Food & Farming
The Indigenous name for the crop -- named for the Taino word for "life-giving seed" -- that was the staple food around which much Indigenous American agriculture developed.
What is maize? (AKA corn)
This civilization built cities such as Chichén Itzá, Tikal, and Uxmal.
Who were the Maya?
This enormous city-state flourished in the Mississippi Valley and had tens of thousands of inhabitants.
What is Cahokia?
This blue-green stone was a highly valuable trade good linking the Southwest and central Mexico.
What is turquoise?
Indigenous decision-making described in the governance section often relied on this rather than majority rule.
What is consensus?
These three crops formed the nutritious combination sometimes called the Three Sisters.
What are corn, beans, and squash?
The Maya made balls from this material for court games.
What is rubber?
These Southwestern people built more than 800 miles of major irrigation canals between about 900 and 1450 CE.
Who were the Hohokam?
These colorful bird products traveled north from Mexico in trade networks.
What are tropical bird feathers?
The constitution of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy is known by this name.
What is the Great Law of Peace?
Farmers in this mountainous South American region cultivated many varieties of potatoes beginning more than 7,000 years ago.
What are the Andes?
A type of ancient, accordion-fold book made from deerskin, tree bark, or paper, using painted pictograms and symbols (glyphs) to record Mayan and Aztecan history, genealogies, rituals, and tributes.
What is a codex?
The peoples of the Pacific Northwest depended heavily on this sacred fish.
What is salmon?
Roads in North America often followed these major geographic features.
What are rivers?
In Haudenosaunee society, these women selected male representatives and could remove them from office.
Who were clan mothers?
Because many corn-growing regions were dry, farmers constructed these to bring water to crops.
What are irrigation systems/canals?
Maya mathematicians had developed this important mathematical concept by 36 BCE.
What is zero?
This urban center, built into a canyon near the present-day Four Corners (Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona), was connected to around 75 communities by roads.
What is Chaco Canyon?
According to the reading, turquoise reached as far north as communities in this modern-day country.
What is Canada?
Muskogee and Seminole governments included civil, military, and this third branch.
What is the sacred/religious branch?
The author identifies three early centers of agriculture in the Americas (out of seven centers globally). Name two of the three.
What are Mesoamerica, the (South-Central) Andes, and eastern North America?
Built on an island in Lake Texcoco (near present-day Mexico City) around 1325, this city became the center of Aztec power.
What is Tenochtitlan?
This northeastern confederacy included the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, and Seneca nations.
What is the Haudenosaunee (or Iroquois) Confederacy?
Thanks in large part to their canals, this Southwestern community became a crossroads in a trade network reaching from Mexico to Utah and from the Pacific Coast toward the Great Plains.
Who were the Hohokam?
Pacific Northwest peoples practiced this ceremony involving the distribution or destruction of accumulated goods.
What is the potlatch?