The Americas to 1500 Essay -- essays papers

THE AMERICAS TO 1500I. Methodology in the HistoryThis period, which deals with the world the Indians knew before the reach of European explorers, poses difficulties flowing more often than not from the pretermit of the usual evidentiary foundation for doing history written documents (for example, letters, speeches, treaties, constitutions, laws, books, newspapers, magazines, almanacs). This lack need not be a major obstacle to diachronic regard, however. Indeed, one of the most important things we can accomplish in inform this period is devising ways to give students a sense of the spectrum of methods that historians exercise to investigate and understand the past. We can give students a sense of the width and depth of the historians task and the remarkable array of tools and techniques available to the historian to break out about the past. In seeking to understand the first human being beings who settled North and South America either 15,000 or 40,000 years ago (the dates are a matter of vigorous historical dispute), historians handling some or all of the following archaeology (digs for artifacts, examinations of burial sites, fill up study of ancient constructions such as the cliff d intimatelyings of the western united States, or the mounds left by the mound-builder peoples of the southeastern United States) comparative devotion and folklore -- the study of creation myths, legends, and folktales told by Indian peoples medicine -- tracing such biological factors as human bloodtypes to show how different peoples (the Aztec, the Comanche, the Seminole, the Kwakiutl) may well share a common ancestry, or studying the differing responses of Indian and European peoples to diseases to illustrate how contact amongst the cultures occasionally proved fatal to the native culture geology, climatology, and ecology -- to reconstruct the land as the Indians found it, to constitute the ways they lived off the land and in harmony with it, and to provide a b asis for comparison between Indian and European understandings of the relationship between human beings and the natural world linguistics -- to trace the origins and development of Indian languages and the genealogy of Indian language families anthropology -- to identify shared pagan elements and cultural distinctions between Indian peoples and even off conventional techniques of history -- e.g., close rendering of such histo... ..., and that technological insights such as the wheel are not inevitable.) Indian economies were shaped by their geography, climate, and ecology. As noted above, some Indian peoples were primarily hunters and grazers, while others were primarily agricultural, and still others possessed complex, sophisticated, and successful mix economies that rivaled European economic systems.One last point Again, all these areas stay put controversial in the extreme, implicating as they do such disputes as whether Indian peoples are primitive and whether the concept of primitive is useful or even appropriate in analyzing a different peoples culture and way of life. Further, as we see in essay II, a complicating factor in the study of the Americas before the arrival of European explorers and settlers is the idea -- widely circulated and discussed during the 500the anniversary of Columbuss arrival in the New World -- that the Europeans dispossessed the rightful inhabitants of these continents, and that all afterward American civilization and history, however notable and estimable its achievements and ideals, is based on a colossal series of acts of expropriation, fraud , and genocide.