Many thousands of these migrants moved South over time and populated Central and South America. They were supported in their movement by the vast availability of kelp. The author describes a "kelp highway." He writes:
[P]eople moved in skin boats along the shore, subsisting on the rich marine and estuarine life that flourished in a cool-water offshore zone a "kelp highway "that spanned from northeastern Asia to the Andean coast. Nutrient-rich kelp beds supported colonies of fish, shellfish, seabirds, seaweed, and sea otters, enabling people to enjoy rich and balanced diets.
You nod at reading this, but "rich and balanced diets" seems like a cheap shot, and I put my spuckie down. Later, Hämäläinen talks about the first Californians and their lifestyle:
What would become known as California was an affluent, politically sophisticated, and safe world. A maritime civilization tethered to an unusually fertile kelp-rich shore and boosted by acorns, it may have been the most densely populated region of North America.
I wish we all could be Californian. That way.
The author spends a few pages talking us through a taster of indigenous origin stories -- Pawnees, Cherokees, Sicangu Lakotas, Iroquois. Sky People, Sky Woman. Tirawa, Morning Star, Evening star, "the search for social and cosmic order in a very particular place," the Cherokees and their "reciprocal relationships between humans and animals and between humans and the Earth." The Navajos rising from a lower world. The First Man, the First Woman, The Mist People "moved through several worlds, accruing knowledge and reason in each, and finally arrived in the present world, fully formed and with a gender balance in opportunities and challenges." A dim sum cart of tasty whims, rather than an entree. Hämäläinen writes of the Northwest Coast people,
By 1500 BCE, the Indigenous worlds in North America were flourishing, built on kelp, acorns, hunting, and fishing, and laying the foundation for later civilizations.
Hämäläinen is interested in laying the spread of his story and to offer up the sense of stability and teleological design; it's a pleasant strategy. I go along for the ride.
Indigenous Continent is a book primarily concerned with the contest for North America, but the author does provide a brief foray into the mighty empires of Mesoamerica -- Oltec, Maya, Aztec, Olmec, Zapotec. Mesoamerica is a region and cultural area in the Americas, extending approximately from central Mexico to Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica. But the empires are not discussed here. Except for the emergence of corn. It is perhaps ironic that we worry today about GMOs and their unintended effects on crops, but, Hämäläinen writes,
Corn is one of humankind's greatest feats of genetic engineering. It does not exist in the wild; its kernels are too tightly attached to the cobs to allow self-seeding, so it needs to be sown and tended to survive. It is a cultural artifact, created and perfected by humans through systematic and bold biological manipulation.
What follows, then, is an extended anecdote about the emergence of corn and the start of long term stability. He continues:
A true dietary revolution came later, with the arrival of maiz de ocho in the first millennium of our era. A major step in the long evolution of corn, the maiz de ocho variety was robust, adaptable, and easy to process. It flowered quickly, requiring less labor, and could withstand harsh weather. When farmers began growing beans and squash along with maiz de ocho some fifteen hundred years ago, they created an ecologically compatible triad of crops the "three sisters "that revolutionized food production and diets in North America.
This leads us to talk of the Southwest and of Ancestral Puebloans and their "monumental" stone edifice known as Pueblo Bonito, which served as a kind of "elite redistribution center" and "the political, commercial, and religious center of the Chacoan world."
One of my favorite sections of Indigenous Continent is on the development of Monk's Mound. This, too, coming as the result of the cultivation and spread of corn. Hämäläinen begins his description of the scene by framing its time and place:
The Indigenous history of North America in the late first and early second millennia CE was characterized by a distinctive pattern of simultaneous centralization and decentralization. Regional centers hoarded power, fueling resentment among subordinate groups that eventually revolted or splintered off, sometimes founding new regimes. The pattern was evident in the sequence from Mogollon to Hohokam to Ancestral Puebloan in the Southwest, and it was particularly pronounced in the shift from Poverty Point to Adena-Hopewellian culture in the Mississippi Valley.
If it was a pattern, then there was a lot of splintering over cash crop corn and its power. These cornhuskers built a "great city" the central focus of which was "a colossal central mound a stately, pyramidal structure that rose in four terraces to one hundred feet above ground." Later explorers named it Monk's Mound, and called the city it was in Cahokia. Of the Mound, the author tells us,
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