Americas

Lore & Background

The topography is dominated by the American Cordillera along the west coast, while the eastern side features large river basins such as the Amazon, St. Lawrence–Great Lakes, Mississippi, and La Plata.

Reader's Guide

This period involved enslavement of indigenous populations, devastating disease introduction, and mass emigration from Europe and Africa. Decolonization began with the American Revolution in the 1770s and largely ended with the Spanish–American War in the late 1890s. Today, almost all of the Americas' population resides in independent countries, sharing common cultural traits such as Christianity and West European languages. The Americas are home to eight megacities with over 10 million inhabitants each, including Mexico City, São Paulo, New York City, and Los Angeles.

Indigenous Cultural Landscapes and Language Families

Within the broader Americas cultural area, indigenous peoples constitute a remarkable diversity of distinct cultural regions. The Indigenous languages of the Americas form a recognized language-family cultural area, while specific groups such as the Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast, Native Americans in the United States, and Indigenous peoples of South America each represent identifiable cultural areas with their own shared elements of environment and culture. These groups illustrate how a single continental cultural area can contain numerous smaller, relatively homogeneous cultural units. The vocabulary of cultural hearths, cores, and spheres of influence applies particularly well to these indigenous landscapes, where a dominant cultural core radiates influence into surrounding domains. Notably, the boundaries between these indigenous cultural areas are not fixed; they shift depending on whether one examines religion and folklore, dress, architecture, or language. This fluidity underscores that the Americas' indigenous cultural geography resists simple cartographic reduction.

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