Pre-1600: Americas: The People: Chronology

IMPORTANT EVENTS TO 1600

IMPORTANT EVENTS TO 1600

40,000 – 10,000 b.c

• Paleolithic Asians migrate to North America across a land bridge in the Bering Strait.

8000 – 1500 b.c

• Native Americans invent basketry and the atlatl (a device for throwing a spear), which sparks the formation of Archaic culture hunting-and-gathering bands.

1500 b.c.-1492 a.d

• Several Archaic cultures develop pottery and adopt horticulture. The changes produce some of the largest and most complex native societies in the Americas.

986–1014

• Vikings explore and settle Newfoundland.

1492

• Christopher Columbus lands in the Caribbean and mistakes the region for Asia. His landfall marks the beginning of the Age of Discovery.

1497

• John Cabot, in the service of the English Crown, explores Newfoundland.

1521

• Calusa warriors thwart Juan Ponce de León’s attempt to colonize Florida for Spain and drive him and his followers back to Cuba.

1524

• Sailing under the French flag, Giovanni da Verrazano explores the east coast of North America.

1528

• The Spanish explorer Pánfilo de Narváez attempts to explore the Florida interior, but attacks by the Apalachee Indians force him to retreat. He and all but four of his men disappear somewhere in the Gulf of Mexico.

1534–1542

• The Iroquoian Indians of Stadacona and Hochelaga welcome French explorer Jacques Cartier’s three voyages of exploration up the St. Lawrence River. Cartier’s efforts to build a colony come to nought, and his kidnapping of several Indian youths angers the Iroquoians.

1539–1542

• Thousands of North American Indians encounter the expeditions of Hernando de Soto in the Southeast and Francisco Vasquez de Coronado in the Southwest. Native resistance and a lack of provisions force both exploring parties to beat hasty retreats back to Mexico.

1562

• Chief Saturnia welcomes Frenchman Jean Ribault’s Charlesfort colony in Florida (present-day Port Royal, South Carolina). The site is abandoned two years later.

1564

• Saturnia helps René Goulaine de Laudonnière build a second French colony in Florida, Fort Caroline, but grows angry with the Frenchman’s unwillingness to uphold certain promises he had made.

1565

• Pedro Menéndez de Avilés’s Spanish force destroys the French settlement at Fort Caroline and builds the city of St. Augustine.

1585

• Chief Wingina allows the English to build the Virginia colony on Roanoke Island, but relations between him and the colonists deteriorate, and the colonists flee back to England the following year.

1587

• A second attempt to found a Virginia colony is undertaken, but it too fails, and the colonists vanish in 1590.

1598

• Juan de Oñate settles among the Pueblo Indians of the Southwest.