aridoamerica

History

2022

We explain what Aridoamérica is, its location, characteristics and which peoples lived there. Also, what are Oasisamerica and Mesoamerica?

The peoples of Aridoamérica had the most difficult life due to the climate and the absence of rivers.

What is Aridoamérica?

Scholars of ancient Mexico give the name Aridoamérica to one of the cultural regions that existed long before the arrival of the European conquerors, and in which different populations aborigines made life. The main regions of this type were Mesoamerica, Oasisamerica and Aridoamérica.

The Arido-American region was characterized by the most rugged and difficult of all, due to its climatic conditions and its absence of large rivers to channel or take advantage of, which made it almost impossible to farming. Hence its name, a combination of "arid" and "America", always used from a general and panoramic point of view, since the Arido-American peoples never came to constitute a culture unified.

Depending on the sources consulted, it is possible that both properly arido-American peoples are considered part of Aridoamérica, as well as those classifiable as part of Oasisamérica, a distinction that obeys the two climates of the region: arid and dry, and semi-dry .

In any case, it is important to understand that the Aridoamerican settlers led a radically different existence from the Mesoamericans, which largely prevented them from achieving the same level of civilizational development.

Location of Aridoamérica

Aridoamérica spread through various regions of present-day Mexico and the United States.

Aridoamérica was located in the regions Arid and wild of the Mexican north and the American south, in the territory of the current Mexican states of Tamaulipas, Nuevo León, Coahuila, Baja California, Baja California Sur, and part of San Luis Potosí, Zacatecas, Durango, Chihuahua, Sonora, Hidalgo, Guanajuato, Querétaro, Jalisco, Sinaloa and Aguascalientes.

It also spread around the US regions of California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, Arizona, and Texas.

Characteristics of Aridoamérica

Broadly speaking, the region was characterized by the following:

  • A weather dry and with little rainfall, without counting on large rivers that allowed irrigation of the land, and therefore very few margins for agriculture. The summer was hot and the winter was cold.
  • Topography little varied, with large plains Y moutains, and one biodiversity limited.
  • Its inhabitants were nomadic or semi-nomadic, with temporary or subsistence agriculture, in the best of cases, and a predominance of hunting, gathering and occasional fishing as economic activities. Their dwellings were mostly caves and they developed lithic and wooden tools.
  • Arido-Americans usually traveled great distances to obtain food and settled only during the winter, in human groups that never built a homogeneous culture. The cultural development of these populations was always precarious.
  • The Nahuas of the northern lands called them “chichimeca”, a term equivalent to “barbarian”.

Aridoamerican cultures

The nomadic peoples of Aridoamérica lived mainly in caves.

As we have seen, in Aridoamérica there was no cultural development that allowed us to identify homogeneous cultures, but there was a diversity of more or less organized settlers, among which we can mention:

  • The Acaxee people, inhabitants of the Sierra Madre Occidental, were some of the peoples that most resisted Spanish rule, and therefore suffered military extermination, along with their neighbors, the nineteenth-century.
  • The nineteenth-century people, nowadays disappeared, inhabited the Mexican state of Sinaloa and Durango, where they developed a certain degree of agriculture. The tradition He accuses them of cannibalism as part of his fertility rites.
  • The Monqui people, whose nomadic life was limited to the California peninsula, were hunter-gatherers. Their culture disappeared around the 18th century, due to the acculturation resulting from the Catholic missions, and the sustained demographic decline.
  • The people of the pame, nowadays located in San Luis Potosí, call themselves xi’ui (in idiom pame). They were a participating culture in the Chichimeca War against the Spanish (1547-1600).
  • The Tepecano town, formerly located in the north of Jalisco and the south of Zacatecas. Very related to the southern Tepehuanes and other Uto-Aztec families, it is today extinct as a culture.
  • The Guachichil people, of nomadic life in the territories of Zacatecas, San Luis Potosí and the south of Coahuila, were fiercely resistant to European domination. Their way of life was militaristic and patriarchal, and they were exterminated by the Spanish.

Aridoamerica Economy

The Arido-American economy was precarious, focused entirely on survival. Temporary or subsistence agriculture, gathering, fishing and hunting were the main ways of obtaining food, always conditioned to the inclement weather of the seasons.

However the Commerce it was common among the various nomadic or semi-nomadic peoples. Many of them came to have frequent contact with the Oasisa-Americans or Meso-Americans, exchanging minerals and tools for food and technologies.

Oasisamerica

Unlike the region of Aridoamérica, determined by drought and difficult life, the region called Oasisamérica used the presence of great rivers such as the Yaqui, the Bravo or the Colorado to sustain a kinder model of life.

Agriculture was possible thanks to immense irrigation canals and trade with Mesoamericans was constant, so this cultural region can be considered an intermediate between the aridity of the north and the abundance of the south of North America at that time.

Mesoamerica

In Mesoamerica, great cultures such as the Mayan and the Mexica developed.

The most important of the pre-Columbian cultural regions of North America, Mesoamerica, was the only one to develop a complex and powerful culture.

There lived peoples as developed as the mayan or the Mexica, capable of economically and culturally controlling their neighbors and developers of complex technologies and cultural traditions. Mesoamerica left an important aboriginal legacy that survived centuries of Spanish colonization.

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