Key Concept 1.1

Before the arrival of Europeans, native populations in North America developed a wide variety of social, political, and economic structures based in part on interactions with the environment and each other.

I. As settlers migrated and settled across the vast expanse of North America over time, they developed quite different and increasingly complex societies by adapting to and transforming their diverse environments

• The spread of maize cultivation from present day Mexico northward into the American Southwest and beyond supported economic development and social diversification among societies in these areas; a mix of foraging and hunting did the same for societies in the Northwest and areas of California
  • Pueblo, Chinook
• Societies responded to the lack of natural resources in the Great Basin and the western Great Plains by developing largely mobile lifestyles.
• In the Northeast and along the Atlantic Seaboard some societies developed a mixed agricultural and hunter-gatherer economy that favored the development of permanent villages.
  • Iroquois, Algonquian