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Archaeological History
| The English and other early Europeans to arrive in America
frequently speculated on the origins of the Native Americans. In
1637, Thomas Morton, an attorney from England who had spent many years
in America on several different occasions, wrote: "it hath been
the opinion of some men, which shall be nameless, that the Natives of
New England may proceed from the race of the Tartars, and come from
Tartaria [the wilds of Asia] into those parts over the frozen sea."
Morton thought this an absurd idea because there would be no food or
firewood to sustain life. More probable, he believed, was that the
Indians descended from the scattered Trojans, who dispersed after the
Trojan War. Other Englishmen speculated the Indians must be
descended from one of the lost tribes of Israel.
Archaeologists today, based on both archaeological and genetic research, believe that the Native Americans arrived in America around 12,000 years ago, in one or several waves of immigration, with the main wave coming across the land bridge in the Bering Strait during the most recent ice age. Recent genetic research has shown that Native Americans are descended from the Mongoloid peoples of central Asia and Siberia, although a few in Central and South America appear to have genetic ties with the Polynesian islands of southeast Asia. The Wampanog and other Algonquian peoples first began settling in New England about 9,000 to 12,000 years ago, where they were primarily a nomadic hunting and gathering culture. By about 1000 AD, the early signs of agriculture begin to appear, in particular the corn crop, which became an important staple, as did beans and squash. |