This chapter recounts the history of the first inhabitants of what is today the United States and Canada. Its focus runs through the beginnings of sedentary life to the period of European contact. After crossing from Asia more than 10,000 years ago, the earliest settlers in the Americas dispersed across the New World, diversifying their subsistence pursuits to concentrate on distinct sets of local resources. By the end of the Archaic period (c. 1000 BC), cultigens were added to the diet, including local plants such as chenopodium, marsh elder, and squash as well as maize, the domesticate that was introduced from Mexico. Lifeways were diverse and remained so up to the time of the European arrival. Some groups in the West continued a mobile hunting and gathering way of life until historic times, while a diverse array of more hierarchical political formations developed in parts of the Southeast, the Midwest, the Northwest Coast, California, and the Southwest.

We begin with Poverty Point, one of the few late Archaic settlements in North America (north of Mexico) that contained monumental earthworks. Yet it does exemplify important changes in the late Archaic in the southeastern United States: decreasing mobility, experimentation with fired clay, and increasing reliance on cultivated plants. In the following centuries these trends became increasingly important in areas outside the Southeast. During the last centuries BC, at the Hopewell site in Ohio, we see the construction of burial mounds and the unequal distribution of grave offerings, which may be evidence of social differentiation. Yet it is not clear how marked those distinctions were or if they were inherited.

By the end of the first millennium AD, at Cahokia, on the floodplains of the Mississippi, such inherited social distinctions appear to have been well entrenched. Cahokia was one of the largest Mississippian centers and contains the largest precontact pyramid built north of Mexico. Increasing reliance on corn at Cahokia is part of a trend found at later prehistoric sites across the eastern United States. Moundville, a later Mississippian center in Alabama with monumental constructions and elaborate artifacts, flourished after AD 1300 after Cahokia went into decline. Late prehistoric groups of the Northeast and southern Canada appear to have been organized less hierarchically. The Draper site, in southern Ontario, provides a picture of a large Iroquoian village that was composed of large multifamily longhouses and lacked the monumental constructions of the large Mississippian centers.

An important difference between the maize-farming peoples of the late prehistoric eastern United States and those of the West is the greater reliance on irrigation in the latter. Snaketown, an early Hohokam village in southern Arizona, was located near a river that could be tapped for irrigation. By the end of the first millennium AD, the village became an important craft production center and exchanged goods across the Southwest and with northern Mexico.

For the most part, the indigenous peoples of the Southwest lived in small, dispersed communities. Yet, periodically, they clustered into larger more hierarchically organized networks, as we see at Chaco Canyon in northern New Mexico around AD 900. Although the population nucleation at Chaco was short-lived, Chaco was the center of a large regional trading network that was linked by a complex of roads leading from the canyon. The nature of hierarchical organization in the Southwest differed from that of Mississippian societies, although both were categorized by internal variation as well as fluctuations over time.

On the Northwest Coast, at the late prehistoric coastal village of Ozette, we see that people who were largely dependent on wild plants and animals could become sedentary. Large permanent settlements of several hundred people appeared by AD 1000, despite the absence of agriculture. Social ranking appeared even earlier, and by the time of European contact, all individuals in some Pacific Coast societies were ranked according to heredity and wealth.

As part of this discussion of Native North America, specific blocks and site sections in this chapter present information on the archaeology of exchange, monumental architecture, the archaeological interpretation of grave offerings, the study of community plans, dendrochronology, and a consideration of chiefs and their different societal roles.