Mesoamerica

History

‘Middle America’
High School:
Rivers nurture. Rivers inspire growth and prosperity. On broad sweeping banks, secured by annual crop feeding floods, civilizations were born. Disparate hunter-gatherers congregated in close proximity along expansive banks, morphing into sedentary villages; these were the first foundations of empires. Sumer can hardly be spoken of without also naming Tigris and Euphrates in the same sentence; proud Egypt-of-the-pyramids revered the Nile; India’s first inklings of promise bloomed upon the Indus and Ganges; and ancient China retains its prosperity in the ripples of the Yangtze and Yellow.
Not so, however, in Mesoamerica, where powerful civilizations emerged independently of complete dependence upon a single waterway. Instead, seasonal rains collected in above-ground reservoirs more commonly provided the necessary water supply. Drought, though, could yield cataclysmic results. This has led some anthropologists to assume that such natural disasters, combined with internal unrest generated by the lack of water, led to the natural demise of Mesoamerica’s greatest cultures. The classical Maya, for example, were highly sophisticated mathematicians and astronomers. Their cities cluttered the Yucatan of Mexico and the highlands and lowlands of Guatemala, but eventually succumbed to nature’s indifference, over two hundred years, at the end of the first millennia CE. “The Maya did not survive in 95 percent of the cities that depended on surface reservoirs for their water supply,” Richard B. Gill asserts, though his claims are not universally recognized. Nevertheless, drought and war is a killer combination.
To apply a comparison from European antiquity to Mesoamerica, the endless wars between the Greek city-states of the fifth and fourth centuries BCE led to a severe decline born of mutual exhaustion. Late Classical era Maya cities suffered similar problems; according to some, “the political landscape of the Classic Maya resembles many in the Old World...where a sophisticated and widely shared culture flourished amid perpetual division and conflict.” Mayan unity did not exist as cities partnered with one another against their neighbors, ushering in a cyclical pattern of rise and fall, which eventually led to a complete decline and eclipse of the once-prosperous Maya. Military conflict between neighbors was characteristic of Mesoamerica, just like anywhere else in the world. A dominant power emerged through war, built an empire, lorded it over the defeated, and collapsed when someone bigger and tougher came along.
Military operations depended upon the weather. Annual rains provided for crops, but, if the male population was gone from the fields during harvest time, food scarcity could make for a very poor winter. As such, Mesoamerican armies operated based upon their ability to feed themselves and how far and fast they could travel on foot. This made long-distance, prolonged campaigning unfeasible. These restraints limited military expansion outside one's immediate geographical homeland, and continued to plague Mesoamerican armies from the time of the Olmecs, in the two millennia before Christ, to the Spanish conquests of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries CE. Even so, beginning with the Olmecs, conquests - and the empires born of them - began to transform Mesoamerica from a land of disparate groups into a collection of culturally connected people. Common religious beliefs, language, and mannerisms spread outward from the power center, which at various times included the Olmecs, Toltecs, Maya, Tepanecs, and Aztec.
Intellectually, Mesoamerican civilizations made great strides, independent of the rest of the world. Ask yourself: what is the value of zero? Mathematician Tobias Dantzig called its discovery, “one of the greatest single achievements of the human race.” The Maya utilized it as a placeholder within their vigesimal (a numerical) system, and as a baseline for their calendars. This occurred almost simultaneously with Indian mathematicians’ use of it as a number, as early as the fourth century CE. Just who discovered zero is debated, and quite frankly, doesn’t really matter, because different cultures were using it for different reasons. Cut off from Europe, Asia, Africa and the silk roads where diplomatic and trade links extended (from Rome to Beijing, and Indonesia to western Africa), the advances of Mesoamerican peoples in mathematics, astronomy, medicine, crop cultivation, architecture, city planning and construction, engineering, and so many other aspects of human improvement is staggering to behold.
When the Spanish arrived, they saw the lack of the horse, draft animals, and wheeled transport as signs of backwardness. Indicative of human progress in the old world, the lack thereof in Mesoamerica was made apparent by the sheer difficulty of the terrain. Why walking was the primary mode of transport came sharply into focus as Cortes’s forces traversed Mexico’s eastern lowlands into the mountains, bordering the heart of the Aztec realm. When the great cities of Tenochtitlan and its neighbors came into view, the Spanish sense of superiority vanished in a haze of wonderment, echoed elsewhere by participants in later campaigns against the Maya cities and the Inca. In all their campaigns on the American mainland, Spanish armies relied heavily upon Mesoamerican warriors as allies; without them, Spain would not have forged an empire stretching from modern Texas to the borders of Chile.
Mesoamerican civilizations were highly sophisticated, enduring thousands of years of political, military, social, and artistic evolution, to produce an amazing display of distinctive, yet interconnected, nations, by the time of Columbus. Disease, war, and natural disasters ruined old realms, while paving way for the new. The arrival of the Europeans, however, proved disastrous for most; despite their common cultural values, they had no singular unity with which to drive off the invaders. Compounded by the influx of unknown diseases into the deepest parts of the continent, people who had never yet seen a Spaniard inadvertently perished by the diseases they brought with them. Civil Wars, rebellions, and internal grudges destroyed the rest.

Heart of the Americas
Mesoamerica encompasses everything from central Mexico to the borders of Panama. Millennia of human habitation have left this place rich in cultural heritage. Maya, Aztec, and ruins from earlier peoples dot the landscape, beautifully preserved for the tourist onslaught. These cities have awed and intimidated, for centuries after their fall from glory. Imagine what once was, and glean an inkling of Mesoamerica’s storied past! Isolated from the rest of the world, Mesoamerica developed unique systems of governance, religion, war, and learning. And yet, in many respects, these accomplishments are eerily similar to the realms of the old world. Great powers came and went, and culturally homogenous people warred and slaughtered one another for the honor and prestige of their cities, all while making enormous strides in mathematics, architecture, engineering, and calendrical systems.

As elsewhere, powerful civilizations emerged, connecting disparate groups through war and trade. In the case of Mesoamerica, these were the Olmecs, emerging to attain an empire stretching across the region, in the millennia before Christ. Military conquest was limited, due to the scarcity of food available for campaigning armies and the distances marching men could travel over prolonged periods. Olmec armies were first to utilize weapons for war and first to organize themselves for expansion through war, sowing the seeds for later peoples who came after them. The proliferation of Olmec ideas, architecture, religion, and learning gave Mesoamerican a common cultural heritage while maintaining certain distinctive characteristics among individual peoples.

The Olmec people thrived throughout the region, with nearly 18,000 citizens, until they met their abrupt and mysterious end. Whether by war or by famine, no one knows why this ancient civilization nearly vanished. All that can be known, is that their people disappeared without a record of their last days.

When Maya cities began to emerge, nearing the end of the Olmec period, they never achieved a singular unity, but rather acted much like Greek poleis - or cities - of the fifth and fourth centuries BCE. Storied cities, like Tikal and Calakmul, blossomed into major regional powers at the height of the classical Maya period (250-950 CE). Home to tens of thousands, these sprawling urban centers suffered from the intermittent warfare so common between Maya city-states. Military exhaustion, compounded by recurring droughts, ensured the decline of the Maya by the end of the tenth century; however, their achievements in transmitting the Olmec heritage and progressing forward on their own brought continuity to Mesoamerican learning. Chief among such learning was the mathematical use of zero in their numeric system and calendars.

The discovery of zero, mathematician Tobias Dantzig proclaimed, was, “one of the greatest single achievements of the human race.” Independent of the Babylonians or Indians, the Olmec and Maya seem to have used it as a placeholder and baseline for their calendars. Whether they were the first to use zero as zero is debatable, and really doesn’t matter, because they used it for a purpose different from Eurasia. Still, the fact that peoples isolated from one another by tens of thousands of miles began to make use of that core value of mathematics within a few centuries of one another, is extraordinary.

Six hundred years after Maya civilization fell from its highest pinnacle, newcomers from Europe showed up on the outskirts, completely unaware of what they’d sailed into, and not having any clear understanding of the vast complexities waiting for them in the interior. Spaniards brought the horse and wheeled transport to the Americas, where none had been before. Everyone walked or were carried on the shoulders of others, bearing their burdens by the strength of their backs. The lack of wheeled transport and horses, for men like Cortes and his troops (who came from a world where the horse and wheel had been in use for a long time), proved to them the backwardness of the people they encountered. But terrain which morphed so quickly from lowland, to mountain, to jungle, proved ideal ground for foot-born transport. When the great cities of the Mexican interior were reached, however, the Spaniards gaped as if in a daze. Elsewhere, whenever they sighted the abandoned cities of the Maya or the mountain carved palaces of the Inca, Spanish writers were unstinting in their praise.

Mesoamerica was old and scarred by the time of Cortes. Like elsewhere, it had seen great powers rise and fall, and newcomers take their place. The Spaniards were different only in that they came from outside the Mesoamerican sphere, bringing with them new diseases, for which there was no immunity. In numbers, they were small, but found willing allies in the plethora of Mesoamerican groups only too willing to deal a blow to their hated rivals and overlords - in this case, the Aztec of Tenochtitlan. Without Mesoamericans, Spanish conquistadors, which were few in number, would have been shattered.

‘Middle America’
In terms of geography, Mesoamerica is a region stretching from central Mexico to the border of Panama. Historically, it is home to some of the greatest civilizations ever - people whose cities rivaled those of Rome and China. Sharing a common cultural heritage, inherited from the Olmecs who ruled the region in the thousand years before Christ, the Mesoamerican peoples nevertheless remained distinct from one another, even in similar ethnic groups. For all their power and learning, Maya cities, for example, fought one another as often as Greek city-states, or the clans of Japan. This intermittent warfare led to exhaustion, weakening them, just as recurring natural disasters sent the Maya into a death spiral, from which they never fully recovered.
Even so, Maya mathematicians, priests, astronomers, and artists took what was gained from the Olmecs and integrated this knowledge into their own societies. The famous Maya calendars operated with zero as a baseline. Zero, one of the greatest discoveries ever made, was discovered by different peoples across the world, and used for different purposes within centuries of one another. Mayan civilization, the epicenter of Mesoamerica for over a thousand years, was isolated from Babylon or India, where zero was being introduced almost simultaneously. The fact that people separated by thousands of miles of ocean conceived this crucial mathematical value and began using it almost simultaneously, is nothing short of extraordinary.
The ruins of Mesoamerican cities populate the landscape, reminders of a glorious past, with their towering pyramids and carefully laid out cities. That they didn't use wheeled transport or have the horse inclined outsiders to think them backward. When the men of Spain showed up in the sixteenth century and saw no horse and no wheel (for them signs of cultural sophistication), they looked at the Mesoamericans as underdeveloped.
Food was only widely available during the summer months and after the harvest. A hungry army cannot advance far. Further, because Mesoamericans did not have wheeled transport or draft animals, they advanced on foot carrying their own supplies with them. Terrain alone will impede any forces' advance, and Mesoamerica is home to some of the most difficult terrain in the world.
These ‘backward’ thoughts vanished when the great cities of the Aztec Empire, the Maya, and the sprawling mountain cities of the Inca were seen for the first time. Still, for all their greatness, Mesoamerica succumbed to the Spanish, because there was no single united power. Aztec fought Tlaxcalans, Tarascans, and so on, enabling the Spanish to come and exploit these divisions to their own advantage. Diseases unknown to Mesoamerica killed off tens of thousands, further weakening the imperial Aztec and Tarascans. Common religious beliefs and cultural backgrounds do not breed unity; western Europe, for example, considered themselves the inheritors of Rome and they fought one another for centuries. And so it was with the people of Mesoamerica.

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Pyramids are an identifiable cultural link between Mesoamerican civilizations. Built across millennia by different people groups, they, nevertheless, share common design features, such as flat tops (boasting temples at the summit), and slopes, bisected by broad staircases, ascending skyward. Architectural characteristics aside, these masses of stone were temples to the divine, and integral pieces in Mesoamerican city-life, from the days of the Olmec, to the arrival of the Spanish. What can they tell us about the people - nay, the states - that built them, and do they provide evidence of common cultural links among pre-Columbian peoples? If so, what are they? For background, look here:

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Citations

Gill, Richardson B. The Great Maya Droughts: Water, Life , and Death. (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2001), 383; Mann, Charles C. 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus. Second Edition. (New York: Vintage Books, 2011), 27-29.
Simon Martin and Nikolai Grube, Chronicle of the Maya Kings and Queens: Deciphering the Dynasties of the Ancient Maya. (London: Thomas and Hudson, 2000), 21.
Hassig, Ross. War and Society in Ancient Mesoamerica. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 19 -23.
Dantzig, Tobias. Number, The Language of Science. (London: MacMillan, 1930), 13, 35; Mann. 1491, 22 -23; Native Mesoamerican Spirituality, ed. Miguel Leon-Portilla. (Mahwah: Paulist Press, 1980), 17.
Bernal Diaz del Castillo. The Conquest of New Spain, trans. J. M. Cohen. (New York: Penguin Books, 1962), 214 -215; Sancho, Pedro. An Account of the Conquest of Peru, trans.Philip Ainsworth Means. (New York: The Cortes Society, 1917), 153 -156.

7000 BC - 1550 AD

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