LONG ESSAY

Five Essay Questions

Five Essay Questions

Question 1:

It estimated that as many as 30 million Native Americans lived in South America when Europeans first arrived. Some of them had developed complex civilizations, many of them centred in the Andes. The various peoples speaking as many as 1,550 different languages sometimes grouped into the following culture areas for purposes of study: the central and southern Andes and adjacent Pacific coastal regions, where complex farming civilizations. Such as that of the Inca, developed; northern South America, where the peoples lived a way of life similar to lower Central America and Caribbean peoples, with small villages and some farming. The tropical forests of eastern South America, which offered a wealth of resources to the hunting-and-gathering peoples also living in scattered villages. Many of them along the Amazon River; and the colder regions in the south, to the east and south of the Andes, consisting of nomadic hunter-gatherers.

The peoples of North America were diverse in almost every conceivable way except biologically. Experts argue about the extent of North America's pre-contact population. The range is 1 million to 18 million—but most agree that populations began declining several hundred years before Europeans showed up. By 1450, some large Indian communities in the Southwest, Pacific Northwest, and middle Mississippi Valley had vanished or dispersed, abandoning sophisticated buildings and artifacts. Factors that have been proposed to explain these declines include climate change, warfare, and disease.

By 1450, there were dozens of tribal groups and alliances speaking diverse languages and following very different religious and social customs. There were some commonalities: Most Indians were animists, believing in the spiritual power of their natural surroundings. They devised elaborate rituals to placate these spirits, especially those of animals they had killed. In many areas, human burials placed in elaborate and extensive earthen mounds. Most tribes respected shamans (healers) and believed that a Great Spirit oversaw the natural world. Because tribes were likely to move often in search of better land or more abundant game. Or to avoid other hostile tribes—property ownership in the European sense was all but unknown. Archaeologists have found abundant evidence of trade routes that spanned the continent, bringing tribes together in the process of barter and exchange.

In most North American tribes, women were in charge of agricultural production, while men hunted for game. Maize (corn), first cultivated in Mexico, was by the time of contact a basic crop in much of North America. Squash and beans were also staples of most tribes' diets. While by no means environmentalists in any modern sense, most North American tribes were well adapted to their surroundings and were often helpful to amateur Europeans. For example, natives taught French explorers how to build lightweight birch-bark canoes to travel where their clunky wooden ships were useless. Others helped Europeans identify strange plants and animals, learning which were edible and which poisonous. Most famously, Squanto, a Patuxet who had been kidnapped by an English slave trader in 1614, returned to America in time to teach the Pilgrims ...