Native American Foods: Before and after Contact: Prehistory

Christopher Columbus’s discovery of what was called the New World was a globe-shaping event. Others had preceded Columbus—among them Vikings and Basques—but their influence was slight. America, having had a long and rich history of major civilizations comparable with those on the other side of the Atlantic, was a new world only from the perspective of Old World Europeans.

Archaeologists debate the dates of the first settlement of the Western Hemisphere. Evidence strengthens the case for a succession of waves of migration, the first as early as forty thousand years ago, during which both large mammals and hunting Siberians crossed the Bering Strait to Alaska by way of a land bridge. Usually under water, the bridge surfaced during ice ages, when an immense amount of ocean moisture was redistributed into frozen glaciers, causing the sea level to drop. The land bridge likely was used most recently during the last Ice Age (ca. 10,000 BCE) but may not have been an easy traversal for nomadic Asians. Rather, because of massive deposits of ice that blocked the land, many Asians probably came to North America by sea, probably hugging the coast and making landfall at several sites along the West Coast. Newcomers of this period spread through large areas of the Americas, leaving archaeological evidence of their presence and their hunting and gathering methods of procuring food. The mammoth-hunters were called the Clovis people (ca. 11,000–6000 BCE), named for the type of stone points they made. The Clovis left remains on the Great Plains and in the American Southwest and the Southeast. Their successors developed preagricultural cultivation of wild plants. These plants later became secondary to the domesticated plants of Mexican agriculture (ca. 6000 BCE), which slowly made their way north. The descendants of the Clovis over the course of many thousands of years and after much interaction evolved from hunting and gathering societies to sophisticated agricultural systems and achieved sufficiently large-scale production to support the growth of highly developed civilizations. These peoples influenced the North American cultural and culinary development of the large Adena and Hopewell cultures of the east of the Mississippi and of the Anasazi, the ancestors of the pueblo dwellers.