Main Points for
Chapter I: The First Peoples of the Americas
Coming to America:
1. Earliest migrations to America are thought to have taken place more than 35,000 yrs ago and continued until about 14,000 yrs ago.
2. Warming of earth separated the "new" world from the "old" world for about ten millennia. Which proved disastrous for the native Americans when the Europeans appeared on their shores.
“Subsistence Strategies and the Development of Agriculture”
1. Early Americans were hunter-gatherers that moved often based on seasons and the abundance of food.
2. Gradually, these early Americans started to plant seeds and carry these seeds with them to new places, but this was not a decided shift toward agriculture.
3. “The gradual extinction of mammoths, horses, and other large game after about 8000 B.C.E. gave them an extra incentive to find new sources of food (4).”
4. As early as 6500 B.C.E., “Mesoamerica had developed some of the earliest complex agricultural systems (4)”, and South America began developing agriculture by 5000 B.C.E.
5. People of coastal Peru gathered food from the ocean and about 4000 B.C.E. began including cultivated crops into their diets.
6. “But only after 2000 B.C.E., as they added maize to their list of crops, did more of their diets come from agriculture than from hunting, gathering, and fishing (5).”
7. “Elsewhere, hunting and gathering persisted even longer as the primary mode of subsistence, in some cases until well after the arrival of Europeans in the hemisphere (5).”
Sedentary Communities and Ceremonial Centers
· By the year 2000 BCE, many early Americans had begun to settle in one location due to cultivating enough food in one place.
· Sedentary communities led the way for labor that was dedicated to purposes other than survival, such as developing architecture.
· Many buildings were dedicated to some type of religion, with the earliest in Peru dating from 3000-2000 BCE.
· Other uses for labor began to appear by the second millennium, such as irrigation canals and agricultural terraces, different types of ceramics, and other artifacts.
How Historian's Understand:
Point 1- Historians uncover ancient mysteries by observing archaeological artifacts.
a) Understand the lives of past peoples.
Point 2- By using pictures and designs on walls and on pottery, historians learn early civilizations ways of life.
Point 3- Some others left detailed facts (pictures) and even some early forms of writing. With a written language, we can now understand the details of a past civilization.
a) Greeks and Romans
Point 4- The past can be lost.
a) Some people who could have left behind a piece of information may have been killed in conquests.
b) Spanish priests ordered destruction of writings and artifacts, believing they were a work of the devil.
c) Bad weather and looters have also stopped historic artifacts from being discovered.
Ceremonial Centers in Mexico and Peru:
1. Farmers now produced surpluses sufficient to enable many people to become
full-time construction workers, artisans, rulers, and ritual specialist. The
result was an increase in the building and use of ceremonial centers, which in
return was accompanied by remarkable advances in art and architecture.
2. Religious practices became more elaborate, and social divisions among people
of different occupation widened.
The Olmec: "Mother Culture" of Mexico?:
3. The Olmec were one of the first groups in Mesoamerica to develop large
ceremonial complexes. Fertile soil and abundant rainfall allowed farmers to
harvest maze and other crops twice a year, freeing others to build and embellish
temples.
4. They were also the first Mesoamerican people to carve bas-reliefs and
statues in the world. The facial features of each head are so distinctive that
historians theorize that they were actually portraits of specific individuals.
5. Because the Olmec showed many cultural traits that reappeared in later
civilizations in Mexico and Central America, scholars have often portrayed them
as the "mother culture" of Mexico.
-They were evidently among the first to play the Mesoamerican ball game.
6. They also had a rudimentary writing, in the form of glyphs using dots and
dashes. Although archaeologists have not succeeded in deciphering these
symbols, they were probably calendar notations.
7. Another very important cultural innovation that apparently developed in various parts of Mesoamerica during the later stages of the Olmec era was the tortilla.
Chavin de Huantar in Peru:
* Ceremonial site, located in Northern Peru at an altitude of more than 9,000 feet. It was established in the tenth century B.C.E.
* Chavin primarily served as a center of religious observation.
* It’s best known monument is the Lanzon, a 15-foot- high granite sculpture that combines human and feline features, perhaps reflecting the priests’ belief that they could transform themselves into jaguars.
* Religious observances at Chavin evidently employed hallucinogens, intoxicants, ritual cannibalism, and sacrificial offerings of llamas and guinea pigs.
* Material culture at Chavin suggests the importance of long-distance trade. Tropical crops such as manioc and peanuts, suggesting contact with the Amazon basin east of the Andes. Other items such as lapis lazuli from as far away as the Atacama Desert of northern Chile. Also large strombus shells from coastal Ecuador were used for religious ceremonies.
* Artisans at Chavin were well known for their expertise and innovation in textile design.
* After 200 B.C.E. the Chavin cult began to decline, perhaps because of widespread droughts.
* The two most important things to remember are: Religious ceremonial and trade. It was a commercial and ceremonial center.
Monte Alban:
1) Founded by Zapotec people in about 500 BCE; dominating the surrounding area for more than 1000 years.
2) At its height in the 6th century CE it was home to as many as 25000 people.
3) The city’s main ceremonial structures were on an artificially flattened mountain top.
a. A pyramid with an internal staircase leading to the top
b. Numerous sacrificial alters
c. A ball court
d. Palaces that housed priestly elite
4) Palacio de los Danzantes
a. Named for the hieroglyphic men assumed to be dancers
b. Later the pictures were believed to be prisoners; human sacrifice
c. Zapotec rulers standing on conquered territories suggesting military forces
5) Had Olmec influence or cultural kinship.
6) Declined in 600 CE when it lost access to merchandise coming from the great central Mexican City of Teotihuacan.
Teotihuacán
Teotihuacán or “the place of the gods”, as the Aztecs called it, was a city located in the Valley of Mexico, not too far from present day Mexico City.
Around 100 B.C.E., the population of Teotihuacán was 40,000. 600 years later, the cities population had grown to well over 100,000 and some say it even approach-ed 200,000, making it one of the largest cities in the world at that time. Some of the city’s population growth can be attributed to the forced relocation of other conquered tribes.
They traded with tribes in the present day southwestern United States and with tribes in Central America. They had a monopoly on obsidian, the sharpest material in the Americas at that time.
They were the first tribe to use a cotton body armor, which was believed to be 2 to 3 inches thick. The Aztec armies wore similar armor when they fought with the Spanish in the 16th century.
Teotihuacán began to lose its population by the sixth century c.e. and what was left of the city dispersed throughout central Mexico.
Maya Civilization in the Classic Era:
· One of the Maya’s greatest cultural achievements was the development of a true system of writing.
· The Maya could record the spoken word far more accurately than any other pre-Colombian civilization.
· Many Mayan writings record the genealogies of local ruling classes, and the Maya are the earliest Americans for whom we can identify specific individuals and exact dates.
· Mayan civilization had no single dominant center comparable to Teotihuacan or Monte Alban.
· Each separate Mayan polity had its ahau, or king, and nobility, and these upper classes lived in style.
· Scholars once thought that the Mayan city-states lived in relative harmony with one another, but the images on their monuments suggest otherwise.
· Most lowland Mayan communities had similar resource bases, so trade was not particularly important in their relations with one another.
· The Maya excelled in mathematics, using a system based on the units of 20.
· Mayan city-states suffered a devastating collapse beginning around 800 c.e.
· Numerous factors have been cited to explain the decline of the Classic Mayan sites.
Moche
1. Inhabited the river valleys along North Coast of Peru. Excellent engineers, building impressive public works, such as flat-topped pyramid mounds, fortresses, roads, and complex irrigation works. Expert metalworkers.
2. Impressive ceremonial structures - mausoleum for deceased rulers.
3. Skilled artists, producing ceramics, carvings, and textiles. Art showing humans going about daily activities, from domestic routines, detailed information about their societies.
4. Evidence of human sacrifice, know as warlike people.
Nazca
The Nazca flourished for several hundred years in five separate river valleys along the southern coast of Peru. They excelled in hydraulic engineering because their land was dry.
In the sixth century C.E. they constructed elaborate aqueducts to tap underground streams, some were used until the twentieth century.
The Nazca were best known for their geoglyps which are large designs of animals, people, and abstract shapes into the land. Some were as large as five miles in length and are still visible today. These were thought to be markings that pointed to sources of water.
The Nazca were expert artisans. Their textile productions, a combination of different fibers, yielded many shades of the same color and so did their pottery.
The Tiwanaku:
1) The Tiwanaku flourished between 100 and 1200 C.E. extending its influence to southern Peru, coastal Chile, and eastern Bolivia through trade and military conquest.
2) The Tiwanaku’s most imposing buildings were erected between 100 and 700 C.E. from these ceremonial centers were created. Soil that was dug up to form the moat was then used to create a cross shaped multi level platform, known as the shrine of Akapana.
3) One of its most impressive monuments was a 24 foot high sandstone carving of an elaborately dressed human figure representing either a god or a ruler that today stands in a plaza in La Paz, capital of Bolivia.
4) Extensive irrigation works and raised fields made the area surrounding Tiwanaku far more fertile than it is today.
5) Deteriorating environmental conditions must noticeably reduce rainfall after about 950 C.E. contributed to the eventual decline of Tiwanaku.
The Wari Empire:
1. Wari Empire began as a colony of Tiwanaku and later asserted its independence.
2.Wari employed administrative tactics later used so effectively by the Incas. i.e. storage houses for crops, control over agricultural production and the use of the quipus to record and transmit information are just a few.
3. Network of roads with rest stops at strategic points along the way, linked is capitals together and helped hold the empire together.
4.Significant cultural contact with the Tiwanaku and Pachacama.
5. Wari administrators put the local population to work in return for feeding them. They also relocated subject peoples to consolidated their dominions building a centralized control of production.
6. Wari outpost of Pikillaqta had separate barracks for female workers who made chicha (maize beer) for ritual activities.
The Toltecs:
- The Toltec were migrants to central Mexico who integrated with the more civilized people already there.
- The Toltec rose to prominence in about 800 C.E., especially under the legendary ruler Mixcoatl.
- The Toltec’s greatest city of Tula, built approximately 50 miles from the site of Teotihuacan, had 35,000 to 60,000 residents.
- Like Teotihuacan before it, Tula controlled the Obsidian trade which, along with military power, led to its expansion.
- The Toltec were very militaristic. They carved 15 foot tall statues of warriors, and painted murals showing legions of soldiers.
- Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent, played a key role for the Toltec. Sacrifices to Quetzalcoatl were of flowers and butterflies instead of blood. Ce Acatl, Mixcoatl’s son, actually adopted the name Quetzacoatl for himself and was later exiled because it disagreed with the Toltec’s militaristic society. He and some followers migrated to the Yucatan where there are signs of major Toltec influence.
- The Toltec influence can be seen in the Aztec culture in the areas of maize and cotton cultivation as well as in art.
The Mixtecs of Oaxaca:
I. Dominate people in Oaxaca during the Post-Classic period. Mixtecs occupied important Zapotec sites such as Monte Alban & Milta.
II. First people among Mesoamerica to master the art of Metallurgy. They crafted exquite gold jewelry and were great artisans. They also produced fine carvings in wood and bone. Aztecs were given Mixtec jewelry and art as tribute.
III. Mixtecs are best remembered for their colorful pictorial books that were painted on deerskin. These pictorial books recorded political history and genealogies of the rulers. Eight of the deerskin books have survived and some of the events date back to 692 C.E. One book tells of the Mixtecs conflict during a time period known as “War of Heaven,” which followed the decline of Monte Alban.
IV. King 8 Deer of Tilantongo rose to power in 1097, expanding power and controlling highland and coastal settlements. Even though he was assassinated, Tilantongo remained one of Oaxaca’s greatest kingdoms.
V. Toltec influences were apparent in Oaxaca, because the Mixtecs used the same calendar that was used in Tula.
The Post Classic Maya:
1. The Post-Classic period the Yucatan flourished, the most important city state was Chichen Itza.
2. 2. The Maya cities had considerable influence and contact with central Mexico.
3. Scholars suggest Chichen Itaza was taken over by invading Toltec, others suggest influence was made through trade.
4. Human sacrifice played an important role in ceremonial life as evidenced in human remains and gold objects found in cenotes.
5. Pre-Hispanic Mayan documents, the Dresden Codex dating to the thirteenth century, contain an elaborate chart of the cycles of Venus, proving the Maya were great astronomers.