Books
Period
Ancient and Pre-Columbian Americas
c. 15,000 BCE–1533 CE
Ancient and Pre-Columbian Americas encompasses the many Indigenous societies that developed across North, Central and South America before sustained European colonisation. Over thousands of years communities created distinctive political systems, trade networks, agricultural traditions, cities, ceremonial centres and regional empires adapted to environments ranging from the Arctic and Great Plains to Mesoamerica and the Andes.
The branch uses 1492 as the major contact threshold but extends to 1533 so that the final decades of the Mexica and Inca states remain within the same historical framework. It therefore accommodates pre-conquest Mesoamerican and South American histories without implying that Indigenous history itself ended with European arrival.
