North American Civilization Paper - Essay Example

No attempts were made to immigrate to Antarctica so the migration essentially stopped there. The enormity of the landscape allowed two distinct sources of food delivery to evolve: maintenance of hunter-gatherer societies in nomadic formations and agricultural societies tying themselves to distinct geographical enclaves. The book contends the population to be 5-10 million but other sources place the number between 2-7 million. Agriculture increased the complexity of the societies that developed in the various areas of continent.

Men tended to wield more power and influence in the hunter societies while the women of the tribes started to come into their own in the agricultural societies. The increased complexity of the societal fabric tended to bring more power to the women of the tribes. The relative scarcity of arable land or diminished animal populations for consumption tended to dictate the type of civilizations that would arise around the provision of foodstuffs. They tended to vary in shape and complexity. While the Pueblos tended to an increasingly sophisticated agricultural society, the Iroquois all the way on the other side of the continent erected an equally sophisticated culture of their own.

The availability of edible wildlife tended to dictate the societal formations that emerged. Davidson et al asserts that nearly 70 Pueblo villages flourished by 1540, a little more than a generation before the Gutierrez map was published. The variations in living and cultural differences between the tribes were as large as the continent was wide. A vast panoply of climates, topography and variations in water systems made a huge tapestry of different lifestyles and tribal constructs apparent. The division and sheer variety of tribal affiliations, lifestyles and resistance to unity made the aboriginal tribes in North America especially vulnerable to the depredations that would be visited on them in the coming decades and centuries.

Internecine and centuries old tribal feuds and warfare made it almost impossible to prevent the European tidal wave that was coming. The authors make short shrift of the massive internecine conflict that had embroiled the continent for centuries between different tribes. “On the Western Plains, pre?Columbian warfare—before the introduction of horses and guns—pitted tribes against one another for control of territory and its resources, as well as for captives and honor. Indian forces marched on foot to attack rival tribes who sometimes resided in palisaded villages.

” In the eastern woodlands, “mourning wars” would take place where tribes would fight each other. It is sad to say that the tribal rivalries were a serious impediment to offering a united front against the European invasion on its way. Soon enough, as the eighteenth century emerged more than two hundred years after Gutierrez’ map made its debut, a European march westward marking the ultimate destruction of the aboriginal tribes of America began to gain steam and the North American Indian tribes’