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...