education: The Americas 341 Medieval Africans, like their ancestors in the Zimbabwean civilizations of southern Africa, the Egyptians and Ethiopians of northeastern Africa, and the many empires like those of Songhai, Ghana, and Mali, have always cherished good education The high value placed on education is evident both in their traditions and in ancient historical records and artifacts The Americas by Angela Herren Archaeological and historical records provide little information on formal education systems in the Americas before the 16th century However, evidence suggests that communities passed along specialized knowledge through oral traditions, ritual practices, and systems of training and apprenticeship Lacking a formal alphabetic writing system, early American cultures recorded complex knowledge for future generations in various forms In all these cultures the adults trained children to perform everyday tasks Cooking, cleaning, weaving, child rearing, hunting, fishing, agricultural production, construction, art making, and other basic community labors often were divided according to gender In more stratified societies the opportunity to learn specialized knowledge was sometimes limited by ability, social standing, and political considerations Native North Americans recorded meaning in frescoes, symbolic architecture, monuments, petroglyphs, and iconographic motifs on ceramic, stone, shell, and metal objects Information about astronomy, the spiritual world, life, and death complemented knowledge obtained through ritual practices and oral traditions The art of the Mississippian phase of the Woodlands cultures (ca 750–ca 1500), mostly recovered from burial sites, indicates that community members learned and performed tasks like killing game, gardening, cooking, and engaging in ceremonial activities that celebrated the dead Select individuals learned specialized social roles Carved circular plates worn at the chest depict ritual decapitation and may illustrate aspects of the warrior’s life High-status burial sites contained the remains of priests or chiefs adorned with headdresses and ritual clothing The predominance of representations of powerful animals and birds like the falcon, rattlesnake, and deer suggests that Woodlands people imparted to their children an intimate knowledge of and spiritual association with local fauna The Hohokam and Mogollon (ca 500–ca 1400), two cultures that flourished in the southwestern part of the present-day United States, also developed a sophisticated knowledge of local flora and fauna Adults taught their children important sustenance activities such as hunting, fishing, and gathering and important ritual activities like playing musical instruments and dancing In the same geographic region the Anasazi developed large centralized communities (ca 900–ca 1300) at sites such as those found in Mesa Verde in Colorado and Pottery Mound in New Mexico Extensive multifamily dwellings built from adobe brick contained living and storage spaces, platforms, and circular subterranean rooms called kivas Women probably worked on the open platforms, teaching their daughters cooking, ceramic painting, and other skills Like later Pueblo peoples, Anasazi men may have initiated their sons into manhood by teaching them important ritual knowledge in the ceremonial spaces of kivas decorated with frescoes showing human, animal, and supernatural figures engaged in activities related to fertility and mortuary rites According to Pueblo descendants of the Anasazi, the small hole in the floor of the kiva signified the sipapu, the place where man first emerged from the earth Soapstone bowl of a kind associated with girls’ initiation rites, Strait of Georgia culture, British Columbia, ca 1–900 (© The Trustees of the British Museum)