The history of the American indigenous peoples, the original inhabitants of the continent, dates back to around 26,000 years before Europeans arrived. This is called the pre-Columbian era—the period of North American history before Christopher Columbus landed in the Bahamas in 1492. After they crossed into North America from Siberia, the first Americans, known to archaeologists as Palaeo-Americans or Palaeo-Indians, later diversified into many hundreds of nations and tribes that make up the Native American population (also known as American Indians, Amerindians or, in Canada, First Nations). Some Palaeo-Indians travelled south to Central and South America, where, thousands of years later, the Maya, Aztec, Inca and other peoples built great civilizations. Among those who made their home in North America were the mound-builders of the Mississippi basin and the cliff city dwellers of the American Southwest.

People may have first arrived in North America around 26,500 years ago—the dates are still uncertain. During the Ice Ages, the sea level was lower than it is today. It was possible to walk from northeastern Siberia to Alaska, crossing what is known as the Beringia land bridge (today it is once again under the waters of the Bering Sea). Hunters followed their prey—mammoth, deer and other animals—from Asia into this new land. Centuries later, the Palaeo-Indians, as these people are called, managed to make their way south, either travelling through a “corridor” to the east of the Rocky Mountains, which became passable as the ice sheets melted and retreated to either side, or moving southwards along the Pacific coastline.
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The Clovis people are named after the distinctive stone tools found by archaeologists at sites near Clovis, New Mexico, in the 1920s and 1930s. Around 13,000 years old, these stone spearheads, known as Clovis points, are fluted (they have long, shallow grooves) on both sides. With them, Clovis people hunted mammoths, mastodons and gomphotheres (all prehistoric elephants), bison, sloths, tapirs and horses, as well as a number of smaller animals.

​​​​​​​Until recently, scientists thought the Clovis people were the first humans to spread south across the North American interior, but new evidence suggests that other groups may have made it south from Beringia before they did—possibly as early as 23,000 years ago.

Folsom people

About 11,000 years ago, people living in central North America began to hunt bison, which roamed the Great Plains in vast herds. Archaeologists have named them the Folsom people, after the particular style of stone points they fixed to the ends of their spears. Folsom people roamed across the Plains in small family groups following the bison herds, settling in camps a few days at a time before moving on.

Archaeologists refer to the period that began about 10,000 years ago as the Archaic period. By this time, all the prehistoric “megafauna” (giant animals such as mammoths and mastodons) had died out. Most Native Americans were still nomadic hunters, but in some areas, people became more settled, starting to search for their food—for example, small game, fish, wild vegetables and other plants—in one place.

Poverty Point

​​​​​​​Almost 2000 years later, in 1650 BC, a group of people built settlements in the lower Mississippi Valley. At a site called Poverty Point in northeastern Louisiana, earth mounds are arranged in a semicircular pattern around a central “plaza”, a flat, open area which may have been used for public ceremonies, dances and games. The mounds probably had houses built on top of them.

When Spanish explorers arrived in what is now the southwestern United States at the beginning of the 16th century, they came across people living in villages with multi-storey houses built around a central courtyard. The Spanish called these places pueblos, meaning "towns”. This became the name for the native peoples inhabiting them: the Pueblo people, or Puebloans.

The Puebloans were descended from peoples who lived in the region many centuries earlier. One group were the “Ancestral Puebloans” (once known as the Anasazi), who from possibly as early as 2000 BC started to cultivate maize—and, later, squash and beans—in what is now “Four Corners” region of the United States (southeastern Utah, northeastern Arizona, northwestern New Mexico and southwestern Colorado). By around 1200 BC, they were living in villages consisting of simple pit-houses: buildings partly dug out of the ground and covered by a roof made of dried mud and stone.

By about 850 AD the Ancestral Puebloans were building multi-storey villages, or “great houses”, out of adobe (mudbrick), stone and other local materials. The buildings were divided up into numerous rooms, and surrounded a central courtyard called a kiva.

From about 1150, the Ancestral Puebloans started to abandon their homes, for reasons that are not known. Perhaps prolonged periods of drought, soil erosion and the loss of forests made it difficult to live where they did. Or maybe defeat in warfare waged against other peoples coming to live in the region drove them away.

Hohokam and Mogollon

Neighbouring the Ancestral Puebloans were the Hohokam people, who lived along the Gila River in present-day Arizona. Their early dwellings were pit-houses, while later ones, such as Casa Grande, had thick adobe walls with internal rooms. The Hohokam built extensive canal systems to irrigate their crops.

​​​​​​​The Mogollon people lived farther south. Like the Hohokam, they originally lived in pit-houses, then later built ground-level dwellings with adobe walls. They also built cliff houses like the Ancestral Puebloans. A farming people, they made pottery in their own distinctive style.

Adena

Adena culture started to flourish in the central Ohio Valley in around 1000 BC. The Adena are known for their large burial mounds. To build them, the workforce carried thousands of baskets of specially selected earth to and from the site. Adena people lived in villages made of circular wooden houses with cone-shaped, bark-covered roofs. They still hunted deer, birds and other small game, and gathered nuts and seeds, but they also cultivated pumpkins, squash and sunflowers. They managed to build an extensive trading network, which brought in raw materials such as copper from the Great Lakes region and shells from the Gulf of Mexico.

Hopewell

By about 200 BC, a number of peoples had begun to settle along the rivers of northeastern and midwestern United States. Called the Hopewell peoples, they were linked together by a wide-ranging trade network by which raw materials, such as marine shells, flint and obsidian, were imported from across North America by traders travelling along rivers.

Beginning around 1000 AD, a patchwork of chiefdoms started to emerge in the Ohio and Mississippi valleys and across the southern United States. They formed what archaeologists today call the Mississippian civilization. The largest earthworks in North America (outside Mexico) were created at Cahokia in present-day Illinois. A major religious centre and, by the middle of the 13th century, a city of between 20,000 and 30,000 people, Cahokia lay at the hub of a trading network extending from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico.

Mississippian earthworks were flat-topped platform mounds, built to a sophisticated design. They probably had houses or temples built on top of them. On the surrounding fertile lowlands, the Mississippians cultivated maize, and, later, beans, on a large scale. The plentiful food supported large city populations. But in around 1400, the onset of drought—and possibly warfare—forced many Mississippian peoples to move away from their cities. When the Spanish conquistador Hernando de Soto journeyed through the southeast of what is today the United States in the 1540s, the Mississippian chiefdoms he came across, such as the Coosa, were already in decline.

​​​​​​​Many Native American tribes are descended from the Mississippian peoples. They include the Alabama, Apalachee, Caddo, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee Creek, Kansa, Missouria, Natchez, Osage and Quapaw.