Historically, classification of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas is based upon cultural regions, geography, and linguistics. Anthropologists have named various cultural regions, with fluid boundaries, that are generally agreed upon with some variation. These cultural regions are broadly based upon the locations of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas from early European and African contact beginning in the late 15th century. When Indigenous peoples have been forcibly removed by nation-states, they retain their original geographic classification. Some groups span multiple cultural regions. Peoples can also be classified by genetics, technology, and social structure.
In the United States and Canada, ethnographers commonly classify Indigenous peoples into ten geographical regions with shared cultural traits, called cultural areas. [1] Greenland is part of the Arctic region. Some scholars combine the Plateau and Great Basin regions into the Intermontane West, some separate Prairie peoples from Great Plains peoples, while some separate Great Lakes tribes from the Northeastern Woodlands.
Indigenous peoples of the Great Plains are often separated into Northern and Southern Plains tribes.
Most of these no longer exist as tribes.
Nota bene: The California cultural area does not exactly conform to the state of California's boundaries, and many tribes on the eastern border with Nevada are classified as Great Basin tribes and some tribes on the Oregon border are classified as Plateau tribes. [56]
This region is also called "Oasisamerica" and includes parts of what is now Arizona, Southern Colorado, New Mexico, Western Texas, Southern Utah, Chihuahua, and Sonora
The regions of Oasisamerica, Aridoamerica, and Mesoamerica span multiple countries and overlap.
Partially organized per Handbook of South American Indians . [65]
Anthropologist Julian Steward defined the Antilles cultural area, which includes all of the Antilles and Bahamas, except for Trinidad and Tobago. [65]
The Central American culture area includes part of El Salvador, most of Honduras, all of Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama, and some peoples on or near the Pacific coasts of Colombia and Ecuador. [65]
The Colombia and Venezuela culture area includes most of Colombia and Venezuela. Southern Colombia is in the Andean culture area, as are some peoples of central and northeastern Colombia, who are surrounded by peoples of the Colombia and Venezuela culture. Eastern Venezuela is in the Guianas culture area, and southeastern Colombia and southwestern Venezuela are in the Amazonia culture area. [65]
This region includes northern parts Colombia, French Guiana, Guyana, Suriname, Venezuela, and parts of the Amazonas, Amapá, Pará, and Roraima States in Brazil.
This region includes parts of the Ceará, Goiás, Espírito Santo, Mato Grosso, Mato Grosso do Sul, Pará, and Santa Catarina states of Brazil
This region includes Amazonas in Brazil; the Amazonas and Putumayo Departments in Colombia; Cotopaxi, Los Rios, Morona-Santiago, Napo, and Pastaza Provinces and the Oriente Region in Ecuador; and the Loreto Region in Peru.
This region includes Amazonas, Maranhão, and parts of Pará States in Brazil.
This region includes southern Brazil (Mato Grosso, Mato Grosso do Sul, parts of Pará, and Rondônia) and Eastern Bolivia (Beni Department).
This region includes the Cuzco, Huánuco Junín, Loreto, Madre de Dios, and Ucayali Regions of eastern Peru, parts of Acre, Amazonas, and Rondônia, Brazil, and parts of the La Paz and Beni Departments of Bolivia.
Indigenous languages of the Americas (or Amerindian languages) are spoken by Indigenous peoples from the southern tip of South America to Alaska and Greenland, encompassing the land masses which constitute the Americas. These Indigenous languages consist of dozens of distinct language families as well as many language isolates and unclassified languages. Many proposals to group these into higher-level families have been made. According to UNESCO, most of the Indigenous American languages in North America are critically endangered and many of them are already extinct. [74]
Before European contact:
After European contact, some distinct writing systems have been used for Indigenous languages:
The haplogroup most commonly associated with Indigenous Americans is Haplogroup Q1a3a (Y-DNA). [75] Y-DNA, like (mtDNA), differs from other nuclear chromosomes in that the majority of the Y chromosome is unique and does not recombine during meiosis. This has the effect that the historical pattern of mutations can more easily be studied. [76] The pattern indicates Indigenous peoples of the Americas experienced two very distinctive genetic episodes; first with the initial peopling of the Americas, and secondly with European colonization of the Americas. [77] [78] The former is the determinant factor for the number of gene lineages and founding haplotypes present in today's Indigenous American populations. [77]
Human settlement of the Americas occurred in stages from the Bering sea coast line, with an initial 20,000-year layover on Beringia for the founding population. [79] [80] The micro-satellite diversity and distributions of the Y lineage specific to South America indicates that certain Amerindian populations have been isolated since the initial colonization of the region. [81] The Na-Dené, Inuit and Alaska Native populations exhibit haplogroup Q (Y-DNA) mutations, however are distinct from other Indigenous Americans with various mtDNA mutations. [82] [83] [84] This suggests that the earliest migrants into the northern extremes of North America and Greenland derived from later populations. [85]
Arising before European contact:
Comancheria (1770-1850) has also been described by some scholars as a Native American empire which arose after European contact.
These complex societies developed cities before European contact.
The Andes, Mesoamerica, and eastern North America are considered centers that independently developed agriculture, a process known globally as the Neolithic Revolution.
The technological and social development of pre-Columbian cultures are conventionally classified into five archaeological stages:
In North America, the later stages are grouped instead into the Woodland period and Mississippian culture.
Metallurgy in pre-Columbian America included for some cultures equivalents to Eurasian Copper Age and Bronze Age technology:
The Iron Age in Eurasia is defined by the production of iron tools via smelting; iron smelting was never developed natively in the Americas. Unsmelted iron was used Andeana and Mesoamerican cultures for mirrors, decorative and ceremonial items, starting fires, and small hammers. Iron magnets were apparently used by the Olmec and Chavin to align monuments. Smelted iron from shipwrecked East Asian vessels was used in the Pacific Northwest before European contact.
Haplogroups are defined by unique mutation events such as single nucleotide polymorphisms, or SNPs. These SNPs mark the branch of a haplogroup, and indicate that all descendants of that haplogroup at one time shared a common ancestor. The Y-DNA SNP mutations were passed from father to son over thousands of years. Over time, additional SNPs occur within a haplogroup, leading to new lineages. These new lineages are considered subclades of the haplogroup. Each time a new mutation occurs, there is a new branch in the haplogroup, and therefore a new subclade. Haplogroup Q, possibly the youngest of the 20 Y-chromosome haplogroups, originated with the SNP mutation M242 in a man from Haplogroup P that likely lived in Siberia approximately 15,000 to 20,000 years before present
{{cite web}}
: |author=
has generic name (help)Archaeological evidence, in fact, recognizes that people started to leave Beringia for the New World around 40,000 years ago, but rapid expansion into North America didn't occur until about 15,000 years ago, when the ice had literally brokenpage 2 Archived March 13, 2012, at the Wayback Machine
Over time descendants developed a unique culture—one that was different from the original migrants' way of life in Asia but which contained seeds of the new cultures that would eventually appear throughout the Americas
The relatively lower coalescence time of the entire haplogroup A2 including the shared sub-arctic branches A2b (Siberians and Inuit) and A2a (Eskimos and Na-Dené) is probably due to secondary expansions of haplogroup A2 from the Beringia area, which would have averaged the overall internal variation of haplogroup A2 in North America.
The divergence time for the Nadene portion of the HaeIII np 663 lineage was about 6,000–10,000 years. Hence, the ancestral Nadene migrated from Asia independently and considerably more recently than the progenitors of the Amerinds
Psidium is a genus of trees and shrubs in the family Myrtaceae. It is native to warmer parts of the Western Hemisphere. Many of the species bear edible fruits, and for this reason several are cultivated commercially. The most popularly cultivated species is the common guava, Psidium guajava.
Xanthosoma is a genus of flowering plants in the arum family, Araceae. The genus is native to tropical America but widely cultivated and naturalized in other tropical regions. Several are grown for their starchy corms, an important food staple of tropical regions, known variously as malanga, otoy, otoe, cocoyam, tannia, tannier, yautía, macabo, ocumo, macal, taioba, dasheen, quequisque, ʻape and as Singapore taro. Many other species, including especially Xanthosoma roseum, are used as ornamental plants; in popular horticultural literature these species may be known as ‘ape due to resemblance to the true Polynesian ʻape, Alocasia macrorrhizos, or as elephant ear from visual resemblance of the leaf to an elephant's ear. Sometimes the latter name is also applied to members in the closely related genera Caladium, Colocasia (taro), and Alocasia.
Mandevilla is a genus of tropical and subtropical flowering vines belonging to the family Apocynaceae. It was first described as a genus in 1840. A common name is rocktrumpet.
Indigenous peoples of the Southeastern Woodlands, Southeastern cultures, or Southeast Indians are an ethnographic classification for Native Americans who have traditionally inhabited the area now part of the Southeastern United States and the northeastern border of Mexico, that share common cultural traits. This classification is a part of the Eastern Woodlands. The concept of a southeastern cultural region was developed by anthropologists, beginning with Otis Mason and Franz Boas in 1887. The boundaries of the region are defined more by shared cultural traits than by geographic distinctions. Because the cultures gradually instead of abruptly shift into Plains, Prairie, or Northeastern Woodlands cultures, scholars do not always agree on the exact limits of the Southeastern Woodland culture region. Shawnee, Powhatan, Waco, Tawakoni, Tonkawa, Karankawa, Quapaw, and Mosopelea are usually seen as marginally southeastern and their traditional lands represent the borders of the cultural region.
Cnidoscolus is a plant genus of the family Euphorbiaceae first described as a genus in 1827. The group is widespread across much of North and South America, including the West Indies.
Ditaxis is a plant genus of the family Euphorbiaceae first described as a genus in 1824. Its name comes from Greek dis ("two") and taxis ("rank"), referring to the stamens which are in two whorls. The genus is widespread across much of the Western Hemisphere from the southern United States to Uruguay.
Mabea is a plant genus of the family Euphorbiaceae first described in 1775. It is native to Central and South America as well as Mexico and Trinidad.
Pouteria is a genus of flowering trees in the gutta-percha family, Sapotaceae. The genus is widespread throughout the tropical Americas, with outlier species in Cameroon and Malesia. It includes the canistel, the mamey sapote, and the lucuma. Commonly, this genus is known as pouteria trees, or in some cases, eggfruits.
Aspidosperma is a genus of flowering plant in the family Apocynaceae, first described as a genus in 1824. It is native to South America, Central America, southern Mexico, and the West Indies.
Muhlenbergia is a genus of plants in the grass family.
Aegiphila is a genus of flowering plants in the mint family, Lamiaceae, first described in 1763. It was formerly classified in the Verbenaceae. It is native to Mexico, Central America, South America, the West Indies, and Florida.
Hirtella is a genus of 110 species of woody trees in family Chrysobalanaceae. It was first described as a genus by Linnaeus in 1753. Hirtella naturally occurs in tropical forests throughout Latin America, the West Indies, southeast Africa, and Madagascar. The flowers are mainly pollinated by butterflies.
Syngonanthus is a genus of flowering plants in the family Eriocaulaceae. It is native to tropical Africa and to Latin America.
Spodoptera ornithogalli is a moth of the family Noctuidae.
Olyra is a genus of tropical bamboos in the grass family. It is native primarily to the Western Hemisphere, with one species extending into Africa.
Agrias amydon, the Amydon agrias or white-spotted agrias, is a butterfly of the family Nymphalidae. It is found in Mexico, Central America, and South America.
Odontadenia is a genus of plant in the family Apocynaceae, first described as a genus in 1841. It is native to southern Mexico, Central America, South America, and the West Indies.