How did Indigenous cultures in the Americas get their names?
Cultures in the Americas get their names from various places. For example, the names of many Indigenous cultures are translated to mean The People, The People of This Place, or The Ancient Ones. The People, First Men, and Original People are the most common translations for various Indigenous groups in the Americas. When early Europeans first came to the Americas, they recorded names for different group of Indigenous peoples based on what was told to them by the individuals they encountered (which often ended up being different than the names actually used by members of the group itself). In other cases, anthropologists gave names to living cultures (or attempted to ascertain the names), while archaeologists gave names to the material remains of past cultures they encountered in the archaeological record.
