The Americans Inca Mayan and Aztec Culture the Americans Cultural Art

Learning Objectives

By the end of this section, you will exist able to:

• Locate on a map the major American civilizations before the arrival of the Castilian
• Discuss the cultural achievements of these civilizations
• Discuss the differences and similarities between lifestyles, religious practices, and customs among the native peoples

(credit: modification of work by Architect of the Capitol)

Betwixt 9 and fifteen thousand years agone, some scholars believe that a country bridge existed between Asia and North America that we now call Beringia. The first inhabitants of what would exist named the Americas migrated across this bridge in search of food. When the glaciers melted, water engulfed Beringia, and the Bering Strait was formed. After settlers came by boat across the narrow strait. (The fact that Asians and American Indians share genetic markers on a Y chromosome lends credibility to this migration theory.) Continually moving southward, the settlers eventually populated both North and Southward America, creating unique cultures that ranged from the highly complex and urban Aztec civilization in what is now Mexico Metropolis to the woodland tribes of eastern North America. Contempo inquiry forth the w coast of South America suggests that migrant populations may have traveled down this coast by water equally well as by land.

Researchers believe that about ten thousand years agone, humans also began the domestication of plants and animals, calculation agriculture equally a means of sustenance to hunting and gathering techniques. With this agronomical revolution, and the more than abundant and reliable food supplies information technology brought, populations grew and people were able to develop a more settled style of life, building permanent settlements. Nowhere in the Americas was this more obvious than in Mesoamerica.

This map shows the extent of the major civilizations of the Western Hemisphere. In South America, early civilizations developed forth the coast considering the loftier Andes and the inhospitable Amazon Basin fabricated the interior of the continent less favorable for settlement.

THE Start AMERICANS: THE OLMEC

Mesoamerica is the geographic area stretching from north of Panama upward to the desert of central Mexico. Although marked by nifty topographic, linguistic, and cultural diversity, this region cradled a number of civilizations with like characteristics. Mesoamericans were polytheistic; their gods possessed both male and female traits and demanded claret sacrifices of enemies taken in battle or ritual bloodletting. Corn, or maize, domesticated by 5000 BCE, formed the basis of their diet. They developed a mathematical arrangement, built huge edifices, and devised a calendar that accurately predicted eclipses and solstices and that priest-astronomers used to direct the planting and harvesting of crops. Virtually important for our knowledge of these peoples, they created the only known written language in the Western Hemisphere; researchers have made much progress in interpreting the inscriptions on their temples and pyramids. Though the surface area had no overarching political structure, trade over long distances helped diffuse civilisation. Weapons made of obsidian, jewelry crafted from jade, feathers woven into wearable and ornaments, and cacao beans that were whipped into a chocolate beverage formed the basis of commerce. The female parent of Mesoamerican cultures was the Olmec civilisation.

Flourishing along the hot Gulf Coast of Mexico from about 1200 to almost 400 BCE, the Olmec produced a number of major works of art, architecture, pottery, and sculpture. Most recognizable are their behemothic head sculptures and the pyramid in La Venta. The Olmec built aqueducts to ship water into their cities and irrigate their fields. They grew maize, squash, beans, and tomatoes. They also bred small domesticated dogs which, along with fish, provided their protein. Although no one knows what happened to the Olmec after well-nigh 400 BCE, in office because the jungle reclaimed many of their cities, their culture was the base upon which the Maya and the Aztec built. It was the Olmec who worshipped a rain god, a maize god, and the feathered serpent and then important in the future pantheons of the Aztecs (who called him Quetzalcoatl) and the Maya (to whom he was Kukulkan). The Olmec also developed a organisation of trade throughout Mesoamerica, giving rise to an aristocracy form.

The Olmec carved heads from behemothic boulders that ranged from iv to eleven anxiety in height and could weigh upward to fifty tons. All these figures have apartment noses, slightly crossed eyes, and big lips. These physical features can be seen today in some of the peoples ethnic to the area.

THE MAYA

After the decline of the Olmec, a city rose in the fertile central highlands of Mesoamerica. One of the largest population centers in pre-Columbian America and home to more 100,000 people at its summit in about 500 CE, Teotihuacan was located about thirty miles northeast of modern Mexico City. The ethnicity of this settlement'south inhabitants is debated; some scholars believe it was a multiethnic city. Big-calibration agriculture and the resultant abundance of food allowed time for people to develop special trades and skills other than farming. Builders constructed over twenty-two hundred apartment compounds for multiple families, as well as more a hundred temples. Among these were the Pyramid of the Sun (which is two hundred anxiety high) and the Pyramid of the Moon (one hundred and fifty feet high). About the Temple of the Feathered Serpent, graves have been uncovered that advise humans were sacrificed for religious purposes. The city was likewise the center for trade, which extended to settlements on Mesoamerica's Gulf Declension.

The Maya were ane Mesoamerican culture that had stiff ties to Teotihuacan. The Maya's architectural and mathematical contributions were pregnant. Flourishing from roughly 2000 BCE to 900 CE in what is now Mexico, Belize, Honduras, and Guatemala, the Maya perfected the calendar and written language the Olmec had begun. They devised a written mathematical system to tape crop yields and the size of the population, and to aid in trade. Surrounded by farms relying on primitive agriculture, they congenital the urban center-states of Copan, Tikal, and Chichen Itza along their major trade routes, likewise every bit temples, statues of gods, pyramids, and astronomical observatories. However, because of poor soil and a drought that lasted almost two centuries, their civilization declined past about 900 CE and they abandoned their big population centers.

The Castilian constitute petty organized resistance amid the weakened Maya upon their arrival in the 1520s. However, they did find Mayan history, in the course of glyphs, or pictures representing words, recorded in folding books chosen codices (the singular is codex). In 1562, Bishop Diego de Landa, who feared the converted natives had reverted to their traditional religious practices, collected and burned every codex he could discover. Today but a few survive.

El Castillo, located at Chichen Itza in the eastern Yucatán peninsula, served every bit a temple for the god Kukulkan. Each side contains 90-one steps to the top. When counting the top platform, the total number of stairs is 3 hundred and 60-five, the number of days in a year. (credit: Ken Thomas)

Visit the University of Arizona Library Special Collections to view facsimiles and descriptions of 2 of the four surviving Mayan codices.

THE AZTEC

When the Spaniard Hernán Cortés arrived on the declension of United mexican states in the sixteenth century, at the site of nowadays-day Veracruz, he soon heard of a great city ruled by an emperor named Moctezuma. This city was tremendously wealthy—filled with aureate—and took in tribute from surrounding tribes. The riches and complexity Cortés found when he arrived at that city, known as Tenochtitlán, were far beyond anything he or his men had always seen.

Co-ordinate to legend, a warlike people called the Aztec (as well known every bit the Mexica) had left a city chosen Aztlán and traveled south to the site of nowadays-mean solar day Mexico City. In 1325, they began construction of Tenochtitlán on an isle in Lake Texcoco. Past 1519, when Cortés arrived, this settlement contained upwards of 200,000 inhabitants and was certainly the largest urban center in the Western Hemisphere at that time and probably larger than any European city. One of Cortés'due south soldiers, Bernal Díaz del Castillo, recorded his impressions upon beginning seeing it: "When we saw so many cities and villages congenital in the water and other great towns on dry land we were amazed and said it was like the enchantments . . . on account of the keen towers and cues and buildings rise from the h2o, and all built of masonry. And some of our soldiers fifty-fifty asked whether the things that we saw were non a dream? . . . I exercise not know how to describe it, seeing things as we did that had never been heard of or seen before, not even dreamed about."

In this illustration, an Aztec priest cuts out the beating heart of a sacrificial victim before throwing the body down from the temple. Aztec belief centered on supplying the gods with human blood—the ultimate sacrifice—to go on them strong and well.

Unlike the dirty, fetid cities of Europe at the time, Tenochtitlán was well planned, clean, and orderly. The metropolis had neighborhoods for specific occupations, a trash collection system, markets, two aqueducts bringing in fresh h2o, and public buildings and temples. Unlike the Spanish, Aztecs bathed daily, and wealthy homes might even incorporate a steam bath. A labor force of slaves from subjugated neighboring tribes had built the fabulous city and the three causeways that connected it to the mainland. To farm, the Aztec constructed barges made of reeds and filled them with fertile soil. Lake water constantly irrigated these chinampas , or "floating gardens," which are all the same in employ and tin can be seen today in Xochimilco, a district of Mexico City.

Each god in the Aztec pantheon represented and ruled an aspect of the natural world, such as the heavens, farming, rain, fertility, sacrifice, and combat. A ruling class of warrior nobles and priests performed ritual human cede daily to sustain the sunday on its long journey beyond the sky, to appease or feed the gods, and to stimulate agricultural production. The sacrificial anniversary included cutting open up the chest of a criminal or captured warrior with an obsidian knife and removing the yet-beating centre.

This rendering of the Aztec isle city of Tenochtitlán depicts the causeways that connected the central metropolis to the surrounding state. Envoys from surrounding tribes brought tribute to the Emperor.

Explore Aztec-History.com to learn more than about the Aztec creation story.

The Aztec Predict the Coming of the Spanish

The following is an excerpt from the sixteenth-century Florentine Codex of the writings of Fray Bernardino de Sahagun, a priest and early chronicler of Aztec history. When an former human from Xochimilco first saw the Castilian in Veracruz, he recounted an earlier dream to Moctezuma, the ruler of the Aztecs.

Said Quzatli to the sovereign, "Oh mighty lord, if considering I tell y'all the truth I am to dice, however I am here in your presence and yous may practice what you wish to me!" He narrated that mounted men would come to this land in a great wooden house [ships] this structure was to lodge many men, serving them every bit a home; within they would eat and sleep. On the surface of this business firm they would melt their nutrient, walk and play as if they were on firm land. They were to exist white, bearded men, dressed in different colors and on their heads they would wear round coverings.

Ten years before the arrival of the Spanish, Moctezuma received several omens which at the time he could not translate. A fiery object appeared in the dark sky, a spontaneous fire bankrupt out in a religious temple and could not exist extinguished with water, a h2o spout appeared in Lake Texcoco, and a woman could be heard wailing, "O my children we are about to go forever." Moctezuma also had dreams and premonitions of impending disaster. These foretellings were recorded afterward the Aztecs' devastation. They exercise, notwithstanding, give united states of america insight into the importance placed upon signs and omens in the pre-Columbian world.

THE INCA

In Southward America, the well-nigh highly developed and complex society was that of the Inca, whose name ways "lord" or "ruler" in the Andean linguistic communication chosen Quechua. At its height in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the Inca Empire, located on the Pacific coast and straddling the Andes Mountains, extended some 20-five hundred miles. It stretched from modern-twenty-four hour period Colombia in the n to Chile in the south and included cities built at an distance of xiv,000 feet in a higher place bounding main level. Its route system, kept free of debris and repaired past workers stationed at varying intervals, rivaled that of the Romans and efficiently connected the sprawling empire. The Inca, similar all other pre-Columbian societies, did not use axle-mounted wheels for transportation. They built stepped roads to ascend and descend the steep slopes of the Andes; these would have been impractical for wheeled vehicles but worked well for pedestrians. These roads enabled the rapid move of the highly trained Incan army. Also similar the Romans, the Inca were effective administrators. Runners called chasquis traversed the roads in a continuous relay organization, ensuring quick communication over long distances. The Inca had no system of writing, nonetheless. They communicated and kept records using a system of colored strings and knots called the quipu .

The Inca had no written language. Instead, they communicated and kept records by means of a arrangement of knots and colored strings called the quipu. Each of these knots and strings possessed a singled-out pregnant intelligible to those educated in their significance.

The Inca people worshipped their lord who, as a member of an elite ruling class, had absolute authority over every aspect of life. Much like feudal lords in Europe at the fourth dimension, the ruling class lived off the labor of the peasants, collecting vast wealth that accompanied them every bit they went, mummified, into the side by side life. The Inca farmed corn, beans, squash, quinoa (a grain cultivated for its seeds), and the ethnic potato on terraced state they hacked from the steep mountains. Peasants received only one-third of their crops for themselves. The Inca ruler required a tertiary, and a third was set aside in a kind of welfare system for those unable to work. Huge storehouses were filled with food for times of need. Each peasant besides worked for the Inca ruler a number of days per month on public works projects, a requirement known every bit the mita . For instance, peasants constructed rope bridges made of grass to span the mountains above fast-flowing icy rivers. In render, the lord provided laws, protection, and relief in times of dearth.

The Inca worshipped the sun god Inti and called gold the "sweat" of the lord's day. Different the Maya and the Aztecs, they rarely practiced human sacrifice and usually offered the gods food, article of clothing, and coca leaves. In times of dire emergency, even so, such equally in the aftermath of earthquakes, volcanoes, or ingather failure, they resorted to sacrificing prisoners. The ultimate sacrifice was children, who were specially selected and well fed. The Inca believed these children would immediately get to a much amend afterlife.

In 1911, the American historian Hiram Bingham uncovered the lost Incan metropolis of Machu Picchu. Located about 50 miles northwest of Cusco, Peru, at an altitude of about 8,000 feet, the city had been built in 1450 and inexplicably abandoned roughly a hundred years afterward. Scholars believe the metropolis was used for religious ceremonial purposes and housed the priesthood. The architectural beauty of this city is unrivaled. Using only the strength of human labor and no machines, the Inca synthetic walls and buildings of polished stones, some weighing over fifty tons, that were fitted together perfectly without the utilise of mortar. In 1983, UNESCO designated the ruined city a World Heritage Site.

Located in today's Peru at an altitude of nearly 8,000 feet, Machu Picchu was a ceremonial Incan city built well-nigh 1450 CE.

Browse the British Museum'southward World Cultures drove to see more than examples and descriptions of Incan (too as Aztec, Mayan, and North American Indian) art.

North AMERICAN INDIANS

With few exceptions, the Due north American native cultures were much more than widely dispersed than the Mayan, Aztec, and Incan societies, and did non take their population size or organized social structures. Although the cultivation of corn had made its way north, many Indians all the same practiced hunting and gathering. Horses, first introduced past the Spanish, allowed the Plains Indians to more easily follow and hunt the huge herds of bison. A few societies had evolved into relatively complex forms, but they were already in decline at the time of Christopher Columbus's arrival.

In the southwestern part of today's United states dwelled several groups we collectively call the Pueblo. The Spanish first gave them this name, which means "town" or "village," because they lived in towns or villages of permanent rock-and-mud buildings with thatched roofs. Like present-day apartment houses, these buildings had multiple stories, each with multiple rooms. The three master groups of the Pueblo people were the Mogollon, Hohokam, and Anasazi.

The Mogollon thrived in the Mimbres Valley (New Mexico) from about 150 BCE to 1450 CE. They developed a distinctive artistic style for painting bowls with finely fatigued geometric figures and wildlife, specially birds, in black on a white groundwork. Outset about 600 CE, the Hohokam built an extensive irrigation organization of canals to irrigate the desert and abound fields of corn, beans, and squash. By 1300, their ingather yields were supporting the well-nigh highly populated settlements in the southwest. The Hohokam busy pottery with a red-on-buff blueprint and made jewelry of turquoise. In the high desert of New Mexico, the Anasazi, whose name means "ancient enemy" or "ancient ones," carved homes from steep cliffs accessed by ladders or ropes that could be pulled in at night or in case of enemy attack.

To admission their homes, the cliff-dwelling Anasazi used ropes or ladders that could be pulled in at nighttime for safe. These pueblos may be viewed today in Canyon de Chelly National Monument (above) in Arizona and Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado.

Roads extending some 180 miles continued the Pueblos' smaller urban centers to each other and to Chaco Canyon, which past 1050 CE had become the administrative, religious, and cultural center of their civilization. A century afterward, nonetheless, probably because of drought, the Pueblo peoples abased their cities. Their present-twenty-four hours descendants include the Hopi and Zuni tribes.

The Indian groups who lived in the present-solar day Ohio River Valley and accomplished their cultural noon from the first century CE to 400 CE are collectively known as the Hopewell culture. Their settlements, unlike those of the southwest, were pocket-size hamlets. They lived in wattle-and-daub houses (fabricated from woven lattice branches "daubed" with wet mud, dirt, or sand and straw) and skilful agronomics, which they supplemented by hunting and fishing. Utilizing waterways, they developed trade routes stretching from Canada to Louisiana, where they exchanged appurtenances with other tribes and negotiated in many different languages. From the coast they received shells; from Canada, copper; and from the Rocky Mountains, obsidian. With these materials they created necklaces, woven mats, and exquisite carvings. What remains of their culture today are huge burial mounds and earthworks. Many of the mounds that were opened by archaeologists independent artworks and other goods that betoken their society was socially stratified.

Perhaps the largest ethnic cultural and population heart in Northward America was located along the Mississippi River most nowadays-24-hour interval St. Louis. At its superlative in most 1100 CE, this v-square-mile city, now called Cahokia, was home to more ten thousand residents; tens of thousands more than lived on farms surrounding the urban centre. The city also contained i hundred and xx earthen mounds or pyramids, each dominating a particular neighborhood and on each of which lived a leader who exercised authority over the surrounding surface area. The largest mound covered 15 acres. Cahokia was the hub of political and trading activities along the Mississippi River. After 1300 CE, however, this civilization declined—possibly considering the surface area became unable to back up the big population.

INDIANS OF THE EASTERN WOODLAND

Encouraged by the wealth found past the Spanish in the settled civilizations to the due south, fifteenth- and sixteenth-century English language, Dutch, and French explorers expected to detect the same in North America. What they constitute instead were small, disparate communities, many already ravaged by European diseases brought by the Spanish and transmitted among the natives. Rather than golden and silver, there was an affluence of land, and the timber and fur that land could produce.

The Indians living eastward of the Mississippi did non construct the large and circuitous societies of those to the due west. Because they lived in small autonomous clans or tribal units, each group adapted to the specific environs in which information technology lived. These groups were by no means unified, and warfare among tribes was common as they sought to increment their hunting and angling areas. Nevertheless, these tribes shared some mutual traits. A chief or group of tribal elders made decisions, and although the main was male, unremarkably the women selected and counseled him. Gender roles were not as fixed as they were in the patriarchal societies of Europe, Mesoamerica, and Southward America.

This map indicates the locations of the three Pueblo cultures the major Eastern Woodland Indian tribes, and the tribes of the Southeast, as well as the location of the ancient city of Cahokia.

Women typically cultivated corn, beans, and squash and harvested nuts and berries, while men hunted, fished, and provided protection. But both took responsibility for raising children, and most major Indian societies in the eastward were matriarchal. In tribes such as the Iroquois, Lenape, Muscogee, and Cherokee, women had both power and influence. They counseled the chief and passed on the traditions of the tribe. This matriarchy changed dramatically with the coming of the Europeans, who introduced, sometimes forcibly, their ain customs and traditions to the natives.

Clashing behavior about land ownership and employ of the environment would exist the greatest surface area of conflict with Europeans. Although tribes often claimed the right to certain hunting grounds—usually identified past some geographical landmark—Indians did not do, or in general fifty-fifty accept the concept of, individual ownership of state. There were tribal hunting grounds, usually identified by some geographical landmark, but there was no individual ownership of land. A person'southward possessions included simply what he or she had made, such as tools or weapons. The European Christian worldview, on the other paw, viewed land as the source of wealth. According to the Christian Bible, God created humanity in his own image with the command to apply and subdue the residual of creation, which included not only land, but likewise all animal life. Upon their inflow in North America, Europeans found no fences, no signs designating ownership. Land, and the game that populated it, they believed, were in that location for the taking.

Section Summary

Bang-up civilizations had risen and fallen in the Americas before the inflow of the Europeans. In Due north America, the complex Pueblo societies including the Mogollon, Hohokam, and Anasazi as well every bit the metropolis at Cahokia had peaked and were largely memories. The Eastern Woodland peoples were thriving, simply they were shortly overwhelmed every bit the number of English, French, and Dutch settlers increased.

Mesoamerica and South America had besides witnessed the ascent and fall of cultures. The in one case-mighty Mayan population centers were largely empty. In 1492, however, the Aztecs in United mexican states City were at their peak. Subjugating surrounding tribes and requiring tribute of both humans for sacrifice and goods for consumption, the island urban center of Tenochtitlán was the hub of an ever-widening commercial eye and the equal of whatsoever large European urban center until Cortés destroyed information technology. Further south in Republic of peru, the Inca linked one of the largest empires in history through the use of roads and disciplined armies. Without the use of the wheel, they cutting and fashioned stone to build Machu Picchu high in the Andes before abandoning the urban center for unknown reasons. Thus, depending on what part of the New World they explored, the Europeans encountered peoples that diverged widely in their cultures, traditions, and numbers.

Review Question

1. What were the major differences between the societies of the Aztec, Inca, and Maya and the Indians of North America?

Answer to Review Question

1. North American Indians were fewer in number, more than widely dispersed, and did not have the population size or organized social structures of the Maya, Aztec, or Inca societies. The Eastern Woodland peoples, in particular, lived in pocket-size clan groups and adapted to their atypical environments. Some Due north American Indians lived past hunting and gathering rather than cultivating crops.

Glossary

Beringiaan ancient land bridge linking Asia and Due north America

chasquis Incan relay runners used to send messages over great distances

chinampas floating Aztec gardens consisting of a big barge woven from reeds, filled with dirt and floating on the h2o, assuasive for irrigation

matriarchy a order in which women have political ability

mita the Incan labor tax, with each family donating time and piece of work to communal projects

quipu an ancient Incan device for recording information, consisting of variously colored threads knotted in dissimilar means

activation free energythe corporeality of initial energy necessary for reactions to occur

matriarchy a order in which women take political power

chinampas floating Aztec gardens consisting of a large barge woven from reeds, filled with dirt and floating on the h2o, allowing for irrigation

matriarchy a society in which women have political power

Share this post