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Latin America The distinction between Latin America and Anglo-America, and more generally the stress on European heritage (or Eurocentrism), is simply a convention by which Romance-language and English-speaking cultures are distinguished, currently being the predominant languages in the Americas. There are, of course, many places in the Americas (e.g. highland Ecuador, Bolivia, Guatemala, and Paraguay) where American Indian cultures and languages are important, as well as areas in which the influence of African cultures is strong (e.g. the Caribbean, including parts of Colombia and Venezuela, coastal Ecuador, coastal Peru, and coastal Brazil). U.S. influences shaped the cultures of Latin America, especially those of Mexico, Cuba and Puerto Rico as a U.S. territory. In addition, the U.S. held a territory in a swath of land in Panama over the 20-mile-long Panama Canal from 1903 (the canal opened to transoceanic freight traffic in 1914) to 1979 when the U.S. government agreed to give the territory to Panama. The Americas are thought to have been first inhabited by people crossing the Bering Land Bridge, now the Bering strait, from northeast Asia into Alaska more than 10,000 years ago. Over the course of millennia, people spread to all parts of the continents. By the first millennium AD/CE, South America’s vast rainforests, mountains, plains and coasts were the home of tens of millions of people. The earliest settlements in the Americas are of the Las Vegas Culture[citation needed] from about 8000 BC and 4600 BC, a sedentary group from the coast of Ecuador, the forefathers of the more known Valdivia culture, of the same are. Some groups formed more permanent settlements such as the Chibchas (or "Muiscas" or "Muyscas") and the Tairona groups. The Chibchas of Colombia, the Quechuas of Peru, and the Aymaras of Bolivia were the three Indian groups that settled most permanently.
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