10.2: Introduction to The Americas
Generally, historians have promoted different ideas as to how the Americas became population.
- A land migration over Beringia (via a land bridge that would have separated modern-day Russia and Alaska in the United States)
- A seaborne migration from Asia
- A “Solutrean” migration from Europe ten thousand years before an ice-free corridor opened up in North America
In this chapter, our task is to admire pre-Columbian history. In a little over 15,000 years, migrants from Asia (probably) populated the Americas by foot, built hundreds of major cities, supported a population in the tens of millions, and constructed two of the most impressive empires the world has ever known. Fortunately, recent advances in archaeology and calendrics have helped us uncover much of this past.