What chicken breeds did Native Americans have?

[mom'sfolly]

Interesting article. I think there was much more transfer across the Pacific than many are willing to admit. Peppers (a food from the Americas) show up suspiciously early in Asian foods.

Just a pet peeve of mine...why are all native American settlements referred to as "villages"? Many were larger than European settlements of the same time; particularly those in South America. At the time of the Lewis and Clark Expedition the Mandan Villages had approximately the same population as Pittsburgh...so why is one a city and one "villages"? I have my ideas but I'm curious about what other people think.

 

[Matthew3590]

Probably because they looked like villages. If its not brick and metal people look at it as a village.
In England there are towns that I would call cities that are called villages there.

 

[mom'sfolly]

Viking and other European long houses weren't that different than the longhouses used by various Native American groups, including the Iroquois and Pacific Northwest natives.

There were mound building cultures in what in now the US well past the time of Columbus, and then there are the city building cultures of south and central America.

At the time of Columbus, there were, by many estimates, more people in North America than in Europe.

I don't think it is the type of housing that is the issue.

 

[akashia26]

because europeans were "civilized" everyone else was a "savage". civilized people are advanced enough to build cities while savages live in villages. the idea kinda falls apart when you remember that they were calling india, china, and the islamic nations "savages". never mind that everywhere else in the world most people bathed and washed their clothes more than once a week.

just goes to show you that apparently the person with the best weapons and the will to use them makes them civilized.

 

[chickened]

A city has infrastructure a village did not. To say it is a racist connotation is incorrect as racism is a relatively new word and meaning. People of old never used that word they usually depended on each other more than the current independent lifestyle we have and had an understanding of each other and never stuck their noses on others affair unless they were conquering them. Which was due to a perceived weakness by not seeming to be able to defend themselves by virtue of a weapon free "village". The Indians were disarmed before they were conquered and then starved by OUR government the same one we have today. The Indian had no concept of a wheel which they most likely would have if their cities had infrastructure They usually warred between themselves so much that they probably never thought that far out.

 

[mom'sfolly]

They are finding more and more documentation that supports multiple migrations across the Pacific and trade across the Pacific at much later dates than "conventional wisdom" says happened.

Conventional wisdom also says that Native Americans did not have the wheel, when there is in fact a great deal of pre-Columbian archeological evidence of wheels. They were not in widespread use, and the theories for this are wide ranging, but they were not unfamiliar with wheels. One of the preferred ideas is that pre-Columbian America did not have any draft animals that made the wheel a practical innovation.

 

[KristyHall]

Thank you for the replies!
Were there chicken eggs when Native Americans and Pilgrims celebrated First Thanksgiving? Any eggs? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thanksgiving_(United_States) - I see "wild fowl (ducks, geese, swans, and turkey)" there.

that is a complicated question. The "first thanksgiving" as many think of it wasn't really a thing, it was more of a series of harvest meals that sometimes may have been shared with native people, generally during times of starvation for the settlers who had a bad habit of digging up graves of natives and settlers alike to stave off hunger in well, you get the point.

The food was likely more of a collection of meager peasant foods rather than what we think of now. When Thanksgiving was made into an official holiday fowl was a huge representative of the propaganda because at the time poultry was a symbol of wealth. It was once a rich man's food.

The presence of turkey and chicken would likely have been a minor appearance in any early settler feasts.

 

[KristyHall]

Since many North American tribes were nomadic, I don't think they actually kept chickens (even if they were here before the European settlers). They tended to live off the land - probably gathered eggs from quail, grouse, pheasants and the like.

Most North American Natives, particularly the east coast tribes were and ts ill are agricultural and fishing based, which means permanent residents with complex societies and social structures. Even the more nomadic tribes in the less agricultural friendly climates tended to have set camps they visited in different seasons, and did not become truly nomadic until the introduction of horses and guns that made hunting and traveling easier.

 

[KristyHall]

Not sure if this is true as he never set foot on the mainland.
If your initial answer to this question was to think, "Of course he did!" you might have to think again. Many of us have grown up with the familiar notion, from our earliest school years, that Christopher Columbus got the green light for his journey from Queen Isabella, and then the Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria set sail. The trouble is, that America, as we understand it today, was quite well occupied by the time Columbus hit the new world. While we might have learned in history classes that Christopher Columbus "discovered America" in 1492, we also know that the American continents had actually been inhabited by Native Americans for centuries before Columbus arrived. In fact, Christopher Columbus wasn't even the first European to reach America -- about 500 years before Columbus, a group of Vikings, led by Leif Ericson, reached the North American shores and left a settlement on the island of modern-day Newfoundland. There is even a legend (and until proven otherwise it is only that!) that an Irish monk named St. Brendan may have reached North America even earlier, during the sixth century, along with several other monks in a quest to find Paradise.
Columbus did unquestionably sail into the Bahama islands in 1492 and in fact made four trips to the new world. He even visited Cuba. And his discovery had a lasting impact on the trade routes of the day. Interestingly, one myth that somehow made its way into the lore about Columbus was the notion that somehow he "thought the world was flat." In truth, though, the educated people of his time all understood that the world was round. So that myth has been busted. Columbus did, however, think the world was just a wee bit smaller than it turned out to be. He'd hoped to reach Japan in a few thousand miles of sailing, when in reality it would have been more than 10,000 miles, and some continents in between. But he can't be blamed for something like that, given how much of the globe was still yet to be explored in the late-15th and early-16th centuries

It is also theorized that the native people of central, south america, and the surrounding islands, had traded with the Philippines and Asian countries long before the Europeans made contact. I also believe there were references to a native person arriving on European shores in a simple boat before Columbus, before collapsing and deign shortly after from dehydration, exhaustion and exposure. I do not have available resources to prove this however.

 

[KristyHall]

A city has infrastructure a village did not. To say it is a racist connotation is incorrect as racism is a relatively new word and meaning. People of old never used that word they usually depended on each other more than the current independent lifestyle we have and had an understanding of each other and never stuck their noses on others affair unless they were conquering them. Which was due to a perceived weakness by not seeming to be able to defend themselves by virtue of a weapon free "village". The Indians were disarmed before they were conquered and then starved by OUR government the same one we have today. The Indian had no concept of a wheel which they most likely would have if their cities had infrastructure They usually warred between themselves so much that they probably never thought that far out.

actually certain tribes did have the wheel, and many had complex infrastructure including designated bathing, cooking, and waste disposal areas. how ever the wheel was rarely used because it wasn't needed, and it would have meant that large use of the wheel would mean putting extra man power into building and maintaining roads, which at the time were largely unecisary save for the most basic of trade routes..