During the thousands of years of native inhabitation on the continent, cultures
changed and shifted. Archaeologists often name different cultural groups they
discover after the site where they are first found. One of the oldest cultures yet found
is the Clovis culture of modern New Mexico. A more recent example is the group of
related cultures called the Mound builders (e.g. the Fort Walton Culture), found in
the Mississippi river valley. They flourished from 300 ВС to the 150s AD. The more
southern cultural groups of North America were responsible for the domestication of
many common crops now used around the world, such as tomatoes and squash.
Perhaps most importantly they domesticated one of the world's major staples, maize
(corn).
As a result of the development of agriculture in the south, many important cultural
advances were made there. For example, the Maya civilization developed a writing
system, built huge pyramids, had a complex calendar, and developed the concept of
zero around 400 ВС, a few hundred years after the Mesopotamians. The Mayan
culture was still present when the Spanish arrived in Central America, but political
dominance in the area had shifted to the Aztec Empire further north. Upon the arrival
of the Europeans in the "New World", Native American population declined
substantially, primarily due to the introduction of European diseases to which the
Native Americans lacked immunity. Native peoples found their culture changed
drastically. As such, their affiliation with political and cultural groups changed as
well, several linguistic groups went extinct, and others changed quite quickly. The
names and cultures that Europeans recorded for the natives were not necessarily the
same as the ones they had used a few generations before, or the ones in use today.
21 The indigenous peoples of the Americas are the pre-Columbian inhabitants of
North, Central, and South America, their descendants, and many ethnic groups who
identify with those peoples. They are often also referred to as Native Americans,
Aboriginals, First Nations, Amerigine, and by Christopher Columbus'
geographical and historical mistake, Indians, now disambiguated as the American
Indian race, American Indians, Amerindians, Amerinds, or Red Indians.
According to the still-debated New World migration model, a migration of humans
from Eurasia to the Americas took place via Beringia, a land bridge which connected
the two continents across what is now the Bering Strait. The most recent point at
which this migration could have taken place is 12,000 years ago, with the earliest
period remaining a matter of some unresolved contention. These early Paleo-Indians
soon spread throughout the Americas, diversifying into many hundreds of culturally
distinct nations and tribes. According to the oral histories of many of the indigenous
peoples of the Americas, they have been living there since their genesis, described
by a wide range of traditional creation accounts.
Application of the term "Indian" originated with Christopher Columbus, who thought
that he had arrived in the East Indies, while seeking Asia. This has served to imagine
a kind of racial or cultural unity for the aboriginal peoples of the Americas. Once
created, the unified "Indian" was codified in law, religion, and politics. The unitary
idea of "Indians" was not originally shared by indigenous peoples, but many over the
last two centuries have embraced the identity.
At the time of the European discovery of most of the islands of the Caribbean, three
major Amerindian indigenous peoples lived on the islands: the Taino in the Greater