While fishing, hunting, and foraging supplemented their agricultural activities, corn, beans, and squash formed the major part of their diet. When the first European colonists set foot on North American shores, they met dozens of Indian tribal groups living in large villages scattered across the landscape, growing their own crops in agricultural fields and processing the grain with stone hoes, mortars, pestles, and milling stones. Gradually the bow and arrow took the place of the spear, making the procurement of smaller game such as the white-tailed deer and antelope possible. By about 1,000 BC, “Woodland” Indians began living in small villages or hamlets, and had invented ceramics they made from clay along the riverbanks. About 9,000 years ago, “Archaic” Indians based their subsistence strategies on seasonal hunting and food-gathering rounds, and learned to make fire and cook foodstuffs in bowls and pots they carved out of soapstone. Archeologists refer to these early immigrants as Paleo Indians, who lived in small, nomadic groups and hunted big game such as the wooly mammoth, musk ox, and bison with stone-tipped spears. These people likely migrated from the Old World across the 50-mile Bering Sea between the USSR and Alaska approximately 14,000 years ago (when sea level was considerably lower than it is today, exposing a “land bridge” between the two continents). Long before Europeans set foot in the New World, people referred to as Indians, Native Americans, or First Americans roamed across the North and South American continents. By Dan Roberts, Nancy Jones, and Marge Kennedy
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