Archaeological work along the Texas Gulf Coast has documented skeletal trauma consistent with endemic raiding among hunter-gatherer groups. Multiple sites show individuals with embedded projectile points and healed cranial fractures indicating survival of violent attacks. Documented by Ricklis and Collins. The coastal Karankawa-related populations show patterns of conflict similar to those documented by Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca in his 1528–1536 account of captivity among Texas coastal groups.
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 coastal groups in Texas coastal plain
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