Indigenous peoples of the Americas
The indigenous peoples of the Americas are the Pre-Columbian peoples of North and South America and their descendants. Although some indigenous peoples of the Americas were traditionally hunter-gatherers—and many in the Amazon basin, still are—many groups practiced aquaculture and agriculture; the impact of their agricultural endowment to the world is a testament to their time and work in reshaping and cultivating the flora indigenous to the Americas. Although some societies depended on agriculture, others practiced a mix of farming and gathering. In some regions the indigenous peoples created monumental architecture, large-scale organized cities, city-states, states and empires. Among these are the Aztec and Maya states that until the 16th century were among the most politically and advanced nations in the world, they had a vast knowledge of engineering, mathematics, writing, medicine and irrigation, mining and goldsmithing. Many parts of the Americas are still populated by indigenous peoples.
At least a thousand different indigenous languages are spoken in the Americas. Some, such as the Quechuan languages, Guaraní, Mayan languages and Nahuatl, count their speakers in millions. Many maintain aspects of indigenous cultural practices to varying degrees, including religion, social organization and subsistence practices. Like most cultures, over time, cultures specific to many indigenous peoples have evolved to incorporate traditional aspects but cater to modern needs; some indigenous peoples still live in relative isolation from Western culture and a few are still counted as uncontacted peoples. Indigenous peoples of the United States are known as Native Americans or American Indians and Alaska Natives. Application of the term "Indian" originated with Christopher Columbus, who, in his search for India, thought that he had arrived in the East Indies; those islands came to be known as the "West Indies", a name still used. This led to the blanket term "Indies" and "Indians" for the indigenous inhabitants, which implied some kind of racial or cultural unity among the indigenous peoples of the Americas.
This unifying concept, codified in law and politics, was not accepted by the myriad groups of indigenous peoples themselves, but has since been embraced or tolerated, by many over the last two centuries. Though the term "Indian" does not include the culturally and linguistically distinct indigenous peoples of the Arctic regions of the Americas—such as the Aleuts, Inuit or Yupik peoples, who entered the continent as a second more recent wave of migration several thousand years before and have much more recent genetic and cultural commonalities with the aboriginal peoples of the Asiatic Arctic Russian Far East—these groups are nonetheless considered "indigenous peoples of the Americas". Indigenous peoples are known in Canada as Aboriginal peoples, which includes not only First Nations and Arctic Inuit, but the minority population of First Nations-European mixed race Métis people who identify culturally and ethnically with indigenous peoplehood; this is contrasted, for instance, to the American Indian-European mixed race mestizos of Hispanic America who, with their larger population, identify as a new ethnic group distinct from both Europeans and Indigenous Americans, but still considering themselves a subset of the European-derived Hispanic or Brazilian peoplehood in culture and ethnicity.
The term Amerindian and its cognates find preferred use in scientific contexts and in Quebec, the Guianas and the English-speaking Caribbean. Indígenas or pueblos indígenas is a common term in Spanish-speaking countries and pueblos nativos or nativos may be heard, while aborigen is used in Argentina and pueblos originarios is common in Chile. In Brazil, indígenas or povos indígenas are common if formal-sounding designations, while índio is still the more often-heard term and aborígene and nativo being used in Amerindian-specific contexts; the Spanish and Portuguese equivalents to Indian could be used to mean any hunter-gatherer or full-blooded Indigenous person to continents other than Europe or Africa—for example, indios filipinos. The specifics of Paleo-Indian migration to and throughout the Americas, including the exact dates and routes traveled, are the subject of ongoing research and discussion. According to archaeological and genetic evidence and South America were the last continents in the world to gain human habitation.
During the Wisconsin glaciation, 50–17,000 years ago, falling sea levels allowed people to move across the land bridge of Beringia that joined Siberia to northwest North America. Alaska was a glacial refugium; the Laurentide Ice Sheet covered most of North America, blocking nomadic inhabitants and confining them to Alaska for thousands of years. Indigenous genetic studies suggest that the first inhabitants of the Americas share a single ancestral population, one that developed in isolation, conjectured to be Beringia; the isolat
Puerto Rico
Puerto Rico the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico and called Porto Rico, is an unincorporated territory of the United States located in the northeast Caribbean Sea 1,000 miles southeast of Miami, Florida. An archipelago among the Greater Antilles, Puerto Rico includes the eponymous main island and several smaller islands, such as Mona and Vieques; the capital and most populous city is San Juan. The territory's total population is 3.4 million. Spanish and English are the official languages. Populated by the indigenous Taíno people, Puerto Rico was colonized by Spain following the arrival of Christopher Columbus in 1493, it was contested by French and British, but remained a Spanish possession for the next four centuries. The island's cultural and demographic landscapes were shaped by the displacement and assimilation of the native population, the forced migration of African slaves, settlement from the Canary Islands and Andalusia. In the Spanish Empire, Puerto Rico played a secondary but strategic role compared to wealthier colonies like Peru and New Spain.
Spain's distant administrative control continued up to the end of the 19th century, producing a distinctive creole Hispanic culture and language that combined indigenous and European elements. In 1898, following the Spanish–American War, the United States acquired Puerto Rico under the terms of the Treaty of Paris. Puerto Ricans have been citizens of the United States since 1917, enjoy freedom of movement between the island and the mainland; as it is not a state, Puerto Rico does not have a vote in the United States Congress, which governs the territory with full jurisdiction under the Puerto Rico Federal Relations Act of 1950. However, Puerto Rico does have one non-voting member of the House called a Resident Commissioner; as residents of a U. S. territory, American citizens in Puerto Rico are disenfranchised at the national level and do not vote for president and vice president of the United States, nor pay federal income tax on Puerto Rican income. Like other territories and the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico does not have U.
S. senators. Congress approved a local constitution in 1952, allowing U. S. citizens on the territory to elect a governor. Puerto Rico's future political status has been a matter of significant debate. In early 2017, the Puerto Rican government-debt crisis posed serious problems for the government; the outstanding bond debt had climbed to $70 billion at a time with 12.4% unemployment. The debt had been increasing during a decade long recession; this was the second major financial crisis to affect the island after the Great Depression when the U. S. government, in 1935, provided relief efforts through the Puerto Rico Reconstruction Administration. On May 3, 2017, Puerto Rico's financial oversight board in the U. S. District Court for Puerto Rico filed the debt restructuring petition, made under Title III of PROMESA. By early August 2017, the debt was $72 billion with a 45% poverty rate. In late September 2017, Hurricane Maria made landfall in Puerto Rico; the island's electrical grid was destroyed, with repairs expected to take months to complete, provoking the largest power outage in American history.
Recovery efforts were somewhat slow in the first few months, over 200,000 residents had moved to the mainland State of Florida alone by late November 2017. Puerto Rico is Spanish for "rich port". Puerto Ricans call the island Borinquén – a derivation of Borikén, its indigenous Taíno name, which means "Land of the Valiant Lord"; the terms boricua and borincano derive from Borikén and Borinquen and are used to identify someone of Puerto Rican heritage. The island is popularly known in Spanish as la isla del encanto, meaning "the island of enchantment". Columbus named the island San Juan Bautista, in honor of Saint John the Baptist, while the capital city was named Ciudad de Puerto Rico. Traders and other maritime visitors came to refer to the entire island as Puerto Rico, while San Juan became the name used for the main trading/shipping port and the capital city; the island's name was changed to "Porto Rico" by the United States after the Treaty of Paris of 1898. The anglicized name was used by the U.
S. government and private enterprises. The name was changed back to Puerto Rico by a joint resolution in Congress introduced by Félix Córdova Dávila in 1931; the official name of the entity in Spanish is Estado Libre Asociado de Puerto Rico, while its official English name is Commonwealth of Puerto Rico. The ancient history of the archipelago, now Puerto Rico is not well known. Unlike other indigenous cultures in the New World which left behind abundant archeological and physical evidence of their societies, scant artifacts and evidence remain of the Puerto Rico's indigenous population. Scarce archaeological findings and early Spanish accounts from the colonial era constitute all, known about them; the first comprehensive book on the history of Puerto Rico was written by Fray Íñigo Abbad y Lasierra in 1786, nearly three centuries after the first Spaniards landed on the island. The first known settlers were the Ortoiroid people, an Archaic Period culture of Amerindian hunters and fishermen who migrated from the South American mainland.
Some scholars suggest their settlement dates back about 4,000 years. An archeological dig in 1990 on the island of Vieques found the remains of a man, designated as the "Puerto Ferro Man", dated to around 2000 BC; the Ortoiroid were displaced
John Gabriel Stedman
John Gabriel Stedman was a British–Dutch colonial soldier, who wrote The Narrative of a Five Years Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam. This narrative covers his years in Surinam as a soldier in the Dutch military deployed to assist local troops fighting against groups of escaped slaves, he first recorded his experiences in a personal diary that he rewrote and expanded into the Narrative. The Narrative was a bestseller of the time and, with its firsthand depictions of slavery and other aspects of colonization, became an important tool in the early abolitionist cause; when compared with Stedman's personal diary, his published Narrative is a sanitized and romanticized version of Stedman's time in Surinam. He was born in 1744 in Dendermonde in the Austrian Netherlands, to Robert Stedman, a Scot and officer in the Dutch Republic's Scots Brigade, his wife of presumed Dutch noble lineage, Antoinetta Christina van Ceulen, he lived most of his childhood in the Dutch Republic with his parents but spent time with his uncle in Scotland.
Stedman described his childhood as being "chock-full of misadventures and abrasive encounters of every description." Stedman's military career began at the age of 16. His first commanded rank was ensign, under which he defended various Low Country outposts in the employment of the Dutch Stadthouder, his rank was elevated to lieutenant. In 1771, Stedman reenlisted because of overwhelming debt after the death of his father. Stedman left the Dutch Republic on 24 December 1772 after responding to a call for volunteers to serve in the West Indies, he was given the rank of Captain by way of a brevet, a temporary authorization for an officer to hold a higher rank. His corps comprised 800 volunteers to be sent to Surinam aboard the frigate Zeelust to assist local troops fighting against marauding bands of escaped slaves, known as Maroons, in the eastern region of the colony; the corps, trained for the battlefields of Europe, was unprepared for battle against the unfamiliar guerrilla tactics of its opponents.
After arriving in the colony, Stedman received orders from Colonel Fourgeoud, commander of the newly arrived troops. Fourgeoud was known for dining on gourmet meats and other delicacies while his troops survived on meager and spoiled sustenance, he treated inventing tasks for him to complete and taking away his ammunition. Stedman believed that Fourgeoud neglected his duties as an officer, ignoring the well-being of his troops, that he only retained his title through monetary bribes. Regarding Fourgeoud's poor leadership, Stedman was uncompromising: "I solemnly declare to have still omitted many other calamities that we suffered."On 10 August 1775, shortly after falling ill in Surinam, Stedman wrote Col. Fourgeoud a letter requesting both a furlough to regain health and six months' military pay, owed him. Fourgeoud refused twice. Stedman wrote, "This so incensed me that I not only wished him in Hell, but myself to have the satisfaction of seeing him burn."In addition to the 800 European soldiers, Stedman fought alongside the newly formed corps of Rangers.
The Rangers, slaves purchased from their masters, were promised their freedom, a house and garden plot, military pay for their involvement in action against the rebelling Maroons of the colony. The corps of Rangers numbered 116, but 190 more were purchased after the original group displayed remarkable courage and perseverance on the battlefield. Stedman served in seven campaigns in the forests of Surinam, each averaging three months, he only engaged in one battle, which took place in 1774 and concluded with the capture of the village of Gado Saby. A vivid portrayal of this battle can be seen in the frontispiece of Stedman's Narrative, which depicts Stedman standing over a dead slave in the foreground and a village burning in the distance. Throughout these campaigns, ambushes occurred and disease spread resulting in an enormous loss of troops; these losses were so great that 830 additional troops were sent from the Dutch Republic in 1775 to supplement the original 800. The campaigns were riddled with sickness, anger and death.
Stedman observed the horrors of battle and the cat-and-mouse antics of both sides that resulted in pushing the battle across Surinam instead of quelling it. Surinam was first colonized by the governor of Barbados in the 1650s captured by the Dutch soon after, who began to cultivate sugar. In 1683 Surinam came under control of the Dutch West India Company; the colony developed an agricultural economy dependent on African slavery. Two rivers are central to the colonies: the Amazon. At the time of Stedman's deployment, the Portuguese lived along the river Amazon and the Spanish along the river Orinoco. Dutch colonists were spread along the seaside and the French lived in a small settlement known as Cayenne; the Narrative of a Five Years Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam is an autobiographical account of Stedman's experiences in Surinam from the year 1773 through 1777. While Stedman kept a diary of his time in Surinam, held by the University of Minnesota Libraries, the Narrative manuscript wasn't composed until ten years after his return to Europe.
In the Narrative manuscript, Stedman vividly describes the landscapes of Suriname, paying great attention to flora and the social habits of indigenous and enslaved Africans, European colonists in Suriname. His observations of life in the colony encompass the different cultures present at the time: Dutch, native, Spanish and French. Stedman takes time to describe the day-to-day life in the colony; the first
Trinidad and Tobago
Trinidad and Tobago the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago, is a twin island country, the southernmost nation of the West Indies in the Caribbean. It is situated 130 kilometres south of Grenada off the northern edge of the South American mainland, 11 kilometres off the coast of northeastern Venezuela, it shares maritime boundaries with Barbados to the northeast, Grenada to the northwest, Guyana to the southeast, Venezuela to the south and west. The island of Trinidad was a Spanish colony from the arrival of Christopher Columbus in 1498 until Spanish governor Don José María Chacón surrendered the island to a British fleet under the command of Sir Ralph Abercromby in 1797. During the same period, the island of Tobago changed hands among Spanish, French and Courlander colonisers more times than any other island in the Caribbean. Trinidad and Tobago were ceded to Britain in 1802 under the Treaty of Amiens as separate states and unified in 1889. Trinidad and Tobago obtained independence in 1962 and became a republic in 1976.
As of 2015, the sovereign state of Trinidad and Tobago had the third highest GDP per capita based on purchasing power parity in the Americas after the United States and Canada. It is recognised by the World Bank as a high-income economy. Unlike most of the English-speaking Caribbean, the economy is industrial with an emphasis on petroleum and petrochemicals. Trinidad and Tobago is known for its Carnival and Diwali celebrations and as the birthplace of steelpan, the limbo, music styles such as calypso, soca and chutney. Historian E. L. Joseph claimed that Trinidad's Amerindian name was Cairi or "Land of the Humming Bird", derived from the Arawak name for hummingbird, ierèttê or yerettê. However, other authors dispute this etymology with some claiming that cairi does not mean hummingbird and some claiming that kairi, or iere means island. Christopher Columbus renamed it "La Isla de la Trinidad", fulfilling a vow made before setting out on his third voyage of exploration. Tobago's cigar-like shape may have given it its Spanish name and some of its other Amerindian names, such as Aloubaéra and Urupaina, although the English pronunciation is /təˈbeɪɡoʊ/, rhyming with lumbago, "may go".
Trinidad and Tobago are islands situated between 10° 2' and 11° 12' N latitude and 60° 30' and 61° 56' W longitude. At the closest point, Trinidad is just 11 kilometres from Venezuelan territory. Covering an area of 5,128 km2, the country consists of the two main islands and Tobago, numerous smaller landforms, including Chacachacare, Huevos, Gaspar Grande, Little Tobago, St. Giles Island. Trinidad is 4,768 km2 in area with an average length of 80 kilometres and an average width of 59 kilometres. Tobago has an area of about 300 km2, or 5.8% of the country's area, is 41 km long and 12 km at its greatest width. Trinidad and Tobago lie on the continental shelf of South America, are thus geologically considered to lie in South America; the terrain of the islands is a mixture of plains. The highest point in the country is found on the Northern Range at El Cerro del Aripo, 940 metres above sea level; as the majority of the population lives on the island of Trinidad, this is the location of most major towns and cities.
There are four major municipalities in Trinidad: Port of Spain, the capital, San Fernando and Chaguanas. The main town in Tobago is Scarborough. Trinidad is made up of a variety of soil types, the majority being heavy clays; the alluvial valleys of the Northern Range and the soils of the East–West Corridor are the most fertile. The Northern Range consists of Upper Jurassic and Cretaceous metamorphic rocks; the Northern Lowlands consist of younger shallow marine clastic sediments. South of this, the Central Range fold and thrust belt consists of Cretaceous and Eocene sedimentary rocks, with Miocene formations along the southern and eastern flanks; the Naparima Plains and the Nariva Swamp form the southern shoulder of this uplift. The Southern Lowlands consist of Miocene and Pliocene sands and gravels; these overlie oil and natural gas deposits north of the Los Bajos Fault. The Southern Range forms the third anticlinal uplift, it consists of several chains of hills, most famous being the Trinity Hills.
The rocks consist of sandstones, shales and clays formed in the Miocene and uplifted in the Pleistocene. Oil sands and mud volcanoes are common in this area; the climate is tropical. There are two seasons annually: the dry season for the first five months of the year, the rainy season in the remaining seven of the year. Winds are dominated by the northeast trade winds. Unlike most of the other Caribbean islands, both Trinidad and Tobago have escaped the wrath of major devastating hurricanes, including Hurricane Ivan, the most powerful storm to have passed close to the islands in recent history, in September 2004. In the Northern Range, the climate is different in contrast to the sweltering heat of the plains below. With constant cloud and mist cover, heavy rains in the mountains, the temperature is much cooler. Record temperatures for Trinidad and Tobago are 39 °C for the high in Port of Spain, a low of 12 °C; because Trinidad and Tobago lies
Kalina people
The Kalina known as the Caribs, mainland Caribs and several other names, are an indigenous people native to the northern coastal areas of South America. Today, the Kalina live in villages on the rivers and coasts of Venezuela, Suriname, French Guiana, Brazil, they speak a Cariban language known as Carib. They may be related to the Island Caribs of the Caribbean. Traditionally, Westerners have called the Kalina people variants of the Spanish name Caribe, including "Caribs" in English, Galina in French, Karaïeb in Dutch. However, the speakers call themselves Karìna, spelled variously. Variants include Kali'na, Cariña, Kariña, Kalinya. Kalina may distinguish themselves as Kali'na tilewuyu to differentiate themselves from the mixed Maroon-Kalina inhabitants of Suriname. Use of "Kalina" and related variants has become common practice only in publications. Lacking a written form of language before the arrival of Europeans, Kali'na history was passed down orally from one generation to the next through tales of myth and legend.
For a long time, the few Europeans studying the history of the Amerindian people of this area did not distinguish between the various Caribbean tribes. Once the period of exploration was over, interest in the study of these people diminished and did not re-emerge until the end of the 20th century, when a few French expatriates, notably Gérard Collomb, became interested in the Kali'na, the Kali'na themselves began to relate their history, in particular Félix Tiouka, president of the Association of Amerindians of French Guiana, his son Alexis. For the reasons given, historical information regarding the Kali ` na is incomplete. Making up for lack of written records, archaeologists have to date uncovered 273 Amerindian archeological sites on only 310 km² of the land recovered from the Sinnamary River by the Petit-Saut Dam; some date back as far as two thousand years, establishing the antiquity of the Amerindian presence in this area. The weak historical clues available indicate that before 1492, the Kali'na inhabited the coast, dividing their territory with the Arawak, against whom they fought during their expansion toward the east and the Amazon River.
In their first contact with Europeans, the Kali'na thought they were dealing with the spirits of the sea, Palanakiłi, a name they use to this day when referring to whites. One of the first consequences of the arrival of Europeans, as in the case of many other Native American peoples, was a decrease in population due to violence inflicted by European soldiers genocide, diseases brought over by the Europeans; the Kali'na succumbed in large numbers, because their immune systems were not adapted to the viruses and bacteria of the Old World. The second half of the nineteenth century saw the heyday of World's Fairs, in which European countries were displaying their wealth with colonial "villages" representing the colonized cultures. Although the World's Fairs of Paris did not have "Amerindian villages," public curiosity was such that Kali'na were sent to the capital twice - once in 1882 and again in 1892 - to be exhibited as oddities at the Jardin d'Acclimatation. Fifteen Kali’na, all members of one family living in Sinnamary and Iracoubo, were sent to Pau:wa in July 1882.
Nothing is known about them, except their names and the fact that they were housed in huts on the lawn of the Jardin d'Acclimatation. The trip lasted four months, including a month's journey by boat, they were accompanied by a Creole who acted as intermediary and interpreter. There are several portraits of them, taken by photographer Pierre Petit; the part of South America where the Kali'na live is sparsely populated. However, the people of this ethnic group are such an extreme minority in all of the countries in which they are well established that locally they are a majority only in certain secluded areas, their current geographic distribution covers only a small fraction of their Pre-Columbian territory. In Brazil, they are localized in São José dos Galibi, a village founded in 1950 on the right bank of the Oyapock River opposite Saint-Georges in French Guiana by several families who came from the region of the Mana River, they are in the capital of Amapá, Macapá, in Pará, in Belém. In French Guiana, they are still present in significant numbers in their original territory, the region between the Maroni and the Mana rivers, the Amerindian village of Kourou as well as, in fewer numbers, the island of Cayenne.
In Suriname, they are a strong presence on the left bank of the Maroni River and on the banks of the Coppename River. In Venezuela, the country where their numbers are the greatest, they can be found in two distinct zones: in the llanos of the Orinoco river valley and on the Cuyuni River valley part of, in Guyana, they use percussion instruments. Their sanpula is a large drum with two skins stretched over either end of the shell by hoops pulled together with cord and is played with a mallet, they have two kinds of maracas, called a kalawasi and a malaka. Their flute, the kuwama, is still made but is more and more replaced by the European flute. There is a terra cotta horn called a kuti, they speak Kali'na, belonging to the family of Cariban languages, is today still spoken by above 10,000 people in the coastal str
Amazon River
The Amazon River in South America is the largest river by discharge volume of water in the world, by some definitions it is the longest. The headwaters of the Apurímac River on Nevado Mismi had been considered for nearly a century as the Amazon's most distant source, until a 2014 study found it to be the headwaters of the Mantaro River on the Cordillera Rumi Cruz in Peru; the Mantaro and Apurímac join, with other tributaries form the Ucayali River, which in turn meets the Marañón River upstream of Iquitos, Peru, to form what countries other than Brazil consider to be the main stem of the Amazon. Brazilians call this section the Solimões River above its confluence with the Rio Negro to form what Brazilians call the Amazon at the Meeting of Waters at Manaus, the river's largest city. At an average discharge of about 209,000 cubic metres per second —approximately 6,591 cubic kilometres per annum, greater than the next seven largest independent rivers combined—the Amazon represents 20% of the global riverine discharge to the ocean.
The Amazon basin is the largest drainage basin in the world, with an area of 7,050,000 square kilometres. The portion of the river's drainage basin in Brazil alone is larger than any other river's basin; the Amazon enters Brazil with only one-fifth of the flow it discharges into the Atlantic Ocean, yet has a greater flow at this point than the discharge of any other river. The river was known by Europeans as the Marañón and the Peruvian part of the river is still known by that name today, it became known as the Rio Amazonas in Spanish and Portuguese, or The Amazon in English. The name Rio Amazonas was given after native warriors attacked a 16th-century expedition by Francisco de Orellana; the warriors were led by women, reminding de Orellana of the Amazon warriors, a tribe of women warriors related to Iranian Scythians and Sarmatians mentioned in Greek mythology. The word Amazon itself may be derived from the Iranian compound *ha-maz-an- " fighting together" or ethnonym *ha-mazan- "warriors", a word attested indirectly through a derivation, a denominal verb in Hesychius of Alexandria's gloss "ἁμαζακάραν· πολεμεῖν.
Πέρσαι", where it appears together with the Indo-Iranian root *kar- "make". During what many archaeologists call the formative stage, Amazonian societies were involved in the emergence of South America's highland agrarian systems; the trade with Andean civilisations in the terrains of the headwaters in the Andes, formed an essential contribution to the social and religious development of the higher altitude civilisations of among others the Muisca and Incas. Early human settlements were based on low-lying hills or mounds. Shell mounds were the earliest evidence of habitation, they are associated with ceramic age cultures. Artificial earth platforms for entire villages are the second type of mounds, they are best represented by the Marajoara culture. Figurative mounds are the most recent types of occupation. There is ample evidence that the areas surrounding the Amazon River were home to complex and large-scale indigenous societies chiefdoms who developed large towns and cities. Archaeologists estimate that by the time the Spanish conquistador De Orellana traveled across the Amazon in 1541, more than 3 million indigenous people lived around the Amazon.
These pre-Columbian settlements created developed civilizations. For instance, pre-Columbian indigenous people on the island of Marajó may have developed social stratification and supported a population of 100,000 people. In order to achieve this level of development, the indigenous inhabitants of the Amazon rainforest altered the forest's ecology by selective cultivation and the use of fire. Scientists argue that by burning areas of the forest repetitiously, the indigenous people caused the soil to become richer in nutrients; this created dark soil areas known as terra preta de índio. Because of the terra preta, indigenous communities were able to make land fertile and thus sustainable for the large-scale agriculture needed to support their large populations and complex social structures. Further research has hypothesized; some say that its effects on forest ecology and regional climate explain the otherwise inexplicable band of lower rainfall through the Amazon basin. Many indigenous tribes engaged in constant warfare.
James Stuart Olson wrote: "The Munduruku expansion dislocated and displaced the Kawahíb, breaking the tribe down into much smaller groups... first came to the attention of Europeans in 1770 when they began a series of widespread attacks on Brazilian settlements along the Amazon River." In March 1500, Spanish conquistador Vicente Yáñez Pinzón was the first documented European to sail up the Amazon River. Pinzón called the stream Río Santa María del Mar Dulce shortened to Mar Dulce sweet sea, because of its fresh water pushing out into the ocean. Another Spanish explorer, Francisco de Orellana, was the first European to travel from the origins of the upstream river basins, situated in the Andes, to the mouth of the river. In this journey, Orellana baptised some of the affluents of the Amazonas like Rio Negro and Jurua; the name Amazonas is taken from the native warriors that attacked this expedition women, that reminded De Orellana of the mythical female Amazon warriors from the
Salem witch trials
The Salem witch trials were a series of hearings and prosecutions of people accused of witchcraft in colonial Massachusetts between February 1692 and May 1693. More than 200 people were accused, 19 of whom were executed by hanging. One other man, Giles Corey, was crushed to death for refusing to plead, at least five people died in jail, it was the deadliest witch hunt in the history of the United States. Twelve other women had been executed in Massachusetts and Connecticut during the 17th century. Despite being known as the Salem witch trials, the preliminary hearings in 1692 were conducted in several towns: Salem Village, Salem Town and Andover; the most infamous trials were conducted by the Court of Terminer in 1692 in Salem Town. The episode is one of Colonial America's most notorious cases of mass hysteria, it has been used in political rhetoric and popular literature as a vivid cautionary tale about the dangers of isolationism, religious extremism, false accusations, lapses in due process.
It was not unique, but a Colonial American example of the much broader phenomenon of witch trials in the early modern period, which took place in Europe. Many historians consider the lasting effects of the trials to have been influential in subsequent United States history. According to historian George Lincoln Burr, "the Salem witchcraft was the rock on which the theocracy shattered."At the 300th anniversary events in 1992 to commemorate the victims of the trials, a park was dedicated in Salem and a memorial in Danvers. In November 2001, an act passed by the Massachusetts legislature exonerated five people, while another one, passed in 1957, had exonerated six other victims; as of 2004, there was still talk about exonerating all the victims, though some think that happened in the 19th century as the Massachusetts colonial legislature was asked to reverse the attainders of "George Burroughs and others". In January 2016, the University of Virginia announced its Gallows Hill Project team had determined the execution site in Salem, where the 19 "witches" had been hanged.
The city is planning to establish a memorial to the victims. While witch trials had begun to fade out across much of Europe by the mid-17th century, they continued on the fringes of Europe and in the American Colonies; the events in 1692/1693 in Salem became a brief outburst of a sort of hysteria in the New World, while the practice was waning in most of Europe. In Against Modern Sadducism, Joseph Glanvill claimed that he could prove the existence of witches and ghosts of the supernatural realm. Glanvill wrote about the "denial of the bodily resurrection, the spirits."In his treatise, Glanvill claimed that ingenious men should believe in witches and apparitions. Glanvill wanted to prove. Works by men such as Glanvill and Cotton Mather tried to prove that "demons were alive." The trials were started after people had been accused of witchcraft by teenage girls such as Elizabeth Hubbard, 17, as well as some who were younger. The earliest recorded witchcraft execution was that of Alse Young in 1647 in Connecticut.
Historian Clarence F. Jewett included a list of other people executed in New England in his 1881 book. New England had been settled by religious refugees seeking to build a Bible-based society, they lived with the sense of the supernatural. The original 1629 Royal Charter of the Massachusetts Bay Colony was vacated in 1684, after which King James II installed Sir Edmund Andros as the governor of the Dominion of New England. Andros was ousted in 1689 after the "Glorious Revolution" in England replaced the Catholic James II with the Protestant co-rulers William and Mary. Simon Bradstreet and Thomas Danforth, the colony's last leaders under the old charter, resumed their posts as governor and deputy governor, but lacked constitutional authority to rule because the old charter had been vacated. At the same time, tensions erupted between English colonists settling in "the Eastward" and French-supported Wabanaki Indians of that territory in what came to be known as King William's War; this was 13 years after the devastating King Philip's War with the Wampanoag and other indigenous tribes in southern and western New England.
In October 1690, Sir William Phips led an unsuccessful attack on French-held Quebec. Between 1689 and 1692, Native Americans continued to attack many English settlements along the Maine coast, leading to the abandonment of some of the settlements and resulting in a flood of refugees into areas like Essex County. A new charter for the enlarged Province of Massachusetts Bay was given final approval in England on October 16, 1691. News of the appointment of Phips as the new governor reached Boston in late January, a copy of the new charter reached Boston on February 8, 1692. Phips arrived in Boston on May 14 and was sworn in as governor two days along with Lieutenant Governor William Stoughton. One of the first orders of business for the new governor and council on May 27, 1692, was the formal nomination of county justices of the peace and the commission of a Special Court of Oyer and Terminer to handle the large numbers of people who were "thronging" the jails. Paul Boyer and Stephen Nissenbaum have postulated that without a valid charter, the colony had no legitimate form of government to try capital cases until Phips arrived with the new charter.
This has been disputed by David Konig. He points out that between charters
