Pre-Columbian Civilizations

10 Key excerpts on "Pre-Columbian Civilizations"

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  A History of Public Administration

  Volume II: From the Eleventh Century to the Present Day

  • E.N. Gladden(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Taylor & Francis

    (Publisher)

  Chapter 4 Early American Civilizations

  Distinct civilizations had developed in Central and South America long before the date set for the beginning of the present volume. However, since their existence was not known until after the Spanish invasions of the sixteenth century of our era and earlier histories of their beginnings do not exist it would have been somewhat artificial to have dealt with them in our first volume, although in fact their beginnings go back at least to the second millennium B.C. , to a time when the Egyptians were building their pyramids, Babylon was being unified and the Minoans were still flourishing. For these earlier periods the evidence is to be gleaned from archaeological, anthropological and cultural survivals, or the oral traditions of the later Inca, Aztec and Maya peoples, whose current records were so unfortunately and misguidedly destroyed by the invading Spaniards. Nevertheless their existence is less open to challenge than that of many ancient communities of the West, for the evidence is still to be seen abundantly on all sides.

  The stepping-stone to the New World was Hispaniola (the island today divided between the Haiti and Dominican Republics) where the Spaniards established their own government. Christopher Columbus himself, in 1502 on his fourth voyage to the Indies, was the first European to make contact with the Mayas at Guanaja, an island off the coast of Honduras. Very quickly his presence was reported to the Aztecs of Mexico. Their priests, believing him to be the long-expected white god, prophesied the end of the world. Hernando Cortés (1485-1547), commissioned in 1518 by Velazquez, Spanish Governor of Cuba, to lead an expedition to conquer Mexico, landed on the mainland at a spot now known as Vera Cruz and, with some five hundred Spaniards, marched over the mountains to the central plateau and the magnificent Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán, situated in the centre of a lake which was subsequently drained and is today the site of Mexico City. The Emperor Montezuma, who received him with his following, was shortly taken prisoner and compelled to admit vassaldom to Spain. The warlike Aztec civilization fell and withered with hardly any resistance before the impact of outsiders, defeated not solely by Spanish fire power but partly by their own superstitious interpretation of the fate that was overwhelming them. The Mayas, occupying territory contiguous to the Aztecs, already a dying civilization, presented a less attractive prey and consequently were able to put up a longer resistance in Yucatan until 1546. In fact outlying areas continued to resist, and the Maya Empire was not finally liquidated before 1697.

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  People of the Earth

  An Introduction to World Prehistory

  • Brian M. Fagan, Nadia Durrani(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  NATIVE AMERICAN CIVILIZATIONS BEFORE 2000 B.C. TO A.D. 1534

  PART V

  Passage contains an image

  21	Mesoamerican Civilizations

  CHAPTER OUTLINE Village Farming Preclassic Peoples in Mesoamerica The Rise of Complex Society in Oaxaca Monte Albán Teotihuacán Maya Civilization The Ninth-Century Collapse The Toltecs Aztec Civilization and the Spanish Conquest

  B y any standards, New York lawyer turned traveler John Lloyd Stephens was a remarkable man. In 1839, he and Scottish artist Frederick Catherwood journeyed deep into the Mesoamerican rain forest, following rumors of vanished civilizations and great ruins masked by primordial jungle. They came first to the tiny modern village of Copán, where “around them lay the dark outlines of ruins shrouded by the brooding forest. The only sound that disturbed the quiet of this buried city was the noise of monkeys moving around among the tops of the trees” (Stephens, 1841: 48). While Catherwood drew the intricate hieroglyphs he had found on the stelae, Stephens tried to buy the ancient city of Copán for 50 dollars so that he could transport it block by block to New York. The deal fell through when he found he could not float the antiquities downstream. Stephens and Catherwood visited Palenque, Uxmal, Chichén Itzá, and other sites. They were the first to recognize the Maya as the builders of these great sites: “These cities . . . are not the works of people who have passed away . . . but of the same great race . . . which still clings around their ruins,” Stephens wrote (p. 222). All subsequent research into the Maya and into ancient Mesoamerican civilization has been based on his premises. Today, Maya civilization, with its intricate, recently deciphered glyphs and spectacular cities, ranks among the most fascinating in the world. As we shall see in this chapter (Table 21.1 ), its origins lie deep in the remote past. ■

  A reconstruction of a Maya ball game, Copán, Honduras. National Geographic Image collection.

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  A Companion to Mexican History and Culture

  • William H. Beezley(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  PART II The Indigenous World Before the Europeans CHAPTER SEVEN The Gods Depart: Riddles of the Rise, Fall, and Regeneration of Mesoamerica’s Indigenous Societies SUSAN KELLOGG “If this is a history class, why do I have to learn about archaeology?” This is a common student question at the start of any colonial Mexico history class. The general answer is that prehispanic peoples are a part of that history; their cultures and civilizations shaped Spanish exploration, conquest, and governance in the post-conquest era and after. There are also some specific answers: first, the environments that Spaniards found had already been shaped in profound ways by native peoples; they were differentiated in terms of ethnicity, class, and gender, and indigenous forms of difference influenced the development of colonial society. The cultures and civilizations encountered by Spaniards were themselves the products of thousands of years of development and change, their own longue dureé, a point first made by Eric Wolf in his classic 1959 book, Sons of the Shaking Earth. This chapter treats the history of Mesoamerica’s indigenous peoples before 1519. Drawing on both archaeological and ethnohistoric investigation by a multitude of scholars, it dispenses with a concept often used to describe this long period time, that of “prehistory” (defined as the period before the appearance of writing), since writing was an ancient practice made use of by many indigenous groups. 1 The chapter draws especially on recent archaeological writings and argues that several fundamental characteristics of prehispanic political economy and spirituality developed early and became highly elaborated by the time Spaniards arrived

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  Daily Life in Maya Civilization

  • Robert J. Sharer(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Greenwood

    (Publisher)

  2 UNDERSTANDING THE MAYA PAST In this chapter we consider (1) basic concepts underlying the study of past societies such as the Maya; (2) how archaeologists find and interpret evi- dence from the past to reconstruct such civilizations; (3) the environment of the Maya homeland, and (4) the chronology used to understand the development of Maya civilization. THE GROWTH OF CIVILIZATIONS We begin by defining certain basic concepts. Civilization is a term often used to refer to complex and sophisticated cultural developments. Civi- lization implies the development of cities, as well as large-scale public architecture, writing, organized religion, far-flung trade, art, and other achievements. Cities are large concentrated settlements of people who spe- cialize in non-food-producing activities. Although city dwellers may have gardens or farm plots outside the city, a proportion of them specialize in manufacturing, trade, religion, or politics and live by exchanging goods and services with an agricultural hinterland that produces food. Civilizations are associated with a particular kind of political and eco- nomic system known as the state. The first states to develop in various parts of the world are called preindustrial states. These were characterized by full-time craft specializations, complex social stratification (i.e., societies divided into two or more classes, including an elite upper class), and a cen- tralized political authority (such as a “king”). The centralized authority is usually supported and perpetuated by institutions, such as official religions, administrative bureaucracies, laws, courts, palace guards, and armies. But 12 Daily Life in Maya Civilization preindustrial states were very different from the modern industrial states that developed with the Industrial Revolution. Preindustrial states did not have machine-based mass production of goods, rapid communication, and efficient transport—all of which are typical of modern industrial states.

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  Gardner's Art Through the Ages

  A Global History, Volume I

  • Fred Kleiner(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  519 519 NATIVE AMERICAN CULTURES BEFORE 1300 18 Ancient Cities in a New World During the millennium and a half before European explorers landed in what for them was a “New World,” the native peoples of the Western Hemisphere constructed some of the world’s largest cities. Teotihuacán (fig. 18-5), for example, near present-day Mexico City, was a great metropolis covering 9 square miles. The city, which had a population of 125,000 to 200,000 at its peak around 600 ce, was widely influential throughout the region. The most famous of the many civilizations that flourished in the Americas before 1300 was that of the Maya. Renowned for their great urban centers and imposing temple-pyramids constructed in vast clearings in the dense rain and scrub forests of Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, and Belize, the Maya were also skilled in mathematics and astronomy, developed a complex written language, and kept detailed historical records. One of the best-preserved Maya sites—frequently visited because of its proximity to the popu- lar vacation destination of Cancún in the Yucatán Peninsula—is Chichén Itzá (fig. 18-1). The city dates to the period that archaeologists have dubbed the Postclassic—that is, the late period, beginning around 900 ce. Some of its major buildings are typical, however, of earlier Classic sites, such as Copán (fig. 18-10) in Honduras and Tikal (fig. 18-11) in Guatemala. Dominating Chichén Itzá’s main northern plaza is a gigantic pyramidal stepped platform crowned by a temple to Kukulcán, the feathered-serpent god. Oriented to the four cardinal points, the pyramid has nine levels and 365 steps collectively on its four sides—references to both the Underworld and the sun, which abound in Maya architecture (see “Mesoamerican Pyramid Design,” page 533). Chichén Itzá also boasts the largest ball court in Mesoamerica, almost 500 feet long.

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  Ancient Oaxaca

  The Monte Albán State

  • Richard E. Blanton, Gary M. Feinman, Stephen A. Kowalewski, Linda M. Nicholas(Authors)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  The hierarchically structured core–periphery systems of the early civilizations became engines of social, cultural, and technological change as the flows of goods, people, and information across cultural boundaries intensified. Premodern worlds that were centered on empires and large urban states did not suddenly spring up fully formed. Each has a lengthy history of development (e.g., Frank and Gills [1993] and Gills and Frank [1991] trace the origins of the modern world system back 5,000 years). To introduce the central features of change in the evolution of Mesoamerican civilization, we first briefly describe it just prior to the advent of extensive European influence (which began with the Spanish conquest), and in subsequent chapters we contrast its form with the situation some 2,500 years earlier, when some of Mesoamerica’s 8 Mesoamerica and Its Pre-Hispanic Civilization distinctive features were just beginning to appear. The development of urban Monte Albán in the Valley of Oaxaca was one of the transforma- tions that set the foundation for the Mesoamerican civilization of AD 1521. Mesoamerican Civilization in the Late Postclassic The last pre-Hispanic era of the Mesoamerican sequence prior to the inva- sion of the Spanish was the Late Postclassic (Table 2). By the final century prior to Spanish conquest, the Mesoamerican civilizational tradition had extended into parts of what are now Honduras, El Salvador, and Nicaragua and all of Belize and Guatemala (Figure 1.1). At that time, this premodern world (Smith and Berdan 2003) of approximately 1 million square kilo- meters (larger than the area of the US eastern-seaboard states from Maine through Georgia) was inhabited by an estimated 35 million people.

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  Latin America

  Regions and People

  • Robert B. Kent(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • The Guilford Press

    (Publisher)

  This cultural sequence is most clearly under- stood for Mesoamerica, whose history pro- vides a useful perspective on the timing and the characteristics of the evolution of advanced cultures throughout Latin America. Mesoamerica The culture history of Mesoamerica is divided into three distinct periods of cultural develop- ment: the Pre-Classic (also known as the For- mative), the Classic, and the Post-Classic. It was during the Pre-Classic period, running roughly from 2500 B.C.E. to 300 C.E., that settled village life based on an agricultural economy became commonplace throughout Mesoamerica. Early on, slash-and-burn agriculture predominated, but this gave way to more complex agricultural systems that included the use of fallow field cy- cles, terracing, and irrigation. In the Valley of Oaxaca, for instance, indigenous peoples devel- FIGURE 5.4. A farmer dries coca leaves along the road. Cocaine is made from its leaves. Chapare region, Bolivia, 1988. 78 | LATIN AMERICA: REGIONS AND PEOPLE oped a system of irrigation using shallow wells and pots by about 1000 B.C.E. and were using irrigation canals by 500 B.C.E. Class distinc- tions were almost nonexistent at the beginning of the Pre-Classic period, but as time passed and increasingly sophisticated agricultural sys- tems produced greater and greater food sur- pluses, differences in wealth, power, and so- cial status became institutionalized. Religious life showed a similar evolution. Simple Earth Mother clay figurines measuring just 7–8 cm in height were the most common religious arti- fact at the beginning of the Pre-Classic period, but by about 1000 B.C.E. the construction of monumental ceremonial religious sites became widespread. Massive flat-topped pyramids, made of earth or stone and covered with adobe bricks, characterized these sites.

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  Imperfect Balance

  • David Lentz(Author)
  • 2000(Publication Date)
  • Columbia University Press

    (Publisher)

  First, the Western Hemisphere represents a dis-crete and easily defined geographic unit with a large landmass uninhabited by humans for most of its evolutionary history. Second, we have a reasonably good idea when humans arrived in the Americas, probably somewhere between 12,000 and 15,000 years ago. When humans appeared on the horizon in the first wave of migration, the impact was gradual but observable even in our earliest archaeological records. For example, some have suggested that human hunters contributed to the mass extinction event of the Pleistocene megafauna (Martin and Klein 1989). Third, we understand something of how and where complex societies developed sui generis. Finally, we know when the indigenous cultures in different regions were overshadowed by incursions of Western culture. At the early end of human occupation, we have a ‘‘pristine’’ region taken over by early Precolumbians who rapidly spread their numbers across the land-scape and later developed efficient trophic systems based on domesticates with the ca-pability of supporting complex societies. At the more recent end of the Precolumbian occupation, we have an imposing cultural system that dramatically altered, and in many cases terminated, the indigenous cultural /ecological systems that were in place at the time of contact. To provide a chronological guidepost for the reader, table 1.1 lists some of the major cultural developments in each of the regions addressed, begin-ning in the late Pleistocene and ending with the age of discovery. Of course, a key factor in the degree of landscape modification and the effect of human interactions with Precolumbian ecosystems was tempered by the number of humans occupying an area in any given time period. Population estimates for the pre-contact New World have always been controversial, mostly because the accounts of the earliest explorers were vague, at times exaggerated, and based on limited or nonexis-tent data.

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  The Essential World History

  • William J. Duiker, Jackson Spielvogel(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  Before their relocation, however, the Pueblo Bonito peoples clearly maintained commer- cial contacts with their counterparts in Mexico and even as far south as the Pacific Coast of South America. Jars containing the residue of fermented chocolate have been found in the area, suggesting that trade with peoples in Mesoamerica, where cacao trees were cultivated, was common. 6-4 THE FIRST CIVILIZATIONS IN SOUTH AMERICA Tikal Teotihuacán MAIZE AND MANIOC CULTIVATORS OF CARIBBEAN LOWLANDS La Venta Monte Alban Chichén Itzá Chav´ ın de Huantar Caral SAVANNA FARMERS FARMING SOCIETIES NORTH ANDEAN CHIEFDOMS CENTRAL ANDEAN CIVILIZATION SAVANNA FARMERS HUNTERS OF THE CHACO SAVANNA MARITIME HUNTERS, SHELLFISH COLLECTORS GRASSLAND STEPPE HUNTERS Monte Verde Moche (Chan Chan) C a ri b b e a n S e a P a c i fi c O c e a n A t l a n t i c O c e a n A m a z o n R . 0 500 1,000 Miles 0 500 1,000 1,500 Kilometers Farming peoples Chiefdoms Organized states Hunters and gatherers Map 6.4 Early Peoples and Cultures of Central and South America. This map shows regions of early human settlements in Central and South America. Urban conglomerations appear in Mesoamerica (see inset) and along the western coast of South America. Q Why do you think urban centers appeared in these areas? Q Focus Question: What role did the environment play in the evolution of societies in South America? South America is a vast continent characterized by extremes in climate and geography. The north is domi- nated by the mighty Amazon River, which flows through dense tropical rain forests carrying the largest flow of water of any river system in the world (see Map 6.4). Farther to the south, the forests are replaced by prai- ries and steppes stretching westward to the Andes, which extend the entire length of the continent from the northern Isthmus of Panama to the southern Strait of Magellan. The western slopes of the Andes along the Pacific coast are some of the driest desert regions in the world.

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  The Essential World History, Volume I: To 1800

  • William J. Duiker, Jackson Spielvogel(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  Before their relocation, however, the Pueblo Bonito peoples clearly maintained commer- cial contacts with their counterparts in Mexico and even as far south as the Pacific Coast of South America. Jars containing the residue of fermented chocolate have been found in the area, suggesting that trade with peoples in Mesoamerica, where cacao trees were cultivated, was common. 6-4 THE FIRST CIVILIZATIONS IN SOUTH AMERICA Tikal Teotihuacán MAIZE AND MANIOC CULTIVATORS OF CARIBBEAN LOWLANDS La Venta Monte Alban Chichén Itzá Chav´ ın de Huantar Caral SAVANNA FARMERS FARMING SOCIETIES NORTH ANDEAN CHIEFDOMS CENTRAL ANDEAN CIVILIZATION SAVANNA FARMERS HUNTERS OF THE CHACO SAVANNA MARITIME HUNTERS, SHELLFISH COLLECTORS GRASSLAND STEPPE HUNTERS Monte Verde Moche (Chan Chan) C a ri b b e a n S e a P a c i fi c O c e a n A t l a n t i c O c e a n A m a z o n R . 0 500 1,000 Miles 0 500 1,000 1,500 Kilometers Map 6.4 Early Peoples and Cultures of Central and South America. This map shows regions of early human settlements in Central and South America. Urban conglomerations appear in Mesoamerica (see inset) and along the western coast of South America. Why do you think urban centers appeared in these areas? Focus Question: What role did the environment play in the evolution of societies in South America? South America is a vast continent characterized by extremes in climate and geography. The north is domi- nated by the mighty Amazon River, which flows through dense tropical rain forests carrying the largest flow of water of any river system in the world (see Map 6.4). Farther to the south, the forests are replaced by prai- ries and steppes stretching westward to the Andes, which extend the entire length of the continent from the northern Isthmus of Panama to the southern Strait of Magellan. The western slopes of the Andes along the Pacific coast are some of the driest desert regions in the world. South America has been inhabited by human beings for more than 12,000 years.

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