Practice questions: Native American Societies Before European Contact

Answer: (A) Open grasslands where large bison herds grazed and moved with the seasons

1. On the western Great Plains, people moved camp to follow bison, which gave them meat, hides for tents and robes, and bone for tools.
2. Plains peoples got horses from Spanish New Mexico only in the 1600s; before that they followed the herds on foot, with dogs pulling their loads.
3. Maize farming supported settled villages, such as the earth-lodge villages along the Missouri River, rather than constant movement.
4. Plains bands did trade meat and hides for Pueblo corn, but that trade grew out of their hunting economy rather than creating it.

Answer: (C) Bison hunters of the western Great Plains, who moved camp with the herds

1. Missouri River villagers hunted bison too, but they grew maize, beans and squash and lived all year in earth lodges.
2. Pueblo farmers lived all year in their towns and relied on stored maize rather than a seasonal round.
3. Like Great Basin families, western Plains bands moved through territory they knew, timing each move to where food would be that season.
4. Lower Columbia households stayed in one town all year, living on salmon runs, wapato roots and stored food.

Answer: (D) Families worked together in planned drives they repeated over thousands of years

1. The jump was in use for thousands of years before Plains peoples got horses from the Spanish colonies in the 1600s and 1700s.
2. Plains bands came to jump sites in certain seasons and moved camp for the rest of the year, following the herds.
3. The jump was used for thousands of years before any European trade; bison supplied the hunters’ own food, robes, tents and tools.
4. Marked drive lanes, a camp and deep beds of bison bone show many families cooperating in a hunt that people used for nearly 6,000 years.

Answer: (B) Farming of maize and potatoes that fed dense populations farther south

1. European diseases spread only after contact; smallpox reached Mexico in 1520, so it cannot explain population levels in 1491.
2. Maize in Mesoamerica and potatoes in the Andes gave the Maya, Aztec and Inca societies stable food supplies that supported large, dense populations.
3. Many peoples north of Mexico farmed, from Pueblo towns in the Southwest to maize-growing villages in the Northeast and Southeast.
4. Cahokia’s center had emptied by about 1400, but one city’s decline cannot explain why tens of millions more people lived farther south.

Answer: (D) Maize farming that produced surpluses people could store from year to year

1. The Spanish found Cicuye already standing in 1541, and their great silver strikes in Mexico came later, beginning in 1546.
2. Cicuye’s people were settled farmers who got much of their bison meat and hides by trading with Plains bands.
3. Cicuye’s warriors were feared, but the town obtained Plains goods through trade, exchanging corn, cotton cloth and pottery.
4. Pueblo towns grew maize and stored the surplus, which let hundreds of families live in one place all year.

Answer: (A) Larger settled populations with more people doing work besides farming

1. Irrigation raised harvests in a dry land, and the surplus supported bigger towns and people who worked as builders, traders and religious leaders.
2. Canals tied farmers to their fields; mobile lives built around wild plants belonged to dry regions without irrigation, such as the Great Basin.
3. Southwestern towns kept trading with their neighbors, and their exchange with Plains bands grew stronger by about 1450.
4. Maize had reached the Southwest by about 2100 BCE, long before the large canal systems the account describes.

Answer: (C) Its societies went through major changes before any Europeans arrived

1. Spanish expeditions reached the Southwest only in the late 1530s and 1540s, nearly a century after farmers stopped maintaining these canals.
2. The Akimel O'odham, who count the canal builders among their ancestors, were still farming along the Gila River when Spaniards reached them.
3. Canal towns along the Salt River contracted around 1450, about ninety years before Coronado’s expedition reached the Southwest in 1540.
4. Plains peoples did not have horses until the 1600s, more than a century after the canals fell out of use.

Answer: (B) farmers and mobile hunters each produced goods that the other group needed

1. Archaeology shows Plains–Pueblo exchange growing by about 1450, nearly a century before Coronado’s expedition arrived.
2. Plains hunters needed corn, and Pueblo farmers wanted bison meat, fat and hides, so the two economies traded what each lacked.
3. The visitors slept outside the town walls and kept their own leaders; trade linked independent peoples without uniting them.
4. Pueblo towns kept farming and traded corn to Plains bands; drought led them to store food, not to stop growing it.

Answer: (A) Kinship traced through mothers, which gave senior women political power

1. Haudenosaunee clan membership passed through the mother’s line, and senior clan women chose chiefs and could remove one who failed his people.
2. Under the Great Law, the women of a chief’s family nominated his successor; the title did not pass from father to son.
3. Ranking people by ancestry describes the later Spanish casta system, not Haudenosaunee clans, which were kin groups traced through women.
4. The league was governed by a council of chiefs from the member nations, chosen by clan women, with no king above them.

Answer: (D) settled farming villages with mixed economies that relocated after some decades

1. Great Basin bands moved camp several times a year to reach seasonal foods, while Northeastern towns stayed put for years at a time.
2. Rain watered fields in the Northeast; canal irrigation belonged to dry regions such as the Hohokam country of the Southwest.
3. Salmon-fed towns without farming were found in the Northwest, while Northeastern villages grew maize, beans and squash.
4. Iroquoian towns farmed and hunted, and families lived in the same longhouses for years, moving to fresh fields roughly every ten to thirty years.

Answer: (B) reshaped their surroundings to grow food as well as adapting to them

1. Hohokam canals were dug centuries before the Spanish arrived in 1540, and eastern peoples were clearing forest with fire long before contact.
2. Hohokam canals carried river water to desert fields, and eastern farmers girdled and burned trees to open fields and improve hunting grounds.
3. Farmers in the forested Northeast and Southeast grew maize, beans and squash in fields they had cleared with fire.
4. Eastern farming peoples kept hunting, fishing and gathering alongside their crops, a mixed economy that supported their villages.

Answer: (C) Rich fisheries and stored foods that let elite households build wealth

1. Chinookan towns on the lower Columbia grew no maize; their food came from fishing, hunting and gathering.
2. Fur-trading ships first entered the Columbia in 1792, long after ranked households had formed there.
3. Salmon runs and wapato roots yielded food that could be dried and stored, and control of that surplus supported elite households, feasts and slaveholding.
4. Spanish missions were founded in California from 1769 on and did not reach the lower Columbia; Chinookan ranks were older and their own.

Answer: (D) organized and managed rich river resources without farming

1. Yurok towns and their neighbors grew no food crops; maize farming had not spread to northwestern California before contact.
2. Spanish missions did not reach the Klamath River; the dam and its rules were a Yurok tradition.
3. The Kepel dam was a fish weir across the river, built to catch salmon, not a reservoir for watering crops.
4. Yurok towns on the Klamath River lived on salmon and acorns, and building and opening the Kepel dam took many towns working together under shared rules.

Answer: (A) Lower Columbia towns where people stayed year-round by fishing and gathering

1. Chinookan towns such as Cathlapotle lived in one place all year on salmon and wapato roots without growing crops, so farming was not the only basis for permanent towns.
2. Haudenosaunee towns were settled farming communities, so they fit the argument rather than challenging it.
3. Pueblo towns were settled farming communities that relied on stored maize, which supports the argument.
4. Plains bands were mobile hunters, so their trade with farmers does not show a settled town that lived without crops.

Answer: (B) Algonquian farmers planting maize, beans and squash in shared plots

1. Rain watered fields on the Carolina coast; canal irrigation was a Southwestern practice suited to desert farming.
2. Carolina Algonquians set beans and peas between their corn hills and grew squash and sunflowers in the same plots, so one field yielded several crops.
3. Harriot measured the yields of Algonquian fields, which Native farmers worked with wooden hoes and digging sticks, not plows and oxen.
4. The crops Harriot lists are American ones, maize, beans, squash and sunflowers; European grains were not grown in these fields.

Answer: (C) Salmon-fed plank-house towns on the Columbia and bison camps on the western Plains

1. Maize spread from Mexico to both regions, so this pair shows a shared crop more than adaptation to different surroundings.
2. Trade connected regions, but it does not show how each people fitted its way of life to its own land.
3. Fishing towns in the Northwest and mobile hunting camps on the grasslands show different ways of life fitted to very different environments.
4. Horses and sheep arrived with Spanish colonists, so these changes reflect contact with Europeans rather than adaptation before 1492.

Answer: (D) Settled farming towns in the Southwest supported by irrigation

1. Maize did help European populations grow, but only after the Columbian Exchange began in 1492.
2. Lower Columbia towns grew no maize; salmon and wapato roots supported their settled life.
3. Great Basin bands moved to reach scattered wild foods, a pattern shaped by aridity rather than by maize farming.
4. Maize spread north from Mexico and reached the Southwest by about 2100 BCE, where it supported settled towns, canal irrigation and more specialized work.

Answer: (A) Exchange networks linked the Southwest with Mesoamerica long before 1492

1. Cacao grows only in the tropics, so cacao drunk in the Southwest around 1000–1125 had to come through trade with Mesoamerica.
2. The Spanish conquered the Aztecs in 1521, about four centuries after this cacao reached the Southwest.
3. The Aztec Empire rose in the 1400s, centuries after these vessels were used, and it did not rule the Southwest.
4. Cacao trees need a hot, wet tropical climate and could not grow in the dry Southwest, even with irrigation.

Answer: (B) hunted wetland birds as one of several seasonal food sources

1. The decoys were made centuries before Spaniards reached the region; Great Basin hunters used nets, decoys and bows.
2. Great Basin families moved among marshes, seed grounds and pine-nut groves, and decoys helped them hunt waterfowl when the birds gathered on the wetlands.
3. Scattered, seasonal foods in the dry Great Basin kept most groups small and mobile rather than settled in large towns.
4. Great Basin hunters lured wild ducks with decoys; they did not raise domestic ducks.

Answer: (C) lived in towns supported by fields of corn that they had planted

1. The English expedition depended on Native corn rather than supplying it, and the journal records the English destroying a town’s crops.
2. Harriot reported that disease began killing people in the towns after the English visited them in 1585 and 1586.
3. The English found towns such as Secotan and Aquascogok surrounded by cornfields, the settled farming life of Atlantic coast Algonquians.
4. Carolina Algonquians lived in villages near their fields and fisheries; herd-following camps belonged to the western Plains.

Answer: (D) Native peoples had long histories of their own before Europeans came

1. Over those thousands of years, Native peoples developed farming, towns and trade networks, so their societies changed greatly.
2. Most scholars trace the first Americans to Asia, by way of a land bridge from Siberia to Alaska or along its coast.
3. Farmers in Mexico domesticated maize roughly 9,000 years ago, many thousands of years after these footprints were made.
4. Footprints at White Sands show people in North America more than 20,000 years ago, so Native societies had long histories of their own before 1492.