ABSTRACT
The fundamental division of the indigenous societies of the Americas into sedentary, semisedentary, and nonsedentary peoples greatly conditioned interaction with Europeans. This chapter treats the complex changes that occurred among the sedentary agricultural peoples of Mexico and the Andes due to Spanish colonization. Later chapters examine the far different interactions with and transformations of the semisedentary and nonsedentary peoples elsewhere in the Americas, due to the presence of the Spanish and Portuguese in South America, and the French, English, and Dutch in North America. The Spanish alone had the good fortune to encounter and subjugate the two zones of advanced sedentary peoples in the Americas-central Mexico and the Andean region-and most people think of these places when they envision the Spanish colonial presence in the New World.
