Ways of Life
This was the most important factor in explaining why Native societies developed differently across North America before European contact.
What is geography?
This crop spread northward from present-day Mexico and helped support larger and more complex societies.
What is maize?
This “G” refers to the economic motive that pushed Europeans to explore the Americas.
What is gold?
This term refers to the transfer of plants, animals, minerals, diseases, and people between the Old and New Worlds.
What is the Columbian Exchange?
This Spanish labor system used coerced Native labor in agriculture and mining.
What is the encomienda system?
In this region, some Native societies developed mixed agricultural and hunter-gatherer economies that supported permanent villages.
What is the Northeast, Mississippi River Valley, and/or the Atlantic seaboard?
One major result of maize cultivation was this type of settlement pattern, meaning people stayed in one place.
What is sedentary/permanent settlement?
This “G” refers to the religious motive behind exploration and conquest.
What is God?
This disease devastated Indigenous populations and greatly weakened resistance to Spanish conquest.
What is smallpox?
As Native labor declined because of disease and brutal conditions, the Spanish increasingly turned to enslaved laborers from this continent.
What is Africa?
Because of arid conditions in this region, many Native groups developed mobile lifestyles instead of permanent settlements.
What is the Great Basin and Great Plains?
In dry regions, maize cultivation often required this technique for directing water toward crops.
What is irrigation?
This “G” refers to the political desire for power, prestige, and empire.
What is glory?
These New World crops helped stimulate population growth in Europe after being transferred across the Atlantic.
What are maize and potatoes?
This Spanish social system ranked people by ancestry and race in the colonies.
What is the caste system?
Groups in this region often built settled communities supported by ocean resources rather than large-scale agriculture.
What is the Northwest and present-day California?
These Native peoples of the Southwest built cliff dwellings at Mesa Verde and adapted to their environment with agriculture and irrigation.
Who are the Ancestral Puebloans?
European exploration was encouraged by improvements in maritime technology and this business arrangement that spread risk among investors.
What are joint-stock companies?
This animal, introduced by the Spanish, transformed life on the Great Plains by changing hunting and warfare.
What is the horse?
These Spanish soldiers overthrew the Aztec and Inca empires while seeking wealth and territory.
What are conquistadors?
This large Mississippian settlement showed that major urban centers existed in North America before European contact.
What is Cahokia?
These two staple crops, along with maize, helped support agricultural societies in parts of North America before European contact. Better know as Three-Sister Farming.
What are beans and squash?
This 1494 agreement drew a line of demarcation between Spanish and Portuguese claims in the New World.
What is the Treaty of Tordesillas?
The influx of precious metals from the Americas helped speed Europe’s shift away from this older economic system.
What is feudalism?
This Spanish priest and reformer argued that Indigenous peoples were fully human and should not be subjected to the brutality of systems like encomienda.
Who is Bartolomé de las Casas?