This is the History of the World Podcast with me Chris Hasler

and this is volume 2 the ancient world

episode 33 the Archaic Americas Oh, Throughout the production of volume 2 I have received a number of messages showing enthusiasm about the ancient history of the Americas.

The last two episodes were an obvious choice geographically. It was an obvious choice geographically.

It was an obvious choice to focus on Mesoamerica

and it was also an obvious choice to focus on Peru.

These two areas of the Americas advanced through the earliest natural progressions, the quickest.

Firstly, from hunter-gathereng gathering to pastoralism and farming, and then from nomadic lifestyles

and camps to sedentary life in constructed settlements.

Then these settlements would grow in size and require stronger governance to succeed.

Successful governance relied on having a stronger common psychological bond within the population

which required greater representation via temple complexes.

So we followed these stories. temple complexes.

So we followed these stories.

However, it is a fact that population spread out to occupy all areas of the Americas and

diversified according to the areas in which they

resided. If we look at the Americas it is a huge continent which stretches from the Arctic in the far north with its cold polar conditions

to the more temperate climates of the sub-artic, woodlands and grasslands of modern Canada and the United States, down to the subtropical

and desert lands of the southern states of Mexico, the tropical rainforests of Central America, and the Amazon interspersed with the dry savanna grasslands of South America and finally the Patagonian Step and semi-desert to the south and the Highlands of the Andes in the west.

This very wide array of climates and altitudes required societies to specialise to these conditions and ultimately become

very different from one another.

So we take a grand tour of the Americas this week and explore the different

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