THE AMERICAS UNTIL 1500I. Methodology of historyThis period, which deals with the world that the Indians knew before the arrival of European explorers, poses difficulties arising mainly from the lack of the usual evidentiary basis for doing history: written documents (for example, letters , speeches, treaties, constitutions). , laws, books, newspapers, magazines, almanacs). This gap should not, however, constitute a major obstacle to historical study. Indeed, one of the most important things we can accomplish in teaching this period is to find ways to give students a sense of the range of methods historians use to investigate and understand the past. We can give students a sense of the breadth and depth of the historian's task and the remarkable range of tools and techniques available to him for uncovering the past. In seeking to understand the first human beings who settled in North and South America, either 15,000 or 40,000 years ago (the dates are the subject of intense historical controversy), historians use everything or part of the following: archeology (excavations of artifacts, examinations of burial sites, in-depth study of ancient structures such as cliff dwellings in the western United States). United States, or the mounds left by the mound-building peoples of the southeastern United States); comparative religion and folklore – the study of myths, legends and folk tales of creation told by Indian peoples; medicine -- tracing biological factors such as human blood types to show how different peoples (the Aztecs, the Comanches, the Seminoles, the Kwakiutl) might well share a common ancestry, or studying the different responses of Indian and European peoples to diseases to illustrate how contacts between cultures sometimes proved fatal to indigenous culture; geology, climatology, and ecology -- to reconstruct the land as Indians found it, to identify how they lived off and in harmony with the land, and to provide a basis for comparison between Indian and European understandings of the relationship between humanity, human beings and the natural world; linguistics – to trace the origins and development of Indian languages ​​and the genealogy of Indian language families; anthropology -- to identify common cultural elements and cultural distinctions among Indian peoples; and even "conventional" techniques of history - for example, a narrow interpretation of such history...... middle of paper ..., and that technological knowledge such as the wheel is not not inevitable.) Indian economies have been shaped by their geography, climate and ecology. As noted above, some Indian peoples were primarily hunters and herders, while others were primarily agricultural, and still others had complex, sophisticated, and prosperous mixed economies that rivaled European economic systems. One final point: again, all of these areas remain controversial around the world. extremes, involving disputes such as whether Indian peoples are "primitive" and whether the concept of "primitive" is useful or even appropriate in analyzing the culture and way of life of a different people. Furthermore, as we see in Essay II, a factor complicating the study of the Americas before the arrival of European explorers and settlers is the idea – widely disseminated and discussed during the 500th anniversary of the arrival of Columbus in the “New World” – according to which the..