The 4th millennium BCE in North American history provides a timeline of events occurring within the North American continent from 4000 BCE through 3001 BCE in the Gregorian calendar. This time period (from 4000 BCE–3001 BCE) is known as the Middle Archaic. Although this timeline segment may include some European or other world events that profoundly influenced later American life, it focuses on developments within Native American communities. The archaeological records supplements indigenous recorded and oral history.
Because of the inaccuracies inherent in radiocarbon dating and in interpreting other elements of the archaeological record, most dates in this timeline represent approximations that may vary a century or more from source to source. The assumptions implicit in archaeological dating methods also may yield a general bias in the dating in this timeline.
- 4000 BCE: Inhabitants of Mesoamerica cultivate maize (corn) while Peruvian natives cultivate beans and squash.
- 4000–1000 BCE: Old Copper Complex emerges in the Great Lakes region
- 3500 BCE: The largest, oldest drive site at Head-Smashed-In Buffalo Jump, Alberta, Canada.
- 3500–3000 BCE: Construction of extensive mound complex built at Watson Brake in the floodplain of the Ouachita River near Monroe in northern Louisiana.
- Shell ornaments and copper items at Indian Knoll, Kentucky evidence an extensive trade system over several millennia.
- 3001 BCE: Cultivation of the sunflower and marsh elder begins in the American South; northeastern natives cultivate amaranth and marsh elder. After harvesting these plants, the people grind their seeds into flour.
- 3001 BCE: The Cochise people of the American Southwest begin cultivating a primitive form of maize imported from Mesoamerica; common beans and squash follow later.
- 3001 BCE: Native Americans of the Pacific Northwest begin to exploit shellfish resources.
- 3001 BCE: Fishing in the Northwestern Plateau increases.
- 3001 BCE: Natives speaking the Algonquian languages arrive in eastern Canada from the south.
Famous quotes containing the words millennium, north, american and/or history:
“At the end of one millennium and nine centuries of Christianity, it remains an unshakable assumption of the law in all Christian countries and of the moral judgment of Christians everywhere that if a man and a woman, entering a room together, close the door behind them, the man will come out sadder and the woman wiser.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)
“I felt that he, a prisoner in the midst of his enemies and under the sentence of death, if consulted as to his next step or resource, could answer more wisely than all his countrymen beside. He best understood his position; he contemplated it most calmly. Comparatively, all other men, North and South, were beside themselves.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“It is easy to see that, even in the freedom of early youth, an American girl never quite loses control of herself; she enjoys all permitted pleasures without losing her head about any of them, and her reason never lets the reins go, though it may often seem to let them flap.”
—Alexis de Tocqueville (1805–1859)
“I am ashamed to see what a shallow village tale our so-called History is. How many times must we say Rome, and Paris, and Constantinople! What does Rome know of rat and lizard? What are Olympiads and Consulates to these neighboring systems of being? Nay, what food or experience or succor have they for the Esquimaux seal-hunter, or the Kanaka in his canoe, for the fisherman, the stevedore, the porter?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)