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Global Historical Themes

Understanding our place in time and Space

• Where people came from...
• How they got to the Americas...
• How similar or different were Old and New World societies?

Where we came from. . .

• Eve" vs. Multi-regional models
• Either way, our roots are in Africa
• Living in the rest of the world required cultural ways of coping

Humans' recent arrival in much of the world

• A 4-million-year-old species has only been in much of the world for 40,000 years, 1% of that time
• Distant realms
• Australia & Polynesia
• The Arctic
• The Americas
• (the remote Atlantic islands)
• "anatomically modern people"

Coming to America...

• The controversy over early dates
• Two competing ideas:
• 12,000 years ago - Pre-Clovis hunters across Beringia
• ~25,000 years ago - small earlier groups

The First American Colonization

• A rapid movement across continents that were radically different from today

How isolated were they?

• Inuit colonization
• Norse in Vinland
• Constant controversial claims
• White Legends and Lost Tribes

New World - Old World comparisons

The most amazing thing...

A general pattern of emerging complexity

• Food production
• Complex society
• Kingship
• Urbanism
• Social and political stratification

With striking similarities

Food Production

• Domestication
• Irrigation
• Producing on marginal lands

Complex Societies

• Multiple hierarchies
• Religious specialists
• Military
• Legislative
• Judicial
• Production
• Tax officials

Urbanism

• Urban planning
• Segmented cities
• by ethnicity, socio-economic status, etc.
• Trade and market infrastructure to feed everyone
• Similar defensive provisions

Social and Political Stratification

• Social stratification - permanent hierarchy in peoples’ relations to one another
• achieved status: status that comes from one’s talents and achievements
• ascribed status: status that comes from your parents

To be of noble birth...

• Differential access to resources?
• The ability to coerce the actions of others?
• Control of productive resources?

One Conquest-period consequence...

Next...

• Parallels and differences between the Old and New Worlds
• Anthropological ideas and models about where complex societies come from
• Europe at 1000 A.D.

Europe and others...

• Europe was internally diverse
• It was disorganized and economically weak
• It was flanked by other more powerful groups

Where and when did states emerge?

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comments to Wilson
Created 8/21/98, modified by SMW 9/17/98
©SMW