---
node: north_america
type: region
slug: north_america
title: "North America"
lead: "North America's human history reaches back at least 15,000 years, from the first peoples who crossed from Asia through the great Indigenous civilizations of Mesoamerica and the mound-building and Puebloan cultures to the north. European contact after 1492 reshaped the continent through conquest, colonization, and the rise of the modern nations of Mexico, the United States, and Canada."
published: 2026-07-13
updated: 2026-07-13
---

## Overview

North America stretches from the Arctic to the tropics of Central America and the Caribbean, and its past does not divide neatly along today's borders. Before 1492 it held some of the densest and most sophisticated societies on Earth — Maya city-states, the metropolis of Teotihuacan, the Aztec empire, the Mississippian mound centers, and the Ancestral Puebloans — while its later history was shaped by European empires and the nations that grew from them.

## The major eras

The first peoples arrived from Northeast Asia by at least around 15,000 years ago, and Paleo-Indian hunters such as the Clovis culture spread across the continent. Over the long Archaic period foragers adapted to a warming, post–Ice Age world and, in Mesoamerica, began domesticating maize. From about 2000 BC a Formative era brought the Olmec, the first Maya cities, and the Adena and Hopewell cultures of the eastern woodlands; in the Classic period (c. 250–900) Maya civilization and Teotihuacan reached their height. The Postclassic saw the Toltecs and then the Aztec (Mexica) empire, the northern Maya, the Mississippian center of Cahokia, and the Ancestral Puebloan cliff dwellings. Columbus's landfall in 1492 opened a century of contact and conquest — the fall of Tenochtitlan in 1521, Spanish rule, and catastrophic epidemics. Colonial North America was divided among New Spain, New France, and the British colonies, sustained by the fur trade and Atlantic slavery, until the Age of Revolutions produced the independent United States (1776–1783), Mexico (1821), and the Canadian Confederation of 1867. Modern North America — industrialization, the Mexican Revolution, twentieth-century superpower, and today's linked economies — grew out of those foundations.