Mexico

From the Olmecs to the Aztecs

Michael D. Coe, Rex Koontz

• Publisher: Thames and Hudson Ltd
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9780500770825
• Edition: 8
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book, long recognized as the most readable and authoritative introduction to the region's pre-columbian civilizations, has now been completely revised for its seventh edition. Spectacular new discoveries have thrown more light on the Olmec culture, Mexicos earliest civilization. At the great city of Teotihuacan, recent investigations in the earliest monumental pyramid indicate the antiquity of certain sacrificial practices and the symbolism of the pyramid. The Huastec region of the northeastern Gulf of Mexico gets a much fuller account than in previous editions and further discoveries in the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan have allowed us to refine our understanding of the history and symbolism of its sacred precinct.

1 • Introduction

The ancient cultures of Mexico along with the Maya civilization comprise the larger entity known to archaeologists as “Mesoamerica,” a name first proposed by the anthropologist Paul Kirchhoff and including much of the great constriction that separates the masses of North and South America. Above all, the peoples of Mesoamerica were farmers, and had been somewhat isolated for thousands of years from the simpler cultivating societies of the American Southwest and Southeast by the desert wastes of northern Mexico, through which only semi-nomadic, hunting aborigines ranged in pre-Spanish times. Beyond the southeastern borders of Mesoamerica lay the petty chiefdoms of lower Central America, distinguished by a high production of fine ceramics and quantities of jade or gold ornaments, lavishly heaped in the tombs of their great chieftains.

Further south yet, in Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia, was the Andean area, most noted for its final glory, the immense Inca empire, but having native civilizations as far back in time as the tenth century before Christ, and large temple constructions even earlier than that. The Andean area and Meso­america were the twin peaks of American Indian cultural development, from which much else in the Western Hemisphere seems both peripheral and sometimes derived; yet this picture may be oversimplified, because research in the Pacific lowlands of Ecuador, the Caribbean coast of Colombia, and the upper reaches of the Amazon has shown that the important criteria of settled life – agriculture, pottery, and villages – may have had a precocious start in those areas.

Setting them off from the rest of the New World, the diverse cultures of Mesoamerica shared in a number of features most of which were pretty much confined to their area. The most distinctive of these is a complicated calendar based upon the permutation of a 260-day sacred cycle with the solar year of 365 days. Others are hieroglyphic writing (the Andean area never developed a script); bark-paper or deer-skin books which fold like screens; maps; an extensive knowledge and use of astronomy; a team game resembling basketball played in a special court with a solid rubber ball; large, well-organized markets and favored “ports of trade”; chocolate beans as money and as the source of a drink; wars for the purpose of securing sacrificial victims; private confession, and penance by drawing blood from the ears, tongue, or penis; and a pantheon of extraordinary complexity.

1 Map of major topographical features of Mexico.

Naturally, the peoples of Mesoamerica followed a number of other customs which are widespread among New World Indians, such as ceremonial tobacco smoking, but their typical method of food preparation as a unified complex appears to be unique. The basis of the diet was the four-some of maize, beans, squash, and chile peppers. Maize was, and still is, prepared by boiling it with lime, then grinding the swollen kernels with a hand stone (Spanish mano) on a trough- or saddle-shaped quern (metate, from the Nahuatl metlatl). The resulting dough is either toasted as flat cakes known in Spanish as tortillas, or else steamed or boiled as tamales. Always and everywhere in Mesoamerica, the hearth comprises three stones, and being the conceptual center of the world, is semi-sacred.

The geographic setting

On the map, Mexico resembles a great funnel, or rather, a cornucopia, with its widest part toward the north and its smallest end twisting to the south and east, meeting there the sudden expansion of the Maya area. There are few regions in the world with such a diverse geography as we find within this area – Mexico is not one, but many countries. All the climatic extremes of our globe are found, from arctic cold near the summits of the highest volcanoes to the Turkish-bath atmosphere of the coastal jungles. Merely to pass from one valley to another is to enter a markedly different ecological zone.

This variation would be of interest only to the tourist agencies if one neglected to consider the effect of these contrasts upon the human occupation of Mexico. A topsy-turvy landscape of this sort means a similar diversity of natural and cultivated products from region to region – above all, different crops with different harvest times. It means that no one region is now, or was in the past, truly self-sufficient. From the most remote antiquity, there has been an organic interdependence of one zone with the others, of one people or nation with all the rest. Thus, no matter how heterogeneous their languages or civilizations, the people of Mexico, through exchange of products, were bound up with each other symbiotically into a single line of development; for this reason, great new advances were registered throughout the land within quite brief intervals of time.

Most of this funnel-shaped country lies above 3,000 ft (900 m), with really very little flat land. The Mexican highlands, our major concern in this book, are shaped by the mountain chains that swing down from the north, by the uplands between them, and by numerous volcanoes which have raised their peaks in fairly recent geological times. The western chain, the Sierra Madre Occidental, is the loftiest and broadest of these, being an extension of the Rocky Mountains; it and the Sierra Madre Oriental to the east enclose between their pine-clad ranges an immense inland plateau which is covered by mesquite-studded grasslands and occasionally even approaches true desert. Effectively outside the limits of Mesoamerican farming, the Mexican plateau was the homeland of partially or wholly nomadic hunters and collectors. As we move south, the two Sierras gradually approach each other until the interior wastelands terminate some 300 miles (480 km) north of the Valley of Mexico.

2 Central highlands of Mexico, near Puebla, with Popocatepetl volcano in the distance.

The Valley of Mexico, the center of the Aztec empire, is one of a number of natural basins in the midst of the Volcanic Cordillera, an extensive region of intense volcanism and frequent earthquakes. A mile and a half high with an area of 3,000 sq. miles (7,800 sq. km), much of the Valley was once covered by a shallow lake of roughly figure-eight shape, now largely disappeared through ill-advised drainage and the general desiccation of central Mexico in post-Conquest times. Since the Valley of Mexico has no natural outlet, changing rainfall patterns have produced severe fluctuations in the extent of the lake. As will be seen in Chapter 10, the Aztec table was amply supplied by foods raised on its swampy margins in the misnamed “floating gardens,” or chinampas. Surrounded by hills on all sides, the Valley is dominated on the southeast by the snowy summits of the volcanoes Popocatepetl (“Smoking Mountain”) and Iztaccihuatl (“The White Lady”).

3 Chinampas or “floating gardens” in the vicinity of Xochimilco, Valley of Mexico.

Other important sections of the highlands are the Sierra Madre del Sur, its steep escarpment fronting the Pacific shoreline in southern Mexico, and the mountainous uplands of Oaxaca; both of these fuse to form a highland mass heavily dissected into countless valleys and ranges. Separated from this difficult country by the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, the southeastern highlands form a continuous series of ranges from Chiapas down through Maya territory into lower Central America.

Although snow falls in some places at infrequent intervals, the Mexican highlands are temperate; before denudation by man, they were clothed in pines and oaks, with true boreal forests in the higher ranges. As elsewhere in Mexico, there are two strongly marked seasons – a winter dry period when rain seldom if ever falls, and a summer wet spell. The total rainfall is less than half that of the lowlands, so that occasionally conditions are arid and somewhat precarious for the farmer, in spite of the general richness of the soil. This is especially true of the boundary zone between the agricultural lands and the northern deserts.

The lowlands are confined to relatively narrow strips along the coasts, of which the most important is the plain fronting the Gulf of Mexico. Of alluvial origin, this band of flat land extends unbroken from Louisiana and Texas down through the Mexican states of Tamaulipas, Veracruz, and Tabasco to the Yucatan Peninsula, and played a critical role in the origins of settled life and the growth of civilization in Mexico.

A bridge between the Gulf Coast plain and the narrower and less humid Pacific Coast plain is provided by the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, a constriction in the waist of Mesoamerica, with a gentle topography of low hills and sluggish rivers.

Lowland temperatures are generally torrid throughout the year, except when winter northers come down the Gulf Coast, bringing with them cold rains and drizzle. So heavy is the summer precipitation that in many places the soils are red in color and poor in mineral content as a result of drastic leaching. However, when these rains cause flooding of rivers, the soils can be highly productive since they are annually replenished with silt along the natural river levees. The winter dry season is generally well marked, so that many of the tropical trees lose their leaves at this time of year. But where there is an unusually great amount of rain (along with winter northers), one encounters the evergreen canopies and lush growth of the fully developed rainforest. Dotting the lowlands are patches of savannah grassland, sometimes quite extensive, and of little use to the once plowless Mexican farmer.

In response to the opportunities presented by these surroundings, contrasting modes of land cultivation have been developed over the millennia. Highland farmers are quite efficient about their land, since only a moderate period of fallowing is necessary for the fields. On the other hand, many lowland cultivators, faced with immense forests, the low potential of the soil, weed competition, and winter desiccation, have evolved a shifting form of horticulture which they share with other peoples of the world. This system entails the cutting and burning of the forest from the plot to be sown; a very extensive territory is required for the support of each family since exhausted and weed-infested fields have to be left fallow for as much as ten years. Such a mode of food-getting could never have supported a large population, and we have every evidence to suggest a light occupation of much of the lowland zone throughout its history.

Nonetheless, it is easy to exaggerate the limitations of the lowlands; there are not one but many lowland environments, and a diversity of human responses to them. For instance, one could point to the use of fertile river levees by ancient and modern farmers of the southern Gulf Coast plain, which could have led and did lead to increased population density.

Tragically reduced in today’s Mexico, game abounded in ancient times. The most important food animals are the white-tailed deer and the collared peccary, found everywhere. Confined to the lowlands are the tapir, the howler monkey, and the spider monkey, all of which are still eaten with relish by the native inhabitants. The lowlands also harbor the now-rare jaguar, the largest of the spotted cats and the source of much-desired skins for the nobles of civilized Mexico; it must have been an object of primitive terror to the early dwellers of the coastal plains. Waterfowl, especially ducks, teem on the lakes and marshes of the uplands, and wild turkeys in the more isolated reaches of the country. Feathers from tropical birds such as the cotinga, the roseate spoonbill, the hummingbird, and above all, the quetzal, with iridescent blue-green plumage, provided rainbow-like splendor for headdresses and other details of costume.

The larger highland lakes, such as Lake Pátzcuaro in Michoacan and the great lake of the Valley of Mexico, teemed with small fish, while the lowland rivers and the coasts provided such an abundance of fish (such as snook and snappers) and turtles that these food resources were more important to ancient peoples than game mammals.

There were no wild species in the New World suitable for domestication as draught animals. The native American horse was exterminated at the end of the Ice Age, probably by human hunters; the South American llama is amenable only as a pack animal; and modern efforts to tame the North American bison have shown that beast to be completely intractable. As a consequence, none of the American Indians prior to the European arrival had wheeled vehicles. Ancient Mexico did without any form of overland transportation other than the backs of men, although the principle of the wheel was known and applied to toys and idols of clay. The only warm-blooded animals kept in domestication were the dog and the turkey, the former as well as the latter valuable for its meat. Hives of tiny, stingless bees were exploited for honey by tropical lowlanders.

Languages and peoples

An amazing number of languages were spoken in native Mexico. The situation would be even more confusing if it had not been for the efforts on the part of linguists to group them into families, of which some fourteen have been defined within our area.

4 Native language groups of Mexico at the time of the Spanish Conquest.

Of these, the largest and most important to the history of Mexico is Uto-Aztecan, comprising dozens of languages distributed from the northwestern United States as far south as Panama. Since the greatest diversity within this family is found in northwestern Mexico, this wild region has been suggested as the probable heartland of the Uto-Aztecan peoples. By all odds the major language group within Uto-Aztecan is Nahua, the most significant member of which is Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs and the lingua franca of their empire, still spoken by hundreds of thousands of farmers in the central Mexican highlands and in the state of Guerrero. Since the Conquest, Nahuatl has greatly enriched Mexican Spanish with loan words, and has contributed such words as ocelot, coyote, tomato, chocolate, tamale, and copal to the English language.

Tarascan or Purépecha, the tongue of a large, independent kingdom at the time of the Aztecs centered on Lake Pátzcuaro in the western part of the Volcanic Cordillera, is totally unrelated to any other language in the world. Otomí-Pame was spoken by peoples who follo...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• About the Authors
• Other Titles of Interest
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• 1 • Introduction
• 2 • Early Hunters
• 3 • The Archaic Period
• 4 • The Preclassic Period: Early Villagers
• 5 • The Preclassic Period: Early Civilizations
• 6 • The Classic Period
• 7 • The Epiclassic Period
• 8 • The Post-Classic Period: The Toltec State
• 9 • The Post-Classic Period: Rival States
• 10 • The Aztecs in 1519
• Epilogue
• Visiting Mexico
• Chronological table
• Further reading
• Sources of Illustrations
• Index
• Copyright