ABSTRACT
Historical and popular literature commonly identifies the Spanish American empire with the conquest and colonization of the fully sedentary, state-organized societies of Mexico and Peru: the Aztec and Inca empires. But the Spanish also encountered native peoples to the north and south of Mesoamerica, and throughout South America outside of the Andean zone, who were not densely populated, permanently settled agriculturalists. Some practiced substantial agriculture, but on lands whose limited fertility required periodic movement from one location to another within a certain region (i.e., swidden or slash-and-burn agriculture), while others did not cultivate the land at all, living instead by hunting and gathering. The Portuguese encountered such semisedentary and hunter-gatherer societies in what would become Brazil.
