Native Americans of Middle and South America

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Introduction

Native Americans of Middle and South America, indigenous peoples of Middle America (Mexico, Central America, and the West Indies) and South America. Native Americans were the first humans to inhabit these regions, arriving thousands of years before European explorers laid claim to the “New World.”

The story of Native Americans begins in the ancient past. Scientists believe that the first human settlers of the Americas migrated from northeastern Asia during the last ice age, which ended 10,000 years ago. Whereas today the waters of the Bering Strait separate Asia and North America, during the ice age sea levels were much lower, and a wide land bridge, called Beringia, connected the continents. Anthropologists believe one or more waves of people crossed this bridge to North America, and through countless generations, eventually made their way down to Central America and across the Isthmus of Panama into South America.

In what in evolutionary terms was a brief flash of time, the descendants of those first migrants adapted to nearly every environment throughout Middle and South America, from the temperate highlands of Mexico and tropical rain forest of the Amazon Basin to the grassy pampas of Argentina and frigid islands of southernmost Chile. In Middle America and in the Andes mountains of South America, Native Americans began to grow maize (corn), beans, squash, and many other crops. As agriculture and food production intensified, populations soared, eventually developing into great states and empires of immense size, wealth, and complexity. The largest and best known of these were the Maya civilization, the Aztec Empire, and the Inca Empire. Other important civilizations included the Olmec, Teotihuacán, Toltec, and Zapotec cultures of Middle America; and the Chavín, Moche, Nazca, Tiwanaku (Tiahuanaco), and Chimú cultures of the Andes.

When Italian-Spanish explorer Christopher Columbus landed in the Bahamas in 1492, he thought he had reached islands off the eastern coast of Asia, which was then known as the Indies. Perhaps because of this belief, he called the villagers who greeted him indios, which later became the English word Indian. During the colonial period in Spanish-speaking Middle and South America, many indigenous peoples came to detest the name indio because it was accompanied by their subjugation and maltreatment at the hands of European conquerors. Although the use of indio persists to the present, anthropologists today generally use the term indigenous peoples when referring to the native inhabitants of Latin America and their ancestors; some also use the English terms Indian or Native American in scholarly writing. Like their counterparts in North America, the indigenous peoples themselves prefer to be identified by their specific tribal name, such as Huichol, Maya, Ynomamö, or Aymara. This article uses the terms Native Americans, indigenous peoples, and native peoples interchangeably when referring generally to the indigenous inhabitants of Middle and South America.

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Intermarriage between Native Americans and Europeans began almost immediately from the time of European conquest. The children of these unions became known as mestizos. Mestizos now constitute a large proportion of the population in many Latin American countries, including Mexico, Guatemala, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia. It is often very difficult to distinguish people who are of pure indigenous ancestry from those who are mestizo. In fact, the classification of people as indigenous is usually more of a cultural distinction than a biological one, counting only those people who have not yet abandoned their indigenous ways of life. Today, the majority of indigenous people in Middle and South America live in villages away from urban areas.

This article divides its discussion of Native Americans into three main parts. The Culture Areas section describes indigenous cultures and ways of life, primarily as they existed before European contact, in seven geographic regions. The History section chronicles the earliest migrations to Middle and South America, the rise of civilizations, the European conquests, and the modern history of indigenous groups. The Native Americans Today section discusses many of the political, social, and cultural issues that indigenous people face in contemporary Middle and South America.

For a discussion of the indigenous peoples of North America, see Native Americans of North America.

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Culture Areas

In anthropology, the term culture refers to a society or group of people with shared beliefs, customs, practices, and social behaviors. When European explorers began arriving in Middle and South America in the late 15th and early 16th centuries, hundreds of indigenous cultures existed across the land, from present-day Mexico to the southern tip of South America. The people of these diverse cultures had, over the centuries, developed ways of life well suited to the physical environment in which they lived.

To study these diverse cultures in a meaningful way, many anthropologists divide Middle and South America into different culture areas, distinct geographic regions whose inhabitants shared many cultural traits. The concept of culture areas assumes that geography and culture are intimately connected, and that cultures are best understood by reference to their environment. For example, a principal reason why complex states arose in Mesoamerica and the central Andes is the higher food productivity these regions had compared to other areas, which was due in part to the richness of the soil, rainfall patterns, and temperature. Intensive agriculture produced enough food to support large, dense populations, and with greater numbers of people there arose a corresponding need for more complex social and political systems.

However, neither a perfect nor totally predictable correlation exists between geographic areas and the societal types or cultural traits found within them. For example, if we follow the culture area concept too blindly we might tend to think of Mesoamerica as a place where only states or empires existed in ancient times. The fact is that there existed isolated groups, especially near the northern and southern boundaries of Mesoamerica, that never went beyond the village level of sociopolitical organization. Thus, culture areas provide a way of studying the general characteristics of people in a large geographic area, but at the risk of overlooking some of the details of cultural variability in that area.

This article divides Middle and South America into seven culture areas. These are Mesoamerica, the Caribbean and Northern Andes, the Central and Southern Andes, the Amazon Basin, the Brazilian Highlands, the Gran Chaco, and Southern South America.

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Mesoamerica

This section gives a broad overview of the Mesoamerica culture area. For a more detailed treatment, see Mesoamerica.

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1

Land and Habitat

The Mesoamerica culture area stretches from present-day central Mexico southeast through much of Central America. It includes the Yucatán Peninsula; all of Belize, Guatemala, and El Salvador; and parts of Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica. The primary geographic features of Mesoamerica include a lowland belt of tropical rain forest that runs along the Gulf of Mexico, and a cooler, drier highland belt parallel to it. Within the highland belt are the central Mexican highlands, including the Valley of Mexico; the southern Mexican highlands, including the Valley of Oaxaca; and the hills and valleys of the southeastern highlands of Guatemala.

No major rivers are found in Mesoamerica, in contrast to other areas of the world where early civilizations arose. Ample rainfall occurs throughout the region, however. A line that snakes across central Mexico near the Tropic of Cancer forms the northern boundary of Mesoamerica; north of this line rainfall sharply declines and the climate is much drier. The ancient civilizations of Mesoamerica all arose and developed in the area between this line and the Guatemalan highlands far to the south. Rich volcanic soils are found throughout much of the region.