The 6th millennium BCE in North American history provides a timeline of events occurring within the North American continent from 6000 years ago through 5001 BCE in the Gregorian calendar. This time period (from 6000–3000 BCE) is known as the Middle 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.
- 6000 BCE: Ancestors of Penutian-speaking peoples settle in the Northwestern Plateau.
- 6000 BCE: Nomadic hunting bands roam Subarctic Alaska following herds of caribou and other game animals.
- 6000 BCE: Aleuts begin to arrive in the Aleutian Islands.
- 5700 BCE: Cataclysmic eruption of Mount Mazama in Oregon.
- 5500 BCE–500 CE Oshara Tradition, a Southwestern Archaic Tradition, arises in north-central New Mexico, the San Juan Basin, the Rio Grande Valley, southern Colorado, and southeastern Utah.
- Natives of the Northwestern Plateau begin to rely on salmon runs.
- 5001 BCE: Early cultivation of food crops began in Mesoamerica.
- 5001 BCE: Native Americans in the Pacific Northwest from Alaska to California develop a fishing economy, with salmon as a staple.
- 5001 BCE: The Old Copper Culture of the Great Lakes area hammers the metal into various tools and ornaments, such as knives, axes, awls, bracelets, rings, and pendants.
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“The millennium will not come as soon as women vote, but it will not come until they do vote.”
—Anna Howard Shaw (1847–1919)
“The pure products of America go crazy—mountain folk from Kentucky or the ribbed north end of Jersey with its isolate lakes and valleys, its deaf-mutes, thieves.”
—William Carlos Williams (1883–1963)
“Greece is a sort of American vassal; the Netherlands is the country of American bases that grow like tulip bulbs; Cuba is the main sugar plantation of the American monopolies; Turkey is prepared to kow-tow before any United States pro-consul and Canada is the boring second fiddle in the American symphony.”
—Andrei Andreyevich Gromyko (1909–1989)
“Yet poetry, though the last and finest result, is a natural fruit. As naturally as the oak bears an acorn, and the vine a gourd, man bears a poem, either spoken or done. It is the chief and most memorable success, for history is but a prose narrative of poetic deeds.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)