A Shawnee cooking pot (ca. 1500 AD) The Shawnee people probably first suffered from contact with European explorers and traders shortly after 1500 AD. That's when they caught measles from their Iroquois and Mississippian neighbors. Many Shawnee died. [...]
Excavation of a house at Joara The Little Ice Age The people who lived in the lower Mississippi valley (modern Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama) were not doing so well around 1500 AD. The [...]
Louisiana Purchase: What Europeans were claiming Before the Louisiana purchase In 1800 AD, Native Americans still controlled most of North America. But Spain, France, Britain and the United States were busy fighting over who got to conquer [...]
Lewis and Clark Who were Lewis and Clark? In 1804 AD, the Sioux people received a visit from official representatives of the newly formed United States government. The visitors' names were Meriwether Lewis [...]
Later Iroquois history: Trade beads made in Venice in the 1600s and traded in North America Iroquois trade for beads and knives When the first European traders came to the north Atlantic [...]
A Cherokee house in the 1800s In the late 1600s AD, Cherokee people were still building their towns about the way they had built them before the Europeans arrived. We have a good [...]
Green corn ceremony: Corn, beans, and squash growing together When people started farming... Like other people around the world, when people in North America started to get more of their food [...]
Serpent Mound (Ohio, about 500 BC?) Shawnee people were related to the Algonquin and the Cree, and spoke a related Athabascan language, but they lived a little further south, in the mid-west (modern [...]
Montana landscape with a moose calf wading People we call Athabascans or Dene lived in Blackfoot territory (modern Montana and Canada) in the Paleo-Indian period, by around 10,000 BC. They lived by hunting and gathering. They [...]
The Appalachian Mountains When did the Appalachian Mountains form? About 300 million years ago, near the end of the Carboniferous period, when the first reptiles were evolving, the tectonic plates [...]
