Tools of History
This is the scientific study of past human life through analyzing leftover artifacts and structures.
What is Archaeology?
This large mammal was a crucial resource for food, clothing, and shelter among many Indigenous plains societies.
What is a Bison?
This is the artificial application of water to land or soil to assist in the production of crops.
What is Irrigation?
This devastating pandemic periodically swept through early modern Europe, forcing urban residents to flee to the countryside.
What is the Black Death (or Bubonic Plague)?
While European peasants heavily relied on wheat or rye, many Native American societies relied on this crop as their primary dietary foundation.
What is corn (or maize), a Staple food?
This term describes any object made, modified, or used by humans in the past.
What is an Artifact?
This economic situation occurs when the supply of a resource cannot meet the existing public demand for it.
What is Scarce?
Native Americans used this highly effective pain-relieving compound extracted from the bark of willow trees, which is the basis for modern aspirin.
What is salicylic acid?
This traditional building method uses a network of interwoven wooden sticks plastered with a mixture of mud, clay, and straw.
What is Wattle and Daub?
While European peasants lived under landlords in a feudal system, many Indigenous societies organized their communities based on these extended family networks.
What are clans (or kinship groups)?
This is a proposed explanation or system of ideas intended to explain something based on evidence.
What is a Theory?
This describes a basic food item, like wheat or corn, that forms the dominant part of a population's diet.
What is a Staple?
Indigenous communities engineered complex networks of these earthwork structures to direct river water directly into corn, bean, and squash fields.
What are Irrigation canals?
This flawed European medical idea stated that the human body was controlled by four fluids—blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile.
What is the Theory of the Humors (Humorism)?
Unlike European peasants who faced frequent famine due to land ownership restrictions, Native American societies avoided shortages by utilizing this type of shared land resource system.
What is communal land ownership?
This term refers to a one-sided perspective or prejudice for or against a specific idea, person, or group.
What is Bias?
This is a system of exchange where goods or services are directly traded for other goods or services without using money.
What is barter?
Indigenous builders engineered these massive, precisely aligned earthen platforms used for civic, religious, and residential purposes.
What are platform mounds?
Early modern European doctors widely practiced this dangerous medical procedure to balance bodily fluids, often weakening the patient further.
What is bloodletting?
While European peasants built permanent timber-framed cottages using this muddy plastering technique, some Indigenous groups built mobile tipis to follow seasonal resources.
What is Wattle and Daub?
Historians must identify this specific type of viewpoint distortion when analyzing 17th-century European accounts of Indigenous societies.
What is cultural Bias?
When European trade goods became limited in supply, they became this, causing their trade value to skyrocket.
What is Scarce?
Unlike the European practice of treating only physical symptoms, Native American medical traditions prioritized this type of healing, which balances the mind, body, and spirit.
What is holistic medicine?
This invention by Johannes Gutenberg revolutionized European daily life by drastically increasing literacy rates and spreading medical texts.
What is the printing press?
European peasants suffered from rampant nutrient deficiencies due to a narrow diet, whereas Native American diets were highly varied because they combined agriculture with these two practices.
What are hunting and gathering?