Americas and Related Topics

Indigenous peoples of the Americas

Diné boy, in the desert of Monument Valley, AZ, United States of America. The Three Sisters buttes are visible in the background.

Mayan women in Antigua Guatemala, Central America.

Language families of Indigenous peoples in North America: shown across present-day Canada, Greenland, the United States, and northern Mexico

The Kogi, descendants of the Tairona, are a culturally-intact, largely pre-Columbian society. The Tairona were one of the few indigenous American civilizations that were not fully conquered.

"The Maiden", one of the discovered Llullaillaco mummies. A Preserved Inca human sacrifice from around the year 1500.

Cultural areas of North America at time of European contact

Eight Crow Nation prisoners under guard at Crow agency, Montana, 1887

Drawing accompanying text in Book XII of the 16th-century Florentine Codex (compiled 1540–1585), showing Nahuas of conquest-era central Mexico suffering from smallpox

Indigenous people at a Brazilian farm plantation in Minas Gerais ca. 1824

Ancient mesoamerican engraving of maize, National Museum of Anthropology, Mexico

Main indigenous language families of South America (except Quechua, Aymaran, and Mapuche).

Maya glyphs in stucco at the Museo de sitio in Palenque, Mexico

Textile art by Julia Pingushat (Inuk, Arviat, Nunavut, Canada), wool, embroidery floss, 1995

Chimu culture feather pectoral, feathers, reed, copper, silver, hide, cordage, ca. 1350–1450 CE

Indigenous man playing a panpipe, antara or siku

Indigenous protesters from Vale do Javari, one of the largest indigenous territories in Brazil

A map of uncontacted peoples, around the start of the 21st century

Bill Reid's sculpture The Raven and the First Men (collection of the Museum of Anthropology, University of British Columbia, Vancouver). The Raven represents the Trickster figure common to many mythologies.

Some Inuit people on a traditional qamutiik (dog sled) in Cape Dorset, Nunavut, Canada

Tunumiit Inuit couple from Kulusuk, Greenland

Tenejapa Carnival with Tzeltal people, Chiapas

A Navajo man on horseback in Monument Valley, Arizona

Indigenous Salvadoran Pipil women dancing in the traditional Procession of Palms, Panchimalco in El Salvador

Owners of a roadside cafe near Cachi, Argentina

Indigenous woman in traditional dress, near Cochabamba, Bolivia

Indigenous man of Terena tribe from Brazil

Mapuche man and woman. The Mapuche make up about 85% of Indigenous population that live in Chile.

Shaman of the Cofán people from the Ecuadorian Amazon Ecuador Amazonian forest

Quechua woman and child in the Sacred Valley, Cuzco Region, Peru

A Warao family from Venezuela traveling in their canoe

Evo Morales (Aymara), former President of Bolivia

Schematic illustration of maternal (mtDNA) gene-flow in and out of Beringia, from 25,000 years ago to present

The Indigenous peoples of the Americas are the inhabitants of the Americas before the arrival of the European settlers in the 15th century, and the ethnic groups who now identify themselves with those peoples.

Columbus's geographical conceptions (beige) compared to the known landmasses and their demarkation by Juan de la Cosa (black)

Voyages of Christopher Columbus

The "Columbus map", depicting only the Old World, was drawn c. 1490 in the workshop of Bartolomeo and Christopher Columbus in Lisbon.

Handwritten notes by Christopher Columbus on the Latin edition of Marco Polo's Le livre des merveilles

First voyage (conjectural): modern place names in black, Columbus's place names in blue

A depiction of Columbus claiming possession of the land in caravels, the Niña and the Pinta

Columbus before the King (Ferdinand II) and Queen (Isabella I) of Spain upon returning from his first voyage

Location of Sanlúcar de Barrameda, the starting point for Columbus's third journey

Columbus Before the Queen by Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze, 1843 (Brooklyn Museum of Art)

Columbus fills the natives with fear and awe by predicting the lunar eclipse

Painting of Columbus by Karl von Piloty (19th century)

A replica of the Pinta in Palos de la Frontera

A replica of the Santa María at West Edmonton Mall

Between 1492 and 1504, Italian explorer Christopher Columbus led four Spanish transatlantic maritime expeditions of discovery to the Americas.

Map of early human migrations based on the Out of Africa theory; figures are in thousands of years ago (kya)

Settlement of the Americas

The settlement of the Americas began when Paleolithic hunter-gatherers entered North America from the North Asian Mammoth steppe via the Beringia land bridge, which had formed between northeastern Siberia and western Alaska due to the lowering of sea level during the Last Glacial Maximum (26,000 to 19,000 years ago).

Figure1. Submergence of the Beringian land bridge with post-Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) rise in eustatic sea level

Potential extent of human survivability during the last glacial maximum.

Vegetation cover at the Last Glacial Maximum period ~18,000 years ago, describing the type of vegetation cover present

A diagram of the formation of the Great Lakes

Map of Beringia showing the exposed seafloor and glaciation at 40,000 years ago and 16,000 years ago. The green arrow indicates the "interior migration" model along an ice-free corridor separating the major continental ice sheets, the red arrow indicates the "coastal migration" model, both leading to a "rapid colonization" of the Americas after c. 16,000 years ago.

Figure 2. Schematic illustration of maternal (mtDNA) gene-flow in and out of Beringia (long chronology, single source model).

Map of Y-Chromosome Haplogroups - Dominant haplogroups in pre-colonial populations with propose migrations routes

Map showing the approximate location of the ice-free corridor along the Continental Divide, separating the Cordilleran and Laurentide ice sheets. Also indicated are the locations of the Clovis and Folsom Paleo-Indian sites.

These populations expanded south of the Laurentide Ice Sheet and spread rapidly southward, occupying both North and South America, by 12,000 to 14,000 years ago.

New World native plants. Clockwise, from top left: 1. Maize (Zea mays); 2. Tomato (Solanum lycopersicum); 3. Potato (Solanum tuberosum); 4. Vanilla (Vanilla); 5. Pará rubber tree (Hevea brasiliensis); 6. Cacao (Theobroma cacao); 7. Tobacco (Nicotiana rustica)

Columbian exchange

Old World native plants. Clockwise, from top left: 1. Citrus (Rutaceae); 2. Apple (Malus domestica); 3. Banana (Musa); 4. Mango (Mangifera); 5. Onion (Allium); 6. Coffee (Coffea); 7. Wheat (Triticum spp.); 8. Rice (Oryza sativa)

Sixteenth-century Aztec drawings of victims of smallpox

Slaves working at a plantation in Virginia, depicted in 1670

Inca-era terraces on Taquile are used to grow traditional Andean staples such as quinoa and potatoes, alongside wheat, a European introduction.

Native Americans learned to use horses to chase bison, dramatically expanding their hunting range.

The Columbian exchange, also known as the Columbian interchange, was the widespread transfer of plants, animals, precious metals, commodities, culture, human populations, technology, diseases, and ideas between the New World (the Americas) in the Western Hemisphere, and the Old World (Afro-Eurasia) in the Eastern Hemisphere, in the late 15th and following centuries.

Old World

The Old World consists of Africa, Europe, and Asia, or Afro-Eurasia, most of which encompasses the Eastern Hemisphere, regarded collectively as the part of the world known to the inhabitants thereof before contact with the Americas.

North America

Continent in the Northern Hemisphere and almost entirely within the Western Hemisphere.

Map of populous North America showing physical, political and population characteristics as per 2018

The totality of North America seen by the Apollo 16 crew, with Canada being covered by clouds

Landforms and land cover of North America

Principal hydrological divides of Canada, the United States and Mexico

Geologic map of North America published by USGS

North America map of Köppen climate classification

Map of North America in 1702 showing forts, towns and (in solid colors) areas occupied by European settlements

Non-native nations' control and claims over North America c. 1750–2008

Native languages of the US, Canada, Greenland, and Northern Mexico

Percentage of people who identify with a religion in North America, according to 2010–2012 data

Mexican President Peña Nieto, U.S. President Trump, and Canadian Prime Minister Trudeau sign the United States–Mexico–Canada Agreement during the G20 summit in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on 30 November 2018

Worlds regions by total wealth (in trillions USD), 2018

2006 map of the North American Class I railroad network

Baseball is traditionally known as America's national pastime, but is also played in Canada, and many Latin American countries as well.

The Americas are usually accepted as having been named after the Italian explorer Amerigo Vespucci by the German cartographers Martin Waldseemüller and Matthias Ringmann.

American Discovery Viewed by Native Americans, painting by Thomas Hart Benton (1922), Salem, Peabody Essex Museum.

European colonization of the Americas

Americo Vespucci wakes up "America", engraving from 1638

The Discovery of America (Johann Moritz Rugendas).

The silver mountain of Potosí, in what is now Bolivia. It was the source of vast of amounts of silver that transformed the world economy.

New Amsterdam on lower Manhattan island, was captured by the English in 1665, becoming New York.

The Russian-American Company's capital at New Archangel (present-day Sitka, Alaska) in 1837

Franciscan Alonso de Molina's 1565 Nahuatl (Aztec) dictionary, conceived for friars to communicate with the Indigenous peoples in central Mexico in their own language.

The Kahal Zur Israel Synagogue in Mauritsstad (Recife) is the oldest synagogue in the Americas. An estimated number of 700 Jews lived in Dutch Brazil, about 4.7% of the total population.

Drawing accompanying text in Book XII of the 16th-century Florentine Codex (compiled 1540–1585)
Nahua suffering from smallpox

Depiction of Spanish treatment of the indigenous populations in the Caribbean by Theodore de Bry, illustrating Spanish Dominican friar Bartolomé de Las Casas's indictment of early Spanish cruelty, known as the Black legend, and indigenous barbarity, including human cannibalism, in an attempt to justify their enslavement.

Triangular trade between Europe, Africa, and the Americas

African slaves 17th-century in a tobacco plantation, Virginia, 1670.

Castas painting depicting Spaniard and mulatta spouse with their morisca daughter by Miguel Cabrera, 1763

Puerto Plata, Dominican Republic. Founded in 1502, the city is the oldest continuously-inhabited European settlement in the New World.

Cumaná, Venezuela. Founded in 1510, it is the oldest continuously-inhabited European city in the continental Americas.

Mayflower, the ship that carried a colony of English Puritans to North America.

Although the Norse had explored and colonized explored areas of the North Atlantic, colonizing Greenland and creating a short term settlement near the northern tip of Newfoundland circa 1000 CE, the later and more well-known wave of European colonization of the Americas took place between about 1492 and 1800, during the Age of Exploration.

Central America

Region of North America.

Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama and Belize are historically the seven nations in Central America politically, geographically and culturally.

The seven countries of Central America and their capitals

One of the hanging bridges of the skywalk at the Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve in Monteverde, Costa Rica disappearing into the clouds

Linguistic variations of classic Central American Spanish.

Central America map of indigenous people before European contact

Coat of Arms of the Central American Parliament

Federal Republic of Central America, 4 Escudos (1835). Struck in the San Jose, Costa Rica mint (697 were minted)

Secretariat of Central American Economic Integration

The Great Blue Hole off the coast of Belize is a prime ecotourism destination. It is a UNESCO World Heritage Site

The city rail in La Ceiba, Honduras is one of the few remaining passenger train services in Central America

Ancient footprints of Acahualinca, Nicaragua

National Representation of Central America

Monteverde Cloud Forest Reserve, Costa Rica.

Turquoise-browed motmot, El Salvador and Nicaragua

Following the Spanish expedition of Christopher Columbus' voyages to the Americas, Spain began to colonize the Americas.

An indenture signed by Henry Mayer, with an "X", in 1738. This contract bound Mayer to Abraham Hestant of Bucks County, Pennsylvania, who had paid for Mayer to travel from Europe.

Indentured servitude

Form of labor in which a person is contracted to work without salary for a specific number of years.

Later it was also used as a way for a person to pay the cost of transportation to colonies in the Americas.

Decolonization of the Americas

Graphs showing the make-up of the royalist army at the time of the revolution.

Places in the Americas by date of independence. Note that the United States did not complete its continental territorial expansion until 1867; Canada did not complete sovereignty as an independent country until 1982.

Intendecies (provinces) of the South American viceroyalties.

Retreat of European colonialism and change of political borders in South America, 1700–present

The Battle of Boyacá sealed Colombia's independence

José de San Martín's proclamation of the independence of Peru on 28 July 1821 in Lima

Prince Pedro in São Paulo after giving the news of the Brazilian independence on 7 September 1822

The decolonization of the Americas occurred over several centuries as most of the countries in the Americas gained their independence from European rule.