Pre-Colombian Cities

Jorge Enrique Hardoy

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781135687311
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia mexicana

What visitor to Mexico City, unaware of its pre-Hispanic history, could imagine that right under a Christian Church may still lie the remains of the sinister tzompantli, the Aztecs' altar of skulls? Professor Jorge Hardoy poses this question and many more in his comprehensive summary of the ancient cities where Latin America's peoples lived before the Spaniards arrived in the sixteenth century.

Because Aztec Tenochtitlan, today Mexico City, and Inca Cuzco represent the culmination of the two most advanced civilizations encountered by the Spainsh conquistadors, the author explores these cities end-to-end. He also studies such older civic memorial centers as Teotichuacan, Tula, Monte Alban, Uxmal, Chichen Itza, Tikal, Palenque, Tiahuanaco, Chan Chan, Pachacamac, Machu Picchu, and lesser know sites, most virtually, if not totally, abandoned centuries before the Conquest. Such inclusive coverage makes for a lively discussion of some fifteen hundred years of urban life as immortalized in the architecture, art, and crafts of long vanished civilizations. There is an extensive bibliography, many photographs, maps, charts and city plans showing urban layouts of temples, which tell much about the life of the inhabitants.

His book shows that while new findings come to light each year, so much buried history lies waiting to be found that archaology will always be an ever unfolding drama.

This book was first published in 1973.

1
The Origins of American Civilizations

"God the creator against God the destroyer, an eternal struggle that never ends. Forever forming and transforming the world, it dominates nature and determines man's existence."

PAUL WESTHEIM
(ARTE ANTIGUO DE MEXICO)

1

THE EVOLUTION of America's Indian civilizations ended abruptly as the first generation of Spanish conquistadors arrived on the mainland of the Continent.¹ We can only speculate as to their future had they not come to a premature end. As isolated phenomena of cultural development, Indian civilizations had not even reached, in many aspects, the technical level of the pre-Christian civilizations of Europe or the Near and Far East. We also have serious doubts as to how far they might have been able to progress since they had only an elementary knowledge of metals, a limited number of domesticated animals, did not utilize the wheel, and lacked a system of alphabetical writing.

During the middle of the sixteenth century, the initial thrust of the Spanish Conquest had spent itself, and the first stage of colonization had already begun. Over the ruins of Indian cities and villages, around the more protected bays of the coast or near the mouths of rivers, in the lower valleys and in the fertile plains of North and South America, the first European style cities appeared as the unmistakable stamp of a colonization intended to endure. A new society took the place of the old, promoting values unknown to the Indian cultures.

With the appearance of the viceroys and mayors, bishops and preachers, adventurers, gold seekers, and large landowners, came the first questions. Who were these unexpected persons with strange customs who lived in the forests, coasts, and highlands of this newly discovered world? How could they exist in contradiction of biblical tradition and scientific theories of the epoch? Were they, perhaps, human beings, and therefore descended from Adam? How was it possible that they had reached a level of civilization and built cities which, in many respects, surpassed those known by most of the colonizers in the Old World?

The first speculations about man's origins in America were not slow in coming. By 1590, Father Acosta had already affirmed, wisely as it later developed, that man came to America by crossing the cold regions.² From this first position sprang many theories suggesting Phoenicians, Canaanites, Carthaginians, Egyptians, Armenians, Greeks, Jews, Tartars, Vikings, and even a Chinese Buddhist monk as the first inhabitants of America.³ Then there were those who, like Sarmiento de Gamboa in 1570, declared that in the year 1320 B.C. some Europeans who had settled in a section of the immense Atlantic island (Atlantis) remained isolated there as a result of a flood, the sixth, which submerged part of the island, "and thus the people in this part lost commerce and contact with those from Europe and Africa and other parts, so that they even lost memory of it. . . ." The survivors of Atlantis settled "the rich and most powerful kingdoms of Peru and neighboring provinces," and none other than Ulysses and the Greeks were the first to come "to the land of Yucatán and Campeche, land of New Spain, because the people of this land wear the Greek costume, head-dress and garment from the nation of Ulysses, and use many Greek words and have Greek letters" (Sarmiento de Gamboa, 1947).

The first methodical studies took place during the nineteenth century. The theory of the origin of American man, stated by Ameghino at the end of the preceding century was gradually abandoned for lack of evidences of human remains on the continent (McCown, 1950). Prehistoric studies in the Americas, particularly in North America, have made great strides in the last decades. However, we still are faced with a confusing and often contradictory picture. The ice sheets which marked the end of the last glacial period retreated about 20,000 years ago. In their wake, taking advantage of favorable geographic conditions, came the first Asiatic migrations to the American continent. This is the position generally accepted by archeologists, supported by the total absence of any skeletal remains which can be dated earlier than about 20,000 years ago. However, Stewart tells us that before that epoch, related types existed in east Asia (Stewart, 1960), and Sellard reports that in several sites in California, such as one on the island of Santa Rosa seventy kilometers off the west coast of the United States, as well as in another called Texas Street near San Diego, evidence of human presence has been found dating from 20,000 and 35,000 years ago respectively (Sellards, 1960).

The picture of American prehistory is a complex one and subject to endless speculation.⁴ It is generally accepted that the majority of the original settlers of the American continent were Mongoloids who came across the Bering Straits.⁵ These people must have been small groups formed by several families of hunters, fishermen, and gatherers who crossed Alaska following the animals that served as their food. The problems inherent in supplying food for sizeable groups had yet to be solved, and the clan, the small semifamilial nucleus, was the largest grouping that the environment could support. Lacking beasts of burden, they traveled slowly on foot, carrying their possessions with them. It would certainly have taken them several centuries to travel from one end of the continent to another.

About 8,500 years ago, Pre-Ceramic bands hunting horse and sloth reached the southern tip of the continent and temporarily occupied some caves on the coast of the Straits of Magellan. Traces of their passage have been found in California, Wyoming, Texas, New Mexico, and Nebraska in the United States; in northern Mexico and in the central Valley of Mexico; in the western chain of the Peruvian Andes; on the Bolivian Plateau; and in caves of the central mountains of Argentina, Their remains were sometimes found together with bones of the mastodons, mammoths, horses, bison and other huge animals they hunted for food.

Almost all the accessible regions of America must have been traveled, temporarily occupied, abandoned and reoccupied in an unending search for the most favorable environmental conditions. The first arrivals, who had taken advantage of periods of glacial retreat in the north of the continent, were pushed southward by new migrants. Along the longitudinal valleys of North America and the Pacific Coast, the first great exploration of the continent began. While the women gathered the vegetable foods and hunted the small game found near the caves and camps which served as their base, the men hunted and fished to obtain the protein food needed for survival. When they came across a natural port which offered the combination of abundant fish or shellfish and a source of fresh water, the group halted their travels and enjoyed a period of stable life which encouraged the development and refinement of their limited utensils. The many mounds with remains of shells, artifacts, and vegetable residue which have been found along the Pacific Coast bear witness to the stays of these groups.⁶ Willey and Phillips emphasize that any theory about population dispersion in Mesoamerica and South America must assume the north to south movement of these groups and cultures of a stone age development (Willey and Phillips, 1958).

Some of the principal migration routes may have converged in the central Valley of Mexico. Once past the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, the migrating groups would probably choose the Pacific Coast for its possibilities of fishing and shellfish gathering. Topography determined the route, and environmental possibilities decided the length of stay. Climate and those products which nature generously offered, rather than the quality of the soil, were what attracted the more vigorous groups to the protected valleys of the American plateaus and the coastal areas where fish and shellfish were plentiful. Agriculture was still unknown and pottery useless to people always on the move. Industry was limited to chipping obsidian and other hard stone into crude tools and weapons with which to hunt the great herbivores for food.

While some groups remained, others continued toward the south, across the highlands of western South America as far as the plains. They must have then crossed Patagonia along the coast or over the mountains, living on guanaco, horse, and sloth meat until they came to Tierra del Fuego. Others probably traveled down the Pacific Coast in canoes, feeding on birds, fish and shellfish, tossed about by the rains and relentless winds that devastated the unfriendly terrain, to finally converge in the caves of the Straits or on the freezing islands of the far south (Bird, 1938). Other groups may have traveled eastward across the interminable sameness of the forest without coming across any geographic features which induced them to linger, until they came to the mountain ranges of eastern Brazil, only to then again head south. Thus ended the first great exploration of America, two hundred and fifty or three hundred generations ago.

The inherent advantages or disadvantages of certain environments gradually became factors encouraging either a sedentary pattern of life with cultural progress or a nomadic existence and stagnation. In the valleys of the highlands and small rivers, where some of the great American water systems originate, in coastal areas where a river opens into the sea, on the fertile and humid banks of lakes and rivers where vegetation never stops growing, America's first inhabitants found the resources and incentives they needed to develop the successive stages of a cultural progress which was to culminate in the great Indian civilizations. The central Valley and Gulf Coast of Mexico, the highlands of Oaxaca and Guatemala, the swampy areas of the Petén, the Peru-Bolivian highlands, and the river valleys of the Peruvian coast are of particular interest for this book, along with other sites of ancient and prolonged occupation. These are certainly not the only sites occupied by the stone age hunters of Mesoamerica and South America. On the contrary, the stone age sites seem to have been more numerous in temperate, open areas where game was abundant (Willey and Phillips, 1959). But in the central Valley of Mexico, in the north and central coastal valleys of Peru, and in some of the other areas mentioned, many of the principal events of the prehistoric and historic epochs of America transpired. Here some of the most important Indian cultures and later the mestizaje, or racial mixture, of Colonial life, developed.

Even today, when technical advances can manipulate topography and science is ever widening our possibilities of modifying environment, some of the sites where the preagricultural and preceramic cultures of America lived are still being occupied, now by the cities of a progressively industrial civilization.

Not all Indian societies of Mesoamerica and South America reached the urbanist stage. Those which achieved it did so in limited areas of particularly propitious regions. The area occupied by urban civilizations and their zones of influence was restricted in comparison to the immensity of the continent. Demographically, however, the percentage of the Indian population which it included was certainly greater than their nomadic and seminomadic counterparts. I do not mean that the majority of pre-Hispanic American civilizations lived in urban conditions. This was not the case. I only want to point out that the influence of an urban way of life, with the characteristics we have discussed, affected to some degree a considerable percentage of the population living in the areas studied in this book, distinguishing their manner of living from that of other areas. This cultural difference in living practiced by the principal civilizations and their peripheral areas was even more accentuated at the time of the Spanish Conquest, and the gap between the technological levels and subsistence of the inhabitants of one area as compared to another was widening long before the beginning of the Classic Period in Mesoamerica and South America.

On the other hand, with few exceptions, the inhabitants of the territories which today constitute Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay, and those of east, central, and northwest Brazil never got beyond the level of hunters, fishermen, and gatherers who lived in limited groups in portable or perishable shelters. Other peoples in the interior of South America did not progress beyond a level in which agriculture alternated with a seminomadic life, banding together in groups which stayed only a few years in each place. When the soil became exhausted and game grew scarce, the group moved on to another bend in some river in Brazil, to a new place on the plains of Venezuela or Colombia, or to the east of Peru, Ecuador, or Bolivia. Certain communities reached an acceptable specialization, and in this case each tribe made the baskets, pottery or canoes they needed to exchange with other tribes. The village was the basic social unit, and its members were generally related by family ties (Bennett and Bird, 1949). Unending warfare, infertile soil which was periodically subjected to erosive clearing methods, and natural conditions beyond the scope of their meager technical resources prevented these people from increasing their numbers and developing an urban life.⁷

Temporary settlements arranged along a pathway or in a circle, small round huts scattered separately and without order, or a huge common house up to fifty meters long and ten meters high were the ultimate expressions of urban progress among these seminomadic groups. Lowie found that it was characteristic of several groups in this cultural area to live in a large communal house accommodating from twenty to seventy residents, as among the Yecuana and Guinan. The houses of the Tupari, next to the Guaporé River, are said to have lodged up to thirty-five families. Lowie describes a Tupinamba village as consisting of four to eight houses, each accommodating thirty to two hundred families. Often a single structure, or a pair of this type, accommodates the entire population, as in the villages along the Aiari River (Lowie, 1948).

The Tupinamba villages represent one of the most evolved forms of settlement in those areas of South America that did not reach an urban stage. Their spacious communal dwellings, regular in plan and up to 150 meters long, were arranged around a civic-ceremonial plaza (Métraux, 1948). The villages were defended by a single or double palisade at times reinforced by trenches and stakes driven into the ground, as was also common among the Guarani.

In the Antilles, only the Taino and the Caribes, among the four known aboriginal cultural groups, practiced rudimentary agriculture and lived in simple huts of logs and reeds. They had no cities, but were grouped into villages which they built on easy-to-defend, natural elevations (Pichardo Moya, 1958).

The Early Stages of Urban Evolution in Mesoamerica

Stone age man left traces of his passage in various sites scattered all over Mesoamerica. Remains of his artifacts, along with the fauna existing then, have been found in the basins of the rivers and lakes of the Mexican States of Baja California, Chihuahua, Tamaulipas, and Durango and in the caves of Nueva León, Cohuila, and Tamaulipas. Sites in the States of Guanajuato and Jalisco have yielded evidence of these Pre-Ceramic cultures of hunter-gatherers. Even to the south, near Mitla in the State of-Oaxaca, and in Concepcion in the State of Campeche,...