FIRST AMERICANS: PREHISTORY—1600
BOOK 1, A History Of Us, Joy Hakim
1. The 1,000-mile-wide marshy “land bridge” by which immigrants from Asia crossed
into the Americas between 15,000 and 30,000 years ago. [17] _________________
2. He was the individual who first called Native Americans “Indians.”
[21]
_______________________________
3. This new type of weapon enabled early Native Americans to throw darts much more
effectively – it was but one prominent example of how humans were gaining the
upper hand over the large animals of the New World. [21] _______________
4. The people of the Far North do not use “Eskimo,” an Algonquin word meaning
“eaters of raw flesh,” to describe themselves but rather this term, which can be
translated as “the people.” [26] ______________
5. Much early exploration in the Americas was motivated by the search for this
mythical waterway to Asia. [29] ________________________
6—7. Ancestors of the Pueblo Indians, they lived in the thirteenth century in the Four
Corners region where today’s New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, and Utah now
intersect. [31] ______________________ Literally “green table mountain,” this
Colorado site was the most impressive of their cliff dwellings.
[31,34]
___________________
8. These tall fir carvings of animal and human symbols were used by the Indians of the
Northwest to represent a family’s power and rank. [35] ___________________
9. From a Nootka word for “giving,” these massive Northwest parties revolved around
the giving away of possessions by the host, who thereby gained considerable
prestige. [37] ______________________
10. The approximate number of different languages spoken by the Indians of North
America circa 1500 AD. [40] _____________
11. This animal was at the center of Plains Indians life and culture: it provided material
for food, shelter, clothing, and fuel. [45] __________________
12—14. Linguists classify America’s many languages into these three families. [48]
_______________________; _________________________; ____________________
15. This 1300-foot-long, winding Ohio mound is one of the most impressive of such
edifices etched onto the landscape by ancient Native Americans.
[50-51]
__________________
16—20. Located across the Mississippi from the current site of St. Louis, this city
covered six square miles and had some 25,000 inhabitants circa 1000 AD.
[52]
_______________ The powerful ruler of this slave society. [52] _______________
The name given to the slaves, they could marry upwards into the noble class. [52]
________________ The Mound-Building culture of which this city was the center. [53]
___________________ The introduction of this crop some one thousand years ago was
probably the feature that distinguished the civilization from the two earlier eras of
Mound-Builders. [53] _____________
21. The oldest of the Mound Builders, they lived some 2,500 years ago and are named
for the region in Ohio where some of their mounds were found.
[53]
______________
22. This nineteenth-century farmer who found thirty mounds on his Ohio farm has
given his name to the era some 2,000 years ago when mound-building flourished.
[50-51, 53] ____________________
23—25. What is the name typically given by historians and archaeologists to the Indians
of the eastern forests? [55] __________________ Most of these Native Americans
were divided into these two major language groupings. [57] __________________;
______________________
26—32.
What were the five original nations of the Iroquois League?
____________;
________________;
________________;
[58]
________________;
___________________ This sixth nation joined the Confederacy in 1722 when they
were driven from North Carolina by white settlers. [58] ___________________ The
name the Iroquois gave to their chiefs. [58] _________________
33. These tiny shell beads were woven into designs and used by the Iroquois both as
money and to tell stories of the tribe. [58] ________________
34. The name the Iroquois gave to North America. [60] ________________________
35—36.
The name given by Leif Erickson to the area he explored (in today’s
Newfoundland) around 1000 AD.
[62-63] __________________
In the 1960s
archaeologists found the remains of a Viking settlement at this Newfoundland site. [66]
_____________ _______________________________
37. This Portuguese monarch helped spur the age of exploration by funding various
fifteenth-century
expeditions
eastward
towards
Cathay
(China).
[71]
_________________________________________
38. The erroneous maps of this famous Greek classical geographer were still being used
in the Renaissance of Columbus’s time, 13 centuries after their design.
[75]
_________________
39—41. The marriage of this Castilian queen and this Aragonian king would help to
unify Spain. [75] __________________; ______________________ The reconquest in
1492 of the last remaining lands from this group, who had occupied parts of Spain since
the eighth century, accentuated Spain’s new triumphalist and expansive vision. [75]
________________
42. The ship on which Christopher Columbus sailed to the Americas.
[77]
______________
43. The name Columbus gave to the island where his crew first landed, it means “Holy
Savior” in Spanish. [79] ________________________
44. The Tiano people who first met Columbus spoke this language; soon all of its
speakers would be dead, killed by European weapons, slavery, and disease. [79-80]
_____________________
45. The title bestowed upon Columbus by the king and queen when he returned to
Spain. [81] _________________________________________________
46. The first Spanish settlement in the Americas. [82] ____________________
47—56. What is the name historians typically give to the transfer of new plants and
animals
between
the
Old
World
and
the
Americas?
[84]
____________________________ Name four animals introduced to the Americas as a
result of this exchange. [84] __________; _________________; __________________;
___________________ Name one animal transferred from the New World to the Old.
[84] ______________ This New World crop would become a staple in Africa. [84]
_____________ This New World crop would become the basic food for the working
class in Ireland and Germany.
contemporary
Italian
cooking
[84] __________________
without
this
New
It is hard to imagine
World
vegetable.
[84]
_________________ This Old World crop would create tremendous wealth for the
plantation owners of Jamaica and Barbados. [84] _____________
57. His 1497 voyage with eighteen men became the basis for the English claim to all of
North America. [88] _______________________
58. Meaning “conqueror,” it was the Spanish term for the early explorers and soldiers
who arrived in the Americas. [88] _____________________
59. Crossing the Isthmus of Panama in 1513, he became the first European to see the
Pacific’s western coast. [88] ______________________________
60. His 1519 quest for a short-cut to the Moluccas or the Spice Islands would take him
past the tip of South America through the straits that would come to bear his name
on
to
a
remarkable
three-year
around-the-world
adventure.
[90]
____________________
61—62. Although not the first European to explore the New World, he was one of the
first to recognize it as a new continent, and it was his name and not that of Columbus
that
would
provide
the
name
for
this
novus
mundus.
[95]
___________________________ Whose famous 1507 world map was the first to use
the new name? [96] _________________________________________________
63—65. What tribe controlled much of present-day Mexico when the Spaniards first
arrived in the early sixteenth century? [103] ___________________ Their ruler, he was
the most powerful in North America, with perhaps some 10 million subjects under his
command. [103] _____________________________ Tribal legends predicted that this
feathered serpent would arrive from the east in human form to take back land that was
his. [103-104] ____________________________
66. His force of 550 soldiers and 16 horses would forge alliances with the discontented
natives of the surrounding area to conquer Mexico for Spain.
_____________________
[103]
67—68. The greatest city in the Americas, it was the capital of the Aztec empire. [105]
______________________ What was the approximate number of people who lived in
this city? [106] ____________________
69. What disease decimated the Aztecs, as indeed it did also to many other Native
American peoples? [107] ___________________
70. Literally the “golden one,” this legend of a New World place where gold was
commonplace and of the king who ruled here spurred much Spanish and other
European exploration. [113] ______________________
71—72. Perhaps the first Spaniard to set foot in North America, he had earlier become
the governor of Puerto Rico but pushed westward in search of the Fountain of Youth.
[113] __________________________
In 1513, he would give a name, literally
“flowery,” to what future American state? [113] _________________
73—76. What native empire controlled present-day Peru in the sixteenth century? [11415] _____________________ What Spaniard toppled the empire with but 180 men, 67
horses, and 3 guns? [114] ________________________________ What was the capital
of this empire? [115] ___________ Who was the leader of the native empire? [115]
____________________
77. Spanish for “mixed,” these were the children of Spaniards and Native Americans.
[117] ______________________
78. From the Spanish word for “mule,” these were the children of Spaniards and blacks.
[117] ___________________
79. Whose 1540 exploration to the southwest was in part motivated by the quest to find
the
mythical
Seven
Cities
of
Cibola?
[122-25]
______________________________________
80. The first permanent European colony in the North American West, it was
established by the Spaniards in New Mexico in 1610. [132] __________________
81. Arriving in the New World in 1502, this priest questioned not only the Spaniards’
enslaving of Native Americans but Europeans’ ethnocentrism.
[133-34]
_______________ ____________________
82. Henry VIII, the king of England, broke with the Catholic Church in 1534 to found
this, also known as the Church of England. [140] ______________________
83. What Italian, in the employ of the French, would sail up the North American coast
and into what would become New York City’s harbor (today a huge suspension
bridge named in his honor links Staten Island to Brooklyn).
[142]
________________________
84. What European fashion helped to spur the development of New France? [149]
______________________________
85. The French explorer Samuel de Champlain founded what settlement in 1608, the
second-oldest continuously-occupied city on the North American continent? [151]
________________
86. The late seventeenth-century French explorer Sieur de La Salle canoed down from
Canada to the Gulf of Mexico, claiming the Mississippi River and everything west
of it for France and naming it what in honor of the French king of the day? [153]
______________________
87. After receiving a charter to the English territory in the New World, Sir Walter
Raleigh
named
the
land
what,
after
Queen
Elizabeth?
[158]
____________________
88. What was the first permanent colony (1565) founded on land that would later
become part of the United States? [159] __________________________
89—91. English colonists landed on what island, now part of North Carolina, in 1587?
[160] _____________________ He was at first an artist and then a leader on these early
English expeditions to the New World. [158, 160] _______________________ What is
the name given to the ill-fated first attempt at English settlement?
[161]
______________________
92. The defeat of what major naval invasion force in 1588 marked the moment when
Spanish power began to be replaced by that of the English?
___________________
[165]