Ancient Civilizations Of The New World

Richard Ew Adams

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429981913
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

In this concise, yet sweeping look at the origins and development of ancient new world civiliozations, Richard adams provides a superb introductory overview of these unique and fascinating cultures. Incorporating the latest breakthroughs in the study of the cultures of Mesoamerica and the Andes, Adams examines the development of the Olmec, Maya, Aztec, and Inca peoples, among others, from simple agricultural societies to urban civilizations with complex transportation networks, distinct social hierarchies, rich artistic and religious traditions, and writing systems that have defied anthropological investigation until recently.

1
Introduction:
Complex Cultures, Cities, and a Rapid Survey of the Earliest Old World Civilizations

During the morning, we arrived at a broad causeway and continued our march towards Iztapalapa, and when we saw so many cities and villages built in the water and other great towns on dry land and that straight and level causeway going towards Mexico, we were amazed and said that it was like the enchantments they tell of in the legend of Amadis, on account of the great towers and cues [temples] and buildings rising from the water, and all built of masonry. And some of the soldiers even asked whether the things we saw were not a dream.

Bernai Diaz del Castillo,

The Discovery and Conquest of Mexico, 1956

In many of the Incas houses there were large halls some two hundred paces in length and fifty to sixty in breadth. They were unpartitioned and served as places of assembly for festivals and dances when the weather was too rainy to permit them to hold these in the open air. In the city of Cuzco I saw four of these halls, which were still standing when I was a boy. . . and the largest was that of the Cassana, which was capable of holding three thousand people.

Garcilaso de la Vega,

Royal Commentaries of the Incas, 1966

Bernai Diaz was a product of the European Renaissance and had seen the grand cities of Moorish Spain. He was not easily impressed, but the first sight of the great Aztec capital overwhelmed him and his comrades with its extraordinary setting and grandeur. He retained this sense of wonder at what they had seen and done for the next sixty years of his long life and transmitted it to us by way of his memoirs, written in his old age. Similarly, the Spanish conquerors of the Inca realm, eleven years later, experienced difficulty in comprehending such a different and yet remarkable cultural tradition. As the colonial period continued through 350 years, and as the mixture of Iberian and Native American cultures produced a new set of civilizations, memories and information about the original high cultures were largely reduced to the status of legend or myth, and the achievements of the natives were discounted and denigrated. However, eyewitness accounts survived, both of the conquest itself and of the native cultures. Spanish churchmen were largely responsible for writing about the latter, but even these books and manuscripts were relegated to dusty archives in Spain or to decrepit monastic repositories and libraries in Spain s former colonies, the new national states of Latin America.

Fortunately, historical research and archaeological work of the last 150 years have enabled us to recover a great deal of what seemed irretrievably lost—for instance, information on periods so remote that even the sixteenth-century Native American descendants had lost track of what had happened. This book is intended to present a synthesis of some of the new information now available about the two New World areas of civilized societies. It is by no means exhaustive, and it may not be agreeable to many specialists. However, it is hoped that the book will provide a summary of most of the important happenings in the prehistoric past as well as of perspectives given us by comparison with Old World civilizations and various theoretical views. Before going farther, it is necessary to define the concepts of culture and civilization.

New World archaeologists are trained as anthropologists, which means that we share with the social anthropologists a great many common views. One of the most basic is that of culture itself. Cultures are composed of traditional patterned behaviors that are systemically related and that are transmitted from generation to generation in a social group. The many components of cultures may be broken down as institutions. Major cultural institutions common to all cultures, no matter how simplified, include kinship, social structure, associations, economics, ideology (including religion), legal systems, and political systems. All cultures have sets of motivating beliefs; some have called these “core values.” The belief in the superiority of social status achieved by individual effort (as opposed to inheritance) is a typical core value in the United States. For the purposes of this book, it should be pointed out that patterned behavior often leaves material traces. Traditional houses built of adobe or stone will still be detectable centuries after they fall down. Varying social statuses are often reflected in the different styles of housing found in an ancient community, with the rich living in larger and better-made structures, and most people dwelling in smaller houses made of less costly materials.

As a field, archaeology has inherent limitations. We cannot observe an ancient culture in action. Everything is over—the people are dead and buried; their houses, temples, workshops, markets, defenses, roads, and the like have deteriorated into ruins. Therefore, an archaeologist must reconstruct a culture by means of the tools, pottery, and other artifacts that are excavated. Buildings, caves, trash heaps, and many other sites are places that will yield data. Not all information can be picked up or photographed, so data on matters such as ancient climate or the patterns of farmhouses in the ancient countryside are very useful. In the end, however, an archaeologist must interpret what is found and then reconstruct what appears to be the most likely series of events to produce the patterns in the data. Only then, when fieldwork is done, can patterns be defined and analyzed and explanations offered. Explanation, or theory, must try to make clear all the patterned information and the exceptions to it. For example, we know that the ancient Maya civilization collapsed, as have many other civilizations. We now understand why this happened to the Maya, and part of our confidence in the explanation is that similar events happened elsewhere. However, as we will see, the Maya did not make a demographic or cultural recovery, something that is very unusual in world history and prehistory. Therefore, our explanation in this case must also cover the unique aspect of this event.

Cultures can be as simple as those hunters and gatherers living in deserts or the Arctic, in which the kinship system is really an all-purpose organization used in various ways to solve legal, political, social, hunting, and other problems. Until about 8000 B.C. all of our ancestors lived in such cultures. After that date, people in several parts of the world began to experiment with animals and plants and eventually became stock breeders and cultivators. The development of a secure form of agriculture was usually a process that took two to three thousand years. It led to settled life in villages with larger social groups. It also laid the economic basis for civilization.

Between 5000 and 1200 B.C., six world areas produced new forms of culture that we call civilizations. In their native zones, each of these new cultures was different from anything that had gone before, and yet they were each in-place developments, owing none of their new sophistication to outside cultures. They superseded and incorporated into themselves the preceding village societies, which were characterized by consensual governance, limited numbers of people, relatively low levels of violence, relatively incoherent folk beliefs about the universe, and limited economic exchanges of basic commodities and manufactures. The new civilized ways of life meant that economic exchange became specialized, with formal markets handling much of the activity. Religion developed along the lines of theologies, that is, coherent systems of belief. Early forms of the state developed systems of decision that became centralized and exclusive, with small inner groups taking control of relatively rationalized administrative organizations. Villages, towns, and hamlets became beholden to a new form of community, the city. Cities assumed the control and integration functions of the new political, economic, religious, and social systems. All cultural forms eventually became hierarchically organized. Class and caste societies based on political and religious status became the norm, replacing the older ranked societies of farming villages. To put it more succinctly, but perhaps less comprehensibly, the new complex cultures reorganized all major cultural institutions (economics, social structure, politics, religion) along hierarchical lines.

These revolutionary developments took place in only six restricted areas of the world: the Middle East, Egypt, the Indus Valley, and China in the Old World and Mesoamerica and the Andean areas of the New World. The New World areas were separated from the Old World cultures by the vast Pacific and Atlantic oceans, and there is no good evidence of any interaction.

Old World Pristine Civilizations

The Middle East

The Middle Eastern culture sphere is very large (see Map 1.1); consideration of the Middle East usually excludes Egypt because of the latter’s apparently unique and independent development of high culture. That leaves a geographic area of approximately 1,547,000 km² (ca. 597,000 mi²) that runs north to south from the Black Sea to the Persian Gulf and east to west from the interior deserts of Iran to the Mediterranean. The great twin rivers of the Euphrates on the west and the Tigris on the east make up the central drainage basin, which is rimmed with mountains on the north, east, and west and by deserts on the south. The other major zone, the great peninsula occupied by present-day Turkey, is characterized by mountains, plateaus, and rivers that drain into the surrounding seas. The coastal shelf of the Levant runs from present-day Lebanon to the Gaza area, and the edge of the Mediterranean is paralleled by mountain ranges with small interior valleys such as the Bekka and the Jordan.

MAP 1.1 Middle East cultures

This geographic diversity, combined with an area large enough to promote cultural differences through isolation, appears to be a sufficient characteristic of most of the areas of early civilizations. The apparent necessary factor was that human cultures in the area came into ever more frequent contact and intense interaction. In the Middle East this interaction began through trade in both basic and even frivolous commodities, such as obsidian, salt, and seashell jewelry in the Upper Palaeolithic (ca. twenty thousand years ago). By the time of the proliferation of farming villages and population growth (ca. 6500 B.C.), people had firmed up trade networks, which were woven around permanent settlements and carried an ever-increasing array of commodities and manufactures. Hybridization improved plants and animals; these hybrids were added to local inventories where they had not been present before. The technological advances, inventions, and goods that were continually passed through webs of interchange included copper and bronze technologies, infinite varieties of pottery, ideas about building (domes, buttresses, standardized floorplans, and so on), and other matters such as the proper arrangements of a well-ordered society. By 6500 B.C. most people in the Middle East lived in single-story houses of mud brick (adobe) that were clustered together into small farming villages. However, two sites of the Neolithic period (ca. 9000-5000 B.C.) were unusual and provide a startling look at possible new cultural developments (Mellart 1975).

Jericho, as it existed in the Jordan Valley of the Holy Land at about 7800 B.C., was a community of perhaps fifteen hundred people. They had built their houses about the springs that are still one of the major attractions of the site (Kenyon 1957). These houses were round and had domed roofs, a rather imaginative use of physical principles for the time. Further, the community was surrounded by a formidable wall that still is about 3.3 m (11 feet) high and included features such as towers with interior staircases at least 7 m (23 feet) in height. Kathleen Kenyon, the excavator of Jericho, had only a glimpse of these earliest levels of the site, given the fact that they lie under 23 m (75 feet) or so of later debris. At about 7000 B.C. the inhabitants of Jericho changed the shape of their houses to the kind of two-room megaron plan that is the basis for the much-later Classical Greek houses and temples of about 400 B.C. They had rebuilt the fortifications and improved them with a dry ditch into the bedrock around the town. There are two major possibilities for investing such a great amount of energy and time in defenses. One is that the traditional Middle Eastern enmity between nomads and village dwellers already existed. There is strong evidence that some of the hunters and gatherers of 11,000 B.C. had chosen to herd animals and thereby keep their old nomadic way of life. (It should be noted that these early nomads were probably goat and sheep herders; camels and dromedaries were not domesticated until very late.) There is also the possibility that somewhere in the vicinity was an equally advanced town considered to be a menace by the inhabitants of Jericho. No such site has been reported to date, however.

Striking developments in religion are present in Jericho in the form of the famous human skulls with modeled stucco facial portraits. These items possibly represent the esteemed and deceased members of families being used in ancestor reverence. Small clay figurines of human females seem to represent a kind of fertility cult—an identification of human life cycles with natural cycles in general.

A considerable distance away, in southern Anatolia, was Chatal Huyuk, another innovative Neolithic community that was partly contemporary with Jericho (Mellart 1967). Chatal Huyuk was a town of about 13 ha (32 acres) in extent that reached its peak at about 6400 B.C. The houses were built of adobe bricks with abutting walls; they lacked windows or doors but had access through clerestories in the roofs. This gave the town a spurious similarity to pueblos of groups in the southwestern United States. Inside the single-roomed houses, however, there is an astounding display of Neolithic art in the form of murals, modeled stucco reliefs, and other productions. Most of the art is dedicated to religious subjects and especially to the “mother goddess” and her consort. Again, without dwelling on detail, the Neolithic fertility cult is identified with the natural cycles of birth, life, death, and rebirth. The burial of women and children in the house benches and some mural evidence indicates a reverence for the dead and possibly something like ancestor commemoration. The mother goddess’s characteristics at Chatal Huyuk are very similar to those of later Classic-era goddesses of the Mediterranean. Mellart (1967) suggests that these similarities are not accidental and that somehow, and no doubt indirectly, these religious conceptions were transmitted over the millennia to later Classical periods with their descendant goddesses such as Artemis and Diana. These early and innovative towns were not the norm, however; that was established by the hundreds of smaller Neolithic villages. Neither were Jericho and Chatal Huyuk representatives of early civilization. There is no strong evidence of their heading or belonging to formal political, economic, or social systems.

By 5500 B.C. population growth had transformed the Middle Eastern landscapes from thinly occupied areas to zones in which villages were clearly in sight of one another and land scarcity was evident. By about 5300 B.C. the first settlements had been established in southern Mesopotamia, and by 5000 B.C. several walled towns existed in the southern valley. These communities show most of the features of cities, and their sustaining cultures are hierarchically organized. The transforming factors are disputed among specialists, but it does appear that population growth continued in irregular patterns. Economics and long-distance trade show many signs of becoming more complex. Indeed Wright and Johnson (1975) argue that trade was a major altering factor in producing civilization. The demands of living in a landscape devoid of most resources other than land and water forced the importation of a variety of commodities. The spaces involved between early towns and cities such as Eridu were such that considerable thought, energy, and investment were needed to establish regular caravans, warehouses, accounting systems, and other features of long-distance exchange. The establishment of irrigation systems made organizational demands. Warfare, ever an accelerator of cultural change, also seems to have hastened the process of change toward more elaborate institutions.

The culture of ancient Sumer (for that is what the southern valley became) is relatively well known. At first, the political systems apparently were diverse forms of city-states. These appear to have evolved from various forms of complex chiefdoms (Wright 1994) that had, in turn, possibly developed from the needs of trade. These early civilized communities had certain characteristics in common. They were all defended by walls. Defenses enclosed large public buildings that include the famous ziggurats (temple platforms), and what seem to have been large and many-roomed palace structures. Both temples and palaces were surrounded by auxiliary buildings, including kitchens, storerooms, and fairly humble residential rooms. These establishments were in turn surrounded by houses of fairly standardized plans that were used in later traditional Middle Eastern cultures. All buildings were made of adobe bricks; the more elaborate were decorated with colored stones, cones, glazed tiles (in a later period), murals, modeled stucco, and other embellishments. These cities were supported by farmers who operated irrigated, intensive farming systems in the countryside. Populations probably ranged from three to nine thousand, judging by the extent of urban areas and comparative material from preindustrial cities elsewhere. The economic base also included large amounts of traded materials, especially wool from flocks of sheep owned corporately by the temples or by individual farmers. Food and trade surpluses supported the corporate enterprises of temple and state.

In regard to the political systems, the archaeological evidence and much later textual information conflict to some degree. Based on Wooley’s excavations a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Tables and Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: Complex Cultures, Cities, and a Rapid Survey of the Earliest Old World Civilizations
• 2 Mesoamerica: Origins and Early Civilizations
• 3 Mesoamerica: Transformations and the Late Civilizations
• 4 The Central Andes of South America: Origins and Early Civilizations
• 5 The Central Andes of South America: Late Civilizations and the Inca
• Epilogue
• References
• About the Book and Author
• Index