Study Guide

Question 1

Maritime Foundation for the Andean Civilization

Answer 1

• Generally, a large increase in population must go hand in hand with agriculture
• This did not apply in early Peru, because of their maritime sustenance patterns

Question 2

Andean Food Products

Answer 2

• Potato, tomato, peanut, quinoa, cocoa, camelids, guinea pigs

Question 3

Tiwanaku Site Andean Civilization

Answer 3

• Centered around lake Titicaca
• Monumental architecture reflects their ideas about cosmology
• Located between two sacred mountains
• Seen as the centre of the universe and the birthplace of the creator god Viracocha

Question 4

Caral Supe

Answer 4

• 30+ major centers
• Oldest known culture in the Americas
• Centered around the city of Caral in the Supe river valley
• City had a population of 3000
• Beginning of agriculture in the area - cotton
• Large diversity in monumental architecture, abandoned for unknown reasons

Question 5

Tawantinsuyu

Answer 5

• “Land of four parts”
• Name associated with the Inca empire

Question 6

Quipu

Answer 6

• Strings of knots with messages coded into them
• ## Associated with the Inca

Question 7

Caverna Da Pedra Pintada

Answer 7

• Associated with the Amazon culture
• Cave with a collection of rock paintings that radiocarbon dated to before our previous earliest estimates of human occupation
• Made us rethink the timeline of human occupation

Question 8

Radiocarbon Dating

Answer 8

• Only for organic material
• Accurate up to 50,000 years

Question 9

Luminescence Dating

Answer 9

• Determines when minerals were last exposed to heat or sun
• Inorganic material
• 1-500 ka

Question 10

Amazon Agricultural Products

Answer 10

• Brazil nut
• Cacao
• Rubber
• Manioc

Question 11

Myth of the Pristine Wilderness

Answer 11

• Associated with the Amazon
• Myth that it was all untouched forest ready to be tamed and controlled, when in reality the Amazons had farmed and shaped their environment in ways that would be obvious if Europeans had paid any attention

Question 12

Amazon Built Environment

Answer 12

• Multiple large geoglyphs with ditches and walls
• Llanos De Moxos - group of several hundred settlements, had stepped platforms topped with u-shaped structures, had conical pyramids, canals
• Cotoca - Largest Amazon settlement, had a 21m tall pyramid in the centre
• Montegrande - Massive mound, used for rituals and astronomy, had 1000 years worth of pottery shrds when excavated

Question 13

Terra Preta

Answer 13

• Patches of dark fertile soil found in the Amazon
• Proof that the Amazons had agriculture and were changing their environment to suit their needs
• Dirt s packed with charcoal, human detritus, and organic matter to make it fertile

Question 14

Polyculture Agroforestry

Answer 14

• Growing multiple crops together in the same space
• Amazons did this using a system similar to the milpa system
• This is why Europeans thought there was no agriculture, because it looked like food-dense forest

Question 15

LiDAR

Answer 15

• Method of measuring topography
• Especially useful in areas where archaeological evidence of settlements is not easily visible from the ground such as dense forests
• Has been very useful in the Amazon

Question 16

Maya Time Periods

Answer 16

• Paleo-Indian Archaic - up to the first villages
• Pre-classic Early - first material culture such as pottery
• Pre-classic Middle - E-groups and a glyphic script
• Pre-classic Late - First major cities and the notion of Kingship
• Classic - the ball game, calendars, the Entrada, Tikal hiatus separates early and late
• Terminal Classic - Slow “collapse” of the Maya, could be due to climate change or increased conflict and competition among the growing noble class

Question 17

The Entrada

Answer 17

• Ruler from Teotihuacan arrived in Tikal, and took over
• He made Tikal the most powerful polity in the area rivalled only by Calakmul

Question 18

Teotihuacan

Answer 18

• “The place where gods were created”
• Associated with the Maya and Aztecs

Question 19

Codex Mendoza

Answer 19

• Associated with the Aztec

Question 20

American Southwest Settlement Features

Answer 20

• Ancestral Puebloans - stone and earth settlements along cliffsides, communities of hundreds or thousands, extensive trade networks, advanced irrigation systems, site include Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde
• Hohokam - No single political entity, instead held together by politics, over 1000 miles of dug-earth canals and weirs resulting in the capacity for large scale agriculture, site is Snaketown, buffware pottery, shell jewelry, rock art

Question 21

Direct Historic Approach

Answer 21

• Assumes that past archaeological cultures are related to the cultures currently in the area
• Examines current cultures in order to make guesses about the lives of people from the past

Question 22

American Southwest Trade

Answer 22

• Maize eventually reached the American Southwest through their extensive trade networks that reached to South America
• It became a staple crop and led to the shift to a fully agriculture-reliant society
• Copper from the great lakes and the ability to cold hammer it into decorations

Question 23

What does Mississippian Refer to

Answer 23

• A culture that lived in the Mississippi River Basin
• Archaeologically defined culture, shared material culture, politics, and economics

Question 24

Mississippian building Tradition

Answer 24

• Mounds
• Built in layers with alternating seasons of use and construction
• Sometimes had summit structures
• Many cities were built around these mounds

Question 25

Mississippian Pottery

Answer 25

- Shell shards added to pottery to temper it against cracking - Coil pottery, no pottery wheel - Pottery often came in the form of effigies

Question 26

Cahokia

Answer 26

- Material culture: stone tools, traded for copper, obsidian , mica, shark teeth, whelk shells, and exported Cahokia style pottery - key features: organization into ethnic neighbourhoods, mounds, organized with cardinal directions, - Architecture: Steam baths, council houses, temples, mounds - Abandonment: Around AD 1400, due to increased political turmoil, Medieval warm period caused two major floods