Oh, like… all of them? Not quite, no. There were about…500 to 600 different Native nations in North America, I think, plus more in Mesoamerica and South America? Across a huge diversity of different landscapes. Some of them were nomadic hunter-gatherers, a few were settled hunter-gatherers, but a very large amount of Native nations were agricultural and either settled in one place year round or had a winter and summer home deal where they transited between the two. A huge amount of foods that are now well established worldwide were bred in the Americas as agricultural crops, including corn, many varieties of beans, tomatoes, potatoes, a number of squashes, and sunflowers. There were several heavily populated urban centers as well – check out the Inca, the Maya, the Aztecs, and in North America the Mississippian Mound Building culture, and the Pueblo culture for examples of heavily populated cities. The Iroquois/Haudenosaunee Confederacy also were settled agriculturalists, though I believe they also did have substantial hunting and gathering activity (agriculturalist vs. hunter/gatherer is more of a spectrum than a binary choice) and I don’t believe they had population centers that were true large urban centers like the other examples I listed.
Oh they were all sorts of things before white folks showed up, even more since. The Yupik still hunt and gather. The Aztec had major cities when the Spanish arrived, with Tenochtitlan having an estimated 200,000 people more than twice the estimates for Madrid at the time. Cahokia was an empire that farmed sunflowers and later maize in what’s now Illinois before being abandoned in the Eastern hemisphere’s middle ages. The people of the pacific northwest were mostly fishers because if you’ve got a fuckload of salmon it’s not a bad call. In what’s now Mexico you had a lot of sylviculture.
Maize was domesticated from teosinte in mesoamerica. Beans, tomatoes, squash, and peppers were all grown by many cultures. The inca grew so many potatoes.
Most people were doing a little bit of everything though. Or whatever made sense to them. Many wanted to hunt and gather and chose to not prioritize agriculture over the hunt.
But also, hunter gatherers can do all these things. They can engage in complex politics, build great monuments, develop an interesting material culture, and plenty else. We have evidence of this in both hemispheres.
I want to add that the Iriquoian people are probably one of the best examples of all these things. They only have one surviving culture, the Haudenosaunee Nation, but when white people arrived in North America they were a significant cultural group in the areas settled by the early French and English colonists. When we arrived they had long been using a combination of farming, hunting, and managed gathering for sustainence, in a way that was compared to nobility. They had a complex society and political system which they frequently debated. Their political debates with Europeans heavily impacted modern European values, and their political system was extremely influential on the structure early American Republic.
The book The Dawn of Everything goes more into this and other cultures and peoples often seen as primitive for their lithic tools and other traits we typically see as of an earlier stage of advancement.
Weren’t they hunter gatherers?
Where do you think corn comes from? When is the last time you saw a wild corn stalk?
Which “they”?
Native Americans.
Oh, like… all of them? Not quite, no. There were about…500 to 600 different Native nations in North America, I think, plus more in Mesoamerica and South America? Across a huge diversity of different landscapes. Some of them were nomadic hunter-gatherers, a few were settled hunter-gatherers, but a very large amount of Native nations were agricultural and either settled in one place year round or had a winter and summer home deal where they transited between the two. A huge amount of foods that are now well established worldwide were bred in the Americas as agricultural crops, including corn, many varieties of beans, tomatoes, potatoes, a number of squashes, and sunflowers. There were several heavily populated urban centers as well – check out the Inca, the Maya, the Aztecs, and in North America the Mississippian Mound Building culture, and the Pueblo culture for examples of heavily populated cities. The Iroquois/Haudenosaunee Confederacy also were settled agriculturalists, though I believe they also did have substantial hunting and gathering activity (agriculturalist vs. hunter/gatherer is more of a spectrum than a binary choice) and I don’t believe they had population centers that were true large urban centers like the other examples I listed.
Not to mention when the Europeans arrived they found massive cities that had running water, sanitation workers, and a relatively clean way of life.
Tenochtitlan was one of the most populated cities in the world when the Spanish arrived
Oh they were all sorts of things before white folks showed up, even more since. The Yupik still hunt and gather. The Aztec had major cities when the Spanish arrived, with Tenochtitlan having an estimated 200,000 people more than twice the estimates for Madrid at the time. Cahokia was an empire that farmed sunflowers and later maize in what’s now Illinois before being abandoned in the Eastern hemisphere’s middle ages. The people of the pacific northwest were mostly fishers because if you’ve got a fuckload of salmon it’s not a bad call. In what’s now Mexico you had a lot of sylviculture.
Maize was domesticated from teosinte in mesoamerica. Beans, tomatoes, squash, and peppers were all grown by many cultures. The inca grew so many potatoes.
Most people were doing a little bit of everything though. Or whatever made sense to them. Many wanted to hunt and gather and chose to not prioritize agriculture over the hunt.
But also, hunter gatherers can do all these things. They can engage in complex politics, build great monuments, develop an interesting material culture, and plenty else. We have evidence of this in both hemispheres.
I want to add that the Iriquoian people are probably one of the best examples of all these things. They only have one surviving culture, the Haudenosaunee Nation, but when white people arrived in North America they were a significant cultural group in the areas settled by the early French and English colonists. When we arrived they had long been using a combination of farming, hunting, and managed gathering for sustainence, in a way that was compared to nobility. They had a complex society and political system which they frequently debated. Their political debates with Europeans heavily impacted modern European values, and their political system was extremely influential on the structure early American Republic.
The book The Dawn of Everything goes more into this and other cultures and peoples often seen as primitive for their lithic tools and other traits we typically see as of an earlier stage of advancement.
Which ones?