RPTM Podcast Episode Two: Land Bridge, The Archaic, The Post-Archaic, The White Myth

There is a common myth that lingers within the historical community. Every year I ask my students whether they enjoy history or not. Generally, I get a good mixed of enjoyment juxtaposed with physical anguish. If I press further and see WHY they hate studying history, the overwhelming answer is that history never changes. It’s boring. Well, I am here to put that baby to bed with Rule number two of history: History is always changing. If we were to receive all our information from a textbook written 30 years ago, then yes, history doesn’t change. But as we discover more artifacts buried in mountain side, or we invite more perspectives to the table (much like the 1619 Project), history becomes a tad more elastic.

 HIGHLIGHTS

• According to the most generally accepted theory of the Americas' settlement, migrations of humans from Eurasia to the Americas took place via Beringia, a land bridge that connected the two continents across what is now the Bering Strait. 
• The primary characteristic of Archaic cultures is a change in subsistence and lifestyle; their Paleo-Indian predecessors were highly nomadic, specialized hunters and gatherers who relied on a few species of wild plants and game, but Archaic peoples lived in larger groups, were sedentary for part of the year, and partook of a highly varied diet that eventually included some cultivated foods.
• The Hopewell tradition was not a single culture or society, but a widely dispersed set of related populations connected by a shared network of trade routes, known as the Hopewell Exchange System. 
• The Pyramid of the Sun is the largest building in Teotihuacan, and the third-largest pyramid in the world, though still just over half the height of the Great Pyramid of Giza. 
• French-American J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur manufactures a new nation's new history, replacing fact with a myth of an ancient and lost white civilization that thrived in North America and left the mounds as proof. This story made the displacement of the natives a kind of full-circle homecoming for white Europeans—a just reclaiming of the continent from "barbarians."

HIGHLIGHTS
0:00 Start
0:38 Introduction
1:35 New Findings
7:10 Land Bridge
14:06 The Archaic
20:55 The Post-Archaic
29:16 The White Myth
32:55 Outro

RESOURCES
Earliest evidence for humans in the America
Beringia.
History of Native Americans in the United States
Archaic culture | ancient American Indian culture
Teotihuacan.
Pyramid of the Sun.
Indians and Aliens – Reason.com.

Episode One

RPTM Podcast

Episode Three