Economy and Communications
Native Americans had an extensive economic and trading system for at least 2,500 years before Europeans reached North America in the mid-1500s (see Chapter 1). Native peoples in the Southwest (present-day New Mexico, Arizona, and Texas) irrigated (watered) their land to grow maize (corn), beans, and squash. Native Americans who lived in the eastern part of the continent (the Eastern Woodlands) burned forests and prairies to stimulate crop production and wild berry growth. They grew maize, potatoes, beans, squash, sunflowers, and tobacco. Archaeologists (scientists who study ancient cultures) have found pottery fragments, baskets, stone weapons, and shells, which reveal that a vast trade network flourished among the 7,000,000 to 10,000,000 Native Americans who inhabited North America. But Europeans disrupted these productive enterprises when they seized native lands, introduced deadly diseases, and gained dominance with their sophisticated weapons. During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, 90 percent of the Native American population north of the Rio Grande (the river that forms part of the border between Mexico and Texas) was wiped out. The continent was nowopen for European settlement and trade. Yet European economic development in North America would have been impossible without the contributions of the surviving Native Americans.
This page contains 201 words.
Economy and Communications article
Read the rest of this article.
This article contains 9,400 words
(approx. 31 pages at 300 words per page).
Order our Economic system Article
