 Hi, I'm Dr. Gene Price. This lecture will look at the prehistoric people in North America to about the time of European contact. What we're going to do in this lecture is try to understand the origins of the migration prehistoric people took to come into North America to summarize the major prehistoric cultures found in North America and to compare those cultures. In 1983, just north of Austin in a town called Leander, archaeologists who were working on a project to widen the road discovered the remains of a young woman. We think she was about 25 to 18 years of age. She was about 5'3". And she died some 13 to 11,000 years ago. It was a rare find because very few full skeletal remains from this period have ever been found in North America. They called her Leanne or the Leanderthal Lady after where she was found. An artist has kind of recreated what she might have looked like if you were to have met her. If we look at the drawing, you'll notice that she was probably buried in some sort of wrapping covered with a rock. With her were found a grinding stone and also a shark's tooth that she probably wore as a necklace. This tells us some things about her and the people she lived among. First, that they probably have trading routes so that she was able to get a shark's tooth when the nearest ocean would have been the Gulf of Mexico about 150 miles away. The other thing is this grinding stone tells us that her people practice agriculture, maybe hunting and gathering. We know that the people who first came to North America probably traveled over a bridge that no longer exists during one of the great ice ages. The water level was much lower because of the glaciers. And so the land between what's now Siberia and Alaska was exposed over this land bridge called Beringia. People either skirted along the coast or migrated across that land bridge down into what is North America as the glaciers began melting. These first Native Americans, these Paleo-Indians as they're sometimes called, came sometime between 70,000 to 10,000 years ago. Most of them were probably tracking large game animals. But as the climate changed about 12,000 years ago, the larger animals became scarce. Vegetation grew more rapidly because of the warmer climate. And as a result, they started developing agriculture. Now we can see this in a couple of archaeological finds. The so-called Clovis Point was found in New Mexico. This was a large, what we might call, spear point today on your left-hand side. It was found in the remains of a mastodon, a giant woolly mammoth type animal. And this tells us that they were hunting large game around this time, about 9,000 years ago. But about a thousand years later, about 8,000 BC, they started using smaller weapons. The agricultural revolution, about 10,000 years ago, people began to domesticate plants and animals and therefore had a more stable food supply in what is now West Texas, in an area called Presidio, and you can see that in red along the Rio Grande River, some of the oldest farmland around. And there they developed grain into what we would today call corn. This allowed people to grow population-wise because they had more stable food supplies and they probably had animals that were domesticated enough so they didn't have to go hunting as much or gathering as much. And so as the food supply was more stable, settlements became more permanent and people in the population grew in their communities. With the growth of the population, people weren't tied up so much hunting and gathering for food, but they could have different roles depending on gender. They might be trading with other groups more frequently and they could also develop religion and leadership roles. Now, of course, this doesn't apply to all people equally. It changed depending upon where they were, what agriculture was available, what animals were available. You still did have hunters and gatherers during this time and you also had people engaged in fishing as well. We look at what we would call the classical and post-classical periods. In three different areas of North America, there were large civilizations, large cultural groupings and empires, essentially, that spread their culture across a vast area of land. One was in the Ohio and Mississippi River valleys. This was the Edina Hopewell culture, the mound builders. And their descendants, the Mississippian culture, which kind of took off where they left off, established a large city of about 15,000 people in what is today East St. Louis. The place is called Cahokia. There are two large mounds there, temple mounds and burial mounds. And the place is now a World Heritage Site. In what is today the American Southwest, there was the Pueblo-Hoho-Kam culture and this civilization still exists today. These were noted for their apartment-like Pueblo buildings built into the sides of cliffs and sometimes even in the desert itself. What is today the desert itself? And finally, further south, where today is Mexico City resides, the Aztec culture developed over the centuries and lasted until European contact in 1521. Their city was Tenochtitlan, which is today Mexico City, and that housed about 4 million people. It was the largest city in North America of this time. Once the Europeans arrived, of course, Columbus came in 1492 and settled in what is today Hispaniola or Haiti in the Dominican Republic, that island. From there, the Spanish branched out into other areas. By 1519, they showed some interest in what we would call the mainland. And, for example, Hernán Cortés, who discovered the Aztec Empire and conquered it. And you also have Alonso de Peñeda, who mapped the Gulf Coast of the United States. Finally, the Narvares expedition, a 1528, a few years later, was set to go and explore what is today Florida and go around the Gulf Coast. A lot of problems happened, shipwrecks, hurricanes and storms destroyed most of the ship. The people were forced to fashion boats or rafts, really, out of wood and try to sail back to Mexico City. They shipwrecked the few survivors around Galveston or Corpus Christi or somewhere in that area. And their treasurer, a man named Alvar Núñez Cavesa de Vaca, wrote about their travels among the Native Americans of South Texas. Finally, they were rescued in 1536. And among Cavesa de Vaca's stories, not only did he tell us about the people who lived in North America, but he told us about gold, cities of gold that perhaps existed. So, what we learned from this short lecture is that of the prehistoric migrations to the Americas, people migrated to North America across a land bridge that no longer exists because it's inundated by water and they were hunting large game. They came from Siberia and settled into what is now North and South America. Of the cultures that developed in North America because of agriculture and animals' domestication, because of a more stable food supply, they were able to build their population and lead to a diverse culture and a changing of roles. And so, in these different groups, in these different cultures that developed in North America, prior to European contact, they developed complex cultures, societies. They had different languages, different religions and extensive trade networks. So, I hope that you learned a little bit about prehistoric people through this lecture. Thank you very much.