Blackwell Reference Online

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When Europeans arrived on the American continent 500 years ago, they found people bearing the modern phase of what archaeologists have called the ‘archaic culture’. This type of culture spread from the north to the south during the climatic changes that occurred around 8000 bce . The strength of this particular type of culture lay in a total utilization of natural resources. Agriculture made its first real impact around the beginning of this era, but even then the variegated use of natural resources did not cease, and we still find hunting and foraging together with agriculture throughout the Americas. Throughout this long history numerous languages and cultures arose. In North America alone 200 separate languages with countless dialects were being spoken shortly before the arrival of the Europeans. Approximately 2,000 separate languages were being spoken on the whole continent, roughly equivalent to one-third of the world's languages. The systematic study of the relationships between these languages is still in progress, but scholars have identified at least seventeen languages families as different from one another as Indo-European is from Sino-Tibetan. Furthermore, most of the 2,000 individual languages are still being spoken today. The cultural variety of Native Americans is just as striking. Cultural diversity can even be found within common linguistic groups (such as the ... log in or subscribe to read full text