ABSTRACT
This chapter summarizes the prehistory of North America after first settlement and generally tells the story of early food production in the Americas. A combination of abundant and predictable food resources, increasingly efficient technology, and sedentary settlement gave rise to more complex hunter-gatherer societies along many parts of the Pacific coast in the last 1,000 years or so before European contact in the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries. The wild ancestor of maize was a perennial grass called teosinte, which still grows in Central America today. There were four areas of later cultivation activity: tropical (northern) South America, the Andean area, Mesoamerica, and southwestern and eastern North America. The earthworks grew slowly as generations of new bodies were added. The story of plant domestication in Mexico shows that it was a deliberate shift in ecological adaptation. The same shift occurred in two areas of the Andean region: in the mountain highlands and along the low-lying, arid Pacific coast.
