Americas Map Project

a useful map of my neck of the woods

Tribal_Territories_Southern_New_England.png


Wohngebiet_Oestlicheabenaki.png


Wohngebiet_Westlicheabenaki.png
 
Aren't all, or at least most, of the Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine tribes part of the Wabanaki, though? Better to represent them all as being part of the Wabanaki Confederacy, I think.
 
Great idea! Thanks for the info.

Here's a map of Texas tribes (you have it a little too oversimplified and kinda wanked the Karankawa (Karankawank?!? :eek:)); it should be accurate to pre-contact as it's based on really early Spanish records:

texas3.jpg


Similarly, here's Virginia, also probably pretty accurate to Pre-Columbian borders:

virginia.jpg


Check out http://www.native-languages.org as a great source for some maps, though be advised that these mostly reflect post-contact borders, particularly in the interior.
 
  • The Cherokee territory was accurately mapped out by Europeans when they promised the Cherokees they would not settle on their homeland. (the promise was obviously broken)

cherokee_country_1900.jpg


I am an American Indian and I know this thread is very old, but I would love to see the finished map, and I was wondering if you could add my tribe. The Passamaquoddy were neighbors of the Micmac, and the tribe recently made the most accurate reconstruction the the original Passamaquoddy territory.

Homeland by Watershed.jpg


Also, you REALLY need to fix some of the names you used to late the tribes. For example, the Apache didn't call themselves the Apache. Apache was the name given to the Inde tribe by the Zuni tribe, which means enemy in their language. It is also what the Europeans called them, which is why the name is used today. So, instead of Apache, it should be Inde, and I think some of the other tribes on the map are named incorrectly for the same reason. The same thing happened to the other tribes I listed, so if you do add the Cherokee and the Passamaquoddy, please label them as Aniyunwiya (what the Cherokee called themselves) and Peskotomuhkat (what the Passamaquoddy called themselves) You can look up maps of the tribes of North and South America, and what the called themselves, by searching Tribal Nations Maps, and going to Images. Hope you finish this map and add my tribes!
 
I'd love to help with this project (partly also because it would be a great reference to make use of).

One problem is that a lot of the maps that people have posted are really maps of the early 1600s (which is the first point at which we have written historical documents from much of North America) rather than the maps of the situation in 1491.

A couple good examples of this from the region I've researched extensively (the St. Lawrence Valley and Great Lakes) are the locations of the Missisquoi on the map earlier in this page, and the location of the Five Nations that someone added to the base map that folks are editing. Both Nations are shown as controlling the South bank of the St. Lawrence. Really, neither had permanent settlements along the St. Lawrence until well after 1600, and, the 16th-century archeological sites along the St. Lawrence are all inhabited by a single culture - the "St. Lawrence Iroquoians." We know very little of them, and they disappeared at some point in time between 1540 and 1600. It was once they disappeared that their former lands became used as hunting grounds and a warpath by the Five Nations and their Wabanaki rivals.

A couple other comments:
- I believe the Wabanaki Confederacy was a post-1600 political arrangement. Certainly the term 'Wabanaki' had existed long before 1600, and there was a concept of commonality between the various Wabanaki people, but, from what I remember from my research, they had very little political unity until they were faced with the common enemy of European colonizers.
- There is reason to believe that the Wendat (*Huron) homeland once stretched from the shores of Georgian Bay along the Trent River valley and the North Shore of Lake Ontario as far as Kingston, Ontario. At some point in the 1500s the Wendat retreated from this original homeland to the small pocket of land where they were found on Georgian Bay. We're not sure of the reason for this, it could have been due to the rise of the Five Nations "Haudenosaunee", or it could have been due to disease brought by Jacques Cartier, could have been due to the onset of the 'little ice age'. We're not really sure....
 
O wow this is an oooold thread.
Ya a completed map would be a very useful resource for scenarios in that time frame, most of which I assume would be alternate colonianisation stuff.
Some simplification is nesisary to put on a map, although if we wait for the m-bam team to make it the Americas it could get really detailed
 
I'd love to help with this project (partly also because it would be a great reference to make use of).

One problem is that a lot of the maps that people have posted are really maps of the early 1600s (which is the first point at which we have written historical documents from much of North America) rather than the maps of the situation in 1491.

A couple good examples of this from the region I've researched extensively (the St. Lawrence Valley and Great Lakes) are the locations of the Missisquoi on the map earlier in this page, and the location of the Five Nations that someone added to the base map that folks are editing. Both Nations are shown as controlling the South bank of the St. Lawrence. Really, neither had permanent settlements along the St. Lawrence until well after 1600, and, the 16th-century archeological sites along the St. Lawrence are all inhabited by a single culture - the "St. Lawrence Iroquoians." We know very little of them, and they disappeared at some point in time between 1540 and 1600. It was once they disappeared that their former lands became used as hunting grounds and a warpath by the Five Nations and their Wabanaki rivals.

A couple other comments:
- I believe the Wabanaki Confederacy was a post-1600 political arrangement. Certainly the term 'Wabanaki' had existed long before 1600, and there was a concept of commonality between the various Wabanaki people, but, from what I remember from my research, they had very little political unity until they were faced with the common enemy of European colonizers.
- There is reason to believe that the Wendat (*Huron) homeland once stretched from the shores of Georgian Bay along the Trent River valley and the North Shore of Lake Ontario as far as Kingston, Ontario. At some point in the 1500s the Wendat retreated from this original homeland to the small pocket of land where they were found on Georgian Bay. We're not sure of the reason for this, it could have been due to the rise of the Five Nations "Haudenosaunee", or it could have been due to disease brought by Jacques Cartier, could have been due to the onset of the 'little ice age'. We're not really sure....

I don't think Gprdic is planning on finishing this, since he hasn't been active since April 17, 2012. I honestly might take what he started and finish it.
 
I don't think Gprdic is planning on finishing this, since he hasn't been active since April 17, 2012. I honestly might take what he started and finish it.

Yeah I didn't look at the dates when the thread popped up to the front page and thought I had missed a whole ongoing current discussion. If you're still interested in continuing it I can definitely help. Maybe start a new thread in AH maps and graphics cause I feel weird posting to this old thread?
 
It's an impossible challenge to accurately map the pre-contact distribution of American Indians, since there's not enough evidence in most of the Americas. "Contact" is relative, and it seems anachronistic and almost certainly wrong to map the nations De Soto encountered in the 1540s along with the Powhatan in 1607 with the Pacific Northwest nations and California in the late 18th century. Further, anything before the 17th century in any part of North America is probably impossible, since there's too much guesswork and no real sources, and that era was the start of tribal migrations and wholescale destruction of people due to disease and what not. In all likelihood, most all of the "Native America" that we know is a product of the 16th century onwards. And that's not even getting into the fact that we know that all over North America that tribal migrations have always been occurring. How else can you account for some of the odd linguistic situations? Or the archaeology in parts related to the adoption of the bow where it seems like a group that used the bow outcompeted a group using pre-bow hunting methods and thus either absorbed or displaced that group?

For instance, look at that map of Virginia above. The Catawba were a tiny, insignificant group in North Carolina prior to epidemics decimating the region, where they and some other groups of similar linguistic and cultural affinity merged and the term "Catawba" became the name for all of those groups and thus a new tribal identity. Further, the Yuchi came from Mississippians who lived in Middle Tennessee until the end of their traditional society caused their transition to the Yuchi more familiar to colonial records. Therefore, that map is wrong, but from a certain point of view, also right.

Wikipedia has a map here that seems to be well-sourced, at least in terms of languages and linguistic affiliation. Note how many compromises the map makes, and note how blank the Eastern US is, simply because of how impossible it is to know. The most interesting part is that a lot of the blank areas are the heartland of the Mississippians. Certainly all the linguistic isolates of cultures associated with the Mississippians (Yuchi, Natchez, Tunica, etc.) is very interesting--who knows how many more there were?

Anyone taking up this challenge has a near impossible task on their hand, but I'd love to see a map as "correct" as possible.
 
Last edited:
Yeah I didn't look at the dates when the thread popped up to the front page and thought I had missed a whole ongoing current discussion. If you're still interested in continuing it I can definitely help. Maybe start a new thread in AH maps and graphics cause I feel weird posting to this old thread?

I would never be able to do BOTH continents, so was planning on using this map of North America as a starting point, but I might be to lazy idk.

map-of-south-america-and-central-america-blank-217 copy.png
 
Top