The San Francisco Bay shellmound populations have been extensively studied. Jurmain's (2001) bioarchaeological analysis of Ohlone skeletal remains documented rates of perimortem trauma consistent with endemic raiding. Early Spanish mission records from the 1770s–1780s document ongoing inter-village warfare among Bay Area peoples, confirming that pre-contact violence was a persistent feature of the region.
Indigenous peoples had inhabited North America for at least 15,000 years before European contact, developing complex societies across every region of the continent. The Mississippian culture, centered on the city of Cahokia near present-day St. Louis, reached its peak around 1100 AD with a population estimated at 10,000 to 20,000 — larger than contemporary London. The Ancestral Puebloans built multi-story stone complexes at Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde between the 9th and 13th centuries. The Iroquois Confederacy, formed between roughly 1450 and 1600, united five nations under a constitution that influenced later American democratic thinking. Across the eastern woodlands, the Great Plains, the Pacific Coast, and the Southwest, hundreds of distinct nations maintained sophisticated trade networks, agricultural systems, and governance structures. European contact beginning in the late 15th century introduced epidemic disease — smallpox, measles, influenza — which devastated Indigenous populations by an estimated 50 to 90 percent within a century.
Competing Ohlone/Costanoan groups in the San Francisco Bay region
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