The 3rd millennium BCE in North American history provides a timeline of events occurring within the North American continent from 3000 BCE through 2001 BCE in the Gregorian calendar. This time period (from 3000 BCE–2001 BCE) is known as the Late Archaic. Although this timeline segment may include some European or other world events that profoundly influenced later American life, it focuses on developments within Native American communities. The archaeological records supplements indigenous recorded and oral history.
Because of the inaccuracies inherent in radiocarbon dating and in interpreting other elements of the archaeological record, most dates in this timeline represent approximations that may vary a century or more from source to source. The assumptions implicit in archaeological dating methods also may yield a general bias in the dating in this timeline.
- 3000 BCE: Cultivation of the sunflower and marsh elder begins in the American South; northeastern natives cultivate amaranth and marsh elder. After harvesting these plants, the people grind their seeds into flour.
- 3000 BCE: The Cochise tradition of the American Southwest begin cultivating a primitive form of maize imported from Mesoamerica; common beans and squash follow later.
- 3000 BCE: Native Americans of the Pacific Northwest begin to exploit shellfish resources.
- 3000 BCE: Fishing in the Northwestern Plateau increases.
- 3000 BCE: Natives speaking the Algonquian languages arrive in eastern Canada from the south.
- Shell ornaments and copper items at Indian Knoll, Kentucky evidence an extensive trade system over several millennia.
- 2500–800 BCE: The Arctic Small Tool tradition develops on the Alaska Peninsula, near Bristol Bay, and on the eastern shores of the Bering Strait in Alaska.
- 2500–1800 BCE: Aleutian tradition emerges in Alaska.
- 2500: Independence I people enter Greenland from Canada. The last archeaological evidence of Independence I is from 1730 BCE.
- 2400 BCE: Saqqaq people enter Greenland from Siberia and live their until 400 BCE.
- 2500 BCE: The Cochise tradition become skilled farmers of the American Southwest.
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“At the end of one millennium and nine centuries of Christianity, it remains an unshakable assumption of the law in all Christian countries and of the moral judgment of Christians everywhere that if a man and a woman, entering a room together, close the door behind them, the man will come out sadder and the woman wiser.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)
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—John Greenleaf Whittier (1807–1892)
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—Amanda Theodosia Jones, U.S. beauty contest winner, Miss U.S.A., 1973. As quoted under the pseudonym “Emma Wright” in American Dreams, Prologue, by Studs Terkel (1980)
“The history of any nation follows an undulatory course. In the trough of the wave we find more or less complete anarchy; but the crest is not more or less complete Utopia, but only, at best, a tolerably humane, partially free and fairly just society that invariably carries within itself the seeds of its own decadence.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)