ABSTRACT
Europeans marveled at the stunning political, economic, and cultural heterogeneity of the peoples they came upon in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and would soon conquer. The societies that instilled awe in the first Europeans were the cumulative result of thousands of years of changes. In this chapter I outline the historical trajectory of LAC societies up to the European conquests. I begin by discussing the concept of social or societal complexity as a way of understanding the economic and political features of the types of societies that Europeans encountered: bands, tribes, chiefdoms, states, and empires. I then turn my attention to the time periods into which the archaeology or “pre-history” of LAC is typically divided: Paleo-Indian, Archaic, Formative, and Horizon. For each of these phases I detail the remarkable transformations in subsistence strategies and cultural and political systems that took place.
