Pre-Columbian era in the context of "Native American languages"

Historiography is the study of the methods used by historians in developing history as an academic discipline. By extension, the term historiography is any body of historical work on a particular subject. The historiography of a specific topic covers how historians have studied that topic by using particular sources, techniques of research, and theoretical approaches to the interpretation of documentary sources. Scholars discuss historiography by topic—such as the historiography of the United Kingdom, of WWII, of the pre-Columbian Americas, of early Islam, and of China—and different approaches to the work and the genres of history, such as political history and social history. Beginning in the nineteenth century, the development of academic history produced a great corpus of historiographic literature. The extent to which historians are influenced by their own groups and loyalties—such as to their nation state—remains a debated question.

In Europe, the academic discipline of historiography was established in the 5th century BC with the Histories, by Herodotus, who thus established Greek historiography. In the 2nd century BC, the Roman statesman Cato the Elder produced the Origines, which is the first Roman historiography. In Asia, the father and son intellectuals Sima Tan and Sima Qian established Chinese historiography with the book Shiji (Records of the Grand Historian), in the time of the Han Empire in Ancient China. During the Middle Ages, medieval historiography included the works of chronicles in medieval Europe, the Ethiopian Empire in the Horn of Africa, Islamic histories by Muslim historians, and the Korean and Japanese historical writings based on the existing Chinese model. During the 18th-century Age of Enlightenment, historiography in the Western world was shaped and developed by figures such as Voltaire, David Hume, and Edward Gibbon, who among others set the foundations for the modern discipline. In the 19th century, historical studies became professionalized at universities and research centers along with a belief that history was like a science. In the 20th century, historians incorporated social science dimensions like politics, economy, and culture in their historiography.

Caral–Supe (also known as Caral and Norte Chico) was a complex pre-Columbian era society that included as many as thirty major population centers in what is now the Caral region of north-central coastal Peru. The civilization flourished between the fourth and second millennia BCE, with the formation of the first city generally dated to around 3500 BCE, at Huaricanga, in the Fortaleza area. From 3100 BCE onward, large-scale human settlement and communal construction become clearly apparent. This lasted until a period of decline around 1800 BCE. Since the early 21st century, it has been recognized as the oldest-known civilization in America, and as one of the six sites where civilization separately originated in the ancient world.

This civilization flourished along three rivers, the Fortaleza, the Pativilca, and the Supe. These river valleys each have large clusters of sites. Farther south, there are several associated sites along the Huaura River. The name Caral–Supe is derived from the city of Caral in the Supe Valley, a large and well-studied Caral–Supe site.

Peru, officially the Republic of Peru, is a country in western South America. It is bordered to the north by Ecuador and Colombia, to the east by Brazil, to the southeast by Bolivia, to the south by Chile, and to the south and west by the Pacific Ocean. Peru is a megadiverse country, with habitats ranging from the arid plains of the Pacific coastal region in the west, to the peaks of the Andes mountains extending from the north to the southeast of the country, to the tropical Amazon basin rainforest in the east with the Amazon River. Peru has a population of over 32 million, and its capital and largest city is Lima. At 1,285,216 km (496,225 sq mi), Peru is the 19th largest country in the world, and the third largest in South America.

Peruvian territory was home to several cultures during the ancient and medieval periods, and has one of the longest histories of civilization of any country, tracing its heritage back to the 10th millennium BCE Caral–Supe civilization, the earliest civilization in the Americas and considered one of the cradles of civilization. Notable succeeding cultures and civilizations include the Nazca culture, the Moche, Wari and Tiwanaku empires, the Kingdom of Cusco, and the Inca Empire, the largest known state in the pre-Columbian Americas. The Spanish Empire conquered the region in the 16th century and Charles V established a viceroyalty with the official name of the Kingdom of Peru that encompassed most of its South American territories, with its capital in Lima. Higher education started in the Americas with the official establishment of the National University of San Marcos in Lima in 1551.

Prehistory, also called pre-literary history, is the period of human history between the first known use of stone tools by hominins c. 3.3 million years ago and the beginning of recorded history with the invention of writing systems. The use of symbols, marks, and images appears very early among humans, but the earliest known writing systems appeared c. 5,200 years ago. It took thousands of years for writing systems to be widely adopted, with writing having spread to almost all cultures by the 19th century. The end of prehistory therefore came at different times in different places, and the term is less often used in discussing societies where prehistory ended relatively recently. It is based on an old conception of history that without written records there could be no history. The most common conception today is that history is based on evidence, however the concept of prehistory has not been completely discarded.

In the early Bronze Age, Sumer in Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley Civilisation, and ancient Egypt were the first civilizations to develop their own scripts and keep historical records, with their neighbours following. Most other civilizations reached their end of prehistory during the following Iron Age. The three-age division of prehistory into Stone Age, Bronze Age, and Iron Age remains in use for much of Eurasia and North Africa, but is not generally used in those parts of the world where the working of hard metals arrived abruptly from contact with Eurasian cultures, such as Oceania, Australasia, much of Sub-Saharan Africa, and parts of the Americas. With some exceptions in pre-Columbian civilizations in the Americas, these areas did not develop writing systems before the arrival of Eurasians, so their prehistory reaches into relatively recent periods; for example, 1788 is usually taken as the end of the prehistory of Australia.

The Iron Age (c. 1200 – c. 550 BC) is the final epoch of the three historical Metal Ages, after the Copper Age and Bronze Age. It has also been considered as the final age of the three-age division starting with prehistory (before recorded history) and progressing to protohistory (before written history). In this usage, it is preceded by the Stone Age (subdivided into the Paleolithic, Mesolithic and Neolithic) and Bronze Age. These concepts originated for describing Iron Age Europe and the ancient Near East. In the archaeology of the Americas, a five-period system is conventionally used instead; indigenous cultures there did not develop an iron economy in the pre-Columbian era, though some did work copper and silver. Indigenous metalworking arrived in Australia with European contact. Although meteoric iron has been used for millennia in many regions, the beginning of the Iron Age is defined locally around the world by archaeological convention when the production of smelted iron (especially steel tools and weapons) replaces their bronze equivalents in common use.

In Anatolia and the Caucasus, or Southeast Europe, the Iron Age began c. 1300 BC. In the ancient Near East, this transition occurred simultaneously with the Late Bronze Age collapse, during the 12th century BC. The technology soon spread throughout the Mediterranean basin region and to South Asia between the 12th and 11th centuries BC. Its further spread to Central Asia, Eastern Europe, and Central Europe was somewhat delayed, and Northern Europe was not reached until c. the 5th century BC.

Mesoamerica is a historical region and cultural area comprising the present day lands of central and southern Mexico, all of Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, western Honduras, and the Greater Nicoya region of Nicaragua and Costa Rica. As a cultural area, Mesoamerica is defined by a mosaic of cultural traits developed and shared by its indigenous cultures.

In the pre-Columbian era, many indigenous societies flourished in Mesoamerica for more than 3,000 years before the Spanish colonization of the Americas began on Hispaniola in 1493. In world history, Mesoamerica was the site of two historical transformations: (i) primary urban generation, and (ii) the formation of New World cultures from the mixtures of the indigenous Mesoamerican peoples with the European, African, and Asian peoples who were introduced by the Spanish colonization of the Americas. Mesoamerica is one of the six areas in the world where ancient civilization arose independently (see cradle of civilization), and the second in the Americas, alongside the Caral–Supe in present-day Peru. Mesoamerica is also one of only five regions of the world where writing is known to have independently developed (the others being ancient Egypt, India, Sumer, and China).

The Maya civilization (/ˈmaɪə/) was a Mesoamerican civilization that existed from antiquity to the early modern period. It is known by its ancient temples and glyphs (script). The Maya script is the most sophisticated and highly developed writing system in the pre-Columbian Americas. The civilization is also noted for its art, architecture, mathematics, calendar, and astronomical system.

The Maya civilization developed in the Maya Region, an area that today comprises southeastern Mexico, all of Guatemala and Belize, and the western portions of Honduras and El Salvador. It includes the northern lowlands of the Yucatán Peninsula and the Guatemalan Highlands of the Sierra Madre, the Mexican state of Chiapas, southern Guatemala, El Salvador, and the southern lowlands of the Pacific littoral plain. Today, their descendants, known collectively as the Maya, number well over 6 million individuals, speak more than twenty-eight surviving Mayan languages, and reside in nearly the same area as their ancestors.