TEMPLATE FOR NOTE TAKING (one class period)

Day: Monday Date: 08/23/2021 Name: Diego Burillo León

1. Key Question or Topic of Summary of the earliest settlement of the New World. The
lecture: Archaic Period in Mesoamerica.

2. Main Points The summary which was presented on class was divided,
or Evidence: each part described an important event:

1.- Archaeological evidence indicates that the earliest

human settlement of easter Siberia is dated to 40,000 years
ago.

2.- Based on rates of change in mitochondrial DNA

(mtDNA) northeast Asian natives and the Native
Americans appear to have separated between 25,000 and
20,000 years ago.

3.- But analysis of the Y chromosomes of modern

northeast Asians and Native Americans suggests a
separation between 22,500 and 20,000 years ago.

4.- The dispersal through North and South America from

south Beringia was around 16,000 years ago, this
according to the mtDNA of Native Americans.

5.- A possible migration route along the Pacific coast of

North America became available for southern Beringia by
about 15,000 years ago, due to the waxed and waned
glaciers at the end of Pleistocene.

6.- Archaeological evidence in Monte Verde, Chile,

suggests an initial migration along the coast route soon
after 18,500 years ago.

7.- An interior route from eastern Beringia became

available for humans and animals as an ice-free corridor to
the American Great Plains, but this event wasn’t earlier
than 14,000 years ago.

8.- Archaeological evidence from Meadowcroft Rock

shelter in Pennsylvania may reflect a habitation by,
migrants who passed through the corridor at this time.
 During the class we also learned that human remains of
North and Central America show affinity between them
and people from northeast Asia. We also talked about the
Pleistocene, and how its cold climate helped many
creatures to migrate and reach different parts of the globe.

Also, we discussed about the Mesolithic or Archaic

Period, and defined it as a culture period between the
paleolithic and the Neolithic, with many human
adaptations, an explosion of regional cultural diversity and
experimentation with new food.

We also learned about some key characteristics of

Holocene cultures worldwide, some of them being mass
extinction forced shifts in subsistence focus, broad and
rich diversity in cultural adaptations due to the modern
climate regimes, change of reliance from megafauna to
smaller animals in some regions and in food rich regions a
more sedentary lifestyle.

3. Expand with your notes

from the readings

4. Vocabulary to learn Haplogroup: A genetic population group of people who

share a common ancestor on the patriline or the matriline.

Wane: Decrease in size.

5. Question(s) to ask: Most of the Native Americans in the US didn’t build

massive cities due to the lack of easy and regular access to
food? Or were there other important factors?

Nowadays the native tribes of the US and Canada have

conserved better their traditions and cosmology in
comparison to the indigenous people of Mesoamerica?

How many haplogroups exist in human beings?

6. Reflect: how does this Many things have amazed me, the first being how based
conflict with my current on the analysis of mtDNA and the chromosome Y we can
knowledge? show a relation between Native Americans and northeast
Asians, but also, we can have an approximate period in
which this people split, simply knowing we can study and
discover such important things by analyzing such small

7. Reflect: What knowledge
can I use from my other
classes or experience to
better understand the
material?
8. Restate verbal instruction
on homework or
assignments
components on the remains of human beings seems simply
amazing to me.
The fact that we still have much to learn and to figure out
about the peopling of America even when we have access
to great scientific methods, makes me think this part of our
history is much complicated than I initially thought.
Finally, something I really want to know about is how
people from different places in the world adapted to what
their environment provided after the extinction of the
megafauna, because I believe that is one of the most
important events in human history, because due to that
adaptation we can still be here.
Knowledge I can use for this class come from books that I
have read about the ice age, things teachers taught me in
the school (even when most of them hardly know anything
about the topic), also the knowledge gain from
archaeology classes is quite important in order to
understand better what we are looking in the class, and as
always, the geographic knowledge helps me to understand
much better some events discussed in class.
NA
 TEMPLATE FOR NOTE TAKING (one class period)

Day: Wednesday Date:08/25/2021 Name: Diego Burillo León

1. Key Question or Topic of Continuation of the Archaic Period in Mesoamerica.
lecture:

2. Main Points At the beginning of the class, we discussed about how the
or Evidence: Amerindians and many other cultures remain
understanding the world in which humans and nature are
highly related and how we, as part of the Western society,
don’t understand the world in this way, in fact we are
constantly looking for taking recurses from the nature.

After that introduction, we learned about the Archaic

Period itself, defining it as a cultural period from 8,000
BCE to 2000 BCE. During this period human beings
started developing new technologies like smaller
projectiles and scarpers, due to the extinction of the
megafauna and the search for smaller animals (the same
we still have today) to have food, but also “manos and
metates” to crush seeds, nuts, and wild grains.

The population density during the Archaic period was

rather small, many of the human beings were nomadic,
therefore the women only had a second or third children
after the firstborn could do many things by him or herself,
also if the groups were too big this would imply that the
group would also be slower.

During this time the transition from eating wild food to

agriculture started, but this process was rather slow,
because human beings remained moving and didn’t settled
there wasn’t a great development of agriculture, there were
small groups of mobile forager farmers with no pottery,
otherwise this would have reduced the mobility of the
groups.

There was a gradual adoption of domestication of different

plants such as: gourds and squash (8,000 BCE), maize
(7,000 BCE), chile and amaranth (5,000 BCE) and beans
(4,000 BCE), but this domestication wasn’t in a full scale.
Humans also develop flood water and rainfall farming but
not irrigation because the populations were too small.
 Remains of human beings in the Archaic Period can be
found in caves on the Tehuacan valley in Oaxaca. For
better dating scientist have decided to divide this period
between early, middle, and late Archaic. In these sites we
can understand that people moved to different places
depending on the season.

3. Expand with your notes Mesoamerica’s Archaic period lasted for seven millennia
from the readings beginning at the end of the Younger Dryas. The end of this
period was irregular, with the earliest using of ceramic by
villagers documented at 1900 cal. BC. During the third and
fourth millennia BC, sedentism increased around different
sources of water, such as the lakes in the Basin of Mexico
and the estuaries of the Gulf coast and the Soconusco
region on the Pacific coast. Different adaptations were
created, with more mobile peoples inhabiting the dry
highland valleys of Mexico and Guatemala and much of
the Maya lowlands. Ultimate climatic causes, however,
provide only a limited understanding of the past, whereas
proximate causes provide a more complete picture of
where, when, and how food production, sedentism, and
ceramic use developed. The Neolithic revolution came
long after the first plant domestication. Nonagricultural
societies with a low level of reliance on domesticates
flourished in Mexico for a longer period of time than
either preceding hunter–gatherer societies or later
agricultural ones.

Evidence from the past few decades has shown that

increased reliance on food production and reduced
residential mobility was slow and spatially variable. In the
Near East, for example, food production began during the
Neolithic pre pottery, a period with warmer, wetter, and
more stable environmental conditions after the Younger
Dryas.

Lentils also were first transported out of their natural

habitat at that time and were cultivated and stored. The
first clear morphologically changed cereals are
documented during the early Pre-Pottery Neolithic. The
herding of sheep and goats increased progressively
through the PPNA and was completed by the beginning of
the PPNB, meanwhile domesticated cattle are not
documented in the southern Levant until the late PPNB,
between 7500 and 7000 BC. Food production in the Near
East thus increased over several millennia, with the
 domestication of different plants and animals occurring
independently.

The independent domestication of plant and animal species

in various places across the globe following the Younger
Dryas is more than only luck.
Many theories have been proposed to explain how climatic
changes led to domestication. Many scientists offer
specific cultural or adaptive explanations to understand the
origins of food production.
Climate change provides the ultimate cause, and the
adaptations and culturally specific details explain the
proximate causes of each case of incipient food
production. Ultimate causes, such as climate and
environmental change, can operate at a longer time scale,
whereas proximate causes function at the ethnographic
scale of lifetimes and moments at which individual
experience is detectable.
Domestication took hold after the Younger Dryas, and
this climatic change appears to be the ultimate cause.
However, identifying ultimate causes only provides a
starting point.
4. Vocabulary to learn Scraper: Tool used for removing animal skin.

Ontology: Knowledge about the properties and relation

between things.

Amerindian: Concept for referring to the indigenous

people of the Americas.

Gourd: Fleshy and usually large fruit with hard skin.

5. Question(s) to ask: How different was this transition to agriculture for human
beings in other parts of the world?

Was easy for humans to domesticate animals in the Old

World?

Were some new technologies, such as smaller projectiles,

easier to dominate for human beings because they knew
how to create similar tools?

Why did people first domesticated squash and gourds?

6. Reflect: how does this This class really made me understand the process that our
conflict with my current ancestors lived. During primary and secondary school
knowledge?
7. Reflect: What knowledge
can I use from my other
classes or experience to
better understand the
material?
8. Restate verbal instruction
on homework or
assignments
teachers taught me about this topic, but all of them talked
about agriculture as something which appear from
nowhere, had no process or the process occurred extremely
quick. Thanks to this class I discovered that the process
leading to agriculture was slow due to some specific
circumstances.
Something which was truly fascinating to understand is the
fact that human beings moved in small groups in the valley
of Tehuacan; at the beginning I thought that by small
groups, we were referring to at least 700 people, but it was
shocking to discover that the total of those groups is not
bigger than 150.
Finally, and returning to agriculture, many of us simply
believe that all the plants were domesticated at the same
time, and even when I knew that this was simply not
possible, it surprised me the amount of time of gradual
domestication of some of the most important grains and
vegetables. Also, I found interesting that the first things to
be gradually domesticated were squash and gourds.
Some knowledges which helped me to understand better
the material of the class are the notion I have about this
period thanks to the previous classes, but also knowledge
gained by reading some books about topic related to this,
and as always the notion of geography helps to situate in a
better way specific events, but I believe the class was quite
easy to understand.
NA