History Chapter 1 Key Terms

The primary grain crop in Mesoamerica, yielding small kernels often ground into cornmeal. Easy to grow in a broad range of conditions, it enabled a global population explosion after being brought to Europe, Africa, and Asia.

Otherwise known as Aztecs, a MesoAmerican people of northern Mexico who founded the vast Aztec Empire in the 14th century, later conquered by the Spanish under Hernan Cortes in 1521.

The dominion established in the 14th century under the imperialistic Mexicas, or Aztecs, in the valley of Mexico.

A funeral tradition, practiced in the Mississippi and Ohio valleys by the Adena - Hopewell cultures, of erecting massive mounds of Earth over graves, often shaped in the design of serpents and other animals.

The largest Chiefdom of the Mississippian Indian culture located in present-day Illinois and the sight of a sophisticated farming settlement that supported up to 15000 inhabitants.

Various Native American societies, particularly the Algonquian, Iroquoian, and Muskogean regional groups, who once dominated the Atlantic seaboard from Maine to Louisiana.

The Christian faith and religious practices of the Roman Catholic Church, which exerted great political, economic, and social influence on much of the Western Europe and, through the Spanish and Portuguese Empires, on the Americas.

16th century religious movement initiated by Martin Luther, a German monk whose public criticism of corruption in the Roman Catholic Church and whose teaching that Christians can communicate directly with God gained a wide following.

Term from the spanish word 'conquerors' Applied to Spanish and Portuguese soldiers who conquered lands held by indigenous peoples in Central and Southern America as well as the current states of Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and California.

A land-grant system under which Spanish army officers (conquistadors) were awarded large parcels of land taken from Native Americans.

The transfer of biological and social elements, such as plants, animals, people, diseases, and cultural practices, among Europe, the Americas, and Africa in the wake of Christopher Columbus's voyages to the new world.

Also called contagious diseases, Illnesses that can pass from one person to another by way of invasive biological organisms able to reproduce in the bodily tissues of their hosts. Europeans unwittingly brought many such diseases to the Americas, devastating the Native American peoples.

A region in the American Southwest, originally established by the Spanish, who settled there in the 16th century, founded Catholic missions, and exploited the region's indigenous peoples.

The animals that the Spanish introduced to the Americas, eventually transforming many Native American cultures.

A massive Spanish fleet of 130 warships that was defeated at Plymouth in 1588 by the English navy during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I.