at the site.

The marine-based diet of those who lived in Monteverde points to people who adapted well to a marine lifestyle over thousands of years, doing things like experimenting with new ways of life or trial and error on new types. of food, all of this accumulates over many generations and gives us what they call traditional knowledge. Since they first arrived in the Americas, indigenous people have hunted wild animals to obtain food, tools and clothing for shelter, the type of tools used by these ancient hunters are often used to define their cultures, one of the most important discoveries of ancient stone tools in the Americas.

It was made in Clovis, New Mexico, in the early 20th century. The different way of making these spearheads led to the first Clovis theory, which suggested that the first people of America arrived shortly after the glaciers melted and used the same tool technology when we look at the history of archeology as discipline at the beginning, say at the beginning of the 20th century, scholars believed at the time that North America had only been inhabited by indigenous peoples for two or three thousand years, however, this changed course with the Folsom Points findings. and Clovis in association with what we call megafauna or giant mammals and Ice Age creatures that walk the land along with the indigenous people, the discovery of mammoth bones along with stone tools at the Clovis site revealed that the indigenous They were hunting magafana. with spearhead technology about 13,000 years ago Clovis was the place where the first stone tools were found, so after that it became the general term for fluted spearhead technology.

Overseas, this lethal tool was sharp enough to penetrate the thick hides of big game animals such as bison and mammoth Clovis points were made from jasper, flint, obsidian and other brittle stones and were eventually discovered throughout the Americas. North, the Clovis tool complex spread throughout North America very quickly, so it has always given the impression that people are moving and occupying new lands and There is a lot of variety in North America, geographical variations and during For many decades it was believed that the Clovis culture was the first and only culture in all of North America; however, more recently, in the last 10 to 20 years, the first Clovis model.

It's pretty much been thrown out the window because we have ample evidence throughout North America, from Mesoamerica to South America, of sites that predate the Clovis period and this data and these sites are really interesting and push the boundaries of what we know. about that distant time. Think of Clovis as an idea and that there was already a pre-existing population that was receptive to this new invention, so when the new invention came about, it was the idea that spread to a pre-existing population, even though stone tools were widely used . In America for thousands of years tools made from animal bones were also used for hunting and fishing, before people had Clovis points they actually used bone technology and bone tools were just as deadly as stone tools.

Now there are starting to be a whole

series

of sites that have been discovered and one of the discoveries was actually made very early at the Mana Hill site in Washington State there was a bone tool that was embedded in the vertebrae of Macedon and was actually made from the bone of another mastodon from which he was able to obtain a radiocarbonate of the tools element, but he was also able to obtain a radiocarbonate for the slaughter that was embedded in the remains found at the site of the Manus slaughter that They date back 13,800 years, a full millennium, before the glaciers melted enough to open the ice. -Free runner to the north: A hunter probably took down a mammoth once in his life and talked about it for the rest of his life as the glaciers receded and the lands opened up allowing migration across North America.

Hunting techniques changed depending on the terrain and its prey. There is certainly a long history of hunting as a way of life and it dates back to the ice age when humans first appeared on the scene and of course as people became moved to the more northern regions, they began to encounter animals such as reindeer and caribou. and these are grazing animals, so they began to hunt them communally. The Clovis tools were very deadly and anything they hit would have been injured, but of course you would have to be very close to that animal and lead them into natural traps and they are monsters. in natural traps and then you can use your sharp spears to kill them were the first materials used by humans to make tools for hunting.

Some of the first tools discovered date back more than two million years, twenty thousand years ago, to nomadic hunters. Foragers living in the Kibara Caves region of Israel developed Khabaran tool technology using flint to make spear and arrowheads. The healthy tool industry emerged in Western Europe about 19,000 years ago. The people of this region made tools by extracting small flakes from flint. Core hunters also used heat to make flaking more precise. One of the first stone tool technologies in North America was the Clovis point, named after the site in New Mexico where spear points were first discovered.

The people who created these tools hunted a wide range of composite fauna including mammoths around the world, the different styles of tools that people developed determined the type and size of game they hunted when our ancestors settled the two continents creating hundreds of nations, languages ​​evolved and diversified and through these languages ​​they became socially and culturally stronger. identities The Western Hemisphere is the most linguistically diverse region in the world. It is estimated that in

1491

up to 2,000 different languages ​​were spoken in America. Each of these languages ​​is part of a language family connected by common words, grammar and diction.

Languages ​​are more than a means of communication for ancient societies, they contain their cultural, historical and traditional knowledge of a nation. Many of the languages ​​spoken before 1491 are still used today in South America. Mayan in Mesoamerica. English people in North America are in the Arctic. Mesoamerican cultures such as the Mayan and Aztec had a complex writing system, but most indigenous languages ​​were based on an oral tradition. The tongue leaves no marks on the earth. Language is not something we can point to in the world, it is something we can. made by people and especially without writing, all you have are people as evidence, in North America there is a very complex web of different language families that have interbred with each other and there are probably about 30 families in North America, there are probably others 30 or more families in In Central America and perhaps even 100 families in South America, the original work in comparative linguistics was reconstructing languages ​​that had written long histories like English and Romance languages ​​like French and Italian, so From the beginning it was believed that no, you simply could not do that in a language that did not have a written history, the first anthropological linguists in North America demonstrated that you could reconstruct these languages ​​and, often, you could materially demonstrate that the language here was actually a close relative of a language that was quite separate from it. by several others they applied these methods that had been developed in Europe and showed that they could be used for unwritten languages ​​and that opened the door for people to work on Native American languages ​​and find out where they came from, which is always the case.

You know, the question that presses a lot of people when they study us, they also found sometimes that the indigenous people themselves would tell you, well, our language is actually related to those guys over there. I mean, you can ask and you'll find out, well, yeah, we. share a bunch of words and comment and go talk to them, you will realize and even though they can't really communicate in each person's language, they still find a lot of words that are similar indigenous languages ​​and carry deep cultural knowledge and traditional, but tracing their histories is a challenge for linguistic researchers, although we have reconstructions of internally and externally reconstructed language families, we can show that they are related, but we cannot go back any further and that is because, unlike the biology, language does not have a constant rhythm. of change changes in fits and starts with long periods of little change sudden and dramatic reconstructions of how language works is not something we can reliably predict we can show that a language is internally related but we can't tell you how long the connections are and we depend almost for complete archeology to give us some kind of calibration of our estimates.

Oral entomology is both fluid and fragile, and of the thousands of indigenous languages ​​that existed in the Americas in 1491, hundreds have been lost forever. When all these languages ​​came here, as far as linguistics can tell, they were simply here, archaeological sites everywhere in the world tell the story of ancient people and the cultures and civilizations they created over thousands of years. Eric is one of the first major cities in the world to feature monumental stone buildings. It was built at the center of a rapid trading network in the Middle East five thousand years ago. Egypt was divided into upper and lower regions.

A pharaoh named Armor created a unified Kingdom and there are sites everywhere. Egypt, which represents the artistic achievements of this era, thank you. Cahokia was the largest urban center in North America a thousand years ago and was part of an elaborate intertribal trade network that connected people as far away as the Gulf of Mexico and the Great Lakes. The archaeological record in all parts of the world continues to inform us about the achievements and ways of life of our ancestors, the indigenous peoples settled in all regions of the Western Hemisphere, from the high Arctic to the Caribbean islands and the southern tip of South America.

South, according to historians. that in 1491 the population of the Americas may have reached one hundred million people. Population growth in societies around the world can be traced back to the advent of agriculture, when people began growing annual crops. The need to travel to find food decreased. Villages became cities. and towns into cities with farmers providing a constant supply of food, the impact over thousands of years was significant population growth in the Americas throughout the Americas civilizations rose and fell like an oscillating frontier through time , some of them had great periods of development Innovation their technologies were among the most incredible their populations were significant and then they collapsed archaeologically we are looking at a Pelham enthusiasm in other words we are looking at layers and pieces and fragments it is like looking at a wall of graffiti and seeing one layer on top of another on top of another on top of another and when an archaeologist excavates, he may be digging through 10 different layers or he may be recovering the relics of perhaps 10 civilizations.

An example of a significant population increase was the Aztec city-state of Tenochitlán. Founded in 1325 on an artificial island where Mexico City is now located, it was the capital of the Aztec empire, the city had a complex social stratum that included military members of the working class, priests and the elites, it was a vibrant city with a The bustling market at its peak Tenorchitlán was home to more than 250,000 people and was the center of an empire with a population of between two and three million in 1491 Tenochitlán was the largest city in the Americas, the question then is: What about North America, the Mississippi?

The Cahokia side was a center that supported significant populations in the tens of thousands. Cahokia was arguably the largest and most influential urban center in North America before 1491 at its peak about 800 years ago. Cahokia had a population of forty thousand or more. The strategic location of the city. where the Mississippi, Missouri and Illinois rivers meet made it a natural gateway for intertribal trade, butOver time, like the major cities of Mesoamerica, Cahokia also disappeared, we have factors like drought, we have war, we have invasion and conquest, all of these things influence the variable landscape of demographics and population in the Americas.

Indigenous archaeologists are much more adept at thinking about the who of the past and the why of the past than just the what of material culture - it's not just a piece of pottery that happened here without humans being involved in transporting it, breaking it down and moving it around. place to place and I think that's what motivates a lot of good archaeologists to recognize that we're not in it for the artifacts, but for the stories that the artifacts can promise one of the most important things about being an indigenous person involved in archeology. It is knowing the importance of history, the importance of the individual and knowing how all this fits into who we are today.

There are so many tribal peoples involved in trying to relate the history of individual tribes to individual places in the past it has been perceived that it is the role of the expert to tell what the history of a place is and it has often been based on someone else's stories, some written reports and things like that, it is now extremely important that indigenous groups have the authenticity, the authority and the right to present history as they know it. There are so many indigenous people who are getting advanced degrees that are being recognized as Authority and now they can take that and tell the stories that their communities want them to tell so that people outside the community can really understand what happened before.

It has led to many important discoveries about migration and the ways of life of ancient people around the world. Foreign Egyptians believed that the soul remained with the human body afterwards. a person died the egyptian rulers and their families were buried in tombs with golden tools, food and animals to help them on their journey to the afterlife the cave counts in israel is the oldest known human burial site the remains of several adults and children were found including a boy buried with a deer antler placed on his chest at the bottom of a cenote in eastern Mexico.

Archaeologists found the remains of a young woman who died more than thirteen thousand years ago. Their DNA closely matches that of many indigenous peoples living in Today, in Central and North America, for tens of thousands of years, people in all parts of the world have been carrying out rituals and ceremonies as part of their practices. funeraries, while in 1491 there were tens of millions of people living in America, the population shortly after their arrival has only been in the thousands, it is not surprising that the discovery of an ancestor from this period is an extremely rare event.

Thirteen thousand years ago, a teenage girl in Yucatán fell into a deep hole and died above sea level. It rose and water filled the cave in the 1990s, a group of underwater archaeologists found Nia as they called her and 40 meters deep in a cenote near Tulum, Maya's DNA testing confirmed that she is a direct ancestor. of indigenous peoples living in North and Central America. Today, when the human genome was sequenced at the beginning of the 21st century, the door was opened for geneticists to study it. The biological model of humans Data collected by studying DNA found in human cells can be used to trace a person's ancestry By comparing the DNA of modern indigenous peoples with that of ancient peoples we can see how our ancestors They migrated and settled during the last few thousand years their DNA is being used to look at similarities between different populations, so there are many different ways we can do this.

We can observe his maternal lineage. We can look at her paternal lineage or we can look at everything that makes up the entire genome. and in that case we are looking at the full contribution of your father, your mothers and all your ancestors. This is just another way of thinking about our past and finding out how we were related to each other, we are all really connected and Our genetics tells us that also to have a really rigorous study it is necessary to have old samples because with old samples you can know the date with very precise, how long ago they lived and what they ate and also where they were if We're looking at ancient DNA, we're only looking at the people that they were actually able to extract DNA from.

These are only 50 people, but there were thousands of people at the time and there are very few samples that have been included from the United States. United States and also Canada, most of them were from South America and Central America. What does the DNA of the ancient ancestors we have discovered tell us about our origins? Actually the closest relations with the natives of America are a species from Central Asia, so I know we migrated, but a lot of people have questions about whether it was just one big migration, it happened on several occasions, we really migrated and stayed in one place or we simply spread throughout the Americas and how many migrations occurred.

DNA can only tell us a lot, we need to really know when they occurred and where they occurred, so if one group split from another group just by looking at the DNA, we can kind of make an assumption, but we won't actually know where it happened or when. occurred unless we have archaeological data, the study of the DNA of ancient people requires a culturally sensitive approach and ongoing consultation with indigenous communities, while archeology and genetics may seem contradictory to our indigenous origin stories, they all contribute to the general history of our peoples that goes back to The story of my creation that I grew up with was a journey because I believe that many creation stories are journeys and that is how I reconcile it with the genetics that we are talking about, the migration of population, our ancestors undertook this long and enormous journey. thousands of years and I am a product of that, so not only did they have to travel across continents and oceans, but we also had to fight diseases and once European contact came, many of our people died, our ancestors, but we here as living people.

They are actually the products of all that that long journey abroad Columbus first encountered indigenous peoples in our traditional territory more than 500 years ago he mistakenly called us Indians we thought he had found a new route to India he actually came to a world like no other In the rest of the Earth, a world that was home to thousands of different nations and millions of people, today we keep our history alive through our stories and traditional knowledge and stay connected to our ancestors through the material culture they left before 1491. Foreigners we are the First Peoples of the Americas we have been here from the beginning our ancestors sailed by the wind and the stars Crossing vast oceans and mountain ranges in search of new lands for thousands of years Our ancestors became astronomers and architects philosophers and scientists artists and inventors we created distinct societies and built a vast trading system that covered two continents in 1492 our world changed forever but we did not disappear today the languages ​​and teachings of our ancestors remain and These are the Untold Stories of the Americas before Columbus, they have taught us that the Western Hemisphere before 1491 was a sparsely populated desert, practically untouched by humans, but this pristine world was nothing more than a myth, in reality there were millions of indigenous people living throughout the Americas and the majority lived in large cities and towns to supply these large urban centers.

Innovative techniques were invented to modify and manipulate the environment. Our ancestors used fire to cleanse the earth. They built canals that turned deserts into productive farmland. They built terraces on steep mountain slopes to cultivate crops, and in the Amazon they made soil so fertile that it transformed an entire ecosystem. These impressive modifications to the environment were driven not only by the needs of a growing population but also by an ancient respect and connection to the land and water, as many indigenous metaphors convey entire bodies of thought, philosophy and understanding, and this many sometimes it is not like that. captured in an anthropological record or an archaeological or historical record because these are really the thoughts that guide the people that we have relationships with water, which is the most basic Elemental relationship because water is life, you know that in all cultures in all traditions and that is why we have many metaphors that reflect, represent and symbolize water and all its various stages, from water sitting in a lake or pond or moving in a stream or river to water circulating in clouds and descending as the rain and snow, so all of those forms of water are sacred in the context of indigenous thought covering an area as large as the continental United States.

The Amazon is home to 10 percent of the world's plants. Birds, animals and insects. It also had an indigenous population that counted. in millions in 1491. So the idea that the demos was a pristine rainforest is probably very recent. Rainforests grew on top of places that used to be populated before. If you could go back a thousand years and we would see a different shape. The landscape we see today about two percent of the land lies within the floodplain of the Amazon River and its many branches and the soil here is fertile, the Amazon comes from the end and brings many similar nutrients with its waters and then floods every year.

It brings nutrients to the floodplains, so these soils are very rich, but most soil in the Amazon is too acidic for extensive agricultural use. Normally, the reserves of the Amazon are not very rich, they are very acidic, the pH is not very good, the tropical sheet will reduce very quickly. It loses its fertility due to rain seeping into places where the land was less fertile. The indigenous people designed a soil called terraprite or dark soil made from broken pottery plant remains, fish bones and charcoal. Terraprite has been found at village sites dating back approximately 7,000 years. The time when pottery was first produced in the Amazon in Guyana dates back 5,000 years, even further in southern Arizona, it dates back 7,000 years.

However, the interesting thing is that there is an idea that they are used in agriculture to improve. The natural conditions of the soils were valid. The cultivation of foreign plants and the management of the soil are transmitted from generation to generation among indigenous peoples. Come on, beer. Tara prita has been found in the highlands of the Amazon, often far from rivers. Fertile, productive soils for agroforestry were a matter of survival, but the abundance of terraprite soils next to village sites that were already in fertile areas has raised many questions about their origins. It is interesting because we are discovering that there are also beautiful soils in areas that are very fertile Muchachi Yaki the essential ingredient in Taraprita is charcoal the people who made this soil used to cut and the Char method of creating the charcoal this causes less carbon emissions and produces a more stable product than the cut and burn doodle Washi now cooks ER Papa and this is very productive, their soil is really rich and productive, they allow you to grow in the same place for many years some of these orchards or this one, you know, the Manish forest, there was no need to cultivate, it was a very productive environment involving a different relationship with the people and the surrounding landscape.

Villages were often situated in rings and while the center of the ring was arid, on the outskirts of each village there were garbage dumps where food waste was deposited, the people who developed and used this rich soil were not farmers in the traditional way. It makes sense, but horticulturists simultaneously grew domesticated and wild vegetables, fruits, grains, and trees. The terraprite soil found in these villages may not have been intentionally manufactured in the same way as the Upland sites; It may simply be the result of thousands of years of man-made organic use. waste when we expect to find soils far from the settlement times, but what we find is that in most cases the distance decides or that the soils are in the same place where people used to live in order to live well in the Amazon, one you have to really be aware of the huge amount of information and that requires really very sophisticated societies the ancient Amazonians discovered a way to sustain a growing population despite having acidic soils in much of their territories the ability to design the soil to meet the needs of the people is one of the most important environmental achievements of our ancestors throughout North America.

Indigenous peoples depended on access to hunting areas, as well asdistant communities for trade. It's pretty clear that people used to travel very, very long distances. It seems incredibly difficult, but people knew how to travel back then. Communities were often hundreds of kilometers apart, with forests, mountains and grasslands in between, finding consistent and predictable travel routes year-round was a necessity, the answer was a natural road system integrated into the surrounding environment. Whether flowing in summer or frozen in winter, North American rivers were a reliable transportation route for indigenous people. The Denny people could travel thousands of miles on frozen rivers because they had highly developed snowshoe technology. snow.

Traditional snowshoes are still better than commercial snowshoes in many ways, they are designed for the feet. Designed to meet the demands of your region's climate, you choose specific wood and tendons for them, they are stitched in different ways to suit different snow conditions and you can carry more than one pair for different types of snow and then Of course in the summer we travel thousands of miles along many of our huge rivers, the Mississippi, the Yukon, the McKenzie, these rivers are enormously long and you can travel them quite easily for most of the year, the boat preferred for transportation along the waterways of North America and the coasts were the canoe, the canoe is always central because we are sea based people, the rivers and oceans were our roads so we needed the canoes, So we became very skilled canoe makers to adapt to the stormy climate and strong currents of the Pacific Ocean, the people of northwestern North America carved heavier canoes from Cedar.

We know what the waters are like here on the northwest coast. You could get lost there while some coastal boats were smaller and more suitable for coastal fishing, others were canoes carved from the high seas. From huge logs that required exceptional craftsmanship to build, they had various types of canoes depending on the duty it performed or the purpose it served, so there would be canoes for traveling to latched canoes for gathering food, medicine and plants, canoes for canoes in war. for whaling, canoes for fishing, so there were several types of canoes that were carved for a specific purpose, so there were variations of that canoe.

Inland water travel required a different style of boat using the same basic boat. The canoes of indigenous people living in the interior were smaller and lighter to accommodate long stretches of river or lake travel, these canoes were usually constructed from tree bark strong enough to withstand birch bark canoes. of River Rapids were also light enough to transport or transport long distances between waterways, people thought that nothing packing was something they could carry and then leave for six months or a year to travel, visit distant distant relatives or just to go exploring, there is absolutely no doubt that people would move everywhere all the time, yes, man-made earthworks abroad created artificial topography. throughout North America before 1491.

These mound structures were built over thousands of years. One of the largest concentrations is located on the Mississippi River, near present-day Saint Louis. The ancient city of Cahokia has 120 mounds, the largest being known as Monk's Mound. This huge earth movement. It covered five and a half hectares and was 30 meters high. To build this mound, thousands of workers carried more than a million square meters of soil in woven bags to the site for my own tribe. We have a story about a mound site in Mississippi called naniwaya and we went up from below we left that mound according to a story or we followed two brothers Tata and chiksa from the west we came and traveled east and finally we stopped at a place and built that mound and we carried the bones of our ancestors with us and they built man.

Any of the stories talk about this place that is very significant in the tradition and places us in Mississippi, so it tells us where we came to be in that area and the stories tell us about our relationship with other tribes, the Chickasaw and the Cherokee , among others, science actually fits well with that if you think about people moving from the West to the East and if you think about the mountain sites in the southeast that frequently functioned as burial mounds, so there are mounds that contain human remains . Mounds are also part of the creation stories of indigenous peoples.

A large concentration of ceremonial mounds are found throughout central and eastern North America as family groups. We formed societies and settled in towns and cities, the practice of burial mounds expanded, we can follow the evolution, if you wish, of mound construction from 300 AD. Onwards, we get small mounds, a little bigger, we get burial mounds, we get mounds that have houses. At the top we can see an in situ development. Around 2,000 years ago, the mound-building tradition intensified throughout the region and gave rise to ceremonial centers along rivers and lakes. The mounds were spiritual gathering places where people traveled to make offerings and bury their relatives and leaders so that we can recognize that at one time there was a large group of people who probably spoke the same language and all agreed to serve under whatever political structure existed and then after a time of stress, probably during the little ice age.

In the 1300s, people began to realize that they could no longer exist within a large area that they had to separate again, but we also have some hints of southern influence. The first pottery that is produced in North America is in Florida and then it disappears and then it comes again from the southwest and it moves through, but I think one of the important things is that the tribal people of North America recognize that our cultures they developed in place and whether we had any influence or not, these are North American cultures and we don't have to depend on someone coming from somewhere else to help us advance cultures around the world built the Earth and the mounds for purposes religious and ceremonial people traveled long distances to bury and honor their dead at these sites the kurgan people who originated in the Black Sea region buried their dead in deep pits topped by mounds the name kurgan in Latvian means foreign mound builder They are distinctive keyhole-shaped structures that were used as burial tombs in Japan.

They range from several to 400 meters long. Thousands of burial mounds still exist throughout the Great Lakes region from the Hopewell era. Sacred objects and personal belongings were part of the burial ritual in all parts of the world. Mounds and other man-made structures were used to honor places where ancestors were buried. Steep, high-altitude mountain slopes and the cold climate of the Andes would seem the most inhospitable environment for humans to thrive, let alone agriculture. If we look at the American hemisphere, we are facing a highly mountainous region, a very fractured part of what we call the neovolcanic axis, these regions of Bolivia and Peru. have been home to successive indigenous societies for thousands of years and the vertical topography did not prevent them from developing one of the most productive agricultural regions in the world in places such as Lake Titicaca and the Sacred Valley of Peru, people began to sculpt the landscape in a

series

of flat plateaus graded to make the mountain slopes more accessible for agriculture.

The same trend occurred throughout the Americas, but perhaps the best-known terraces are those of groups such as the Incas. They have terraces from the formative era, which was probably 1000 years BC. When the Inca civilization emerged 600 years ago, terraces already covered more than a million hectares of mountainous land in the Andean mountains as the terraces became larger and more structured workers built them with stone, sand, gravel and earth. cut by experts, in some cases. When leveling an area, soils are pushed up and then agaves and other plants are planted along the boundary and then, over time, become formal masonry structures.

Okay, overseas, alive, those systems were among the most sophisticated. I would say given. that not only were these Terraces often cut from Stone that was easy to lay and entire hillsides were terraced, but to prepare for the terrorists, the soils were basically cleared, the area was cut and then gravel was placed in the basins. these terrace walls. The Stone Terraces' multi-layered walls and floor were designed to prevent leaching of nutrients from the soil, retain heat during cold Mountain nights, and provide a natural, gravity-fed irrigation system. This formed a kind of carbon filtration system in which clays and other soils are filtered. and then rich agricultural soils were laid on top of that and the entire terrace was packed so that it could sustain the year after year crop of foreign potatoes and on some islands in lake itikaka they grew corn and they also have quinoa because of the nature of the clay.

The soils in the region of Peru, for example, those soils were almost impervious to erosion, so this allowed those Terraces to be maintained throughout the centuries and even today many of the Terraces built a thousand years ago still They are in use literally moving mountains. The Andean people of South America manipulated their environment to create one of the world's greatest engineering achievements for thousands of years. Farmers have been sculpting mountains and slopes to create usable land to grow rice, potatoes and yams, which are some of the cereals and vegetables grown. on terraced farmland in Southeast Asia Farmers grew rice on terraces that would otherwise be unusable hillsides.

They used a system of ditches and canals to move rainwater between platforms. The ponds were built on Polynesian hillsides a thousand years ago and were designed to produce higher yields of yams. and Taro for a growing population Foreign LRAs first built terraces in the mountainous terrain around Lake Titicaca more than two thousand years ago when Incan farmers worked the land 600 years ago there were twenty thousand square kilometers of terraces in the Andean mountains Terraces offered farmers greater amounts of arable land, which in turn provided food to sustain the growing populations in nearby urban centers during the long winter months.

The Arctic region becomes an endless expanse of snow and ice. Farther south, in central North America, the prairie summer landscape is unlike anything ever seen before. -end of Sea of ​​Grass with few natural landmarks to guide travelers and hunters. Both environments can be daunting and even dangerous places to travel. Ancient people have erected stone markers in the landscape for thousands of years in North America, two of the most prominent stone structures. They are the inukshuk in the Arctic and subarctic and the medicine wheel in the central plains. Many of us Inukchuks have been there for hundreds, maybe thousands of years.

The Inuktitude word inukshuk means someone who looks like a person from Alaska to Greenland. These anthropomorphic stone structures have been built for over two thousand years and serve many purposes, including tracking seals captured during hunting expeditions. The seal catch at some point in the summer goes down and if you want to get that seal back and you have nothing to get back. you go ashore and you put a couple of inoxuks to mark exactly where the seal went down, you know, so you can go back to that water and line yourself up, you know when you're going to find your seal and you know that, so he made little ones just up to a point in which you know where our seal had fallen or some animal had fallen.

Another purpose of an enochuk is to serve as a landmark in the landscape that you grow up in, you live there, you know, and all these nuts. They're everywhere you can recognize them you know they help you navigate the land in 1973 we took a canoe trip down the Ferguson River and it's about 160 miles long and at one point we were completely lost you know we had two canoes and four people and We were rowing around this huge lake that had twice as many islands as they were supposed to have and at the end of the day we hadn't gone anywhere, you know, we were still looking for the way out and so late at night we decided We would stop and already You know, we spent the night and looked for the exit the next day,so we saw a ninook in the distance and I said, let's camp there, so we paddled around all these islands, we got to the Enochsu and we set up camp and before I went to bed I said: you know, I'm going to go there to the enochuk and have a I looked around and um, I went up and stood next to the inukshuk and there was the river we had been on. searching all day after that, every time it got lost we would just find a ninoksukan on the horizon and we would row there and it would guide us to the end and that's why we sailed down the Ferguson River, the enukshuk is one of the most Enduring Arctic symbols of ancient Inuit life found in several locations across the central plains of North America are man-made lows.

Stone circles known as medicine wheels Medicine wheels are enigmatic, they come in all shapes and sizes, some of them are effigies of turtles or other animals, some of them are effigies of humans, but what they all have in common is a certain relationship with landscape medicine. The wheels had many possible purposes, such as ceremonial gathering places or as a place of cosmological alignment medicine. The wheels may also have had more practical purposes. uses, there has been some attempt to try to find calendrical devices that align astronomically from them. I'm skeptical about that area, in fact I think the best explanation is that they are geographic markers where we find medicines.

The wheels are usually in a very prominent Butte position so that you have a good view of the surrounding landscape. The main rivers are easier to cross. You know, the Majorville Medicine Wheel is located right near the Blackfoot Crossing, which is the best place to cross the Bow River and when people don't have bridges and have to walk across the water, this is crucial knowledge. I think, in fact, I think these, what we call medicine wheels, are not so much calendrical devices as they are mnemonic devices for cognitive geography on the plains, one of the oldest stone structures in Central.

North America is located in the territory of the Blackfoot Nation in southern Alberta, at the center of the Majorville Medicine Wheel is a nine meter Center Cairn connected by 28 stone spokes to an outer ring. Not only did people build this at the same time, it was a slow build up of the central Cairn and then also creating the outer rings and sometimes spokes linking the Karen and the outer ring, as well as being an important geographical marker across the landscape, Indians traveled to Majorville for ceremonies and gatherings. The Majorville Medicine Wheel at the bottom of the Cairn. that the artifacts came from a time closer to five thousand years ago and they discovered a lot of artifacts like projectile points, but they also found other things like phalanges or finger bones of people you know and again, that was a very common thing where people Si someone is grieving, they would cut off the tip of a finger and then leave it on the medicine wheel.

Recently, the University of Calgary wanted to repatriate those artifacts to the Blackfoot community, but the Blackfoot people say no, we don't want them because when someone left an artifact on the medicine wheel, they were leaving their problems with that artifact, so if you come , you take that artifact today, all you're doing is taking someone else's problems with you, they have ceremonial functions where people go there to lead. their problems and make offerings, but they also serve as geographic markers when people travel across the grasslands, as it is one of the oldest continuously used ceremonial sites in the Americas.

Majorville suggests that Plains cultures were strongly rooted in a traditional homeland and continue to maintain their sacred values. Gathering place for thousands of years The ancestral Pueblo people have lived in southwestern North America for more than ten thousand years. To survive in this semi-arid region with its high seasonal temperatures, it was crucial to find a way to control the rivers to irrigate the land for agriculture and to provide a year-round supply of water for cooking and drinking, given the requirements of living in this type of landscape, this type of environment, the essential basis for the development of communities in this area because it is a desert or was its access to water known for its multi-story Adobe multi-family apartment complexes, the ancestral Pueblo people were also master engineers When it came to manipulating and controlling the region's limited water sources, beginning about 1,400 years ago, the agricultural peoples of the Phoenix Valley designed and built an advanced irrigation system of canals and reservoirs known as the Hohokum Canal.

For the canals, they were rivers that originate in the nearby mountains and the Salado River were the ones that delivered the water or brought the water and it was through these irrigation canals that, of course, they were able to cultivate the largest canal, which measured about six meters in length. depth and more than 20 meters wide the longest canal was 32 kilometers long the hohokum canal system irrigated more than 40,000 hectares of farmland with great physical effort and a lot of cooperative planning and they all had a common goal that was to make that agricultural way of life, the hohokum canal, really represent an application of the community mind both in the construction of the canals and also in the conceptualization of the canals, the essential way in which it survived.

It was through the community and through participation in community work that a part of the community as a whole realized that these structures were necessary again to achieve that goal of a good life: the production of food and ways that The Hohokum canal system that flowed from the salt and Gila rivers transformed the desert landscape and supported a prosperous society based on agriculture. It was both an engineering achievement and a year-round source of life-giving water. Although a long drought likely forced people from the Phoenix Valley to move. The imprint of this elaborate water system is still visible today.

The Hohokum were one of many indigenous peoples of the Americas who developed sophisticated irrigation systems in northern Peru. Rivers flowing from the Andean mountains brought water to the semi-arid not the small valley where tens of thousands of people lived in cities between 4000 and 5500 years ago irrigation canals brought water to the fields where cotton and food crops were grown in Mesoamerica The Aztec city of Tenorchitlán was built on an artificial island in Lake Takoko, an intricate system of dams, canals and reservoirs was built that supplied hundreds of thousands of people in the city with fresh water for drinking, bathing, gardening and fish farms, After humans began domesticating wild vegetables and grains, they began devising ways to manage them. and divert water to irrigate fields and orchards.

Irrigation and water control systems were common throughout the Indian subcontinent for thousands of years. In Sri Lanka, a huge artificial lake called Paracrama Samudra, built 1600 years ago, is still in use today. One of the oldest irrigation systems in the world. The world was built six thousand years ago in Mesopotamia. Rainwater and runoff from the mountains were captured and held in dams and then diverted to irrigate farmland overseas. The Phoenix Valley was transformed from a desert to a highly productive agricultural region through the construction of an 800-kilometer-long canal. system that irrigated over 40,000 hectares of land canals artificial lakes and dams built thousands of years ago formed the ancient footprint of irrigation systems still used around the world today throughout the Americas indigenous peoples altered and manipulated widely changing the environment, sometimes changing entire ecosystems in the process.

What we see in the Eastern Woodlands is intensive landscape modification over thousands of years. Archaeological research has now shown that the development of agriculture in that region occurred much earlier than previously believed. Both archaeologists and researchers are just beginning to realize and recognize how the earth was molded and formed and we tend to call this anthropomorphic conformation of the landscape six thousand years ago we find the appearance of stone tools that have been polished and molded and have a sharp edge. and we can believe that they were used to cut down trees to clear the land.

The oldest plant cultivation in the eastern forests of North America began about 4,000 years ago. Among the first crops were sunflowers, goose's feet and pumpkins. Later, corn, beans, and nuts were widely grown in eastern North America. Southeastern people ate. Pretty similar types of things and then you move around and people live differently because they are different cultures, different tribes, different communities after the introduction of corn about 1000 years ago, eastern North America became a mosaic of fields. farms and orchards, this intensive crop production was the result of a new organizational structure for agriculture and better tools made of antler bone and stone throughout the eastern region.

Farmers grew a variety of nuts, including walnuts, acorns, walnuts, and chestnuts. Even forests were designed and modified to attract animals for hunting. they would plant the crops, they would create gardens, the gardens actually brought in animals that they could use for food and when they started to create these gardens, they cut down the trees, they opened up extensions, they also used the trees for building, they built houses. They also used them for the fire in the houses, for heating and cooking, to open up the landscapes. It was a new balance between nature and agriculture completely manufactured by indigenous people.

People in many parts of the world began to leave behind a hunter-gatherer lifestyle in favor. During the farming process it became necessary to clear the land, which led to the development of farmland in areas that were once wild forests and grasslands. About ten thousand years ago in the Middle East people moved from harvesting wild grains and hunting to growing wheat and barley and domesticating livestock. This shift to an agricultural lifestyle ensured a year-round food supply and led to the establishment of permanent villages. Broom corn and foxtail. Millet was first domesticated in northern China 6,000 years ago. In southern and central China, one of the first domesticated crops was rice.

The indigenous people of eastern North America have been growing plants and grains for thousands of years to produce three of the most important crops: corn, beans, and squash. They cleared vast areas of forests using fires and tools as hunter-gatherers began to domesticate animals and grow annual crops. Villages appeared, permanent settlements required an increasing agricultural land base and this led to larger urban centers as communities in North America became larger and more centralized, the need for stable food sources increased, which which led to changes in the landscape caused by man to open lands. For agricultural and hunting purposes, a convenient way to manage the landscape was to conduct controlled burns.

Fire is indispensable and I truly believe this goes back to when our ancestors first discovered fire and how useful it was in various parts of the world. The indigenous people of North America used fire to clear the land and create agricultural plots, and of course, burning that landscape improved the soil over a period of time. On the western side of the continent, people literally burned down parts of the forest and what this did was encourage other types of plants to grow, particularly berries, which could also be harvested en masse to support large populations in the central plains, grasslands.

They were cleared with fire to encourage the growth of new plants in the spring, which in turn attracted large herd animals such as buffalo. Fire was also used to drive Buffalo to certain hunting spots, when the Blackfoot people were setting up a Buffalo Jump, they knew in advance where they were going to make their Buffalo Jump, so they would send someone there in the fall to burn the grass. in the Gathering Basin and as you burn the grass, you put the seeds back into the soil, but you also give it a little fertilizer with the ash, so spring is where the grass will be greenest first and that will attract the animals They graze, like bison, a Buffalo Jump not only.

It happened to be very purposeful, you know, people created the conditions that would guarantee a success. The controlled burns generated higher yields for farmers and hunters and caused significant changes to the natural ecosystem. Indigenous people before 1491 impacted the natural environment through agriculture. Earth movements. Urban Development. Water management. Controlled burning and deforestationThey were innovations driven by the need to provide food, clothing, and shelter to an ever-growing population in the Americas. All of these adaptations created an artificial landscape and had a profound effect on the climate, soil, water, and wildlife in the Americas. Today we have a powerful tradition of land stewardship that evolved from these ancient foreign technologies We are the First People of the Americas We have been here from the beginning Our ancestors sailed by the wind and the Stars Crossing vast oceans and mountain ranges in search of new lands Over thousands of years our ancestors became astronomers and architects philosophers and scientists artists and inventors we created distinct societies and built vast trading systems that covered two continents in 1492 our world changed forever but languages ​​and teachings did not disappear today of our ancestors remain and these are the Untold Stories of the Americas before Columbus 100 Throughout history, people in all parts of the world hunted fish and gathered wild plants to survive.

Over time, these foods became a central part of each nation's cultural identity. The Americas, our ancestors collected fish. We hunted seals and whales and hunted giant bison and other animals and adapted more species of wild grasses, vegetables and fruits than anywhere else on Earth, but no food has had a greater influence on the history of our ancestors than corn for thousands of years. of years. Corn has permeated every aspect of Mayan culture, from the practical to the spiritual, not only is corn the basis of their creation stories, but it is the heart and soul of the Mayan civilization in Mayan oral and written history. , the gods created the first humans from cornmeal after attempts to create people. out of the mud and Beto would not miss the labyrinth.

God was referred to as the first father and the goddess of corn is associated with fertility. The moon and the new corn labyrinth appear in the most sacred Mayan ceremonies and in the most sacred acts. simple facts of everyday life Corn has nourished and inspired the Mayan people for almost 4,000 years. It's really a very integral part of people's everyday lives, you know, providing them with nutrition, but also spiritually it's very important. I mean, this is what has shaped people's lives and the history of popular culture not only includes, you know our beliefs about creation, for example, it has allowed people to survive to this day, the Mayan people did not actually develop the corn plant, that honor goes to the indigenous farmers of the Balsas Valley in Mexico, who began one of the world's first forms of agriculture by cultivating a wild herb known as teosinte, which became the labyrinth that we know today after each growing season.

Farmers selected the plants with the most desirable attributes and planted their grains to observe the evolution of the base. Here we have a story that begins with the Diosynte and goes back to about 8,000 years ago. Corn could well be the first act of genetic engineering in human history between six and seven thousand years ago the labyrinth had traveled to the Andean and Amazonian regions of South America we began to We discovered that corn traveled these ancient routes from the beginning, so we know that food was essential. The labyrinth was also easy to transport and store, which the Mayans used to their advantage considering the importance of corn to the people's diet.

I'm sure it was a valuable commodity, a valuable food. to trade, how do you obtain these products when you do not grow corn yourself? Beads are exchanged, shells are exchanged, obsidian is exchanged and the product is obtained. As the Mayan population grew, the need to generate food on a scale also grew. industrial, a method used by the Mayans to mass produce corn was known as slash and burn, which would mean that you know you live in an area, you cut down the forest, you grow corn and after a while, the soil may no longer can sustain you, so you move to another place and cut it and do the same.

Other agricultural methods were also adopted, including the move to terrace farming along hillsides and raised agricultural beds and bogs, would produce weeds or plants that would grow in water that would not. Pile them up as a source of nutrients. Crop diversification was also essential for the health of both the people and the land itself, and corn was grown alongside chili peppers, squash, and beans. It requires a lot of nutrients, so beans are actually a plant that provides nitrogen in the soil, so beans help corn grow, obviously it is necessary for these crops to grow together so that they provide each other or help each other. each other grow better by using a variety of methods to grow corn.

The Mayans developed intricate agricultural infrastructures. In Mesoamerica, as corn spread across the Americas, it contributed to the development and growth of the ancestral Inca Aztec people and many other foreign indigenous civilizations, oh yeah, that's good, they are the Mesoamerican civilizations that rose and fell over the millennia. . There is one thing that remained constant: the central role. that corn figures in the dietary traditions and mythology of people today Corn is one of the most cultivated crops in the world its development remains one of the most impressive agricultural achievements Ten thousand years ago, people in three different regions of the world were domesticating wild species vegetables and cereals rice in China wheat in the Middle East and corn in central Mexico were three founding crops rice was first cultivated in China and was grown on terraced hillsides In classical Chinese languages, the The word for agriculture is the same as for rice, wheat was foreign.

It was first cultivated in Mesopotamia and is believed to be the first grain domesticated by humans. Five thousand years ago, the Egyptians made the first bread by adding yeast to wheat flour. The labyrinth was first cultivated in Mexico and within 8,000 years it had spread to all parts of the world. South America and much of North America Corn can be ground into a flower, the cobs are burned for fuel, and the husks are woven into mats and baskets. Today, rice, wheat and corn are three of the most cultivated crops in the world. The potato is for the Andes. region of South America what labyrinth is for Mesoamerica a stable source of food and essential to the cultural identity of the people unlike corn the potato grows at high altitudes and can be left in the ground for a year or more the potato was grown for the first time Between eight and ten thousand years ago near Lake Titicaca, which straddles the borders of Peru and Bolivia, indigenous farmers eventually created more than 5,000 varieties of potatoes, each with its own unique flavor and color.

From the point of view of the onion, color is also important for these people because each type of potato has a social role. Planting everything in the Andes has a powerful ritual that is very entangled with many things they are doing all the time. the communities the real communities in the Indians do not understand that distinction between political or economic rituals for these people it is almost the same the planting of potatoes each season was accompanied by prayers performed by priests The farmers carried out a planting ritual that involved the men breaking the soil and the women planting the potatoes.

The potato is especially adaptable to the climates of the Andes, as it grows well in the colder ecosystem of the high mountains using During the agricultural process of terrace farming, the Andean people They sculpted the sides of mountains to create flat sections of land to grow potatoes and other crops such as corn. Potatoes were hardy and easy to transport, but unlike corn, which traveled from Mesoamerica to South America shortly after their development, the potato did not reach Mexico until about 500 years ago, from there it was traded with other indigenous communities and eventually It reached the northwest coast of North America and as far north as Alaska.

Cultures in Mexico along the western coast of Mexico. had potatoes in one form or another, it is only when you get to the region of the United States that potatoes begin to disappear completely and yet they reappear in Washington and in Oregon called simply or clinkit potatoes, there are old potatoes, they are the that everyone used. Before we had these big ones, a potato research lab in Wisconsin sequenced the genes of the cassan potato and the Maria's clinket potato and found that the closest relatives of them were the ozette potato that was known in the Maha area and the ozet on the outer coast of the Olympic Peninsula in Washington, the next closest relatives are in Mexico.

It remains a mystery how long potatoes have been grown along the northwest coast of North America. Early explorers explicitly said they saw people with gardens on the north-west coast. It could have been the first Spanish ships that introduced this, but it is difficult to see because the Spanish did not spend much time in Klinka country. They came, named things, stopped, greeted in Yakitat and then left. I am of the opinion that they are probably pre-European if the potatoes that originated in Mexico reached the west coast of North America before the arrival of European sailors, how did they make the trip to Alaska?

If we know that a clink a couple of young clinkets knew how to row From Wrangle in southeastern Alaska to Fort Vancouver on the Columbia River, there's no reason why people wouldn't have traveled as far south as California to pick potatoes and take them north, and What's more extraordinary is that in the intervening centuries I have maintained exactly the same line of potatoes and have them growing at home. Corn and potatoes were integral to the ancient economies of the Americas and remain vital components of the world's food supply today. Abroad, plants and vegetables were offered for storage to ancient people annually.

Coffee is one of the most popular drinks in the world, but its ancient history remains a mystery. It originally grew wild in Ethiopia and about 500 years ago coffee beans were exported to North Africa and Europe. Foreign tea has its origins. to medicinal use by the emperors of China, it eventually became a popular drink throughout Asia and the world. Potatoes were first grown in raised gardens in the high altitudes of Peru and Bolivia. Inca farmers developed a dried potato product called chimú that could be stored for over a year, tea, coffee and potatoes were an important part of ancient diets and economies and still are today.

The population of the Amazon before 1491 numbered millions of people living in small coastal villages and large cities along the tributaries of the Amazon River. The plants and small game that were gathered in the rainforest could not support this growing population. The indigenous people needed to find a way to produce high-yielding plants. Plant domestication is as old here as it is in places like China or Mesopotamia, but these guys, these people here. in the new world they were like domesticated, they were domesticated with pumpkins, very early chilies and then corn, and we know that there are many Amazonian plants like cocoa, for example, it was domesticated in the Amazon for thousands of years, the people who live in the Amazon.

River Basin has practiced a form of agriculture that led to the development of dozens of varieties of vegetables and fruits, unlike potatoes and corn, this type of plant cultivation did not involve the intensive clearing of traditional style agriculture, but instead They practiced agroforestry, which is the mixing of wild and cultivated fruits, vegetables and nuts in a forest environment. These people eat a lot of corn, for example, but they also eat palms and Brazil nuts. Technically, your wild plants are not domesticated, but I mean, they did not become Farmers were generally hunter-gatherers who had domesticated plants in their backyards for thousands of years, unlike agricultural practices in Mesoamerica and the Andes, the Agroforestry required less labor intensive to prepare the land and harvest the crops in such a traditional way, how would an archeology view this? that archeology would say well these people there were incipient farmers traditionally how scientists would see them that oh these guys are backwards they are not farmers they have not achieved as if they never rose to another step or another layer in the cultural revolution that is false If we look at current evidence, we see that we know these were stable lifestyles.

Agroforestry was as innovative and productive as agricultural methods used in other parts of the Americas. Each type of environment demanded different agricultural approaches. Typically, farming locations become more important at the beginning. There were places where there was a shortageof resources, places like Carl, for example, is a small river valley surrounded by very dry deserts and mountains, whereas if you look at places where resources were abundant, like the Amazon or the northwest coast, there was no pressure for these people become farmers and that idea that agriculture is necessarily a change for the better is a modern idea that has been applied since Western Europe, but in areas covered by tropical forests I think we are dealing with different strategies, the Amazon record really helps us to rethinking the things we take for granted in the Amazon, we see this context of abundance, so much protein in the river waters, but also many diversities of plants, better strategies work based on diversification if we look at the biological data, I said. one of the most biologically diverse fighting places in the world, so it's only natural that the people who live there are aware that fruits, vegetables and grains like pumpkins and quinoa grown in South America thousands of years ago now They are widely distributed throughout the world.

You can see the forest as a library. There's so much information there and being able to sort through, understand, and really find a way to use all of those resources. It is very sophisticated knowledge. A constant source of abundance. The Amazon continues to be one of the places with the greatest biological diversity. In the world, among the first tree crops cultivated by humans were apples in Asia, olives in the Middle East, and peach palms in South America. Overseas, the wild ancestors of olives grew throughout Mesopotamia and then spread to the Mediterranean region and North Africa, where they were found.

Domesticated and grown for cooking in lamp oil, fruits and wood, the domestication of crab apples first took place in the mountains of Kazakhstan. Farmers planted apple trees and orchards and, over time, cultivated new varieties of the fruit. Peach palm trees are a wild plant that became an important cultivated tree in the Amazon, the tree eventually spread throughout South America, the Caribbean and Mesoamerica through human intervention. Apples, olives and peach palms are an important source of food around the world. Miles north of the Amazon is another major rainforest in the Pacific Northwest, like the Amazon. The vegetation and waterways provide such a diversity of flora and fauna that the indigenous people had little need to engage in large-scale agriculture.

One of the few exceptions is Camas, the nutritious bulb of this purple-flowered plant was an important part of the Coast Salish diet while growing wild it became an important source of food and trade item through long-term cultivation. women who had the role and responsibility of managing these food systems knew all the different things that needed to be done the burning that had to be done in the fall and managing the areas where the canvases can be placed. Harvest all the other different plants that needed to be cared for throughout the year and harvested as well. The farming process used by Coast Salish women to grow Camas was a hybrid between agricultural techniques seen in Mesoamerica. and the Andes and the agroforestry found in the Amazon, it is not about laying lines and dropping seeds in a row, but about harvesting the Camus when they are in seed and removing the soil, selecting the bulbs that you are going to take and returning them to the ones you are.

You're not going to accept dropping the seed right before you put the last bits of soil back down. They maintain their plots through regular and controlled cleaning. Burns Camas was cooked for 24 hours or more to break down the crystalline fibers of the bulb into a digestible sugar, once cooked Camas was mixed with flattened and dried berries into a fruit skin. It was cooked with other foods or dried and ground into a flower. I'd say if anything, it might look like a parsnip, but it has the consistency of a sweet potato. I wouldn't be here if women didn't manage these food systems in a way that sustained the community, like the Labyrinth of Mesoamerica and the potatoes of the Andes.

Camas has practical spiritual and cultural significance to the Coast Salish peoples. I know when me and my family go out, we wear Harvest Camis and pick cooks. It's a completely different type of conversation that you engage in. We're talking in a different way than you normally wouldn't be at your table. We connect with the earth. we're connecting with food and all these memories come from what we've been taught about our history, we start talking about the history of the area we're harvesting, we're talking about the food we're talking about. the stories that come within our ancestral lands and also within the food system and when I'm there I imagine what it must have been like for our ancestors to have that kind of conversation and connect with food and remind everyone that we are still a part of This food system The foreign addition to their agricultural achievements the indigenous peoples of America developed innovative ways of fishing and hunting the Arctic region of North America has been home to a succession of indigenous cultures over the past five thousand years they found ways to Survive the harsh winter climate without the advantage of wood, stone or clay to build houses.

The main source of food for the Inuit of Thule Dorset and other northern peoples was the sea. Emulation throughout the North survived primarily because of one animal, and that animal is the sealing. We will travel mainly on sea ice hunting seals all winter because that is what we live off of seals. The traditional way was to use a harpoon because you know that seals are very cautious and apparently don't see very well. Do you know when? We're out of the water and they have to get out, you know, because you know they have to breathe and they come out and they have these holes, some of them very close to their holes so they can just dive in when you know when we or the polar bears came on a hunt for Successful sealing depended on patience, skill and cunning in the spring, when all the snow was gone, you know, the ice, uh, we'd have to basically crawl on the sea ice pretending to be a seal, you know, until Me I got close enough to use Harpoon.

We had all these implements that we used to detect when they were rising to see when the water was rising. You know, up and down when the seals swam down or up. You know, and they took her away. breath we used dogs to sniff them out and then we used a harpoon to catch a seal we studied the animals we hunt so we could outsmart them but we are also very grateful to them for providing us with you know what we eat. in a region where people lived off the land for months, the hunters used every part of the animal, every part of the seal was used, of course, we ate the meat and then we wove skins, you know, mainly for what we call kamik, which are seal skins. boots and they are warm, they are waterproof and they are very comfortable to wear, we use the fat to burn in our great looks that are like half-moon-shaped lamps with which you know how to cook and heat our igloos and the seal fat was crushed for you to release all the oil and that's what we burn, we eat seal, we ate it well, we eat caribou, we not only hunt them but we also thank them for providing us with all this food and and our survival weighs more than 30 tons and measures 15 meters the largest animal of the sea would be a formidable challenge for any fisherman for the macaw and nuchanov nations in the northwestern region of North America the Welsh hunt was more than an exercise in man's superiority over animals it was a way of life whales are central to our identities such as new channels and macabre towns in our oral traditions we say that we were whalers from the day we were created with archaeological evidence both in new channels and in Maca territory demonstrates a connection with whaling for more than 5,000 years, this It is due to the whale bones they collected from the whale in the garbage dumps, showing that it was an important food product.

Whale bones were used as part of the equipment and tools we used. The whaling culture permeated every part. From these nations the lifestyles change to ceremony and art, you grow up knowing that you come from the cries of the Thunderbird teakin that gave us the whale with the eclipse with this with a sea serpent and you see it everywhere, I mean, it's in our songs, it's in our dances it's in our artwork, that's how we keep whaling culture alive in the spring, when our food was running out, that's when we hunted the whales in the early spring, when they were going through their migration .The pattern to Alaska and Wales contributed to more than 70 percent of the food in our diet, especially in early spring, because the oil and blubber from whale meat had important nutritional benefits within the new channels and Macan Nations was a distinct hierarchy that dictated each person's role in whaling, the chiefs were the people who cried, so the chiefs were the ones who basically had the rights to the whale products, oil and blubber. whale meat, the oil itself was a highly prized trade item that was traded along the coast. and also for some inland communities, the Thai Hawaii, who is the highest chief, would ultimately oversee the distribution, he and his family would keep the chosen pieces of the whale and the chukwusi, which is the dorsal fin, where it is located the spirit of the whale. lives, they would have prayers performed for four days after that to show respect for that spirit and when that Spirit left the chukwusi, the dorsal fin would stay with that Chief, the rest of the whale would be distributed according to the status in that community so that the next chief in line and the next chief or two guests from other communities would be distributed in this larger Potlatch, but for the new canals and the macaw towns whaling represented much more than a food source that many people don't understand this when they look at wailing, especially the idea of ​​what it means to kill something, to kill a whale, because they fail and misunderstand that spiritual, emotional and psychological connection that we have with whales.

We wouldn't put whales on our walls if we didn't. We wouldn't revere them if we didn't respect them if they weren't central to who we were if it was just a matter of killing something to eat, it went beyond that and how you understand that is by looking at the prayers and certain rituals. that were carried out not only by the whale or the entire whaling crew, but especially by the whaler's wife, many people say that they are transmitted to the oral record, as well as anthropological research done on whaling, the whaler's wife , the hakum, who is a woman of high status.

In our family, in our language, she had a special and intimate connection with the whale, the whale that was being searched for, and it was believed that if that whale came to the boat and surrendered, that is what we believe in the end: we are not killing the whale. is to provide that the Spirit of the whale is giving itself to those whalers, to that Chief who cries, is giving itself to her, so it has some of the most important rituals to observe and, especially, when the whaling crew leaves, he can't move because he thinks his spirit is connecting with the Wailing spirit, so if he moves, he could make that Wailing Spirit rebel, he could make the whale leave, he could make the whale hurt the whaling crew, so she stays very still at home in her Longhouse.

While the crew is searching for the whale and even after capturing it, the whale will come if it is connected to his spirit. The whaler's wife, even though she is not in the water, is ultimately the most important and central figure of that whale. hunt because that whale is connecting with it one of the largest land mammals hunted by our ancestors was the buffalo also known as the American bison in the central region of North America the buffalo has been an important source of meat, hide and fat for the indigenous people. people for more than ten thousand years since the end of the Ice Age people were already hunting bison but they were extinct they were hunting the extinct forms of bison three meters tall and a thousand kilograms each these extinct bison would have surpassed a hunter very early Later we see that people are already focusing much of their energies on this species.

Thousands of years before the introduction of the modern horse to America, the buffalo would have been an imposing target for even the hardiest foot hunters just beyond the ice. Back in the days when community hunting was going on, there was a small group of hunters, for example, maybe six, six or seven hunters, and they would ambush a small herd of bison like maybe a dozen, they would do it in small herds, but the greatmass of The herds we hear about in the historical period became more gregarious as they became smaller. About two thousand years ago, hunting bison by plane went through a dramatic transformation.

Instead of small hunting parties chasing a few bison, suddenly there were hundreds of people at work. together to chase herds of bison over cliffs or into natural or artificial traps, this form of hunting required large numbers of people to hunt, process the meat and hides, and transport it all back to settlements; They would get as much as they could in the shortest time possible. as fast as they can and then, of course, the carcasses will start to be less good for human consumption, but they are still good for animals like martins, grizzly bears, wolves or coyotes, even things like vultures and California condors They would have a big feast at the Buffalo Jump after people took their share and left, rather than being a waste of Buffalo, it is part of the food chain on the grasslands of the Basant Valley in south central Saskatchewan where The first site was discovered and it seemed that they attracted a herd. of bison in a pen and then slaughtered them there, but the Buffalo Jump was not the only significant discovery made at the Basant Valley site, they also created a structure that was architecturally very similar to what we would later recognize as a Sundance Lodge, so this idea of ​​Sundance and the invention of the Buffalo Jump come together at almost the same time, almost in fact, earlier archaeologists on the plains noted this connection and speculated that people congregated for the ritual and the Buffalo Jump was a byproduct of that.

Other people would say that the Buffalo Jump brought people together and that the ritual context was a byproduct of There is another theory about the sudden rise of large-scale buffalo hunting. Several large cities on the Mississippi River, including Cahokia, were important centers of continental Indian trade. People traveled thousands of miles from all over North America to trade goods in these cities. The market for buffalo meat had expanded, so an economical solution was to import more buffalo meat from the plains, which meant that people on the plains could harvest it. An entire herd of bison takes as much as they can for their own consumption, but also enough to obtain a surplus that they could market, leading to a cycle of dependency between those two communities.

Fish and seafood have always been part of the human diet. People in different parts of the world invented fishing tools and techniques to improve harvest success. The Egyptians invented a variety of copper and bronze fishing hooks that they used to fish the Nile River and its tributaries. Harpoons were carved in the south of France. made of deer antlers and used to catch fish and seals in rivers and seas foreign fishing mirrors in the world was discovered under 120 meters of water near Haidaguay the stoneware confirms that people lived along the coast of North America before from the end of the last ice age Fishing tools developed thousands of years ago are still used in many parts of the world today.

Thank you. Rivers, lakes and oceans have always been an important source of food for the indigenous people of the Americas. The discovery of an underwater fishing stone in Haidaguay and a village site near Bella Bella dating back more than 14,000 years reinforces claims that our ancestors lived along the western Pacific coast for a long time. Before there was an inland route to the Americas after the Ice Age ended, waterways have since provided protein in the form of fish, shellfish, and a variety of marine mammals. The Fraser River in Canada is the river of largest salmon farm in the world, with millions of fish traveling from the Pacific Ocean to the numerous tributaries of the Fraser to spawn each year, it was understood that the migratory fish would be shared by the many nations that lived along the ocean and rivers and inland lakes.

The Spanish were often called the saltwater people because much of our traditional territory was a marine environment. Salmon remains one of the most important foods. The salmon we catch because we catch them in the marine environment. We are of much better quality than when they reach the river. Our salmon was prized and we often traveled to the river to trade with those people for things we needed, so there was a tradition. The economy there too Salmon is not only a food and important trade item, but is also part of the mythology, art and culture of the many nations of the Region.

The indigenous people of the Northwest had both personal and community ceremonies to honor the salmon they harvested for food when the first sockeye salmon was caught, it was the first salmon ceremony, it was the children who greeted the salmon on the shore and brought it back to the community. In our thinking, the children were very pure, so the most appropriate people to bring the salmon back and they would bring the salmon back to the community, but they told me that they carried it like a baby and we have started to bring that ceremony Also in recent years, while the tradition was different for each nation in each case, the salmon was honored by returning to spawn and feed the people for another year.

Of the many species of salmon found in the waterways of the northwest coast, one has stood out from the rest, the most important salmon in our traditional times and even today was the sockeye salmon, we do not have any sockeye salmon spawning rivers in our territory, but the Sakai travel through our territory on their way to the freezer to spawn, so we needed fishing technology that was capable of catching the salmon in the marine environment methods. used by indigenous people to capture salmon from the ocean and rivers, including nets, traps, weirs, pooks and harpoons, some harpooned fish from platforms they built over the river, others made conical fish traps, three-pronged, spears and dip nets, Nets made of willow and alder, an example of that.

It's the development of technology for the straight Salish people, these reef nets were traditionally capable of catching thousands of fish and I think the capability was there to catch them all if we wanted to, but the idea of ​​conservation was already part of that system. In fact, in traditional times we wove a willow ring into the end of The Reef net to allow some of the salmon to escape, not because it was just an act of conservation, but also because of a belief and worldview that salmon that they were our relatives and the salmon that traveled together we are family lineages the salmon had two names they had a common name and they also had a prayer name and those prayer names referred to those salmon since they were using kinship terms praying and speaking with salmon as if they were relatives, so if we allow some of the salmon to escape, those families will continue to perpetuate themselves into the future and will be able to come back to us year after year, although our practices might have seemed primitive, that was only because we used everything we it was found in our natural environments, but I think the key behind it was also the worldview and belief system it held. all those traditional technologies and that's what really made them sustainable for thousands of years.

The first people of the Americas developed techniques to hunt migratory animals, fish from abundant oceans and waterways. Innovations in agriculture in the Americas through the domestication of wild plants were a turning point. For our ancestors, we cleared forests and terraced mountain slopes for farming, built towns and cities near farmland, and like the animals we hunted, the plants we grew influenced our traditions and beliefs, but the greatest impact of agricultural and hunting innovation was not realized until 1491, when The indigenous population in the Americas was in the tens of millions. This was a feat that could only have been accomplished by a people who had mastered the art and science related to fishing, hunting, and plant cultivation.

We are the first peoples of the Americas. We have been here. from the beginning our ancestors sailed by wind and starved Crossing vast oceans and mountain ranges in search of new lands for thousands of years our ancestors became astronomers and architects philosophers scientists artists and inventors we created distinct societies and built vast trading systems that covered two continents in 1492 our world changed forever but we did not disappear today the languages ​​and teachings of our ancestors remain and these are the

untold

stories of the Americas before Columbus thanks to the architectural styles of our ancestors reflected the diverse natural environments of the Americas and the social and cultural needs of each nation ice houses in the Arctic adobe apartment buildings in the southwest and tipis hidden in airplanes our unique designs that have endured for thousands of years our achievements Architectural designs are not limited to houses throughout the American continent large cities prominent temples Central plazas markets and baseball fields throughout the millennia indigenous architecture adapted to changes in the environment Innovations in technology and a growing population Indigenous peoples have lived in southwestern North America for more than twelve thousand years.

The people lived in underground houses built with wood and mud. With the natural insulation of the land, these houses were cool in the summer and warm in the winter. About 2000 years ago, the ancestral people began growing corn and the cultivation of gourds led to a more sedentary way of life and eventually the growth of villages and In the towns here in the southwest, this tradition, so to speak, of community building, was very well developed, so the feeling of the community that the community spirit was certainly the essential way in which it survived, was through the community and through participation in community work tonight, the architecture foreignness changed dramatically when the Pueblo people began building rectangular family homes attached to the ground. 1,200 years ago, multi-story apartment buildings began to appear throughout the Southwest.

The adobe structures were built under rock overhangs and on mesas and were home to hundreds and even thousands of people. Pueblo cities such as Mesa Verde in Colorado and Chaco Canyon in New Mexico are among the largest ancient cities in North America. You can see the height of the construction of apartment structures, especially from the times I think of. the big cities of Mesa Verde and Chocolate Canyon, those are definitely structures that required an understanding of geometry and an understanding of practical engineering skills to figure things out in terms of load-bearing walls, how you can actually put a structure on top of another structure without it collapses, those are our technical feats that have some central architects that you know are guiding the way the structure should be built, but the knowledge of how to actually do it is held collectively because everyone participated, you see, In the construction of these structures, the individual is like a thread of a much larger network of foreign relations, thank you Panama and for the community to feel that the community spirit was certainly responsible for what today will be called Magnificent feats of architecture and planning For about 400 years these large urban centers prospered, but change was in store for the people living in these cities, we know that there was climate change that affected and impacted people, problems like a great drought in the year 1200 that It catalyzed a lot of movement of communities outside of those large structures, again with water being the central element.

Factor here in the southwest, you know you have to move to where the water sources are. A 50-year drought in the Southwest that began about 900 years ago inevitably led to crop failures, the people of Mesa Verde and Chaco Canyon faced famine and lack of water. and most likely social unrest, they had no choice but to abandon their cities and look for new places to live. Some people moved south and established new cities along rivers like the Rio Grande, others joined smaller Pueblo communities in different parts of the southwest, and new people moved in. Towards these towns, the demand for housing increased migration out of the main cities.

It did not mean that the Pueblo Society disappeared, it simply changed. The Pueblo communities of today are actually coalitions of large family lineages that have come together to form that Pueblo and that goes for all of them. It goes back to ancient times, you know in the sense that it is actually the extended family that is then shapein what is called a clan and then the clans come together to almost through a confederation create a particular people in the third foreign, the people. Those who built Charbón Canyon and Mesa Verde were the same people that are seen today among the public this was not a dispossession of one group of people over another realizing that it was time to set foot on a New Journey hello hello the people were able coming together in a variety of different types of community forms to do community work.

The physical construction of the community was an integral part of indigenous life. Multi-story apartment buildings and towering pyramids were not the only architectural achievements of indigenous peoples in a thousand years ago a vast road system connected millions of people in South America originally built by the Wadi Society this ancient road was expanded by the Incas are the roads of the ancient Peruvians of those who came before the Incas who began to build segments of roads that extended you know the ability of communities to send troops, trade, participate in ritual and ceremonial activities along along the Andes, had these systems that the Incas built on one of the things of the Inca Empire and it really was an Empire that extended them throughout the span of the Andes, the Incas designed their road system to connect the people who They live in the four regions of their empire.

The great forty thousand kilometer Inca Trail connected hundreds of cities and towns across a wide range of ecosystems and terrain. These roads extend from Ecuador to the entire world. Until reaching Argentina, his empire extended for about 2,000 miles from north to south. The Inca Trail was essential for the transportation of goods and information, as well as the movement of armies. What the Incas had devised was a system through which they could supply armies or communities. from a distance to maintain their 24,000+ miles of roads, they used pre-existing road systems and then taxed the people to maintain their portion of the road system along with conquest and population growth.

All participated in the maintenance and construction of these road systems. The engineers who designed the Inca Trail faced a variety of natural obstacles including steep mountains, rivers, deserts, and wide ravines. We are seeing a highly mountainous region, a very fractured part of what we call the neovolcanic axis, how then? it connects segments of roads when you know chasms and gorges and well, they built suspension bridges and these two are marvels for their time, they eventually became the models for the types of suspension bridges we use here today in modern society, they were able to span entire gorges.

They built durable rope bridges that sometimes extended to the top of the region's mountains, about 16,000 feet high. They could carve a path through the shifting sand desert, and they did so by building low walls on either side that allowed For those who remove the sand and allow the path to remain clear, this is a massive system, as well as being an impressive feat of engineering, the great Inca Trail served the political, social and economic needs of the Inca rulers. This vast road system was instrumental in creating one. of the world's largest empires before 1491. Foreign throughout the ancient world the efficient movement of people, food and trade goods from one place to another was crucial to survival some road systems were impressive feats of engineering that covered vast distances built over more than Two thousand years ago, the Great Wall of China was designed to prevent foreign invasion and protect lucrative trade routes.

This 22 thousand kilometer long wall also served as an important transportation route through ancient Asia. Foreign year of the reign of the Roman Republic and Empire. More than 80,000 kilometers of cobblestone roads were built throughout Europe. Without this vast road system, the Romans would not have managed to conquer and control most of Europe and the Mediterranean basin. The north-south highways that followed the spine of the Andes today, parts of the highway are still in use. including the trail leading to Machu Picchu, the Chinese Incas and Romans built vast transportation systems, these architectural wonders allowed them to conquer cultures by controlling the movement of armies, food and trade goods throughout their empires long before the The Inca Empire came to power in South America in the The people of the North Bay Chico region in northern Peru designed and built one of the first known urban centers in the Americas.

Carbon dating has confirmed that buildings in the region, including those in the town of Caral, are at least 5,500 years old. It is foreign and was the most The most prominent of the 20 or so cities in the northern region of Chico featured pyramids, sunken circular plazas, platform mounds, and residential neighborhoods. The region's buildings were built on foundations of quarried stone and river rock transported in reed bags to construction sites. The El Chico region is prone to earthquakes and engineers of the time designed buildings that could withstand seismic activity. Innovative design techniques were used to prevent buildings and walls from collapsing during an earthquake.

An herb called shikra was woven into a mesh bag and filled with stones. and was used to form the retaining walls and foundations of buildings, the construction of short sections of walls prevented significant damage during an earthquake abroad. The achievements of this ancient society that existed more than 5,000 years ago reflect a society that had superior engineering skills and social advancements and cultural structure and a strong sense of community preparedness in the high Arctic region of North America, the indigenous peoples They had to adapt to the extreme weather conditions that existed most of the year. Tall tents were used as summer houses and, in winter, whale bones, grass skins and snow. were the building materials commonly used to house the engineering, you know, that goes into an igloo, it's built in a dome shape of course, but that's not the most surprising thing, the downward entrance traps heat inside the igloo because The heat increases, you sleep halfway to the Dome and that is one of the warmest places.

Snow houses are igloos that were used for both hunting expeditions and semi-permanent winter homes. Sleeping areas and storage spaces were placed near the wall and the Central Area was a community space for cooking and daytime activities when you build an igloo you test the snow to make sure it is level all the way because where the layers are the blocks They will break, usually you find a spot with sloping snow, start at the top of the slope and trim it. Your blocks have a wet shape. You trim your block so that it spirals up to the top and you angle them inward, you know, to make a nice dome.

You put the last piece through the hole and cut out. so that it fits perfectly in the hole and you just drop it in and that's it, if you build your eggs that way they won't fall out, you can actually climb to the top and it won't fall out. It would be nice, you know, if someone could find the original igloo, but of course you know that the snow melts every spring and the extreme weather conditions and the shortage of building materials in the Arctic region led the Inuit and their ancestors to develop innovative housing designs that were used for thousands of years The construction of pyramids in Peru Egypt and Iraq at approximately the same time in human history suggests that people around the world independently developed the concept of building massive architectural structures the pyramids of giza were built from limestone blocks weighing 2 to 15 tons each of the giza complexes included three large and three small pyramids which were tombs for the pharaoh and his wives.

The ziggurat of UR was an enormous stepped pyramid measuring 64 meters long and nearly 30 meters high. All that remains today is the base. The pyramid was believed to be part of a temple complex and a shrine dedicated to the moon god Nana. The main pyramid in the corral is 150 meters long and 28 meters high. It was made of hundreds of thousands of cane bags filled with quarry stones that the workers carried. to the construction site thanks to the ingenuity and engineering skills of the ancient people can still be seen in the pyramidal structures that have survived to this day 600 years ago the Aztec civilization was at the peak of its dominance in central Mexico Founded in 1345 Tenochitlan was the capital city of the Aztec world and home to nearly 200,000 people, not only was it the political and spiritual center of the Aztec empire, but it was one of the most impressive technical achievements in the world, so we have to go back to this geography of the Aztec world.

Mexico 4,000 meters or 5,000 meters high between all these volcanic chains there is a gigantic lake that collects all the water that melts from the glaciers of these volcanic buildings and this lake has no outlet, so basically this lake is going to grow and grow. and growing and growing because there is no river that is going to empty, it is like the foreigners of the Aztecs, the modification of tiny islands of silt into a gigantic artificial island of 13 square kilometers and an unknown volume of cubic meters of land that had to be brought from the shores of the lake artificially to create that huge island in the center of this man-made island was the sacred precinct of the Aztecs there is a large plaza Montezuma's palace is on one side the palace of the father of the Summa It is on the other side and then you see the main Temple and the second percent the entire Cathedral of Mexico City would fit within the volume of the main Temple and that is just one structure in the sacred Precinct of the Aztecs we know that this The area had more than 80 specialized temples, so from this center there will be four roads, one will be this one to the south and the other will be Takuba Street that will connect with the western shore of the lake. and then there will be another Causeway to the north that will connect the center of that part with the twin city of Tennessee and that is later, we do not have to pay attention to the pyramids, the pyramids were small elements, it is the volume of The Building of a City artificial on an island outside the Sacred Precinct was a vibrant City where residents traded and exchanged in a large Central Market for flowers, fabrics, Jade, spices, chocolate and everyday products along the side streets there were workshops where artisans specialized in metal, Jade and fabrics. but building an island from scratch and designing and building a city on top of it was just the beginning, infrastructure had to be built to grow food for the large population of Tino Chitlán and then they started playing with the lake levels they have to create a A system of dams to basically regulate the flow of water in the lake prevents brackish water from entering the area and also slows the movement of fresh water coming down from the rivers in the mountain, so the dams basically change the ecology of the lake. lake completely, these dams, dikes and causeways divided the waters around Tenochitlán into large freshwater ponds, some of which were used for fish farms along the shallow lake beds, crops were grown in artificial fields called chinampas , but even if you are, if you are waiting. produce foods that you are growing to create beautiful gardens in These Magnificent Gardens, so when we have that context, we will have to go back to the first Europeans who came to this and climbed these paths between the volcanoes and then at one time when they were at this Point Stop for the The first time you look at the lake you see these 40 cities around the lake and in the middle of the lake a gigantic island is artificial.

We need to reaffirm to them that the island is not natural, that the island is completely man-made, it is a product of the Aztec Empire. When they saw the architectural feats of the Aztecs, they said that this is another Venice. Basically, that was the comparison. It is as if this were another Venice. Tenno Chitlan was not only the economic and political ceremonial heart of the Aztec empire but was among the most impressive engineering feats in history. the world the ink became larger and part of the Aztecs the Aztecs had a more dynamic demographic empire and the tenor sidland became the largest indigenous city ever created by indigenous peoples in northwest North America the abundance of cedar Red made it a natural choice.

As a building material, the trunks of these enormous trees were used to build structures called great houses that were used for both residences and community ceremonies. The various nations of the northwest coast lived in villages that consisted of severalbig houses. Some of the largest communities were made. Build a large house was made up of 30 or more houses and had populations of more than a thousand people. Building a large house involved weeks of preparation with several families working together to build the house. Different clans, different families helped each other and, through a kind of ancient engineering, they could move them and put them in place, it really took a village to be able to move the pieces of the house posts from the previous era upon contact, some of those house poles would be, you know, 500 or a thousand years old, very old.

The cedars even more so, the beams crossing the house pole houseboats were huge, several related families shared a large house, each family had their own cooking fire and sleeping area, bedrooms were often made of planks or mats and every section of the big house was there. There would be several different fire pits, we would make holes in the roof for the smoke to escape, but when we wanted to have a winter ceremony, we would clear out all the bedrooms in the big house and light a central fire and for us, when we light a fire in our ceremonies it is One way to connect with our ancestors, it is like a direct conduit to the spirit world through the smoke that rises up to the Smoke Hole, so we light a fire in the big house and invite other tribes to enter that house big and witness our dances and listen to the songs that belong to that family or Clan inside a big house in our territory we usually have four house posts and the four houses The posts are carved and usually relate to the story of the origin of the family who lives in that big house and that's the purpose of our host post: to remind us where we come from when you wake up in the morning and look up. but your posts at home and you realize that you know where you're coming from and where you're coming from means so much to us that it's literally the structure that you're living in.

If you can imagine being able to look at your origin and realize that your entire ancestry is to support your house, the cedar beams and posts that form the frames of the great houses were permanent, but the planks of the walls could be removed and transported. to the Summer Village sites for our people, the planks were very important possessions, there were methods to be able to remove the planks from living trees and still have the tree survive, so today you can find culturally modified trees that are their boards have been removed and even before contact, the mild climate and abundance of food in the Pacific Northwest led to the establishment of many permanent villages.

As a result, the great house was the primary housing structure in the region for thousands of years. Today, indigenous communities throughout the Pacific Northwest still use large houses for closing pots and other ceremonies. Between 900 and 1700 years ago, Taiwanaku was the dominant society in a region that included parts of Bolivia, Peru and Chile. It is believed that its far-reaching influence was based on Tiwanaku religion, trade and culture. The main city of the Empire was built. On the southern shore of Lake Titicaca a seven-tiered pyramid called Akapana dominated the city skyline. The city also featured impressive works of monolithic art.

Dewanaku featured running water sewers and painted walls. The buildings were made of huge blocks of red sandstone that were They originated in a quarry 10 kilometers away. The foreign theory is that the stones were transported in reed boats across Lake Titicaca. this huge system of lakes, Lake Titicaca, and this was a system that was an incredible resource for the populations of that region and, over time, the populations grew as Tijuanaku expanded, as did its influence. The city center was organized to the cardinal points, its temples, palaces, observatories and pyramids. It had both religious and astrological functions, it was a place where people moved and I believe that by virtue of the ancestors who spread their influence and laid the foundation for the main Cult of the Andes, where the mountains were sacred and sacrifice was key among the most imposing.

The structures in the city are a 10 ton solid andesite block called the Gate of the Sun, these huge gates, the tenant heads the moats around the city, the river causeways, the various structures like Kalawasa, these were all structures that clearly They are dedicated to the ceremonial construction of the elites, so the elites of this ancient city were clearly differentiated from the commoners of the city. About 1,000 years ago, Tiwanaku had evolved into a large urban center with a regional population of hundreds of thousands at a time. To the north and Peru, the Cautious civilization was expanding its power base through military conquest and Whitey, as he grew, was a giant who engaged in conquest and conflict interaction and we have much evidence of this in the archeology of the Andean region and along the coastal margins where they dominated, so you have these two monsters of civilization, both expanding towards imperial status, they were no longer kingdoms to assert themselves and build their places of prominence and their civic enclosures sacred, they began to carve huge blocks of stone like the Gate of the Sun with what some have identified as the God of the staff or Life kocha to others, this deity who was a Supreme Creator was foreign, although there is no evidence that Wadi ever conquered Tawanaku, they were the two main civilizations of their time.

For thousands of years, ancient people carved enormous stone sculptures and transported them over great distances. Engineering expertise, tool technology and artistic skills came together to create these impressive public monuments. Stonehenge is made up of one hundred stone monuments placed in a circular pattern. Stonehenge is made up of sandstone slabs transported from nearby quarries and bluestone slabs from Wales over a distance of more than 200 kilometers Easter Island was settled by Polynesian sailors about a thousand years ago, over several hundred years they were carved 900 statues in a stone quarry and were transported to different In some parts of the island, the tallest statue is 10 meters high and weighs 82 tons.

The Gate of the Sun is a solid stone monument built by the ancient Taiwanaku people. The carvings in the stone represent human faces, heads of condors and a central man with foreign personnel, remains a mystery. how ancient people quarried, transported, and erected stone monuments weighing up to one hundred tons indigenous big game North American hunters faced a major challenge, above all others, elk, buffalo, and caribou They constantly migrate in search of food, who survive hunters and their families have to follow the migration of these animals sometimes hundreds of kilometers each year across the central plains or subarctic regions.

This nomadic lifestyle created a dilemma if the housing was permanent it could not be packed up and taken with them every time the herds moved, but if it was too light it would not protect them from the cold winters on the plains the solution was the tipi the word TPS would be considered a southern word that comes from the Dakota language which is a theipi meaning a meeting place for people is a conical shaped structure made up of multiple poles covered with animal skin or birch bark these portable houses were relatively easy to assemble, disassemble and transport from one camp to another The first forms of tipis were made from tree bark with wooden frames, the TPU would have been more of a sweat lodge in its very ancient origins, which could date back to 10,000 years ago, so it would have been a small frame of bent wood and would not have had a fire traditionally or they would have used rocks to heat it and cook outside which would have been primarily a bark covering and those benders would have been Willow Black Spruce, possibly a younger pine, and over time, the Ojibwe believed and Other forest peoples moved to the plains where bark was scarce.

The bark was replaced by more affordable and durable skins from larger game animals. The shape of the tipi was also modified to accommodate the central fire. Within the structure, as time went on and people expanded and more trade routes opened, it was also probably the most important development of the TP because it would have had to be able to move the camp very quickly during the summer months and, Therefore, it would have made economic sense to have something that could be taken apart and put back together very quickly after the Buffalo along its routes in the Great Plains area, everything east of the Rocky Mountain tipis always faced the door to the east due to the prevailing winds and it was also the first sunlight that would warm the tipi in historic times.

It was the woman's primary possession and it was almost exclusively the women's responsibility to pack the tipi and assemble it properly for transport. Women were mainly the Hide makers and the builders of the tipis. There is no definitive evidence for the quotes. There's a lot. What remains is that there are medicine wheels with large horns, which are the most famous of them, and they showed that there were very large tipis, if in fact that was what they were for. There are other suggestions that these were not tipis like the ones we know for life, but yes.

TPS for astronomical observation, so they placed the rocks around the tipis in a very particular way. There is also evidence in Alberto Saskatchewan Montana of many large camps. The evidence is the rocks that were used to stabilize the TV pools, I believe. Between 4,500 and 5,000 years ago, despite being portable and lightweight, the TP could withstand inclement weather and constant handling during installation and disassembly. It's a very remarkable structure, first of all, in circular terms, and it's always one of those stronger structures. You have to build with this, it is shown over and over again around the world with other similar structures that also use the circle, in the case of storms, in the case of any type of harsh environment or if the circle is the strongest.

When it comes to TP and its architecture, its portability is remarkable, it's amazing to see how quickly a house can be made with a few posts and a deck. I mean, a lot of people say, well, it's just a tent and it's not just a tent. possibly technology that is thousands and thousands of years old and has not been advanced, it does not need to be perfect as it is. Some of the first houses invented by ancient people were portable tents that brought together all the elements of a small house with the added convenience of being light enough to quickly take down.

Foreigners are associated with the nomadic Mongol tribes who rode horses and lived in the foothills of Central Asia. These portable houses are made of an expanding circular wooden frame and covered with animal skins or felt. made from sheep wool a yurt can be disassembled and rebuilt in a few hours the ancient people of north africa have used portable tents for thousands of years a family would have a smaller tent while a tribal leader would have a more impressive dwelling which would measure 20 meters or For longer, the tipi was the primary style of housing for people living on the plains of North America for more than five thousand years.

In the center of the tipi was a hearth with an opening in the roof to allow smoke to escape. The functionality of the Arabian yurt and the TP were so advanced that they are still used today. Ancient architecture is a window to the cultural worlds that existed in the Americas before 1491. From the tundra of the high Arctic to the slopes of the Andean mountains and jungles. of the indigenous peoples of Central America created unique homes with ice wood, stone, adobe and skins. The towns and cities they designed and built were powerful expressions of the innovative spirit of our foreign ancestors.