Study Guide and Learning Resources

Key Terms:

As you read and view the videos, use the following terms to help you take notes.


  1. Columbian Exchange

  2. Three Sisters

  3. matrilineal

  4. Pre-Columbian environmental disasters

  5. Cahokia

  6. Native American slavery

  7. kinship

  8. potlatch

  9. Crusades

  10. Reconquista

  11. sugar cultivation Christopher Columbus

  12. encomienda

  13. Bartolomé de Las Casas

  14. Tenochtitlán

  15. Aztecs

  16. La Malinche

  17. Inca

  18. Sistema de Castas

  19. Virgen de Guadalupe


Short Answers:

As you read the chapter and view the videos, take notes on the following questions. Be sure to provide specific examples from this text in your responses. Responses should be at least 1-2 paragraphs (short answer guidelines):

  1. Where do most scholars believe that Native Americans came from? How did they get to the Americas?.

  2. Describe Native Americans cultures and societies throughout the America’s prior to European contact.

  3. Describe the Aztec, Mayan and Inca Empires. Why might one make the case that they were more advanced than Spain before 1492?

  4. Discuss the motivations for European exploration as well as the political and technological changes in the fifteenth and sixteenth century Portugal and Spain that made exploration possible.

  5. Why did Columbus set sail going west across the Atlantic Ocean in 1492? What did he find on his voyages of exploration and did it match his expectations?

  6. What was the Columbian Exchange? Why was disease transmission as well as the discovery of new plants and animals so essential to Spanish conquest and settlement in the Americas?

  7. How did the Spanish treat the land and labor of Native American tribes that they conquered? What sorts of exploitations and abuses did Bartolome de Las Casas document?

  8. After conquering Native peoples, some Spanish men intermarried with Native women. How did this lead to new racial categories and hierarchies in Spanish colonies?

  9. Which groups of people were at the top, in the middle and on the bottom of the social hierarchy in the Spanish colonies? What did this hierarchy reflect?

  10. What areas of the present-day United States did the Spanish explore and settle in the sixteenth century? What Spanish explorers were involved in this and what were the results?