Notes

The First Inhabitants of the Americas

Historians, scientists, and archaeologists have different theories about how humans physically reached the American continents. Native Americans also have their own creation stories and legends about the history of their ancestors. The most widely accepted theory among historians, scientists, and archeologists is the Bering Land Bridge Theory.


The Bering Land Bridge Theory holds that, during periods in earth's history called ice ages, large glaciers formed at the earth's poles. Glaciers are large masses of snow and ice that cover parts of the earth's surface. Some of these glaciers were the size of whole countries and connected continents together.

These huge ice glaciers near the North Pole were made up of ocean water. Because so much of the ocean was frozen, the ocean's water level dropped. As the water level fell, a natural land bridge emerged in the Bering Sea between present-day Alaska and Asia, making transcontinental migration possible.

Though most scientists agree this migration took place during the last ice age, about 12,000 years ago, some are convinced the migration happened much earlier. An archaeological site at Orogrande Cave, in New Mexico, has been dated back 38,000 years. Still other researchers reject the land bridge theory altogether and have found evidence that early settlers of the Americas arrived by boat from Asia, Africa, or Europe. Legends of Native Americans in North, Central, and South America also speak of landing in the Americas from somewhere else.


Maize.

Evidence suggests that early Central American societies learned to plant crops and had organized systems of farming. About 5,000 years ago, cultures in present-day Mexico began cultivating maize, another name for corn, along with other crops. Using advanced irrigation techniques, large cities emerged and huge stores of food were produced for the people of these cultures. As the cultivation of maize and other crops became more efficient, the population boomed.
Agricultural development spread from South to North, and many Native American groups learned to successfully grow maize, beans, and squash. Growing populations and efficient farming methods led to the establishment of many thriving cultures throughout the Americas. Archaeologists estimate that 30 to 100 million people lived in North and South America before European contact. A term commonly used to refer to American civilizations before European contact is pre-Columbian, that is, prior to contact with Christopher Columbus in 1492 CE.

Note similarities between the following passages about pre-Columbian civilizations in the Americas and the history of early civilizations in Mesopotamia discussed in Lesson 3. In both areas the development of sophisticated farming techniques led to complex, organized societies led by a class of priests. The pyramid-temples at the center of cities in the Americas resemble the ziggurats in Mesopotamia. In both places, independent city-states fell prey to larger and more brutal empires.



An Olmec stone head found at San Lorenzo.

Olmec

The Olmec established one of the first known cultures in the Americas. Their culture thrived between 1500 BCE and 400 BCE in Mesoamerica (what is now Central America), near the Gulf of Mexico. The life of the Olmec has been pieced together from the excavations of two major archaeological sites, San Lorenzo and La Venta, Mexico. Some of the more interesting artifacts found there are enormous stone heads carved out of basalt, a black volcanic rock. Some of these heads weigh up to 40 tons. Archaeologists can only guess as to what the heads represent. One popular suggestion is that the heads depicted Olmec kings.

Though little is known about the Olmec society, similarities with other ancient societies are clear. Olmec society was very structured and centered around religious ceremony. In general, the Mesoamerican cultures are similar to the early Mesopotamian cultures: farming communities which became more complex societies with a very defined social hierarchy. Priests were at the top of the hierarchy. Archaeologists have also found evidence that suggests that Olmec cities had arenas for a game played with a rubber ball. In later civilizations, such as the Maya and Aztec, such games appear to have been a serious part of religious ritual. Stone carvings in arenas and accounts by Spanish conquerors indicate that defeated teams would face death by sacrifice.


Pre-Columbian American Civilizations.

The Olmec lived in a dense, swampy jungle. To make the land useable quickly, they practiced slash-and-burn farming, in which farmers would burn the jungle around them and then plant maize seeds in the ashes. This method of farming made the land arid and infertile after a few years, and farmers had to move often to farm successfully. The Olmec also procured food by trading with other Mesoamerican cultures. Exotic bird feathers, jade figurines, and baskets were some of the valuable items traded.

The Olmec civilization declined and disappeared, as was the case with the Hittites in Lesson 3, the Harrapo culture of Lesson 4, the Minoans of Lesson 5, and Etruscans of Lesson 6. As with those societies, the cause of this collapse is debated.

Scholars have found several inscriptions in different writing styles dating towards the end of Olmec civilization, between 500 and 30 BCE. One of the most exciting areas in archaeology in the world today is the discovery and translation of these hieroglyphic scripts based on pictograms. In the 1960s, scholars could not claim that any Mesoamerican scripts had been deciphered, but since then the progress has been quick.

Scholars today know about 15 distinct writing systems from Mesoamerica which predate the arrival of Columbus. As can be seen from the picture of Mayan script below, most of these scripts continue the tradition established by the Olmec of using complex pictures, or glyphs, as the basis of their writing. Like Egyptian hieroglyphics, writers were attuned to the beauty of the script as well as its meaning. All the Mesoamerican cultures also continued Olmec artistic and architectural traditions.


Mayan Temple in Uxmal, Mexico.

Maya

The Maya began establishing cities on the Yucatan Peninsula, in present-day Mexico and Guatemala, as early as 900 BCE. Rather than a unified kingdom, the Maya were a conglomerate of city-states that shared similar cultural traits and traded with each other. They developed a variety of languages, government systems, and farming techniques depending on their environments.

Religion and religious worship were at the center of Mayan life. The Maya thought their kings were gods. Priests and holy men held tremendous power in Mayan society. People flocked to communal rituals held by their rulers and priests. Pictograms from Mayan temples depict the Mayan gods as mythical creatures made up of different body parts from animals such as monkeys, jaguars, fish, and birds. Human sacrifice was also an important part of Mayan religious practices. The Maya believed that human sacrifices pleased the gods and helped renew and sustain the Mayan way of life.

The Mayan economy centered around farming and trade. Maize, squash, pumpkins, tomatoes, and other crops were traded for jade, cotton, salt, and deer meat. Trade flourished in Mayan culture. People traveled all over Central America to trade for goods. Trade also occurred by water as merchants would carry goods in canoes and barges on local waterways.

At the height of their civilization, between 300 and 900 CE, the Maya constructed huge temples that rose high above the lush jungles of the Yucatan Peninsula. Many of their cities, such as Uxmal and Mayapan, still boast impressive Mayan temples to this day. For centuries, many Mayan cities were overgrown and hidden by dense jungle, but archaeologists have been steadily uncovering these cities for scientific study. El Mirador, in the rain forest of northern Guatemala, is a huge city with a 180 foot (55 meter) high pyramid, one of the highest structures built in pre-Columbian America. This city is still covered with jungle and is almost 40 miles (60 kilometers) from any town or paved road. Archaeologists and travelers can only reach it with difficulty, and transporting the tools or supplies for a proper excavation is even more difficult.


Page 58 of the Maya book known as the Dresden Codex, which contained astronomical observations about the planet Venus. This page contains calculations of an eclipse. The glyphs with dots and dashes are Mayan numbers. The dashes represent five, and dots are usually one. The column on the far right is therefore 9, 12, 11, 11. The eye at the bottom is zero. The Maya, like the Indians, independently invented the zero, but their counting system was a modified base 20, instead of our base 10 system.

Mayan priests invented an extremely accurate calendar, one of the most precise in the ancient world. The calendar could predict eclipses and the positions of the moon, sun, and stars. The calendar helped organize the lives of the Maya by telling them when to have religious ceremonies and when to plant certain crops.

The Maya used both phonetic symbols, like our letters, and pictograms, like Egyptian hieroglyphics, to keep records and inscribe instructions for religious ceremonies. The Maya wrote in books made of bark and plaster and made carvings in clay, stone, and jade. After the Spanish conquered Central America, Spanish priests attempted to completely destroy Mayan culture by collecting and burning all of their books. Only four of their original books survived to be studied by linguists today, in addition to the many carved inscriptions found in Mayan ruins.

The large cities at the center of Mayan civilization were abandoned or destroyed around 900 CE. Although the exact reasons for their sudden decline are unknown, extensive warfare and over-farming, which would have led to starvation and malnutrition, are among the possible reasons. Mayan culture and languages still survive today. Almost half of Guatemala's population (6 million people) still speak a Mayan language, and many still practice variants of Mayan religion.


Aztec


The Aztec Calendar.

Hundreds of years after the fall of the Maya, another civilization flourished in the jungles of Mesoamerica. In their own language, they called themselves Mexica, but since the 1800s they have been called the Aztec. The Aztec were hunters and warriors that moved into Mesoamerica in the 13th century CE. In 1325, they built a powerful city called Tenochtitlan on the present site of Mexico City. The city thrived next to a large lake which made agriculture very productive. It was also near a large quantity of easily accessible obsidian, the volcanic glass used to make very sharp stone tools. Tenochtitlan was the agricultural and trade center for the Aztec people.

The Aztec farmed extensively by creating chinampas, man-made floating islands, by stacking mud from the bottom of a lake onto rafts secured by stakes. This mud was rich in nutrients, and the Aztecs grew many crops, like maize and beans, on chinampas. Like the irrigation systems of Mesopotamia or the flooding of the Nile, the chinampas ensured a steady supply of food that was less dependent upon rain. They also developed a 360-day calendar to chart the growing season of crops. With a steady food supply, the population of Tenochtitlan grew rapidly.

As people began to move outside of the city, Tenochtitlan developed an extensive network of canals and bridges. These throughways allowed people to move around by way of boats and barges made from reeds. The city even removed its garbage regularly, affording a very clean environment for the citizens. Spanish explorers in the 1500s said Tenochtitlan was cleaner and more magnificent than any city that they knew of in Europe during the same time. Estimates of the population range from 80,000 to perhaps as many as 700,000 inhabitants. Even if the conservative low estimate of 80,000 is accepted, the only European cities at the time which surpassed 100,000 were Constantinople, Venice, and Paris. It appears that this urbanization came at the expense of other towns in the surrounding regions, which rarely had more than 5,000 inhabitants.

The Aztec had a hierarchical society with four social classes: nobles, commoners, serfs, and slaves. The emperor was at the top of the hierarchy as the political, military, and religious leader of the Aztec people. For the most part only nobles could own land, though some commoners (farmers, merchants, craftsmen, and priests) owned land as well. Serfs had few rights and were tied to noble lands. Slaves, who were often prisoners of war, were used for labor or as human sacrifices.

Tenochtitlan became a cultural and religious center. Huge temples for religious ceremonies stood all over the city. These temples were either built in commemoration of fallen warriors or to worship the gods. Artisans painted murals depicting great battles in Aztec history on the temples and other buildings. Their primary god was Huitzilopochtli, the sun god, whose giant pyramid-temple rose out of the center of the city.

Here is a description of Tenochtitlan and its main pyramid-temple by one of the first Spanish soldiers to visit it in 1519 CE:

Now let us...come to the courts and enclosures in which their great cue (pyramid-temple) stood. Before reaching it you passed through a series of large courts, bigger I think than the Plaza at Salamanca. These courts were surrounded by a double masonry wall and paved, like the whole place, with very large smooth white flagstones. Where these stones were absent everything was whitened and polished, indeed the whole place was so clean that there was not a straw or a grain of dust to be found there...The top of the cue formed an open square on which stood something like a platform, and it was here that the great stones stood on which they placed the poor Indians for sacrifice. Here also was a massive image like a dragon, and other hideous figures, and a great deal of blood that had been spilled that day.

...So we stood there looking, because that huge accursed cue stood so high that it dominated everything. We saw the three causeways that led into Mexico: the causeway of Iztapalapa by which we had entered four days before, and that of Tacuba along which we were afterwards to flee on the night of our great defeat, when the new prince Cuitlahuac drove us out of the city (as I shall tell in due course), and that of Tepeaquilla [Guadalupe]. We saw the fresh water which came from Chapultepec to supply the city, and the bridges that were constructed at intervals on the causeways so that the water could flow in and out from one part of the lake to another. We saw a great number of canoes, some coming with provisions and others returning with cargo and merchandise; and we saw too that one could not pass from one house to another of that great city and the other cities that were built on the water except over wooden drawbridges or by canoe. We saw cues and shrines in these cities that looked like gleaming white towers and castles: a marvelous sight. All the houses had flat roofs, and on the causeways were other small towers and shrines built like fortresses.

Having examined and considered all that we had seen, we turned back to the great market and the swarm of people buying and selling. The mere murmur of their voices talking was loud enough to be heard more than three miles away. Some of our soldiers who had been in many parts of the world, in Constantinople, in Rome, and all over Italy, said that they had never seen a market so well laid out, so large, so orderly, and so full of people.
Bernal Díaz Del Castillo. The Conquest of New Spain, trans. J.M. Cohen. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965.

The Aztec conquered many people in the surrounding areas and required tribute in the form of humans for sacrifice from those conquered peoples. The Aztec religion was centered around human sacrifice and as many as 50,000 sacrifices occurred a year in Tenochtitlan as part of religious worship.

When not engaged in war or sacrifice, Aztec nobles sometimes composed poetry. Spanish conquerors wrote down some of the poems in the original language (using the Roman alphabet used in Europe), and so the thoughts of the Aztecs are preserved for historians today. Their poems speak of the temporary, fragile nature of life and the joys of fighting and killing in battle:

Let not my soul dread that open field; I earnestly desire the beginning of the slaughter, may thy soul long for the murderous strife.

O you who are there in the battle, I earnestly desire the beginning of the slaughter, may thy soul long for the murderous strife.

The cloud rises upward, rising into the blue sky of the Giver of Life; there blossom forth prowess and daring, there, in the battle field, come the children to maturity.

Let us rejoice, dear friends, and may ye rejoice, O children, within the open field, and going forth to it, let us revel amid the shield-flowers of the battle.
Daniel G. Brinton Ancient Nahuatl Poetry.Brinton's Library of Aboriginal American Literature. Number VII Philadelphia: D.G. Brinton 1889, Song XVI.

The Aztec bloodthirst seen here would eventually help lead to the downfall of their civilization, as the people conquered by the Aztec sought their revenge. Neighboring peoples quickly joined forces with the Spanish invaders to conquer Tenochtitlan in 1521 CE.


Inca

At the time of Christopher Columbus's first voyage in 1492, the Aztec empire was not the largest in the Americas. In South America the Inca empire controlled about 380,000 square miles (984,000 square kilometers), an area larger than any European state at the time or any European state today.

As did the Persians in Mesopotamia, the Inca carved out a huge empire built from conquered smaller states in a short period, from 1400 to 1531 CE. Their empire stretched more than 2,500 miles north to south, and from the high Andes and the edge of the Amazon in the East to the Pacific coast in the West.

Also like the Persians and the Romans, the Inca empire depended upon an extensive network of roads, high mountain paths, and bridges. The Inca had over 4,000 miles of roads, one of the largest networks of any in the ancient world. Their roads reached as high as 16,500 feet (5 kilometers), linking the Inca capital in Cuzco in Peru to the provinces, and to high mountain ritual centers, such as Machu Picchu.


The Incan city of Machu Picchu, a large city in modern Peru abandoned shortly after the Spanish conquest in the 1500s and only brought to the attention of archaeologists and the Western world in 1911.

The Inca developed a unique form of farming from the rugged mountain terrain. They built terraces into hillsides and used irrigation systems to make fields to grow crops. They grew potatoes, yams, and quinoa, a protein-rich grain. After crops were harvested, the government collected the food and divided it among the people. The Emperor was respected as a god on Earth and had complete control over the Incan people. The state owned, and therefore the emperor controlled, all of the land in the empire and the crops that grew on it. In this way, the government was able to control people better and present the harvest as their gift, rather than the product of farmers' hard work.

The engineering and architectural accomplishments of the Inca are impressive, especially since they did not use the wheel and all transport was done by foot or by llama. Furthermore, there is little evidence that they developed a writing system. Accounts were kept using knots in ropes, and some scholars have argued that this "knot-language" was capable of more complex expressions than numbers, but the evidence is tantalizingly scarce.

The leader of the Incan gods was Viracocha, but the Incans mostly worshipped his servant, the sun god Inti. Priests offered food, animals, and sometimes humans as sacrifices to the gods. However, the Inca did not sacrifice humans on the scale that the Aztec did.

The "top-down" hierarchical system of the Inca probably contributed to the Spanish conquest beginning in 1531 CE. The Spanish simply replaced the central king with their own people, and then used the Inca administrative system and roads to conquer and control the empire. Though the Inca struggled against the Spanish, they did not have the resources or technology to successfully fight the invaders.

Today, the Inca language, Quechua, is spoken by almost 10 million people from Columbia to Chile, and it is therefore the most widely spoken Native American language. It is an official language in Bolivia and Peru, where almost half of the population is ethnically Inca.


North American Cultures

While large, centralized civilizations flourished in Central and South America, most of the pre-Columbian societies in North America were smaller.

North America is a continent with very diverse climates. To the far north, permanent glaciers cover the land and very little plant life grows. In the Eastern Woodlands, the Great Plains, and the Pacific Coast regions, however, milder temperatures allow bountiful harvests of diverse crops. North American cultures became as different and diverse as the North American climate.

In the Arctic region, extremely cold temperatures keep the land frozen all year round. As a result, farming was impossible, and native people of the Arctic region hunted and fished for food instead of developing agriculture. Whales, seals, sea lions, salmon, and waterbirds were hunted and used for their meat, skins, and oils. Arctic people lived in small family groups and built houses out of ice, stone, driftwood, and even whalebone.

Milder weather and plentiful rainfall in the Pacific coast region led to more stable, abundant cultures. The native peoples' diets were made up of hunted and trapped deer and small forest animals, gathered nuts and berries, and caught salmon and shellfish. Some groups of people built canoes from redwood trees which extended trade with other groups along the Pacific coast. The wealthiest families would display their status by giving away gifts at celebratory gatherings called potlatches.


The Buffalo were the primary prey of people of the Great Plains.

Due to the dry climate of the Southwestern region, people there developed advanced farming techniques, and the societies grew in ways similar to Mesoamerican societies.
Maize, beans, and squash grew from their irrigated fields. They built dwellings several stories high out of adobe, or sun-dried brick. The people lived in self-contained groups of houses called pueblos, and each pueblo had its own government and elected officials, often with a religious leader at its head. This religious leader would ensure that the pueblo people lived in harmony with nature.

In the northwest corner of New Mexico, near the borders of Arizona, Colorado, and Utah, lies Chaco Canyon. This canyon is the site of some of the most impressive ruins in the Southwest, pueblos built by the Anasazi, the ancestors of contemporary Pueblo Indians living in the area today. From 100 until 1300 CE, various large pueblo towns in the canyon were inhabited. The largest town, essentially one huge apartment building, was Pueblo Bonito, which held as much as 1,000 people. It was the largest apartment building in North America until the 1800s. In the 1100s and again in the 1300s, population declined and many towns were abandoned, for unknown reasons. When European explorers first surveyed the canyon in the 1800s, it had been long abandoned.

The vast, flat stretch of grasslands between the Rocky Mountains and the Mississippi River is called the Great Plains. The people of this area combined hunting, farming, and fishing. They most often set up villages near rivers to ensure a fresh water supply, which helped irrigate farms and soften the soil, making it easier to plow. While women did most of the farming, men went out to hunt buffalo, which they used for their meat and skins. The skins were then cured to make clothes or moveable tents called teepees.

The Eastern Woodlands, which amble from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico, had a much greater variety of game along with much more easily farmable land. The people there hunted deer, turkeys, squirrels, and other small animals. They grew beans, squash, maize, and tobacco and made clothes out of deerskin and tools out of animal bones. Many people in the Eastern Woodlands region lived in bark-covered longhouses, which were well suited both for cold winters and warm, humid summers. The societies in both the Northwest and the Eastern Woodlands were not generally divided into social castes like the large-scale civilizations of the Southwest or of Mesoamerica.

The Mississippi Valley was and still is an excellent area to cultivate maize. In the 600s CE, a farming people settled at Cahokia in Illinois, in the plains across the Mississippi from modern St. Louis. Between 900 and 1250 CE, this site became the largest urban center north of Mexico. In fact, it may have had as many as 30,000 inhabitants. Long after it was abandoned, Cahokia retained this title until it was surpassed by Philadelphia in the early 1800s.


The main mound of Cahokia outside of St. Louis in Illinois.

Today, the ruins of Cahokia have about 100 mounds, including a central pyramid that once stood 98 feet high (30 meters). That height is the equivalent of a ten-story building, and is the tallest pre-Columbian structure north of Mexico. In some of the mounds, archaeologists discovered skeletons with rich grave gifts (clearly leaders of a hierarchy) together with skeletons missing hands or heads (probably people killed or sacrificed at the chief or king's death). The site was abandoned sometime between 1200 and 1400 CE. Today the center of Cahokia is a park with about 70 mounds, but the other mounds and outlying areas are gradually being destroyed to make way for suburban subdivisions, malls, and highways.

Similar but smaller mound communities have been excavated from Illinois to Alabama. Scholars debate to what extent the civilizations in Mesoamerica influenced these communities and the Pueblo communities in the Southwest. The entire mound-building culture was in decline at the time of the arrival of Europeans in the 1500s and 1600s. The root causes for this collapse are debated. Because later mound communities are more heavily fortified, many scholars believe that warfare, either between the mound-builders themselves or with surrounding nomadic tribes, was probably a major factor. Diseases brought by Europeans finished off these urban cultures.

In the late 16th century, five groups of Native Americans in the Eastern Woodlands came together to form the Iroquois League. The Iroquois League was a very well organized, democratic organization whose members worked together to advance their common interests in both politics and war. A council of chiefs called sachems resolved disputes among the members of the Iroquois League. When European settlers eventually tried to move west into Native American lands, it fell to the League to resist their advances. Their lack of success in that endeavor will be discussed in the course World History Since 1815.


Lesson Review

Pre-Columbian American cultures were extremely varied, and also very adaptive. The bow and arrow, today a pop-culture emblem of Native American people, only became a dominant weapon around 1000. Horses only became available in the Americas after they escaped from Europeans in the 1500s. Organized in thousands of communities, as nomadic hunters, peaceful farmers, or anything in between, Native American people did not have one philosophy, one point of view, or one way of life, but rather thousands.

Today, a shared unpleasant history and continued resistance to governments dominated by European Americans unites the Native American experience as never before. Tribes from Alaska, Ontario, Mexico, Louisiana, Brazil, and Rhode Island have similar experiences in attempting to preserve their traditions, languages, and rights from indifferent governments and mass culture.