Found a good "North American History 3,000-1,500 BC" link? Let Us Know!

Because the indigenous peoples of these regions lacked a written language, we must glean events from the admittedly very incomplete archaeological record and place them in time through radiocarbon dating techniques. Because of the inaccuracies inherent in radiocarbon dating and in interpreting other elements of the archaeological record, most dates in this time line represent approximations that may vary a century or more from source to source. The assumptions implicit in archaeological dating methods also may yield a general bias in the dating in this time line.

FAR NORTH AND CANADA

There were always more people on the Aleutian Islands than on the mainland, because of a milder climate. Nevertheless, from 4,000 to 1,000 B.C. an Arctic Small Tool tradition existed in Alaska, spreading across the arctic part of Canada to Greenland, given its name from the miniature blades lashed to handles of bone or walrus ivory used for cutting and scraping skins. The blades were chipped from a core of chert, a rock of micro-crystalline quartz. These Asiatic people even migrated to Ellesmere Island in northeastern Canada, less than 800 miles from the North Pole, about 2,300 B.C., crossing over the mountains in a great notch, today known as Sverdrup Pass, to the upper end of Baffin Bay, which usually has open water at least in the summer. Canadian archeologists have excavated some of these pre-historic sites, where the earliest are now thirty to thirty-five meters above the present sea level, although they were originally on the beach. As in other northern areas of the globe, the earth's crust has risen slowly over the centuries after the lifting of the great weight of the glacial ice. From Ellesmere Island progress into northern Greenland over winter ice was no problem. By about 1,500 B.C. in British Columbia (and Washington state) people were settled in villages and fished for salmon, although they did not practice cultivation.

This is the era of the so-called Red Paint Culture, with native Amerindian Stone Age traditions derived from old northeastern Asia. The Red Paint or Moorehead Culture originally described from prehistoric graveyards in Maine - the graves containing red ochre has now been identified as part of a larger maritime Archaic tradition extending from northern Labrador at the 60th parallel to southern Maine between about 2,000 and 1,500 B.C. This area was deglaciated about 7,000 B.C. with tundra then present until about 3,000 when spruce forests finally appeared. The settlement pattern and life styles of these Red Paint people seems to have been different from both the Eskimos and the Montagnais-Naskopi Indians of inland Labrador and Quebec. Hunting, fishing, trading tools and raw materials and burying their dead were definable activities. The roots of this culture may have extended back several thousand years to the Paleo-Indian hunters of the now submerged continental shelf.

THE UNITED STATES

The reader is advised to review the preceding two paragraphs concerning Maine and Washington State. In the east the eastern Archaic Culture was changing about 2,000 B.C. in that there was the manufacture of some crude pottery and there was an increased attention to burial observances. Some call this the beginning of the Woodland Culture and others call it simply the Late Period of the Archaic of the Eastern Woodland. At the same time, in the southwestern states, specialized desert cultures continued to develop from the Archaic. As recorded in the last chapter, the Cochise began cultivating corn sometime from 3,000 to 2,000 B.C., providing them extra nourishment for their uncertain diet. Squash now was also brought up from Mexico and tiny gardens of both have been found all over the Cochise wandering area. Santa Catalina Island, twenty miles off the California coast, as previously noted, was inhabited and some forty Indian town sites have been identified. It is obvious that coastal Indians had facilities for ocean travel.

Copper: a world trade in 3000 BC? by Philip Coppens - Europe’s economy between 2000 and 1000 BC stood and fell with copper, used for the creation of bronze. At the same time, large quantities of copper were mined in America, though no-one seems to know who was using it. A question of a world economy, and supply and demand?

By 3000 BC, in the Late Archaic period, some people living along the Mississippi River (in modern Louisiana) may have been building earth burial mounds - this is the same time as the Pyramids in Egypt (but the Pyramids are built of cut stone). Some towns got to be bigger than others and probably controlled the villages around them, as in a complex chiefdom. People began to specialize what they hunted and gathered according to what was available where they were living. Along the middle of the East Coast, for instance, people gathered fresh-water mussels, while further south they lived on salt-water oysters. Near the end of the Archaic period, about 1500 BC, some Iroquois people seem to have split off and traveled south to become the Cherokee. At the same time, people even further south (in modern Florida) began to use pottery, and Pueblo people in the south-west of North America (modern Arizona) began to farm corn and beans that they had gotten from the pre-Olmec people in Mexico to their south. The Late Archaic period lasted until about 1000 BC.

2500 BC: The Cochise people become skilled farmers of the American Southwest.
- Inuit settle Arctic Alaska from the Siberian Far East.

* 1500 BC: Salishan speakers arrive in Northwestern Plateau region.
- Natives of the eastern woodlands begin making pottery, a practice originated in Mesoamerica.
- Shell ornaments and copper items at Indian Knoll, Kentucky evidence an extensive trade system over several millennia.

Native Americans: 3000 BC - 1500 AD By any standards, the Native Americans have always been known for their harmony with nature and their efficiency with using foods and products of the land. In that way, of course, almost all of the Native Americans are similar. However, many cultural and gastronomic differences exist between Natives all across the North American continent. To the left are the 10 different regions that associate similar American Cultures. Each of these regions' meals, foods, and traditions all differ widely. Here, we'll tour the continent...

Still working on it. . .

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