Unit 1 Key Terms & Definitions

Chapter 1:

Cahokia• One of the largest urban centers created by Mississippian peoples,

containing 30,000 residents in 1250.

Aztecs• A warrior people who dominated the Valley of Mexico from 1100-

1521.

Transoceanic migrations• A population migration across an ocean.

Beringia• A subcontinent bridging Asia and North America, named after the

Bering Straits.

Athapascan• A people that began to settle the forests in the northwestern area of

North America around 5000 BCE.

Clovis Tradition• A powerful new and sophisticated style of tool making, unlike

anything found in the Old World.

Pleistocene overkill• Intensified hunting efforts brought on in response to lowered

reproduction and survival rates of large animals.

Archaic period• The period roughly 10,000 to 2,500 years ago marked by the retreat

of glaciers.

Mesoamerica• The region stretching from central Mexico to Central America.

Clans• Groups of allied families.

Rancherias• Disperesed settlements of Indian farmers in the Southwest.

Kachinas• Impersonations of the ancestral by Southwest Indians.

Chapter 2:

Reconquista• The long struggle (ending in 1492) during which Spanish Christians

reconquered the Iberian peninsula from Muslim occupiers.

Treaty of Tordesillas• Treaty negotiated by the pope in 1494 to resolve the territorial claims

of Spain and Portugal.

Protestant Reformation• Martin Luther’s challenge to the Catholic Church, initiated in 1517,

calling for a return to what he understood to be the purer practices and beliefs of the early church.

Predestination• The belief that God decided at the moment of Creation which humans

would achieve salvation.

Protestants• All European supporters of religious reform under Charles V’s Holy

Roman Empire.

Feudalism• A medieval European social system in which land was divided into

hundreds of smallholdings.

Renaissance• The intellectual and artistic flowering in Europe during the fourteenth,

fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries sparked by a revival of interest in classical antiquity.

Chapter 3:

Beaver Wars• Series of bloody conflicts, occurring between 1640s and 1680s, during

which the Iroquois fought the French for control of the fur trade in the east and the Great Lakes region.

House of Burgesses• The legislature of colonial Virginia. First organized in 16179, it was the

first institution of representative government in the English colonies.

Indentured Servants• Individuals who contracted to serve a master for a period of four to

seven years in return for payment of the servants passage to America.

Puritans• Individuals who believed that Queen Elizabeth's reforms of the

Church of England had not gone far enough in improving the church. • Puritans led the settlement of Massachusetts Bay Colony.

Pilgrims• Settlers of Plymouth Colony, who viewed themselves as spiritual

wanderers.

Separatists• Members of an offshoot branch of Puritanism. Separatists believed

that the Church of England was too corrupt to be reformed and hence were convinced they must “separate” from it to save their souls.

Proprietary colony• A colony created when the English monarch granted a huge tract of

land to an individual or group of individuals, who became “lords proprietor.”

Quakers• Members of the Society of Friends, a radical religious group that arose

in the mid-seventeenth century. Quakers rejected formal theology, focusing instead on the Holy Spirit that dwelt within them.

Pequot War• Conflict between English settlers and Pequot Indians over control of

land and trade in eastern Connecticut.

Bacon’s Rebellion• Violent conflict in Virginia (1675-1676), beginning with settler attacks

on Indians but culminating in a rebellion led by Nathaniel Bacon against Virginia’s government.

King Philip’s War• Conflict in New England (1675-1676) between Wampanoag's,

Narragansett's, and other Indian peoples against English settlers; sparked by English encroachments on native lands.

Virginia Company• A group of London investors who sent ships to Chesapeake Bay in

1607.

Mayflower Compact• The first document of self-government in North America.

Massachusetts Bay Company• A group of wealthy Puritans who were granted a royal charter in 1629

to settle in Massachusetts Bay.

Great Migration• Puritan migration to North America between 1629 and 1643.

Covenant Chain• An alliance between the Iroquois Confederacy and the colony of New

York which sought to establish Iroquois dominance over all other tribes and thus put New York in an economically and politically dominant position among other colonies.

Culpeper’s Rebellion• The overthrow of the established government in the Albermarle

region of North Carolina by backcountry men in 1977.

King William’s War• The first of series of colonial struggles between England and France,

these conflicts occur principally on the frontiers of northern New England and New York between 1689 and 1697.