The spread of cultivation into North America seems to have proceeded along two separate courses, one from northern Mexico into the southwest and the other from an unknown Middle American source into the Mississippi Valley. One of the earliest known phases in eastern North America in which corn cultivation appears to have had a role in subsistence is the Adena, which occupied the middle Ohio River Valley by about 800 bce. The stimulus of the Adena farmers was apparently instrumental in bringing about the spectacular Hopewell culture in the Illinois and Ohio valleys. The success of the Hopewell peoples (400 bce to 400 ce) seems to have been due largely to their combining elements of the preceding Archaic cultures with elements of the Adena culture and perhaps with some features of a local cultivating tradition. It is evident that the Hopewell culture included a well-organized village-based society in which surplus resources were used in the construction of elaborate earthworks and were concentrated as wealth in a restricted group of individuals. The most outstanding feature of Hopewell culture is a burial complex that called for the deposition of concentrations of wealth in tombs of one or several deceased individuals. The interment procedure was elaborate and involved the construction of a large log tomb, later burned and covered by an earth mound. Artifacts found within these burial mounds indicate that the Hopewell were able to obtain goods from widespread localities in North America. Obsidian and grizzly-bear teeth were apparently derived from the Rocky Mountain region, copper from the northern Great Lakes, and conch shells and other objects from the southeast and along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. The ceramics of the Hopewell appear to be based in two major traditions, one derived from northern Asia, which reached eastern North America by about 1000 bce, and the other from Middle America, where the decorative technique of rocker-stamping, characteristic of finer Hopewell pottery, existed several hundred years prior to the earliest appearance of the Hopewell culture. In less favorable areas of eastern North America, a “generalized Woodland” culture paralleled the Hopewell in time, probably based more on collecting than on cultivation.

Mississippian culture

The period of the Hopewell culture was followed by relative decline in social cohesion in the northern Mississippi and Ohio valleys, evidenced by the absence of unifying features comparable to the Hopewell in the succeeding generalized Woodland culture. At about 800 cea new tradition, with much stronger and more specific Middle American elements, moved up the Mississippi Valley. This Mississippian culture was based on more intensive cultivating techniques than the Hopewell and resulted in impressive concentrations of population in large towns through the southern and central Mississippi Valley and in several areas of the southeastern United States. A central ceremonial plaza provided the nucleus of a Mississippi town, and each settlement had one or more pyramidal or oval earth mounds, surmounted by a temple or chief’s residence, grouped around the plaza. This settlement pattern is typical of most of Middle America after about 850 bce but is not found in North America until the Mississippian culture appears. The scale of public works in the culture can be estimated from remains of the largest of the Mississippian earthworks, Monk’s Mound near Cahokia, Illinois, which measures 1,000 feet (305 meters) in length, more than 700 feet (213 meters) in width, and is still 100 feet (30.5 meters) in height. The first European explorers in the southern Mississippi Valley in the early 16th century found the Mississippian culture still flourishing as warring alliances of towns, each ruled through a theocratic system based on kin ties.

Pueblos

In the southwest, the earliest villages of farmers appeared by about 200 bce, and this initial development in southern New Mexico and Arizona was succeeded by a gradual spread of this way of life as far north as southwestern Colorado, east to the Pecos River, and west into the lower valley of the Colorado River. The maximum expansion of the Puebloan culture of the eastern and northern portions of the southwest appears to have taken place by 1150 or 1200 ce and was followed by the gradual abandonment of much of the area by farming peoples. This decline seems to have been due to a combination of factors, including drought, deforestation, and lack of social cohesion within the villages. At the time of historic contact the Puebloan peoples were restricted to the Rio Grande Valley and adjacent localities and to scattered settlements in west central New Mexico and on the Hopi mesas of Arizona. The early explorers encountered other less well-organized farming groups, descended from the Hohokam and Patayan traditions of the southwest, in scattered localities along the Gila, Salt, and Colorado rivers.

South America

In South America, little is known of cultural development outside the Andean area, where, as in Middle America, urban civilization was well under way by the first few centuries ce. From a sequence near the mouth of the Orinoco, it appears that manioc cultivation, which formed the subsistence base for stable villages in the tropical forest, had been developed by about 1000 bce. Peripheral to the Andean area, numerous cultures are known, particularly in Colombia and northern Argentina and Chile, that show marked influence from Andean urban centers and yet preserve distinct local traditions throughout the late prehistoric period.

The general picture

An overall view of the prehistory of the New World prior to the development of urban civilization reveals several general trends. The outline above follows the forefront of cultural development as it took place in several well-known areas. In localities less favorable to primary or intensive cultivation, the level of cultural development tended to stabilize at the point at which maximum food production was possible with the techniques at hand. Thus, in the Arctic and in the boreal forests of the north, as well as through most of southern South America and various other regions unfavorable for cultivation, cultural activity remained at an Archaic food-collecting level through the entire prehistoric period. In the tropical forests of South America and the woodlands of the northeastern United States, farming villages were the apex of cultural development under prehistoric conditions. In relatively favorable areas, such as the Mississippi Valley, the oasis regions of the southwestern United States, and several other regions peripheral to the South and Middle American high-culture centers, temple-centered towns were the climactic development. A general appraisal of cultural complexity reveals a trend from a single or few early cultural phases of uniform composition covering the entire New World, to the extremely diversified cultures of the last two millennia of the prehistoric period. Within the sequence of cultural development, it appears that the greatest diversity is present at the village-farming level, with hundreds of distinct phases indicating essentially locally oriented social groups that gradually united into larger units as communication and political pressures from more successful centers submerged the cultures of the weaker local phases.

When compared with the Old World sequence, a similar succession of cultural levels can be distinguished in the New World, but there are differences in such basic qualities as the lack of economically important domestic animals in the New World and the much greater diversity of habitats and forms in which the various cultivated plants originated. It was not until several cultivated crops (corn, beans, and squash for most of the New World) were fully developed and assembled that higher cultural levels were possible.