1222 AD: The Dine of the northern forests abandons their reindeer herds for Eurasian livestock and begins their migration southward along the edge of the Rocky Mountains. They were not the only people to do this. Around the same time, the ancestors of the southern Tsalagian tribes broke away from the Tsalagian homelands around the Great Lakes and also began to move southward.
The exact trigger for these concurrent migrations is not precisely known. One theory is the spread of iron tools (and weapons) in North America resulted in wars which drove these peoples away from their homeland.
There was undeniably a general period of social unrest in North America as it entered the Vinland horizon, as the northern peoples began to develop stricter hierarchies and more complex political systems. The population boomed with iron farming tools and livestock, and chieftainships modeled on the Muscogean kingdoms began to rise, centering their politics around a single monarch and his or her family and building mounds as monuments. These chiefs rarely held absolute power, however. Councils of elders sometimes held the power to impeach chiefs, and often had veto power over the chief’s proclamations.
This lack of power among the emerging elite class helped hastened the spread of plowing in the northeast. Throwing feasts and parties was a central facet of chieftainhood, and an inability to produce enough food for these feasts was often a direct cause of coup d’etats. Chiefs began to use plows to up the production of food in their fields, or forced others to use plows as a punishment. As it became apparent that plowing could provide much more food than hoeing, it began to catch on in North America south of the M’ikmaq lands. While the Mikmaq continued to grow mostly barley, farmers south of them would rotate their fields between corn, squash, and beans, leaving some fields to rest and re-fertilize. The spread of the plow and these agricultural techniques allowed the population boom to continue with seemingly no end in sight.
While the plow revolutionized economies, the humble pig revolutionized societies. Although the Muscogean cultures had comfortably raised peccaries, more northern peoples had difficulty raising peccaries in cold climates. Being able to create the infrastructure necessary to keep the animals alive in the cold required wealth, and so keeping peccaries was a major status symbol. When cold resistant pigs were introduced to farming cultures, it meant that what had once been a luxury item could be raised by just about anybody who could make a fence and produce garbage. People across the eastern woodlands scrambled to get pigs, and soon even the poorest peasants could afford to make significant contributions to communal feasts, and therefore gain the prestige necessary to start social climbing. To this day pork is considered a great delicacy by many North American native cultures.
Vinlandic Horizon depiction of a pig, c.a. 1200 AD
1250 AD: The city of Hunkpapa rises on Ending Lake, the westernmost of the Great Lakes (so named by the local people because the sun sets in the west).
Hunkpapa was in many ways on oddity that exemplified the transformation of the Vinland Horizon. It was founded by Algonquian refugees fleeing from the M’ikmaq who were absorbed into the Onetan cultures and transmitted Eurasian technology and livestock to them.
The refugee founders of Hunkpapa probably could not dream of the position of prominence they would achieve when they first began to dig up iron ore. Their access to so much raw material, however, turned them into a center of manufacture and trade. Their boats skitted along the great lakes and great rivers, delivering iron to the Muscogean people of the south. It was the first major population center of the Vinland Horizon in North America (more ancient cities were part of or followed the cultural norms of the Muscogean civilizations). Its rise marked the point where the cold north would be able to grow powers equal to the southern Muscogeans in North America, as well as the point where North America could reach a level of cultural complexity to rival that of the Andes and Mesoamerica.
1280 AD: The Mesoamerican civilizations begin to rise out of the period of ‘barbarization’ with the creation of the massive highland road systems. These road systems were built in response to the appropriation of an old technology once used for children’s toys to serve commerce-the wheel, which was now used for building wagons rather than children’s entertainment. This boosted trade and increased wealth among the Mesoamerican states. As different city-states began to build road systems to accommodate wagon traffic, cooperation increased between former rivals. Alliances such as the Tlaxcalan federation, a confederation of the 4 cities Tizatlan, Ocotelolco, Quiahuiztlan and Tepeticpac, were formed in order to build better road networks for llama wagons, as did the Woodland (Guatamala) confederacy in the Mayan highlands. This invention was so useful it was soon carried to the Chimu Empire by merchants, and transferred from them to the people of the Andes mountains.
The spread of the wheel and other technological advances in Mesoamerica was ushered in by the population stability caused by potato cultivation. By causing population stability (as opposed to the boom and bust cycles brought on by over-cultivating corn) potatoes allowed technology to develop and spread without being hindered by famine and related disasters.
