Land & Life Before Contact
Farmers in the Valley of Mexico built these garden platforms in shallow lake water.
What are chinampas?
The reconquest ended in this year, when Granada fell.
What is 1492?
A population spread from its homeland that keeps cultural ties to it is called this.
What is a diaspora?
This is the Portuguese name for a large sugar plantation and mill complex.
What is an engenho?
Haiti declared independence in this year.
What is 1804?
The Inca cut these stepped fields into Andean mountainsides.
What are terraces?
Centuries of reconquest produced this outlook that made spreading Catholicism a duty.
What is a crusading mentality?
Shared ancestry, culture, language, and traditions describe this concept.
What is ethnicity?
With Zacatecas, this Andean mining city powered Spain's silver economy.
What is Potosí?
This leader's 1780–1783 Andean rebellion began as a broad alliance but became primarily Indigenous.
Who is Túpac Amaru II?
This Maya cycle of clearing, burning, planting, and resting forest plots suited thin tropical soils.
What is milpa?
Spain's rivals spread Las Casas's writings, helping create this image of uniquely cruel Spain.
What is the Black Legend?
After severe population collapse here, colonizers turned to enslaved African labor.
What is the Caribbean?
Places like Paraguay, with little to export and weak control, are called this.
What are fringe regions?
After Napoleon invaded in 1807–1808, this royal court relocated to Rio de Janeiro.
What is the Portuguese royal court?
Unlike the Aztec and Inca, the Maya were organized this way.
What are independent city-states?
This rival city-state and others like it supplied thousands of warriors to Cortés.
What is Tlaxcala?
These semisedentary people of Brazil's coast largely disappeared as sugar plantations spread.
Who are the Tupi?
Domination that works mainly through consent rather than force.
What is hegemony?
In 1815 this Haitian president gave Bolívar ships, weapons, and supplies.
Who is Pétion?
Chinampas, terraces, and milpa look different, but they share this principle.
What is adapting farming to the local environment?
Besides weapons, this political factor helped Spain defeat both the Aztec and Inca empires.
What are divisions among Indigenous peoples?
One biological and one economic factor made enslaved Africans more likely than Indigenous laborers to survive in these colonies.
What are prior exposure to Old World diseases and experience with settled farming?
Because casta paintings were sent to Spain to impose order on race mixing, historians read them as evidence of this.
What are elite beliefs about how society should be ranked?
Bolívar promised equal inclusion at Angostura, yet for decades the reality lagged behind it. Name this gap.
What is the gap between promise and practice?