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P A R T II

New Patterns of Civilization (500–1500 C.E.)

6 THE AMERICAS

7 FERMENT IN THE MIDDLE EAST: THE

RISE OF ISLAM

8 EARLY CIVILIZATIONS IN AFRICA

9 THE EXPANSION OF CIVILIZATION IN

SOUTH AND SOUTHEAST ASIA

10 THE FLOWERING OF TRADITIONAL

CHINA

11 THE EAST ASIAN RIMLANDS: EARLY

JAPAN, KOREA, AND VIETNAM

12 THE MAKING OF EUROPE

13 THE BYZANTINE EMPIRE AND CRISIS

AND RECOVERY IN THE WEST

BY THE BEGINNING of the first millennium C.E., the great statesof the ancient world were in decline; some were even at thepoint of collapse. On the ruins of these ancient empires, newpatterns of civilization began to take shape between 400 and1500 C.E. In some cases, these new societies were built on thepolitical and cultural foundations of their predecessors. TheTang dynasty in China and the Guptas in India both lookedback to the ancient period to provide an ideological modelfor their own time. The Byzantine Empire carried on parts ofthe Classical Greek tradition while also adopting the powerfulcreed of Christianity from the Roman Empire. In other cases,new states incorporated some elements of the former classicalcivilizations while heading in markedly different directions, asin the Arabic states in the Middle East and in the new Euro-pean civilization of the Middle Ages. In Europe, the Renais-

sance of the fifteenth century brought an even greater revivalof Greco-Roman culture.

During this period, a number of significant forces wereat work in human society. The accoutrements of advancedsociety gradually spread from the heartland regions of theMiddle East, the Mediterranean basin, the South Asiansubcontinent, and China into new areas of the world—sub-Saharan Africa, central and western Europe, SoutheastAsia, and even the islands of Japan, off the eastern edge of theEurasian landmass. Across the oceans, unique but advancedcivilizations began to take shape in isolation in the Americas.In the meantime, the vast migrations of peoples continued,leading not only to bitter conflicts but also to increased inter-changes of technology and ideas. The result was the transfor-mation of separate and distinct cultures and civilizations intoan increasingly complex and vast world system embracingnot only technology and trade but also ideas and religiousbeliefs.

As had been the case during antiquity, the Middle Eastwas the heart of this activity. The Arab empire, which tookshape after the death of Muhammad in the early seventh cen-tury, provided the key link in the revived trade routesthrough the region. Muslim traders—both Arab and Berber—opened contacts with West African societies south of theSahara, while their ships followed the monsoon winds east-ward as far as the Spice Islands in Southeast Asia. Nomadsfrom Central Asia, many of them Muslim, carried goods backand forth along the Silk Road between the Middle East andChina. For the next several hundred years, the great cities ofthe Middle East—Mecca, Damascus, and Baghdad—becameamong the wealthiest in the known world.

Islam’s contributions to the human experience during thisperiod were cultural and technological as well as economic.Muslim philosophers preserved the works of the ancientGreeks for posterity, Muslim scientists and mathematiciansmade new discoveries about the nature of the universe andthe human body, and Arab cartographers and historians

Copyright 2012 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s).Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.

mapped the known world and speculated about the funda-mental forces in human society.

But the Middle East was not the only or necessarily eventhe primary contributor to world trade and civilization duringthis period. While the Arab empire became the linchpin oftrade between the Mediterranean and eastern and southernAsia, a new center of primary importance in world trade wasemerging in East Asia, focused on China. China had been amajor participant in regional trade during the Han dynasty,when its silks were already being transported to Rome viaCentral Asia, but its role had declined after the fall of theHan. Now, with the rise of the great Tang and Song dynas-ties, China reemerged as a major commercial power in EastAsia, trading by sea with Southeast Asia and Japan and byland with the nomadic peoples of Central Asia.

Like the Middle East, China was also a prime source ofnew technology. From China came paper, printing, the com-pass, and gunpowder. The double-hulled Chinese junks thatentered the Indian Ocean during the Ming dynasty were slowand cumbersome but extremely seaworthy and capable ofcarrying substantial quantities of goods over long distances.Many inventions arrived in Europe by way of India or theMiddle East, and their Chinese origins were thereforeunknown in the West.

Increasing trade on a regional or global basis also led tothe exchange of ideas. Buddhism was brought to China bymerchants, and Islam first arrived in sub-Saharan Africa andthe Indonesian archipelago in the same manner. Merchantswere not the only means by which religious and culturalideas spread, however. Sometimes migration, conquest, orrelatively peaceful processes played a part. The case of theBantu-speaking peoples in Central Africa is apparently anexample of peaceful expansion; and while Islam sometimesfollowed the path of Arab warriors, they rarely imposed theirreligion by force on the local population. In some instances,

as with the Mongols, the conquerors made no effort to con-vert others to their own religions. By contrast, Christianmonks, motivated by missionary fervor, converted many ofthe peoples of central and eastern Europe. Roman Catholicmonks brought Latin Christianity to the Germanic and west-ern Slavic peoples, and monks from the Byzantine Empirelargely converted the southern and eastern Slavic populationsto Eastern Orthodox Christianity.

Another characteristic of the period between 500 and 1500C.E. was the almost constant migration of nomadic and semi-nomadic peoples. Dynamic forces in the Gobi Desert, CentralAsia, the Arabian peninsula, and Central Africa provoked vastnumbers of peoples to abandon their homelands and seektheir livelihood elsewhere. Sometimes the migration waspeaceful. More often, however, migration produced politicalinstability and sometimes invasion and subjugation. As hadbeen the case during antiquity, the most active source ofmigrants was Central Asia. The region later gave birth to thefearsome Mongols, whose armies advanced to the gates ofcentral Europe and conquered China in the thirteenth cen-tury. Wherever they went, they left a train of enormousdestruction and loss of life. Inadvertently, the Mongols werealso the source of a new wave of epidemics that sweptthrough much of Europe and the Middle East in the four-teenth century. The spread of the plague—known at the timeas the Black Death—took much of the population of Europeto an early grave.

But there was another side to the era of nomadic expan-sion. Even the invasions of the Mongols—the ‘‘scourge ofGod,’’ as Europeans of the thirteenth and fourteenth centu-ries called them—had constructive as well as destructive con-sequences. After their initial conquests, for a brief period ofthree generations, the Mongols provided an avenue for tradethroughout the most extensive empire (known as the PaxMongolica) the world had yet seen.

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New Patterns of Civilization (500–1500 C.E.) 157Copyright 2012 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s).

Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.

C H A P T E R

6

The Americas

CHAPTER OUTLINEAND FOCUS QUESTIONS

The Peopling of the AmericasWho were the first Americans, and when and how didthey come?

Early Civilizations in Central AmericaWhat were the main characteristics of religious beliefin early Mesoamerica?

The First Civilizations in South AmericaWhat role did the environment play in the evolution ofsocieties in the Americas?

Stateless Societies in the AmericasWhat were the main characteristics of statelesssocieties in the Americas, and how did they resembleand differ from the civilizations that arose there?

CRITICAL THINKINGIn what ways were the early civilizations inthe Americas similar to the civilizationsdiscussed in Part I, and in what ways werethey unique?

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IN THE SUMMER OF 2001, a powerful hurricane swept throughCentral America, destroying houses and flooding villages allalong the Caribbean coast of Belize and Guatemala. Fartherinland, at the archaeological site of Dos Pilas (dohs PEE-las),it uncovered new evidence concerning a series of dramaticevents that had taken place nearly 1,500 years earlier. Beneatha tree uprooted by the storm, archaeologists discovered ablock of stones containing hieroglyphics that described a bru-tal war between two powerful city-states of the area, a con-flict that ultimately contributed to the decline and fall ofMayan civilization, perhaps the most advanced society thenin existence throughout Central America.

Mayan civilization, the origins of which can be traced backto about 500 B.C.E., was not as old as some of its counterpartsthat we have discussed in Part I of this book. But it was themost recent version of a whole series of human societies thathad emerged throughout the Western Hemisphere as earlyas the third millennium B.C.E. Although these early societiesare not yet as well known as those of ancient Egypt, Mesopo-tamia, and India, evidence is accumulating that advancedcivilizations had existed in the Americas thousands of yearsbefore the arrival of Hernan Cortes and the Spanishconquistadors in 1519.

158Copyright 2012 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s).


The Peopling of the AmericasFOCUS QUESTION:Who were the first Americans, andwhen and how did they come?

The Maya (MY-uh) were only the latest in a series of sophisti-cated societies that had sprung up at various locations inNorth and South America since human beings first crossedthe Bering Strait several millennia earlier. Most of these earlypeoples, today often referred to as Amerindians, lived byhunting and fishing or by food gathering. But eventuallyorganized societies, based on the cultivation of agriculture,began to take root in Central and South America. One keyarea of development was on the plateau of central Mexico.Another was in the lowland regions along the Gulf of Mexicoand extending into modern Guatemala. A third was in thecentral Andes Mountains, adjacent to the Pacific coast ofSouth America. Others were just beginning to emerge in theriver valleys and Great Plains of North America.

For two thousand years, these societies developed in isola-tion from their counterparts elsewhere in the world. This lackof contact with other human populations deprived them ofaccess to technological and cultural developments takingplace in Africa, Asia, and Europe. They did not know of thewheel, for example, and their written languages were rudi-mentary compared to those in complex civilizations else-where around the globe. But in other respects, their culturalachievements were the equal of those realized elsewhere.When the first European explorers arrived in the region atthe turn of the sixteenth century, they described much thatthey observed in glowing terms.

The First AmericansWhen the first human beings arrived in the Western Hemi-sphere has long been a matter of conjecture. In the centuriesfollowing the voyages of Christopher Columbus (1492–1504),speculation centered on the possibility that the first settlers toreach the American continents had crossed the AtlanticOcean. Were they the lost tribes of Israel? Were they Phoeni-cian seafarers from Carthage? Were they refugees from thelegendary lost continent of Atlantis? In all cases, the assump-tion was that they were relatively recent arrivals.

By the mid-nineteenth century, under the influence of theDarwinian concept of evolution, a new theory developed. Itproposed that the peopling of America had taken place muchearlier as a result of the migration of small groups across theBering Strait, at a time when the area was a land bridge unit-ing the continents of Asia and North America. Recent evi-dence, including numerous physical similarities betweenmost early Americans and contemporary peoples living innortheastern Asia, has confirmed this hypothesis. The debateon when the migrations began continues, however. Thearchaeologist Louis Leakey, one of the pioneers in the searchfor the origins of humankind in Africa, suggested that the firsthominids may have arrived in America as long as 100,000years ago. Most scholars today, however, estimate that thefirst Americans were Homo sapiens sapiens who crossed from

Asia by foot between 10,000 and 15,000 years ago in pursuitof herds of bison and caribou that moved into the area insearch of grazing land at the end of the last ice age. Some sug-gest that early migrants from Asia may have followed a mari-time route down the western coast of the Americas,supporting themselves by fishing and feeding on other organ-isms floating in the sea.

In recent years, a number of fascinating new possibilitieshave opened up. A site discovered at Cactus Hill, in centralVirginia, shows signs of human habitation as long as 15,000years ago. Other recent discoveries suggest that some earlysettlers may have originally come from Africa or from theSouth Pacific rather than from Asia. The question has not yetbeen answered definitively.

Nevertheless, it is now generally accepted that humanbeings were living in the Americas at least 15,000 years ago.They gradually spread throughout the North American conti-nent and had penetrated almost to the southern tip of SouthAmerica by about 11,000 B.C.E. These first Americans werehunters and food gatherers who lived in small nomadic com-munities close to the sources of their food supply. Althoughit is not known when agriculture was first practiced, beansand squash seeds have been found at sites that date back atleast 10,000 years, implying that farming arose in Americaalmost as early as in the Middle East. The cultivation of maize(corn), and perhaps other crops as well, appears to have beenunder way as early as 5000 B.C.E. in the Tehuacan (teh-hwah-KAHN) valley in central Mexico. Archaeologists havetraced the ancestry of corn back at least 9,000 years to a wildMexican grass called teosinte (tay-oh-SIN-tee). Through alengthy process of experimentation, local farmers trans-formed it into a highly productive food crop that enabled therise of the first civilizations in the Americas. A similar processmay have occurred in the lowland regions near the moderncity of Veracruz and in the Yucatan (yoo-kuh-TAHN) penin-sula farther to the east. There, in the region that archaeolo-gists call Mesoamerica, one of the first civilizations in theAmericas began to appear.

Early Civilizations in CentralAmerica

FOCUS QUESTION:What were the maincharacteristics of religious belief in earlyMesoamerica?

The first signs of civilization in Mesoamerica appeared at theend of the second millennium B.C.E., with the emergence ofwhat is called Olmec (AHL-mek or OHL-mek) culture in thehot and swampy lowlands along the coast of the Gulf of Mex-ico south of Veracruz (see Map 6.1).

The Olmecs: In the Land of RubberOlmec civilization was characterized by intensive agriculturealong the muddy riverbanks in the area and by the carving ofstone ornaments, tools, and monuments at sites such as San

Early Civilizations in Central America 159Copyright 2012 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s).


Lorenzo and La Venta. The site at La Venta contains a cere-monial precinct with a 30-foot-high earthen pyramid, the larg-est of its date in all Mesoamerica. The Olmec peoplesorganized a widespread trading network, carried on religiousrituals, and devised an as yet undeciphered system of hiero-glyphics that is similar in some respects to later Mayan writ-ing (see ‘‘Mayan Hieroglyphs and Calendars’’ later in thischapter) and may be the ancestor of the first true writing sys-tems in the Americas.

Olmec society apparently consisted of several classes, includ-ing a class of skilled artisans who produced a series of massivestone heads, some of which are more than 10 feet high. TheOlmec peoples supported themselves primarily by cultivatingcrops, such as corn and beans, but also engaged in fishing andhunting. The Olmecs apparently played a ceremonial game ona stone ball court, a ritual that would later be widely practicedthroughout the region (see ‘‘The Maya’’ later in this chapter).The ball was made from the sap of a local rubber tree, thus pro-viding the name Olmec: ‘‘people of the land of rubber.’’

Trade between the Olmecs and their neighbors was appa-rently quite extensive, and rubber was one of the productsmost desired by peoples in nearby regions. It was used notonly for the manufacture of balls, but also for rubber bandsand footwear, as the Olmec learned how to mix the raw latex(the sap of the rubber tree) with other ingredients to make itmore supple.

Eventually, Olmec civilization began to decline, and itapparently collapsed around the fourth century B.C.E. Duringits heyday, however, it extended from Mexico City to El Sal-vador and perhaps to the shores of the Pacific Ocean.

The ZapotecsParallel developments were occurring at Monte Alban(MON-tee ahl-BAHN), on a hillside overlooking the mod-ern city of Oaxaca (wah-HAH-kuh), in central Mexico.Around the middle of the first millennium B.C.E., the Zapotec(zah-puh-TEK) peoples created an extensive civilization thatflourished for several hundred years in the highlands. Likethe Olmec sites, Monte Alban contains a number of templesand pyramids, but they are located in much more awesomesurroundings on a massive stone terrace atop a 1,200-foot-high mountain overlooking the Oaxaca valley. The majorityof the population, estimated at about 20,000, dwelled on ter-races cut into the sides of the mountain known to local resi-dents as Danibaan, or ‘‘sacred mountain.’’

The government at Monte Alban was apparently theo-cratic, with an elite class of nobles and priests ruling over apopulation composed primarily of farmers and artisans. Likethe Olmecs, the Zapotecs devised a written language that hasnot been deciphered. Zapotec society survived for severalcenturies following the collapse of the Olmecs, but MonteAlban was abandoned for unknown reasons in the late eighthcentury C.E.

Teotihuacan: America’s FirstMetropolisThe first major metropolis in Mesoamerica was the city ofTeotihuacan (tay-oh-tee-hwah-KAHN), capital of an earlystate about 30 miles northeast of Mexico City that arosearound the third century B.C.E. and flourished for nearly a mil-lennium until it collapsed under mysterious circumstancesabout 800 C.E. Along the main thoroughfare were templesand palaces, all dominated by the massive Pyramid of the Sun(see the comparative illustration on p. 162), under whicharchaeologists have discovered the remains of sacrificial vic-tims, probably put to death during the dedication of the struc-ture. In the vicinity are the remains of a large market wheregoods from distant regions as well as agricultural producegrown by farmers in the vicinity were exchanged. The prod-ucts traded included cacao, rubber, feathers, and varioustypes of vegetables and meat. Pulque (POOL-kay), a liquorextracted from the agave (uh-GAH-vee) plant, was used inreligious ceremonies. An obsidian mine nearby may explainthe location of the city; obsidian is a volcanic glass that wasprized in Mesoamerica for use in tools, mirrors, and theblades of sacrificial knives.

Most of the city consisted of one-story stucco apartmentcompounds; some were as large as 35,000 square feet, suffi-cient to house more than a hundred people. Each apartmentwas divided into several rooms, and the compounds were cov-ered by flat roofs made of wooden beams, poles, and stucco.The compounds were separated by wide streets laid out on arectangular grid and were entered through narrow alleys.

Living in the fertile Valley of Mexico, an upland plateausurrounded by magnificent snowcapped mountains, theinhabitants of Teotihuacan probably obtained the bulk oftheir wealth from agriculture. At that time, the valley floor

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MAP 6.1 Early Mesoamerica.Mesoamerica was home to some ofthe first civilizations in the Western Hemisphere. This map shows themajor urban settlements in the region.

What types of ecological areas were most associated withOlmec, Mayan, and Aztec culture?

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160 CHAPTER 6 The AmericasCopyright 2012 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s).


was filled with swampy lakes containing the water runofffrom the surrounding mountains. The combination of fertilesoil and adequate water made the valley one of the richestfarming areas in Mesoamerica.

Sometime during the eighth century C.E., for unknown rea-sons, the wealth and power of the city began to decline, andeventually its ruling class departed, with the priests carryingstone images of local deities on their backs. The next two centu-ries were a time of troubles throughout the region as principal-ities fought over limited farmland. The problem was latercompounded when peoples from surrounding areas, attractedby the rich farmlands, migrated into the Valley of Mexico andbegan to compete for territory with small city-states alreadyestablished there. As the local population expanded, farmersbegan to engage in more intensive agriculture. They drained thelakes to build chinampas (chee-NAM-pahs), swampy islandscrisscrossed by canals that provided water for their crops andeasy transportation to local markets for their excess produce.

The Olmecs: Mother Culture or FirstAmong Equals?What were the relations among these early societies in Meso-america? Trade contacts were quite active, as the Olmecsexported rubber to their neighbors in exchange for salt andobsidian. During its heyday, Olmec influence extendedthroughout the region, leading some historians to surmisethat it was a ‘‘mother culture,’’ much as the Shang dynastywas once thought to be in ancient China (see Chapter 3).

A seventh century B.C.E. pyramid recently unearthed inthe southern Mexican state of Chiapas (chee-AH-pahs) con-tained tomb objects that bore some resemblance to counter-parts in the Olmec site of La Venta, but also displayedcharacteristics unique to the Zoque (ZOH-kay) culture thatwas prevalent in that region at the time. Some scholars pointto such indigenous elements to suggest that perhaps theOlmec were merely first among equals. This issue has not yetbeen resolved.

The MayaFar to the east of the Valley of Mexico, another major civiliza-tion had arisen in what is now the state of Guatemala and theYucatan peninsula. This was the civilization of the Maya,which was older and just as sophisticated as the society atTeotihuacan.

ORIGINS It is not known when human beings first inhabitedthe Yucatan peninsula, but peoples contemporaneous withthe Olmecs were already cultivating such crops as corn, yams,and manioc in the area during the first millennium B.C.E. Asthe population increased, an early civilization began toemerge along the Pacific coast directly to the south of thepeninsula and in the highlands of modern Guatemala. Con-tacts were already established with the Olmecs to the west.

Since the area was a source for cacao trees and obsidian,the inhabitants soon developed relations with other early civi-lizations in the region. Cacao trees (whose name derives fromthe Mayan word kakaw) were the source of chocolate, which

The Grand Plaza at Monte Alban. On the crest of a hilltop at Monte Alban, not far from the moderntown of Oaxaca, the Zapotec peoples constructed this grand plaza around the seventh century C.E. In thevicinity are a palace, a ball court, three temple complexes, an observatory, and a majestic pyramid. As inother Mesoamerican cities such as Teotihuacan, Tikal, Palenque, and Chichen Itza, these religious sitesfunctioned as immense stage sets where the entire community could observe and participate in the dramasand sacrificial rituals of their cultures. The use of poetry, music, and dance to dramatize human fears andhopes was a universal phenomenon in all ancient societies.

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was drunk as a beverage by the upper classes, while cocoabeans, the fruit of the cacao tree, were used as currency inmarkets throughout the region. A fermented beer was pro-duced from the pulp of the fruit. The chocolate consumed inancient Mesoamerican cultures was roasted and had a bittertaste. The flavor survives today in a classic sauce—mole(moh-LAY)—that includes unsweetened chocolate and chilipeppers among its ingredients and is served with poultry andother meats. Chocolate did not develop its familiar sweettaste until the seventeenth century when cocoa beans werebrought to Europe and sugar and milk were added.

As the population in the area increased, the inhabitantsbegan to migrate into the central Yucatan peninsula and far-ther to the north. The overcrowding forced farmers in thelowland areas to shift from slash-and-burn cultivation toswamp agriculture of the type practiced in the lake region ofthe Valley of Mexico. By the middle of the first millenniumC.E., the entire area was honeycombed with a patchwork ofsmall city-states competing for land and resources. Thelargest urban centers such as Tikal (tee-KAHL) may have

had 100,000 inhabitants at their height and displayed a levelof technological and cultural achievement that was unsur-passed in the region. By the end of the third century C.E.,Mayan civilization had begun to enter its classical phase.

POLITICAL STRUCTURES The power of Mayan rulers was im-pressive. One of the monarchs at Copan (koh-PAHN)—known to scholars as ‘‘18 Rabbit’’ from the hieroglyphs com-posing his name—ordered the construction of a grand palacerequiring more than 30,000 person-days of labor. Around theruler was a class of aristocrats whose wealth was probablybased on the ownership of land farmed by their poorer rela-tives. Eventually, many of the nobles became priests or scribesat the royal court or adopted honored professions as sculptorsor painters. As the society’s wealth grew, so did the role of arti-sans and traders, who began to form a small middle class.

The majority of the population on the peninsula, however(estimated at roughly 3 million at the height of Mayan pros-perity), were farmers. They lived on their chinampa plots oron terraced hills in the highlands. Houses were built of adobe

RELIGION &PHILOSOPHY

COMPARATIVE ILLUSTRATIONThe Pyramid. The building of monumentalstructures known as pyramids was character-istic of a number of civilizations that arose inantiquity. The pyramid symbolized the link

between the world of human beings and the realm of deitiesand was often used to house the tomb of a deceased ruler.Shown here are two prominent examples. The upper photoshows the pyramids of Giza, Egypt, built in the third millen-nium B.C.E. and located near the modern city of Cairo. Thesecond photo shows the Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacan,erected in central Mexico in the fifth century C.E. Similarstructures of various sizes were built throughout the West-ern Hemisphere. The concept of the pyramid was alsowidely applied in parts of Asia. Scholars still debate the tech-nical aspects of constructing such pyramids.

How do the pyramids erected in the WesternHemisphere compare with similar structures inother parts of the world? What were theirsymbolic meanings to the builders?

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and thatch and probably resembled the houses of the major-ity of the population in the area today. There was a fairlyclear-cut division of labor along gender lines. The men wereresponsible for fighting and hunting, the women for home-making and the preparation of cornmeal, the staple food ofmuch of the population.

Some noblewomen, however, seem to have played impor-tant roles in both political and religious life. In the seventhcentury C.E., for example, Pacal (pa-KAL) became king ofPalenque (pah-LEN-kay), one of the most powerful of theMayan city-states, through the royal line of his mother andgrandmother, thereby breaking the patrilineal descent twice.His mother ruled Palenque for three years and was the powerbehind the throne for her son’s first twenty-five years of rule.

Pacal legitimized his kingship by transform-ing his mother into a divine representation ofthe ‘‘first mother’’ goddess.

MAYAN RELIGION Like some of the earlyreligious beliefs in Asia and the Mediterra-nean, Mayan religion was polytheistic.Although the names were different, Mayangods shared many of the characteristicsof deities of nearby cultures. The supremegod was named Itzamna (eet-SAHM-nuh)(‘‘Lizard House’’). Viewed as the creator ofall things, he was credited with bringing theknowledge of maize, cacao, medicine, andwriting to the Mayan people.

Deities were ranked in order of impor-tance and had human characteristics, as in an-cient Greece and India. Some, like the jaguargod of night, were evil rather than good.Many of the nature deities may have beenviewed as manifestations of one supremegodhead (see the box on p. 164). As at Teoti-huacan, human sacrifice (normally by decapi-tation) was practiced to propitiate theheavenly forces.

Mayan cities were built around a ceremo-nial core dominated by a central pyramid sur-mounted by a shrine to the gods. Nearbywere other temples, palaces, and a sacred ballcourt. Like many of their modern counter-parts, Mayan cities suffered from urbansprawl, with separate suburbs for the poorand the middle class, and even strip mallsstretched along transportation routes, wheremerchants hawked their wares to pedestrianspassing by.

The ball court was a rectangular space sur-rounded by vertical walls with metal ringsthrough which the contestants attempted todrive a hard rubber ball. Although the rulesof the game are only imperfectly understood,it apparently had religious significance, andthe vanquished players were sacrificed in cer-emonies held after the close of the game.

Most of the players were men, although there may have beensome women’s teams. Similar courts have been found at sitesthroughout Central and South America, with the earliest,located near Veracruz, dating back to around 1500 B.C.E.

MAYAN HIEROGLYPHS AND CALENDARS The Mayan writ-ing system, developed during the mid-first millennium B.C.E.,was based on hieroglyphs that remained undeciphered untilscholars recognized that symbols appearing in many passagesrepresented dates in the Mayan calendar (see the box onp. 165). This elaborate calendar, which measures time backto a particular date in August 3114 B.C.E., required a sophisti-cated understanding of astronomical events and mathematics

A Mayan Bloodletting Ceremony. The Mayan elite drew blood at various ritualceremonies. Here we see Lady Xok, the wife of a king of Yaxchilian, passing a rope piercedwith thorns along her tongue in a bloodletting ritual. Above her, the king holds a flamingtorch. This vivid scene from an eighth-century C.E. palace lintel demonstrates the excellenceof Mayan stone sculpture as well as the sophisticated weaving techniques shown in thequeen’s elegant gown.

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The Creation of the World: A Mayan View

RELIGION &PHILOSOPHY

Popul Vuh (puh-PUL VOO), a sacred work of theancient Maya, is an account of Mayan historyand religious beliefs. No written version in theoriginal Mayan script is extant, but shortly after

the Spanish conquest, it was written down in Quiche (kee-CHAY) (the spoken language of the Maya), using the Latinscript, apparently from memory. This version was later trans-lated into Spanish. The following excerpt from the openinglines of Popul Vuh recounts the Mayan myth of the creation.

Popul Vuh: The Sacred Book of the MayaThis is the account of how all was in suspense, all calm, insilence; all motionless, still, and the expanse of the sky wasempty.

This is the first account, the first narrative. There was nei-ther man, nor animal, birds, fishes, crabs, trees, stones, caves,ravines, grasses, nor forests; there was only the sky.

The surface of the earth had not appeared. There was onlythe calm sea and the great expanse of the sky.

There was nothing brought together, nothing which couldmake a noise, nor anything which might move, or tremble,or could make noise in the sky.

There was nothing standing; only the calm water, theplacid sea, alone and tranquil. Nothing existed.

There was only immobility and silence in the darkness, inthe night. Only the Creator, the Maker, Tepeu, Gucumatz,

the Forefathers, were in the water surrounded with light.They were hidden under green and blue feathers, and weretherefore called Gucumatz. By nature they were great sagesand great thinkers. In this manner the sky existed and also theHeart of Heaven, which is the name of God and thus He iscalled.

Then came the word. Tepeu and Gucumatz came to-gether in the darkness, in the night, and Tepeu and Gucu-matz talked together. They talked then, discussing anddeliberating; they agreed, they united their words and theirthoughts.

Then while they meditated, it became clear to them thatwhen dawn would break, man must appear. Then theyplanned the creation, and the growth of the trees and thethickets and the birth of life and the creation of man. Thus itwas arranged in the darkness and in the night by the Heart ofHeaven who is called Huracan.

The first is called Caculha Huracan. The second is Chipi-Caculha. The third is Raxa-Caculha. And these three are theHeart of Heaven.

So it was that they made perfect the work, when they didit after thinking and meditating upon it.

What similarities and differences do you see betweenthis account of the beginning of the world and thoseof other ancient civilizations?

A Ball Court. ThroughoutMesoamerica, a dangerous game wasplayed on ball courts such as this one.A large ball of solid rubber waspropelled from the hip at suchtremendous speed that players had towear extensive padding. The gamehad religious significance and was notjust an athletic contest. The court isthought to have represented thecosmos and the ball the sun, and thelosers were sacrificed to the gods inpostgame ceremonies. The game isstill played today in parts of Mexico(without the sacrifice, of course).

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to compile. Starting with these known symbols as a founda-tion, modern scholars have gradually deciphered the script.Like the scripts of the Sumerians and ancient Egyptians, theMayan hieroglyphs were both ideographic and phonetic andwere becoming more phonetic as time passed.

The responsibility for compiling official records in theMayan city-states was given to a class of scribes, who wroteon deerskin or strips of tree bark. Unfortunately, virtually allsuch records have fallen victim to the ravages of a humid cli-mate or were deliberately destroyed by Spanish missionaries

A Sample of Mayan Writing

ART &IDEAS

The Maya were the only Mesoamerican peopleto devise a complete written language.Although the origins of the Mayan writing sys-tem are unknown, many specialists believe that

it may have emerged from scripts invented earlier by theneighboring Zapotecs or Olmecs and that the Maya learnedof these experiments through contacts with these peoples inthe first millennium B.C.E.

Like the Sumerian and Egyptian scripts, the Mayan systemwas composed of a mixture of ideographs and phonetic sym-bols, which were written in double columns to be read fromleft to right and top to bottom. The language was rudimen-tary in many ways. It had few adjectives or adverbs, and thenumbering system used only three symbols: a shell for zero,a dot for one, and a bar for five.

During the classical era from 300 to 900 C.E., the Maya usedthe script to record dynastic statistics with deliberate precision,listing the date of the ruler’s birth, his accession to power, andhis marriage and death while highlighting victories in battle, thecapture of prisoners, and ritual ceremonies. The symbols werecarved on stone panels, stelae, and funerary urns or werepainted with a brush on folding-screen books made of barkpaper; only four of these books from the late period remainextant today. A sample of Mayan hieroglyphs is shown below.

How do Mayan glyphs compare with the early formsof writing in Egypt, China, and Mesopotamia?Consider purpose, ease of writing, and potential fordevelopment into a purely phonetic system.

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after their arrival in the sixteenth century. As one Spanishbishop remarked at the time, ‘‘We found a large number ofbooks in these characters and, as they contained nothing in

which there were not to be seen superstition and lies of thedevil, we burned them all, which they regretted to an amaz-ing degree, and which caused them much affliction.’’1

As a result, almost the only surviving written records dat-ing from the classical Mayan era are those that were carved instone. One of the most important repositories of Mayan hi-eroglyphs is at Palenque, an archaeological site deep in thejungles in the neck of the Mexican peninsula, considerably tothe west of the Yucatan (see Map 6.2). In a chamber locatedunder the Temple of Inscriptions, archaeologists discovered aroyal tomb and a massive limestone slab covered with hiero-glyphs. By deciphering the message on the slab, archaeolo-gists for the first time identified a historical figure in Mayanhistory. He was the ruler named Pacal, known from his glyphas ‘‘The Shield’’; Pacal ordered the construction of the Tem-ple of Inscriptions in the mid-seventh century, and it was hisbody that was buried in the tomb at the foot of the staircaseleading down into the crypt.

As befits their intense interest in the passage of time, theMaya also had a sophisticated knowledge of astronomy andkept voluminous records of the movements of the heavenlybodies. There were practical reasons for their concern. Thearrival of the planet Venus in the evening sky, for example,was a traditional time to prepare for war. The Maya alsodevised the so-called Long Count, a system of calculatingtime based on a lunar calendar that calls for the end of thecurrent cycle of 5,200 years in the year 2012 of the Westernsolar-based Gregorian calendar.

Scholars once believed that the Maya were a peaceful peo-ple who rarely engaged in violence. Now, however, it isthought that rivalry among Mayan city-states was endemicand often involved bloody clashes. Scenes from paintings androck carvings depict a society preoccupied with war and the

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MAP 6.2 The Maya Heartland. During the classical era, Mayancivilization was centered on modern-day Guatemala and the lowerYucatan peninsula. After the ninth century, new centers of power likeChichen Itza and Uxmal began to emerge farther north.

What factors appear to have brought an end to classicalMayan civilization?

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The Role of Jade. To many early peoples, the beautiful stone we know as jade possessedmagical spiritual qualities, which undoubtedly inspired the two objects shown here. The funeralmask of Lord Pacal (right), a seventh-century ruler of Palenque, was placed in his tomb in the hopethat its spiritual energy would propel Pacal into the afterlife, thereby merging him with the divinein the Mayan cosmos. In China, members of the Han ruling family were buried in jade body suits,such as the one shown below. The suit was composed of jade squares sewn together with goldthread. Because of the expense, such practices were eventually banned as extravagant.

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seizure of captives for sacrifice. The conflict mentioned at thebeginning of this chapter is but a recent example. During theseventh century C.E., two powerful city-states, Tikal andCalakmul (kah-lahk-MOOL), competed for dominancethroughout the region, setting up puppet regimes and wagingbloody wars that wavered back and forth for years but ulti-mately resulted in the total destruction of Calakmul at theend of the century.

THE MYSTERY OF MAYAN DECLINE Sometime in the eighthor ninth century, the classical Mayan civilization in the centralYucatan peninsula began to decline. At Copan, for example, itended abruptly in 822 C.E., when work on various stonesculptures ordered by the ruler suddenly ceased. The end ofPalenque soon followed, and the city of Tikal was abandonedby 870 C.E. Whether the decline was caused by overuse of theland, incessant warfare, internal revolt, or a natural disastersuch as a volcanic eruption is a question that has puzzledarchaeologists for decades. Recent evidence supports thetheory that overcultivation of the land due to a growing pop-ulation gradually reduced crop yields. A long drought, whichlasted throughout most of the ninth and tenth centuries C.E.,may have played a major role, although the city-state ofTikal, blessed with fertile soil and the presence of nearbyLake Peten, does not appear to have suffered from a lack ofwater. In general, though, as arable land and water becameincreasingly scarce, conflict among the various mini-states inthe region may have intensified, accelerating the process lead-ing to a final collapse.

Whatever the case, cities such as Tikal and Palenque wereabandoned to the jungles. In their place, newer urban centersin the northern part of the peninsula, such as Uxmal (oosh-MAHL) and Chichen Itza (chee-CHEN eet-SAH), contin-ued to prosper, although the level of cultural achievement inthis postclassical era did not match that of previous years.

According to local history, this latter area was taken over bypeoples known as the Toltecs (TOHL-teks), led by a manknown as Kukulcan (koo-kul-KAHN), who migrated to thepeninsula from Teotihuacan in central Mexico sometime inthe tenth century. Some scholars believe this flight was asso-ciated with the legend of the departure from that city ofQuetzalcoatl (KWET-sul-koh-AHT-ul), a deity in the formof a feathered serpent who promised that he would somedayreturn to reclaim his homeland.

The Toltecs apparently controlled the upper peninsulafrom their capital at Chichen Itza for several centuries, butthis area was less fertile and more susceptible to drought thanthe earlier regions of Mayan settlement, and eventually theytoo declined. By the early sixteenth century, the area was di-vided into a number of small principalities, and the cities,including Uxmal and Chichen Itza, had been abandoned.

The AztecsAmong the groups moving into the Valley of Mexico afterthe fall of Teotihuacan were the Mexica (meh-SHEE-kuh).No one knows their origins, although folk legend held thattheir original homeland was an island in a lake called Aztlan.From that legendary homeland comes the name Aztec, bywhich they are known to the modern world. Sometime dur-ing the early twelfth century, the Aztecs left their originalhabitat and, carrying an image of their patron deity, Huitzilo-pochtli (WEET-see-loh-POHSHT-lee), began a lengthymigration that climaxed with their arrival in the Valley ofMexico sometime late in the century.

Less sophisticated than many of their neighbors, theAztecs were at first forced to seek alliances with stronger city-states. They were excellent warriors, however, and (likeSparta in ancient Greece and the state of Qin in Zhou dynastyChina) theirs had become the dominant city-state in the lake

Mayan Temple at Tikal. Thiseighth-century temple, peering overthe treetops of a jungle at Tikal,represents the zenith of theengineering and artistry of the Mayanpeoples. Erected to house the bodyof a ruler, such pyramidal tombscontained elaborate works of jadejewelry, polychrome ceramics, andintricate bone carvings depicting theruler’s life and various deities. Thistemple dominates a great plaza that issurrounded by a royal palace andvarious religious structures.

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region by the early fifteenth century. Establishing their capitalat Tenochtitlan (teh-nahch-teet-LAHN), on an island in themiddle of Lake Texcoco (tess-KOH-koh), they set out tobring the entire region under their domination (see Map 6.3).

For the remainder of the fifteenth century, the Aztecs con-solidated their control over much of what is modern Mexico,from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean and as far south as theGuatemalan border. The new kingdom was not a centralized

state but a collection of semiautonomous territories. To pro-vide a unifying focus for the kingdom, the Aztecs promotedtheir patron god, Huitzilopochtli, as the guiding deity of theentire population, which now numbered several million.

POLITICS Like all great empires in ancient times, the Aztecstate was authoritarian. Power was vested in the monarch,whose authority had both a divine and a secular character.The Aztec ruler claimed descent from the gods and served asan intermediary between the material and the metaphysicalworlds. Unlike many of his counterparts in other ancient civi-lizations, however, the monarch did not obtain his positionby a rigid law of succession. On the death of the ruler, hissuccessor was selected from within the royal family by asmall group of senior officials, who were also members of thefamily and were therefore eligible for the position. Onceplaced on the throne, the Aztec ruler was advised by a smallcouncil of lords, headed by a prime minister who served asthe chief executive of the government, and a bureaucracy.Beyond the capital, the power of the central government waslimited. Rulers of territories subject to the Aztecs wereallowed considerable autonomy in return for paying tribute,in the form of goods or captives, to the central government.The most important government officials in the provinceswere the tax collectors, who collected the tribute. They usedthe threat of military action against those who failed to carryout their tribute obligations and therefore, understandably,were not popular with the taxpayers. According to BernalDıaz, a Spaniard who recorded his impressions of Aztec soci-ety during a visit in the early sixteenth century:

All these towns complained about Montezuma [Moctezuma, theAztec ruler] and his tax collectors, speaking in private so that theMexican ambassadors should not hear them, however. They saidthese officials robbed them of all they possessed, and that if theirwives and daughters were pretty they would violate them infront of their fathers and husbands and carry them away. Theyalso said that the Mexicans [that is, the representatives from thecapital] made the men work like slaves, compelling them to carrypine trunks and stone and firewood and maize overland and incanoes, and to perform other tasks, such as planting maize fields,and that they took away the people’s lands as well for the serviceof their idols.2

SOCIAL STRUCTURES Positions in the government bureau-cracy were the exclusive privilege of the hereditary nobility,all of whom traced their lineage to the founding family of theAztec clan. Male children in noble families were sent to tem-ple schools, where they were exposed to a harsh regimen ofmanual labor, military training, and memorization of infor-mation about Aztec society and religion. On reaching adult-hood, they would select a career in the military service, thegovernment bureaucracy, or the priesthood. As a reward fortheir services, senior officials received large estates from thegovernment, and they alone had the right to hire communallabor.

The remainder of the population consisted of commoners,indentured workers, and slaves. Most indentured workers

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MAP 6.3 The Valley of Mexico Under Aztec Rule. The Aztecswere one of the most advanced peoples in pre-Columbian CentralAmerica. Their capital at Tenochtitlan—Tlaltelolco (tuh-lahl-teh-LOH-koh)—was located at the site of modern-day Mexico City. Ofthe five lakes shown here, only Lake Texcoco remains today.

What forms of agriculture were practiced in the Valley ofMexico, and why?

CHRONOLOGY Early Mesoamerica

Arrival of human beings in America At least 15,000 years ago

Agriculture first practiced c. 8000 B.C.E.

Rise of Olmec culture 1200 B.C.E.

End of Olmec era Fourth century B.C.E.

Origins of Mayan civilization First millennium C.E.

Teotihuacan civilization c. 300 B.C.E.–800 C.E.

Classical era of Mayan culture 300–900 C.E.

Tikal abandoned 870 C.E.

Migration of Mexica toValley of Mexico

Late 1100s

Kingdom of the Aztecs 1300s–1400s

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were landless laborers who contracted to work on the nobles’estates, while slaves served in the households of the wealthy.Slavery was not an inherited status, and the children of slaveswere considered free citizens. Commoners might sell them-selves into slavery when in debt and then later purchase theirfreedom.

The vast majority of the population consisted of com-moners. All commoners were members of large kinshipgroups called calpullis (kal-PUL-eez). Each calpulli, oftenconsisting of as many as a thousand members, was headed byan elected chief, who ran its day-to-day affairs and served asan intermediary with the central government. Each calpulliwas responsible for providing taxes (usually in the form ofgoods) and conscript labor to the state.

Each calpulli maintained its own temples and schools andadministered the land held by the community. Farmlandwithin the calpulli was held in common and could not be sold,although it could be passed down within the family. In thecities, each calpulli occupied a separate neighborhood, whereits members often performed a particular function, such asmetalworking, stonecutting, weaving, carpentry, or com-merce. Apparently, a large proportion of the population

engaged in some form of trade, at least in the densely popu-lated Valley of Mexico, where an estimated half of the peoplelived in an urban environment. Many farmers, who cultivatedtheir crops in chinampas as their predecessors had for centu-ries, brought their goods to the markets via the canals andsold them directly to retailers (see the box above).

The calpulli compounds themselves were divided intosmaller family units. Individual families lived in small flat-roofed dwellings containing one or two rooms. Each housewas separate from its neighbors and had direct access to thesurrounding streets and canals. The houses of farmers livingon the chinampas were set on raised dirt platforms built abovethe surrounding fields to prevent flooding.

Gender roles within the family were rigidly stratified. Malechildren were trained for war and were expected to serve inthe army on reaching adulthood. Women were expected towork in the home, weave textiles, and raise children,although, like their brothers, they were permitted to enterthe priesthood. According to Bernal Dıaz, a female deitypresided over the rites of marriage. As in most traditionalsocieties, chastity and obedience were desirable female char-acteristics. Although women in Aztec society enjoyed more

Markets and Merchandise in Aztec Mexico

One of our most valuable descriptions of Azteccivilization is The Conquest of New Spain,written by Bernal Dıaz, a Spaniard who visitedMexico in 1519. In the following passage, Dıaz

describes the great market at Tenochtitlan.

Bernal Dıaz, The Conquest of New SpainLet us begin with the dealers in gold, silver, and preciousstones, feathers, cloaks, and embroidered goods, and maleand female slaves who are also sold there. They bring asmany slaves to be sold in that market as the Portuguese bringNegroes from Guinea. Some are brought there attached tolong poles by means of collars round their necks to preventthem from escaping, but others are left loose. Next therewere those who sold coarser cloth, and cotton goods and fab-rics made of twisted thread, and there were chocolate mer-chants with their chocolate. In this way you could see everykind of merchandise to be found anywhere in New Spain, laidout in the same way as goods are laid out in my own districtof Medina del Campo, a center for fairs, where each line ofstalls has its own particular sort. So it was in this great mar-ket. There were those who sold sisal cloth and ropes and thesandals they wear on their feet, which are made from thesame plant. All these were kept in one part of the market, inthe place assigned to them, and in another part were skins oftigers and lions, otters, jackals, and deer, badgers, mountaincats, and other wild animals, some tanned and someuntanned, and other classes of merchandise.

There were sellers of kidney beans and sage and othervegetables and herbs in another place, and in yet another theywere selling fowls, and birds with great dewlaps, also rabbits,hares, deer, young ducks, little dogs, and other such crea-tures. Then there were the fruiterers; and the women whosold cooked food, flour and honey cake, and tripe, had theirpart of the market. Then came pottery of all kinds, from bigwater jars to little jugs, displayed in its own place, also honey,honey paste, and other sweets like nougat. Elsewhere theysold timber too, boards, cradles, beams, blocks, and benches,all in a quarter of their own.

Then there were the sellers of pitch pine for torches, andother things of that kind, and I must also mention, with allapologies, that they sold many canoe loads of human excre-ment, which they kept in the creeks near the market. Thiswas for the manufacture of salt and the curing of skins, whichthey say cannot be done without it. I know that many gentle-men will laugh at this, but I assure them it is true. I may addthat on all the roads they have shelters made of reeds or strawor grass so that they can retire when they wish to do so, andpurge their bowels unseen by passersby, and also in orderthat their excrement shall not be lost.

Which of the items offered for sale in this accountmight also have been available in a market in Asia,Egypt, or Europe? What types of goods mentionedhere appear to be unique to the Americas?

INTERACTION & EXCHANGE



legal rights than women in some other traditional civiliza-tions, they were still not equal to men (see the box above).Women were permitted to own and inherit property and toenter into contracts. Marriage was usually monogamous,although noble families sometimes practiced polygyny (hav-ing more than one wife at a time). Wedding partners werenormally selected from within the lineage group but not theimmediate family. As in most societies at the time, parentsusually selected their child’s spouse, often for purposes of po-litical or social advancement.

Classes in Aztec society were rigidly stratified. Com-moners were not permitted to enter the nobility, althoughsome occasionally rose to senior positions in the army or thepriesthood as the result of exemplary service. As in medievalEurope, such occupations often provided a route of upwardmobility for ambitious commoners. A woman of noble stand-ing would sometimes marry a commoner because the chil-dren of such a union would inherit her higher status, and shecould expect to be treated better by her husband’s family,who would be proud of the marriage relationship.

LAND OF THE FEATHERED SERPENT: AZTEC RELIGION ANDCULTURE The Aztecs, like their contemporaries throughoutMesoamerica, lived in an environment populated by a multi-tude of gods. Scholars have identified more than a hundreddeities in the Aztec pantheon; some of them were nature spir-its, like the rain god, Tlaloc (tuh-lah-LOHK), and somewere patron deities, like the symbol of the Aztecs themselves,

Huitzilopochtli. A supreme deity, called Ometeotl (oh-mettee-AH-tul), represented the all-powerful and omnipresentforces of the heavens, but he was rather remote, and othergods, notably the feathered serpent Quetzalcoatl, had a moredirect impact on the lives of the people. Representing theforces of creation, virtue, and learning and culture, Quetzal-coatl bears a distinct similarity to Shiva in Hindu belief.According to Aztec tradition, this godlike being had left hishomeland in the Valley of Mexico in the tenth century, prom-ising to return in triumph (see ‘‘The Mystery of MayanDecline’’ earlier in this chapter).

Aztec cosmology was based on a belief in the existence oftwo worlds, the material and the divine. The earth was thematerial world and took the form of a flat disk surrounded bywater on all sides. The divine world, which consisted of bothheaven and hell, was the abode of the gods. Human beingscould aspire to a form of heavenly salvation but first had topass through a transitional stage, somewhat like Christianpurgatory, before reaching their final destination, where thesoul was finally freed from the body. To prepare for the finalday of judgment, as well as to help them engage in properbehavior through life, all citizens underwent religious trainingat temple schools during adolescence and took part in variousrituals throughout their lives. The most devout were encour-aged to study for the priesthood. Once accepted, they servedat temples ranging from local branches at the calpulli level tothe highest shrines in the ceremonial precinct at Tenochtitlan.In some respects, however, Aztec society may have been

Aztec Midwife Ritual Chants

FAMILY &SOCIETY

Most Aztec women were burdened with time-consuming family chores, such as grinding corninto flour for tortillas and carrying heavy contain-ers of water from local springs. Like their broth-

ers, Aztec girls went to school, but rather than training forwar, they learned spinning, weaving, and how to carry outfamily rituals. In the sixteenth century C.E., a Spanish priest,Bernardino de Sahagun (ber-nar-DEE-noh duh sah-ah-GOON), interviewed Aztec informants to compile a substan-tial account of traditional Aztec society. Here we read his nar-ration of ritual chants used by midwives during childhood.For a boy, the highest honor was to shed blood in battle. Fora girl, it was to offer herself to the work of domestic life. If awoman died in childbirth, however, she would be glorified asa ‘‘warrior woman.’’

Bernardino de Sahagun, The Florentine CodexMy precious son, my youngest one. . . . Heed, hearken:Thy home is not here, for thou art an eagle, thou art an oce-lot. . . . Thou art the serpent, the bird of the lord of the near,

of the nigh. Here is only the place of thy nest. Thou hast onlybeen hatched here; thou hast only come, arrived. . . . Thoubelongest out there. . . . Thou hast been sent into warfare.War is the desert, thy task. Thou shalt give drink, nourish-ment, food to the sun, the lord of the earth. . . . Perhaps thouwilt receive the gift, perhaps thou wilt merit death by the ob-sidian knife, the flowered death by the obsidian knife.

My beloved maiden. . . . Thou wilt be in the heart of thehome, thou wilt go nowhere, thou wilt nowhere become awanderer, thou becomest the banked fire, the hearth stones.Here our Lord planteth thee, burieth thee. And thou wiltbecome fatigued, thou wilt become tired, thou art to providewater, to grind maize, to drudge; thou art to sweat by theashes, by the hearth.

What does this document suggest was the properrole to be played by a woman in Aztec society? Howdid gender roles in Mesoamerica compare with thosethat we have seen in other societies around theworld?



undergoing a process of secularization. By late Aztec times,athletic contests at the ball court had apparently lost some oftheir religious significance. Gambling was increasingly com-mon, and wagering on the results of the matches was wide-spread. One province reportedly sent 16,000 rubber balls tothe capital city of Tenochtitlan as its annual tribute to theroyal court.

Aztec religion contained a distinct element of fatalism thatwas inherent in the creation myth, which described anunceasing struggle between the forces of good and evilthroughout the universe. This struggle led to the creationand destruction of four worlds, or suns. The world was nowliving in the time of the fifth sun. But that world, too, wasdestined to end with the destruction of this earth and all thatis within it:

Even jade is shattered,Even gold is crushed,Even quetzal plumes are torn. . . .One does not live forever on this earth:We endure only for an instant!3

In an effort to postpone the day of reckoning, the Aztecspracticed human sacrifice. The Aztecs believed that byappeasing the sun god, Huitzilopochtli, with sacrifices, theycould delay the final destruction of their world. Victims wereprepared for the ceremony through elaborate rituals and thenbrought to the holy shrine, where their hearts were rippedout of their chests and presented to the gods as a holy offer-ing. It was an honor to be chosen for sacrifice, and captiveswere often used as sacrificial victims, since they representedvalor, the trait the Aztecs prized most.

ART AND CULTURE Like the art of the Olmecs, most Aztecarchitecture, art, and sculpture had religious significance. Atthe center of the capital city of Tenochtitlan was the sacredprecinct, dominated by the massive pyramid dedicated toHuitzilopochtli and the rain god, Tlaloc. According to BernalDıaz, at its base the pyramid was equal to the plots of sixlarge European town houses and tapered from there to the

top, which was surmounted by a platform containing shrinesto the gods and an altar for performing human sacrifices. Theentire pyramid was covered with brightly colored paintingsand sculptures.

Although little Aztec painting survives, it was evidently ofhigh quality. Dıaz compared the best work with that ofMichelangelo. Artisans worked with stone and with soft met-als such as gold and silver, which they cast using the lost-waxtechnique. They did not have the knowledge for makingimplements in bronze or iron, however. Stoneworking con-sisted primarily of representations of the gods and bas-reliefsdepicting religious ceremonies. Among the most famous is

Quetzalcoatl. Quetzalcoatl was one of thefavorite deities of the Central Americanpeoples. His visage of a plumed serpent, asshown here, was prominent in the royal capitalof Teotihuacan. According to legend,Quetzalcoatl, the leader of the Toltecs, wastricked into drunkenness and humiliated by arival god. In disgrace, he left his homeland butpromised to return. In 1519, the Aztecmonarch Moctezuma welcomed HernanCortes, the leader of the Spanish expedition,believing that he was a representative ofQuetzalcoatl.

The Stone of the Fifth Sun. This basalt disk, which weighs 26 tons,recorded the Aztec view of the cosmos. It portrays the perpetualstruggle between forces of good and evil in the universe; in the center isan intimidating image of the sun god clutching human hearts with histalons. Having previously traversed the creation and destruction of fourworlds, the Aztecs believed they were living in the world of the fifth andfinal sun—hence this stone carving, which was found in the centralpyramid at Tenochtitlan.

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the massive disk called the Stone of the Fifth Sun, carved foruse at the central pyramid at Tenochtitlan.

The Aztecs had devised a form of writing based on hiero-glyphs that represented an object or a concept. The symbolshad no phonetic significance and did not constitute a writingsystem as such but could give the sense of a message andwere probably used by civilian or religious officials as notesor memorandums for their orations. Although many of thenotes simply recorded dates in the complex calendar that hadevolved since Olmec times, others provide insight into thedaily lives of the Aztec peoples. A trained class of scribes care-fully painted the notes on paper made from the inner bark offig trees. Unfortunately, many of these notes were destroyedby the Spaniards as part of their effort to eradicate all aspectsof Aztec religion and culture.

The First Civilizations in SouthAmerica

FOCUS QUESTION:What role did the environmentplay in the evolution of societies in the Americas?

South America is a vast continent, characterized by extremesin climate and geography. The north is dominated by themighty Amazon River, which flows through dense tropicalrain forests carrying a larger flow of water than any otherriver system in the world (see Map 6.4). Farther to the south,the forests are replaced by prairies and steppes stretchingwestward to the Andes Mountains, which extend the entirelength of the continent, from the Isthmus of Panama to theStrait of Magellan. Along the Pacific coast, on the westernslopes of the mountains, are some of the driest desert regionsin the world.

South America has been inhabited by human beings formore than 12,000 years. Wall paintings discovered at theso-called Cavern of the Painted Rock in the Amazon regionsuggest that Stone Age peoples were living in the area atleast 11,000 years ago, and a site at Monte Verde, along thecentral coast of Chile, has been dated to 10,500 B.C.E. Earlypeoples lived by hunting, fishing, and food gathering, butthere are indications that irrigated farming was being prac-ticed on the western slopes of the Andes Mountains morethan 5,000 years ago.

CaralBy the third millennium B.C.E., complex societies had begunto emerge in the coastal regions of modern-day Peru andEcuador. Some settlements were located along the coast, butthe remnants of farming communities watered by canals havealso been found in the valleys of rivers flowing down fromthe Andes Mountains. Fish and agricultural products weretraded to highland peoples for wool and salt.

By 3500 B.C.E.—more than a thousand years earlier thanthe earliest known cities in Mesoamerica—the first urban set-tlements appeared in the region. At Caral, a highly publicized

site located 14 miles inland from the coast, the remnants of a4,500-year-old city sit on the crest of a 60-foot-high pyramid.The inhabitants raised squash, beans, and tomatoes but alsoprovided cotton to fishing communities along the coast,where it was used to make fishnets. Land was divided in amanner similar to the well-field system in ancient China (seeChapter 3).

This culture reached its height during the first millenniumB.C.E. with the emergence of the Chavın style, named for asite near the modern city of Chavın de Huantar (chah-VEENday HWAHN-tahr). The ceremonial precinct at the site con-tained an impressive stone temple complete with interior gal-leries, a stone-block ceiling, and a system of undergroundcanals that probably channeled water into the temple com-plex for ceremonial purposes. The structure was surroundedby stone figures depicting various deities and two pyramids.Evidence of metallurgy has also been found, with objects madeof copper and gold. Another impressive technological achieve-ment was the building in 300 B.C.E. of the first solar observatory

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MAP 6.4 Early Peoples and Cultures of Central and SouthAmerica. This map shows regions of early human settlements inCentral and South America. Urban conglomerations appear inMesoamerica (see inset) and along the western coast of SouthAmerica.

Why do you think urban centers appeared in theseareas?

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in the Americas in the form of thirteen stone towers on a hillsidenorth of Lima, Peru. There are even signs of a rudimentary writ-ing system (see ‘‘Inka Culture’’ later in this chapter).

MocheChavın society had broken down by 200 B.C.E., but early inthe first millennium C.E., another advanced civilizationappeared in northern Peru, in the valley of the Moche River,which flows from the foothills of the Andes into the PacificOcean. It occupied an area of more than 2,500 square miles,and its capital city, large enough to contain more than 10,000people, was dominated by two massive adobe pyramidsnearly 100 feet high. The larger one, known today as the Pyr-amid of the Sun, covered a total of 15acres. The other, built on the side of amountain, was adorned with paintedmurals depicting battles, ritual sacrifi-ces, and various local deities.

Artifacts found at Moche (moh-CHAY), especially the metalwork andstone and ceramic figures, exhibit ahigh quality of artisanship. They wereimitated at river valley sites through-out the surrounding area, which sug-gests that the influence of the Mocherulers may have extended as far as 400miles along the coast. The artifactsalso indicate that the people at Moche,like those in Central America, werepreoccupied with warfare. Paintingsand pottery as well as other artifacts instone, metal, and ceramics frequentlyportray warriors, prisoners, and sacrifi-cial victims. The Moche were also fas-cinated by the heavens, and much oftheir art consisted of celestial symbolsand astronomical constellations.

ENVIRONMENTAL PROBLEMS TheMoche River valley is extremely arid,normally receiving less than an inchof rain annually. The peoples in thearea compensated by building a so-phisticated irrigation system to carrywater from the river to the parchedfields. At its zenith, Moche culturewas spectacular. By the eighth cen-tury C.E., however, the civilizationwas in a state of collapse, the irriga-tion canals had been abandoned, andthe remaining population had leftthe area and moved farther inland orsuffered from severe malnutrition.

What had happened to bringMoche culture to this untimely end?

Archaeologists speculate that environ-mental disruptions, perhaps brought onby changes in the temperature of thePacific Ocean known as El Nino, led toalternating periods of drought andflooding of coastal regions, whichcaused the irrigated fields to silt up (seethe comparative essay ‘‘History and theEnvironment’’ on p. 174). The warmwater created by El Nino conditionsalso killed local marine life, severelydamaging the local fishing industry.

WARI AND CHIMOR A few hundredmiles to the south of Moche, a peopleknown as the Wari (WAH-ree) cul-ture began to expand from their for-mer home in the Andes foothills andestablished communities along thecoast in the vicinity of modern Lima,Peru. As the state of Moche declined,the Wari gradually spread northwardin the eighth century and began tooccupy many of the urban sites in theMoche valley. According to somescholars, they may even have madeuse of the Moche’s sacred buildingsand appropriated their religious sym-bolism. In the process, the Wari cre-ated the most extensive land empireyet seen in South America. In the end,however, they too succumbed to thechallenge posed by unstable environ-mental conditions.

Around 1100, a new power, thekingdom of Chimor (chee-MAWR),with its capital at Chan Chan(CHAHN CHAHN), at the mouth ofthe Moche River, emerged in the area.Built almost entirely of adobe, ChanChan housed an estimated 30,000

A Mind-Changing Experience. Forthousands of years, peoples living in the AndesMountains have chewed the leaf of the cocaplant to relieve hunger, restore energy, andcure bodily ailments. At ceremonies held inlocal temples throughout the region, shamansoften engaged in this practice to communicatewith the spirits or with the ancestors of theirconstituents. This terra-cotta object, datingfrom the first millennium C.E. and unearthedin present-day Ecuador, shows a user enteringa trance and having an ‘‘out-of-body’’experience, as his alter ego emerges full-blownfrom the top of his head. The concentratedpaste of the coca plant is used today in themanufacture of cocaine.

CHRONOLOGY Early South America

Monte Verde 10,500 B.C.E.

First organized societies in the Andes c. 3500 B.C.E.

Agriculture first widely practiced c. 3200 B.C.E.

Founding of Caral c. 2500 B.C.E.

Chavın style First millennium B.C.E.

Moche civilization c. 150–800 C.E.

Wari culture c. 500–1000 C.E.

Civilization of Chimor c. 1100–1450

Inka takeover in central Andes 1400s

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The First Civilizations in South America 173Copyright 2012 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s).


residents in an area of more than 12 square miles thatincluded a number of palace compounds surrounded bywalls nearly 30 feet high. One compound contained an intri-cate labyrinth that wound its way progressively inward untilit ended in a central chamber, probably occupied by theruler. Like the Moche before them, the people of Chimor—the Chimu (chee-MOO)—relied on irrigation to funnel thewater from the river into their fields. An elaborate systemof canals brought the water through hundreds of miles ofhilly terrain to the fields near the coast. Nevertheless, bythe fifteenth century, Chimor, too, had disappeared, a vic-tim of floods and a series of earthquakes that destroyed

the intricate irrigation system that had been the basis of itssurvival.

These early civilizations in the Andes were by no meansisolated from other societies in the region. As early as 2000B.C.E., local peoples had been venturing into the Pacific Oceanon wind-powered rafts constructed of balsa wood. By the latefirst millennium C.E., seafarers from the coast of Ecuador hadestablished a vast trading network that extended southwardto central Peru and as far north as western Mexico, more than2,000 miles away. Items transported included jewelry, beads,and metal goods. In all likelihood, technological exchangeswere an important by-product of the relationship.

COMPARATIVE ESSAY

History and the Environment

EARTH &ENVIRONMENT

In The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,published in 1788, the British historian EdwardGibbon raised a question that has fascinated his-torians ever since: What brought about the col-

lapse of that once powerful civilization that dominated theMediterranean region for more than five centuries? Tradi-tional explanations have centered on political or cultural fac-tors, such as imperial overreach, moral decay, militaryweakness, or the impact of invasions. Recently, however,some historians have suggested that environmental prob-lems, such as poisoning due to the use of lead water pipesand cups, the spread of malaria, or a lengthy drought inwheat-growing regions in North Africa, might have at leastcontributed to Rome’s collapse.

The current interest in the impact of the environment onthe Roman Empire reflects a growing awareness among his-torians that environmental conditions may have been a keyfactor in the fate of several of the great societies in the an-cient world. Climatic changes or natural disasters almost cer-tainly led to the decline and collapse of civilization in theIndus River valley. In the Americas, massive flooding broughtabout by the El Nino effect (environmental conditions

triggered by changes in water temperature in the PacificOcean) appears to be one possible cause for the collapse ofthe Moche civilization in what is today Peru, while droughtand overcultivation of the land are often cited as reasons forthe decline of the Maya in Mesoamerica.

Climatic changes continued to affect the fate of nationsand peoples in later eras as well. Drought conditions andoveruse of the land may have led to the gradual decline ofMesopotamia as a focal point of advanced civilization in theMiddle East, while soil erosion and colder conditions doomedan early attempt by the Vikings to establish a foothold inGreenland and North America. Sometimes the problems wereself-inflicted, as on Easter Island, a remote outpost in the Pa-cific Ocean, where Polynesian settlers migrating from the westabout 900 C.E. so denuded the landscape that by the fifteenthcentury, what had been a reasonably stable and peaceful soci-ety had descended into civil war and cannibalism.

Climatic changes, of course, have not always been detri-mental to the health and prosperity of human beings. Awarming trend that took place at the end of the last iceage eventually made much of the world more habitable forfarming peoples about ten thousand years ago. The effects

of El Nino may be beneficial to people liv-ing in some areas and disastrous in others.But human misuse of land and water resour-ces is always dangerous to settled societies,especially those living in fragile environ-ments.

Many ancient civilizations throughoutthe world were weakened ordestroyed by changes taking place inthe environment. What are someexamples in the pre-ColumbianAmericas?

The Pyramid of the Sun at Moche.

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Transportation by land, however, was more difficult.Although roads were constructed to facilitate communication

between communities, the forbidding terrain in the moun-tains was a serious obstacle, and the only draft animal on theentire continent was the llama, which is considerably lesshardy than the cattle, horses, and water buffalo used in muchof Asia. Such problems undoubtedly hampered the develop-ment of regular contacts with distant societies in the Ameri-cas, as well as the exchange of goods and ideas that hadlubricated the rise of civilizations from China to the Mediter-ranean Sea.

The InkaThe Chimor kingdom was eventually succeeded in the latefifteenth century by an invading force from the mountains farto the south. In the late fourteenth century, the Inka were asmall community in the area of Cuzco (KOOS-koh), a citylocated at an altitude of 10,000 feet in the mountains of south-ern Peru. In the 1440s, however, under the leadership of theirpowerful ruler Pachakuti (pah-chah-KOO-tee) (sometimescalled Pachacutec, or ‘‘he who transforms the world’’), theInka launched a campaign of conquest that eventuallybrought the entire region under their authority. Under Pacha-kuti and his immediate successors, Topa Inka (TOH-puhINK-uh) and Huayna Inka (WY-nuh INK-uh) (the word Inkameans ‘‘ruler’’), the boundaries of the empire were extendedas far as Ecuador, central Chile, and the edge of the Amazonbasin.

A Chimu Gold Mask. One of the most impressive achievements ofthe early civilizations of South America was the high quality of theirmetalwork. Much of their finest craftsmanship is found in themanufacture of delicate gold ornaments. Unfortunately, many of theseartifacts were later melted down by Spanish conquistadors. Illustratedhere is a hammered gold mask from the Chimor culture, successors tothe Moche in what is present-day Peru. Such masks were often placedinside royal tombs, and this one is highly reminiscent of the famousdeath mask found at Mycenae, in central Greece.

Nazca Lines. The so-called Nazca Lines, a series of large geometric shapes etched on the parched soil ofhillsides south of modern-day Lima, Peru, are one of the most enduring mysteries in the archaeology ofLatin America. The purpose of these patterns (formally known as geoglyphs) has inspired widespread debate,with some observers even suggesting that they were drawn by aliens from outer space. Most scholars today,however, believe that they represent pathways worn in the soil by the Nazca peoples (contemporaries of theMoche culture in the first millennium C.E.) as they performed their religious rituals. Some of the geoglyphs,as shown here, take the shape of fantastic birds and animals.

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THE FOUR QUARTERS: INKA POLITICS AND SOCIETY Pacha-kuti created a highly centralized state (see Map 6.5). With astunning concern for mathematical precision, he divided hisempire, called Tahuantinsuyu (tuh-HWAHN-tin-SOO-yoo),or ‘‘the world of the four quarters,’’ into provinces and dis-tricts. Each province contained about ten thousand residents(at least in theory) and was ruled by a governor related to theroyal family. Excess inhabitants were transferred to other loca-tions. The capital of Cuzco was divided into four quarters, orresidential areas, and the social status and economic functionsof the residents of each quarter were rigidly defined.

The state was built on forced labor. Often entire commun-ities of workers were moved from one part of the country toanother to open virgin lands or engage in massive construc-tion projects. Under Pachakuti, Cuzco was transformed froma city of mud and thatch into an imposing metropolis ofstone. The walls, built of close-fitting stones without the useof mortar, were a wonder to early European visitors. Themost impressive structure in the city was a temple dedicatedto the sun. According to a Spanish observer, ‘‘All four wallsof the temple were covered from top to bottom with platesand slabs of gold.’’4 Equally impressive are the ruins of theabandoned city of Machu Picchu (MAH-choo PEE-choo),built on a lofty hilltop far above the Urubamba River.

Another major construction project was a system of24,800 miles of highways and roads that extended from theborder of modern Colombia to a point south of modern San-tiago, Chile. Two major roadways extended in a north-southdirection, one through the Andes Mountains and the otheralong the coast, with connecting routes between them. Resthouses and storage depots were placed along the roads. Sus-pension bridges made of braided fiber and fastened to stoneabutments on opposite banks were built over ravines andwaterways. Use of the highways was restricted to official andmilitary purposes. Trained runners carried messages rapidlyfrom one way station to another, enabling information totravel up to 140 miles in a single day.

In rural areas, the population lived mainly by farming. Inthe mountains, the most common form was terraced agricul-ture, watered by irrigation systems that carried preciseamounts of water into the fields, which were planted withmaize, potatoes, and other crops. The plots were tilled by col-lective labor regulated by the state. Like other aspects ofInkan society, marriage was strictly regulated, and men andwomen were required to select a marriage partner from

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MAP 6.5 The Inka Empire About 1500 C.E. The Inka were the lastcivilization to flourish in South America before the arrival of theSpanish. The impressive system of roads constructed to facilitatecommunication shows the extent of Inka control throughout theAndes Mountains.

In what modern countries was the Inka state located?

Paracas Royal Mummy. The ancient residents of coastal Chiledeveloped complex methods for mummifying their dead more than fourthousand years ago, and this practice continued up through Inka times.In Peru, the Paracas (pah-RAH-kus) culture (200 B.C.E.– 500 C.E.)bundled up its rulers in extensive layers of sumptuously embroideredtextiles. The body was placed in the fetal position, adorned with articlesof value such as a crown of feathers, animal skins, and gold and bonejewelry. The mummy was then interred in a chamber with otherdeceased members of the community. Food offerings of maize andpeanuts accompanied the mummy for sustenance in the afterlife.

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within the immediate tribal group. For women, there wasone escape from a life of domestic servitude: fortunate maid-ens were selected to serve as ‘‘chosen virgins’’ in templesthroughout the country (see the box above). Noblewomenwere eligible to compete for service in the Temple of the Sunat Cuzco, while commoners might hope to serve in templesin the provincial capitals. Punishment for breaking the vow ofchastity was harsh, and few evidently took the risk.

INKA CULTURE Like many other civilizations in pre-Colum-bian Latin America, the Inka state was built on war. Soldiersfor the 200,000-man Inka army, the largest and best armed inthe region, were raised by universal male conscription. Mili-tary units were moved rapidly along the highway system andwere bivouacked in the rest houses located along the road-side. Because the Inka had no wheeled vehicles, supplies werecarried on the backs of llamas. Once an area was placed underInka authority, the local inhabitants were instructed in the

Quechua (KEH-chuh-wuh) language, which became the lin-gua franca of the state, and were introduced to the state reli-gion. The Inka had no writing system but kept records usinga system of knotted strings called quipu (KEE-poo), main-tained by professionally trained officials, that were able to re-cord all data of a numerical nature. What could not berecorded in such a manner was committed to memory andthen recited when needed. The practice was apparently notinvented by the Inka. Fragments of quipu have been found atCaral and dated at approximately five thousand years ago.Nor apparently was the experiment limited to the Americas.A passage in the Chinese classic The Way of the Tao declares,‘‘Let the people revert to communication by knotted cords.’’

As in the case of the Aztecs and the Maya, the lack of afully developed writing system did not prevent the Inka fromrealizing a high level of cultural achievement. Most of whatsurvives was recorded by the Spanish and consists of enter-tainment for the elites. The Inka had a highly developed

Virgins with Red Cheeks

FAMILY &SOCIETY

A letter from a Peruvian chief to King Philip III ofSpain written four hundred years ago gives us afirsthand account of the nature of traditionalInkan society. The purpose of author Huaman

Poma was both to justify the history and culture of the Inkapeoples and to record their sufferings under Spanish domina-tion. In his letter, Poma describes Inkan daily life from birth todeath in minute detail. He explains the different tasksassigned tomen and women, beginning with their early edu-cation. Whereas boys were taught to watch the flocks and trapanimals, girls were taught to dye, spin, and weave cloth andperform other domestic chores. Most interesting, perhaps,was the emphasis that the Inka placed on virginity, as is evi-dent in the document presented here. The Inka’s tradition oftemple virgins is reminiscent of similar practices in ancientRome, where young girls from noble families were chosen aspriestesses to tend the sacred fire in the Temple of Vesta forthirty years. If an Inkan temple virgin lost her virginity, she wascondemned to be buried alive in an underground chamber.

Huaman Poma, Letter to a KingDuring the time of the Incas certain women, who were calledaccla or ‘‘the chosen,’’ were destined for lifelong virginity.Mostly they were confined in houses and they belonged toone of two main categories, namely sacred virgins and com-mon virgins.

The so-called ‘‘virgins with red cheeks’’ entered upon theirduties at the age of twenty and were dedicated to the serviceof the Sun, the Moon, and the Day-Star. In their whole lifethey were never allowed to speak to a man.

The virgins of the Inca’s own shrine of Huanacauri wereknown for their beauty as well as their chastity. The otherprincipal shrines had similar girls in attendance. At the lessimportant shrines there were the older virgins who occupiedthemselves with spinning and weaving the silklike clothesworn by their idols. There was a still lower class of virgins,over forty years of age and no longer very beautiful, who per-formed unimportant religious duties and worked in the fieldsor as ordinary seamstresses.

Daughters of noble families who had grown into oldmaids were adept at making girdles, headbands, string bags,and similar articles in the intervals of their pious observances.

Girls who had musical talent were selected to sing or playthe flute and drum at Court, weddings and other ceremonies,and all the innumerable festivals of the Inca year.

There was yet another class of accla or ‘‘chosen,’’ onlysome of whom kept their virginity and others not. Thesewere the Inca’s beautiful attendants and concubines, whowere drawn from noble families and lived in his palaces. Theymade clothing for him out of material finer than taffeta orsilk. They also prepared a maize spirit of extraordinary rich-ness, which was matured for an entire month, and theycooked delicious dishes for the Inca. They also lay with him,but never with any other man.

According to this selection, one of the chief dutiesof a woman in Inkan society was to spin and weave.In what other traditional societies was textilemaking a woman’s work? Why do you think this wasthe case?



tradition of court theater, including both tragic and comicworks. There was also some poetry, composed in blank verseand often accompanied by music played on reed instruments.

Stateless Societies in theAmericas

FOCUS QUESTION:What were the maincharacteristics of stateless societies in the Americas,and how did they resemble and differ from thecivilizations that arose there?

Beyond Central America and the high ridges of the AndesMountains, on the Great Plains of North America, along theAmazon River in South America, and on the islands of theCaribbean Sea, other communities of Amerindians were alsobeginning to master the art of agriculture and to build orga-nized societies.

Although human beings had occupied much of the conti-nent of North America during the early phase of human set-tlement, the switch to farming as a means of survival did notoccur until the third millennium B.C.E. at the earliest, andmuch later in most areas of the continent. Until that time,most Amerindian communities lived by hunting, fishing, orforaging. As the supply of large animals began to diminish,

they turned to smaller game and to fishing and foraging forwild plants, fruits, and nuts.

The Eastern WoodlandsIt was probably during the third millennium B.C.E. that peo-ples in the Eastern Woodlands (the land in eastern NorthAmerica from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico) beganto cultivate indigenous plants for food in a systematic way. Aswild game and food became scarce, some communities beganto place more emphasis on cultivating crops. This shift firstoccurred in the Mississippi River valley from Ohio, Indiana,and Illinois down to the Gulf of Mexico (see Map 6.6).Among the most commonly cultivated crops were maize,squash, beans, and various grasses.

As the population in the area increased, people began tocongregate in villages, and sedentary communities began todevelop in the alluvial lowlands, where the soil could be culti-vated for many years at a time because of the nutrients depos-ited by the river water.

Village councils were established to adjudicate disputes,and in a few cases, several villages banded together under theauthority of a local chieftain. Urban centers began to appear,some of them inhabited by ten thousand people or more. Atthe same time, regional trade increased. The people of theHopewell culture in Ohio ranged from the shores of LakeSuperior to the Appalachian Mountains and the Gulf of

Machu Picchu. Situated in the Andes in modern Peru, Machu Picchu reflects the glory of Inka civilization.To farm such rugged terrain, the Inka constructed terraces and stone aqueducts. To span vast ravines, theybuilt suspension bridges made of braided fiber and fastened them to stone abutments on the opposite banks.The most revered of the many temples and stone altars at Machu Picchu was the thronelike ‘‘hitching post ofthe sun,’’ so called because of its close proximity to the sun god.

ªJim

Zuckerman/C

ORB

IS



Mexico in search of metals, shells, obsidian, and manufactureditems to support their economic needs and religious beliefs.

CahokiaAt the site of Cahokia, near the modern city of East SaintLouis, Illinois, archaeologists found a burial mound morethan 98 feet high with a base larger than that of the Great Pyr-amid in Egypt. A hundred smaller mounds were also foundin the vicinity. The town itself, which covered almost 300acres and was surrounded by a wooden stockade, was ap-parently the administrative capital of much of the surroundingterritory until its decline in the 1200s. With a population ofmore than 20,000, it was reportedly the largest city in NorthAmerica until Philadelphia surpassed that number in the earlynineteenth century. Cahokia carried on extensive trade withother communities throughout the region, and there are somesigns of regular contacts with the civilizations in Mesoamerica,such as the presence of ball courts in the Central Americanstyle. But wars were not uncommon, leading the Iroquois,who inhabited much of the modern states of Pennsylvania andNew York as well as parts of southern Canada, to create atribal alliance called the League of Iroquois.

The Ancient Pueblo PeoplesWest of the Mississippi River basin, most Amerindian peopleslived by hunting or food gathering. During the first millen-nium C.E., knowledge of agriculture gradually spread up therivers to the Great Plains, and farming was practiced as farwest as southwestern Colorado, where an agricultural

community was established in an area extending from north-ern New Mexico and Arizona to southwestern Colorado andparts of southern Utah. Although they apparently never dis-covered the wheel or used beasts of burden, these AncientPueblo peoples (formerly known by the Navajo name ‘‘Ana-sazi,’’ or ‘‘alien ancient ones’’) created a system of roads thatfacilitated an extensive exchange of technology, products, andideas throughout the region. By the ninth century, they hadmastered the art of irrigation, which allowed them to expandtheir productive efforts to squash and beans, and had estab-lished an important urban center at Chaco Canyon, in south-ern New Mexico, where they built a walled city with dozensof three-story adobe communal houses, today called pueblos,with timbered roofs. Community religious functions werecarried out in two large circular chambers called kivas (KEE-vuhs). Clothing was made from hides or cotton cloth. At itsheight, Pueblo Bonito contained several hundred com-pounds housing several thousand residents.

In the mid-twelfth century, the Ancient Pueblo peoplesmoved north to Mesa Verde, in southwestern Colorado. Atfirst, they settled on top of the mesa, but eventually theyexpanded onto the cliffs of surrounding canyons.

Sometime during the late thirteenth century, however,Mesa Verde was also abandoned, and the inhabitantsmigrated southward. Their descendants, the Zuni and theHopi, now occupy pueblos in central Arizona and New Mex-ico (thus leading them to adopt their new name). For years,archaeologists surmised that a severe drought was the causeof the migration, but new evidence has raised doubts thatdecreasing rainfall, by itself, was a sufficient explanation. An

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MAP 6.6 Early Peoples and Cultures ofNorth America. This map shows regionsof human settlement in pre-ColumbianNorth America, including the short-livedViking colony in Newfoundland.

How many varieties of economicactivity are described on this map?

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Stateless Societies in the Americas 179Copyright 2012 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s).


increase in internecine warfare, perhaps brought about by cli-matic changes, may also have played a role in the decision torelocate. Some archaeologists point to evidence that cannibal-ism was practiced at Pueblo Bonito and suggest that migrantsfrom the south may have arrived in the area, provoking bitterrivalries within Ancient Pueblo society. In any event, withincreasing aridity and the importation of the horse by theSpanish in the sixteenth century, hunting revived, andmounted nomads like the Apache and the Navajo came to

dominate much of the Southwest. Prior to their relocation,however, the Pueblo Bonito peoples maintained commercialcontacts with their counterparts in Mexico and even as farsouth as the Pacific Coast of South America.

South America: The ArawakEast of the Andes Mountains in South America, other Amer-indian societies were beginning to make the transition to agri-culture. Perhaps the most prominent were the Arawak (AR-uh-wahk), a people living along the Orinoco River in mod-ern Venezuela. Having begun to cultivate manioc (a tuberalso known as cassava or yuca, the source of tapioca) alongthe banks of the river, they gradually migrated down to thecoast and then proceeded to move eastward along the north-ern coast of the continent. Some occupied the islands of theCaribbean Sea. In their new island habitat, they lived by amixture of fishing, hunting, and cultivating maize, beans,manioc, and squash, as well as other crops such as peanuts,peppers, and pineapples. As the population increased, a pat-tern of political organization above the village level appeared,along with recognizable social classes headed by a chieftainwhose authority included control over the economy. TheArawak practiced human sacrifice, and some urban centerscontained ball courts, suggesting the possibility of contactswith Mesoamerica.

In most such societies, where clear-cut class stratificationshad not as yet taken place, men and women were consideredof equal status. Men were responsible for hunting, warfare,and dealing with outsiders, while women were accountablefor the crops, the distribution of food, maintaining the house-hold, and bearing and raising the children. Their roles werecomplementary and were often viewed as a divine division oflabor. In such cases, women in the stateless societies of NorthAmerica held positions of greater respect than their counter-parts in the river valley civilizations of the ancient world.

AmazoniaSubstantial human activity was also apparently taking place inthe Amazon River valley. Scholars have been skeptical thatadvanced societies could take shape in the region because thesoil was believed to lack adequate nutrients to support a largepopulation. Recent archaeological evidence, however, sug-gests that in some areas where decaying organic matter pro-duces a rich soil suitable for farming—such as the region nearthe modern river port of Santarem—large agricultural soci-eties may once have existed. More information about this pre-viously unknown culture must await further archaeologicalevidence.

Cliff Palace at Mesa Verde. Mesa Verde is one of the best-developedsites of the Ancient Pueblo peoples in southwestern North America. Atone time they were farmers who tilled the soil atop the mesas, buteventually they were forced to build their settlements in more protectedlocations. At Cliff Palace, shown here, adobe houses were hidden on theperpendicular face of the mesa. Access was achieved only by a perilousdescent via indented finger- and toeholds on the rock face.

ªWilliam

J.Du

iker



CHAPTER SUMMARYThe first human beings did notarrive in the Americas untilquite late in the prehistorical pe-riod. For the next several mil-lennia, their descendants wereforced to respond to the chal-lenges of the environment in

total isolation from other parts of the world. Nevertheless,around 5000 B.C.E., farming settlements began to appear in rivervalleys and upland areas in both Central and South America.Not long afterward—as measured in historical time—organizedcommunities embarked on the long march toward creatingadvanced technological societies. Although the total number ofpeople living in the Americas is a matter of debate, estimatesrange from 10 million to as many as 90 million people.

What is perhaps most striking about the developments in theWestern Hemisphere is how closely they paralleled those of othercivilizations. Irrigated agriculture, long-distance trade, urbaniza-tion, and the development of a writing system were all hallmarksof the emergence of advanced societies of the classical type.

Some of the parallels, of course, wereless appealing. States in the WesternHemisphere were every bit as addicted towarfare as their counterparts elsewhere.The widespread use of human sacrifice isreminiscent of similar practices in otherancient societies. Not much is yet knownabout relations between men and womenin the Americas, but it appears that genderroles were as sharply delineated there asin much of Asia and the Mediterranean world.

In some respects, the societies that emerged in the Americaswere not as advanced technologically as their counterparts else-where. They were not familiar with the process of smelting iron,

for example, and they had not yet invented wheeled vehicles.Their writing systems were still in their infancy. Several possiblereasons have been advanced toexplain this technological gap.Geographic isolation—not onlyfrom people of other continentsbut also, in some cases, from eachother—deprived them of the dif-fusion of ideas that had enabledother societies to learn from theirneighbors. Contacts among societies in the Americas were mademuch more difficult because of the topography and the diversityof the environment.

In some ways, too, they were not as blessed by nature. Asthe sociologist Jared Diamond has pointed out, the Americas didnot possess many indigenous varieties of edible grasses thatcould encourage hunter-gatherers to take up farming. Nor werethere abundant large mammals that could easily be domesti-cated for food and transport (horses had disappeared from theWestern Hemisphere before the arrival of Homo sapiens sapiensat the end of the last ice age). It was not until the arrival of theEuropeans that such familiar attributes of civilization becamewidely available for human use in the Americas.5

These disadvantages can help explain some of the prob-lems that the early peoples of the Americas encountered intheir efforts to master their environments. It is interesting tonote that the spread of agriculture and increasing urbaniza-tion had already begun to produce a rising incidence of infec-tious diseases. It is also significant that in the Americas, aselsewhere, many of the first civilizations formed by thehuman species appear to have been brought to an end asmuch by environmental changes and disease as by war. In thenext chapter, we shall return to Asia, where new civilizationswere in the process of replacing the ancient empires.

CHAPTER TIMELINE

200 300 400 500 600 700 800 900 1000 1100 1200 1300 1400 1500

Flowering of classical Mayan civilization Migration of Toltecs to Yucatán peninsula

Reign of Pacalat Palenque

Chichén Itzá underToltec domination

Flowering of Moche civilization

Inka take over central Andes

Civilization of Chimor

Ancient Pueblo culture

Teotihuacán kingdom Migration ofMexica toValley of Mexico

Kingdom of the Aztecs

Chapter Summary 181Copyright 2012 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s).


CHAPTER REVIEW

Upon ReflectionQ How did geographic and climatic factors affect the riseand fall of early societies in the Americas? Were similarfactors at work among contemporary societies in other partsof the world?

Q What are some of the reasons advanced for the collapseof Mayan civilization in the late first millennium C.E.? Whichdo archaeologists find the most persuasive?

Q What common features linked the emerging societies inthe Americas during the pre-Columbian period? Does itappear that technological and cultural achievements passedfrom one society to another as frequently as in other parts ofthe world?

Key TermsAmerindians (p. 159)chinampas (p. 161)calpullis (p. 169)polygyny (p. 170)El Nino (p. 173)quipu (p. 177)Hopewell Culture (p. 178)pueblos (p. 179)Pueblo Bonito (p. 179)

Suggested ReadingEARLY CIVILIZATIONS OF THE AMERICAS For a profusely

illustrated and informative overview of the early civilizations of the

Americas, see M. D. Coe and R. Koontz, Mexico: From the Olmecs to

the Aztecs, 6th ed. (New York, 2008). A fascinating recent account that

covers the entire pre-Columbian era is C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations

of the Americas Before Columbus (New York, 2006). Also see W. Polk,

The Birth of America (New York, 2006).

MAYAN CIVILIZATION On Mayan civilization, see D. Webster,

The Fall of the Ancient Maya: Solving the Mystery of the Maya Collapse

(London, 2002), and J. Sabloff, The New Archeology and the Ancient

Maya (New York, 1990). For a provocative study of religious traditions

in a comparative context, see B. Fagan, From Black Land to Fifth Sun

(Reading, Mass., 1998).

ANCIENT SOUTH AMERICA A worthy account of developments

in South America is G. Bawden, The Moche (Oxford, 1996). On the Inka,

see N. Thomson, A Sacred Landscape: The Search for Ancient Peru

(Woodstock, N.Y., 2006).

ART, CULTURE, AND THE ENVIRONMENT OF THE AN-

CIENT AMERICAS On the art and culture of the ancient Americas,

see M. E. Miller, Maya Art and Architecture (London, 1999); E. Pasz-

tory, Pre-Columbian Art (Cambridge, 1998); and M. Leon-Portilla and

E. Shorris, In the Language of Kings (New York, 2001). Writing systems

are discussed in M. Coe, Breaking the Maya Code (New York, 1992), and

G. Upton, Signs of the Inka Quipu (Austin, Tex., 2003).

For a treatment of the role of the environment, see B. Fagan, Floods,

Famine, and Emperors: El Nino and the Fate of Civilizations (New York,

1999), and J. Diamond, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

(New York 2005).

Go to the CourseMatewebsite atwww.cengagebrain.comfor additional study toolsand review materials—including audio and videoclips—for this chapter.



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