page_title: History of Native Americans in the United States
section_title: Settlement of the Americas
hierarchical_section_title: History of Native Americans in the United States / Settlement of the Americas
caption_attribution_description: English: Classification of indigenous peoples of North America according to Alfred Kroeber
context_page_description: The history of Native Americans in the United States began in ancient times tens of thousands of years ago with the settlement of the Americas by the Paleo-Indians. Anthropologists and archeologists have identified and studied a wide variety of cultures that existed during this era. Their subsequent contact with Europeans had a profound impact on the history of their people.
context_section_description: According to the most generally accepted theory of the settlement of the Americas, migrations of humans from Eurasia to the Americas took place via Beringia, a land bridge which connected the two continents across what is now the Bering Strait. The number and composition of the migrations is still being debated. Falling sea levels associated with an intensive period of Quaternary glaciation created the Bering land bridge that joined Siberia to Alaska about 60–25,000 years ago. The latest this migration could have taken place is 12,000 years ago; the earliest remains undetermined.
  The archaeological periods used are the classifications of archaeological periods and cultures established in Gordon Willey and Philip Phillips' 1958 book Method and Theory in American Archaeology. They divided the archaeological record in the Americas into five phases; see Archaeology of the Americas.
caption: The Cultural areas of pre-Columbian North America, according to Alfred Kroeber.
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