Our podcast series and story The Empire: A 250 Year American Story begins here! Step into “the world before Columbus”—a world far more complex, advanced, and interconnected than most of us were ever taught. This opening episode of your series on the history of the American empire rewrites the mental map of pre‑Columbian North America and pre‑1492 Europe, revealing two Old Worlds evolving in parallel long before their fateful collision.
We begin in deep time, where the first peoples of the Americas crossed the Bering Land Bridge nearly 20,000 years ago. Long before Abraham, Moses, or the rise of ancient Mediterranean empires, the ancestors of Indigenous Americans were already spreading across the continent, adapting to diverse landscapes, and building civilizations whose sophistication rivals anything in the Eastern Hemisphere. From the early Clovis culture to the monumental societies that followed, the world before Columbus in North America was a tapestry of innovation, agriculture, astronomy, and urban planning.
Listeners will encounter the Ancestral Puebloans of the Four Corners region—master astronomers, architects, and agricultural engineers who built multi‑story stone cities, cliff palaces, and ceremonial complexes aligned with celestial events. Their rise and decline, shaped by climate change and social stratification, mirrors the great cycles of human civilization across the globe.
Then the story moves east to Cahokia, the largest city in North America north of Mexico before European contact. At its height between 1050 and 1350 AD, Cahokia rivaled medieval European cities in size and complexity. Its massive earthen pyramids—especially the towering Monks Mound—required millions of cubic feet of soil moved by hand. These monumental constructions reveal a powerful priestly elite, a stratified society, and a civilization vulnerable to the same environmental pressures that reshaped the Puebloan world.
Go Deeper with these books and sources for this episode
Recommended Reading
- 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
- Before the Revolution: America’s Ancient Past
- Indigenous Continent: The Epic Conquest for North America
- 1493: Uncovering the World Columbus Created
