Hello and welcome to a history of the United States. Episode 63. Native Americans 3. Ice Age. All my way, to work in the way,

and working out what happened in pre-Columbia North America is harder than most.

Archaeology is our greatest tool in handling this task, but even this has problems.

I think it was best explained to me during my first year undergraduate course on archaic Greek history

by the esteemed Dr Polly Lowe.

She was talking about how it can be quite difficult to construct histories of the early archaic period,

and that a tool often used when figuring out which particular Greek city state was most dominant at the time, is to look

at the spread of pottery. Now, apply this to the present. Two thousand years in the future,

archaeologists may see the spread of IKEA furniture across England, and would they think

that this points to a Swedish invasion?

You laugh, but when we look at the spread of archaeological culture, that's how it's often treated.

What we know for certain might be a change in design of burial mounds, but it can be problematic to draw out too many conclusions from this.

As neatly described by Dean Snow in the Cambridge History of the Native peoples of the Americas, quote,

At the local level, the archaeological record of these events often looks like a series of very

abrupt cultural replacements, interspersed by periods of stability. Unfortunately, archaeologists

have not always been successful in distinguishing the arrival of a set of adopted innovations

from the arrival of a whole new population."

End quote.

Linguistics is a useful tool in understanding the course of events.

It seems there would be a rapid expansion of one particular tribal group, and, over time,

this large area, breaks down into several speech communities.

One of the more recent of these events were the Inuits of the Arctic, whose language is still

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