The 6th millennium BCE in North American history provides a timeline of events occurring within the North American continent from 6000 years ago through 5001 BCE in the Gregorian calendar. This time period (from 6000–3000 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.
- 6000 BCE: Ancestors of Penutian-speaking peoples settle in the Northwestern Plateau.
- 6000 BCE: Nomadic hunting bands roam Subarctic Alaska following herds of caribou and other game animals.
- 6000 BCE: Aleuts begin to arrive in the Aleutian Islands.
- 5700 BCE: Cataclysmic eruption of Mount Mazama in Oregon.
- 5500 BCE–500 CE Oshara Tradition, a Southwestern Archaic Tradition, arises in north-central New Mexico, the San Juan Basin, the Rio Grande Valley, southern Colorado, and southeastern Utah.
- Natives of the Northwestern Plateau begin to rely on salmon runs.
- 5001 BCE: Early cultivation of food crops began in Mesoamerica.
- 5001 BCE: Native Americans in the Pacific Northwest from Alaska to California develop a fishing economy, with salmon as a staple.
- 5001 BCE: The Old Copper Culture of the Great Lakes area hammers the metal into various tools and ornaments, such as knives, axes, awls, bracelets, rings, and pendants.
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“The millennium will not come as soon as women vote, but it will not come until they do vote.”
—Anna Howard Shaw (1847–1919)
“The North will at least preserve your flesh for you; Northerners are pale for good and all. There’s very little difference between a dead Swede and a young man who’s had a bad night. But the Colonial is full of maggots the day after he gets off the boat.”
—Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1894–1961)
“It is useless to check the vain dunce who has caught the mania of scribbling, whether prose or poetry, canzonets or criticisms,—let such a one go on till the disease exhausts itself. Opposition like water, thrown on burning oil, but increases the evil, because a person of weak judgment will seldom listen to reason, but become obstinate under reproof.”
—Sarah Josepha Buell Hale 1788–1879, U.S. novelist, poet and women’s magazine editor. American Ladies Magazine, pp. 36-40 (December 1828)
“The history of the genesis or the old mythology repeats itself in the experience of every child. He too is a demon or god thrown into a particular chaos, where he strives ever to lead things from disorder into order.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)