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Primary/Early secondary sources and analysis

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This Vocabulario was the first dictionary printed in the Americas.
Fray Alonso de Molina's Vocabulario en la lengua Castellana y Mexicana was published in 1555 at the Mexico City printing house of Juan Pablos. It consists of a title page (with a woodcut showing Saint Francis'¦

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Mesolore: A research & teaching tool on Mesoamerica

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This Vocabulario was the first dictionary printed in the Americas. Fray Alonso de Molina's Vocabulario en la lengua Castellana y Mexicana was published in 1555 at the Mexico City printing house of Juan Pablos. It consists of a title page (with a woodcut showing Saint Francis'¦

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Haudenosaunee

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Iroquois Confederacy, self-name Haudenosaunee ("People of the Longhouse"), also called Iroquois League, Five Nations, or (from 1722) Six Nations, confederation of five (later six) Indian tribes across upper New York state that during the 17th and 18th centuries played a strategic role in the struggle between the French and British for mastery of North America. The five original Iroquois nations were the Mohawk (self-name: Kanien'kehá:ka ["People of the Flint"]), Oneida (self-name: Onᐱyoteʔa∙ká ["People of the Standing Stone"]), Onondaga (self-name: Onoñda'gega' ["People of the Hills"]), Cayuga (self-name: Gayogo̱hó:nǫ' ["People of the Great Swamp"]), and Seneca (self-name: Onödowa'ga:' ["People of the Great Hill"]). After the Tuscarora (self-name: Skarù∙ręʔ ["People of the Shirt"]) joined in 1722, the confederacy became known to the English as the Six Nations and was recognized as such at Albany, New York (1722). Often characterized as one of the world's oldest participatory democracies, the confederacy has persisted into the 21st century.

The origins and growth of the Iroquois Confederacy

The Peacemaker story of Iroquois tradition credits the formation of the confederacy, between 1570 and 1600, to Dekanawidah (the Peacemaker), born a Huron, who is said to have persuaded Hiawatha, an Onondaga living among Mohawks, to advance "peace, civil authority, righteousness, and the great law" as sanctions for confederation. Cemented mainly by their desire to stand together against invasion, the tribes united in a common council composed of clan and village chiefs; each tribe had one vote, and unanimity was required for decisions. Under the Great Law of Peace (Gayanesshagowa), the joint jurisdiction of 50 peace chiefs, known as sachems, or hodiyahnehsonh, embraced all civil affairs at the intertribal level.

The Iroquois (Haudenosaunee) Confederacy differed from other American Indian confederacies in the northeastern woodlands primarily in being better organized, more consciously defined, and more effective. The Iroquois used elaborately ritualized systems for choosing leaders and making important decisions. They persuaded colonial governments to use these rituals in their joint negotiations, and they fostered a tradition of political sagacity based on ceremonial sanction rather than on the occasional outstanding individual leader. Because the league lacked administrative control, the nations did not always act in unison, but spectacular successes in warfare compensated for this and were possible because of security at home.

During the formative period of the confederacy about 1600, the Five Nations remained concentrated in what is now central and upper New York state, barely holding their own with the neighbouring Huron and Mohican (Mahican), who were supplied with guns through their trade with the Dutch. By 1628, however, the Mohawk had emerged from their secluded woodlands to defeat the Mohican and lay the Hudson River valley tribes and New England tribes under tribute for goods and wampum. The Mohawk traded beaver pelts to the English and Dutch in exchange for firearms, and the resulting depletion of local beaver populations drove the confederacy members to wage war against far-flung tribal enemies in order to procure more supplies of beaver. In the years from 1648 to 1656, the confederacy turned west and dispersed the Huron, Tionontati, Neutral, and Erie tribes. The Andaste succumbed to the confederacy in 1675, and then various eastern Siouan allies of the Andaste were attacked. By the 1750s most of the tribes of the Piedmont had been subdued, incorporated, or destroyed by the league.

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Iroquois Confederacy | Definition, Significance, History, & Facts

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Iroquois Confederacy (or Haudenosaunee Confederacy), confederation of five (later six) Indian tribes across upper New York state that participated in the struggle between the French and British in North America. The Iroquois nations are the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, and Tuscarora.

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Native Languages - Native Words Native Warriors

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Language is the essence of culture. People's ways of living, their histories, and their philosophies are all understood and communicated through language. Although most American Indian people today speak English, they still consider their traditional languages to be extremely important for cultural identity. Even though many of these Native languages have disappeared now, many are still spoken.

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Comparing Mayan, Aztec and Incan

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Get access to files anywhere through secure cloud storage and file backup for your photos, videos, files and more with Google Drive.

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Britannica

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pre-Columbian civilizations, the aboriginal American Indian cultures that evolved in Mesoamerica (part of Mexico and Central America) and the Andean region (western South America) prior to Spanish exploration and conquest in the 16th century. The pre-Columbian civilizations were extraordinary developments in human society and culture, ranking with the early civilizations of Egypt, Mesopotamia, and China. Like the ancient civilizations of the Old World, those in the New World were characterized by kingdoms and empires, great monuments and cities, and refinements in the arts, metallurgy, and writing; the ancient civilizations of the Americas also display in their histories similar cyclical patterns of growth and decline, unity and disunity.

In the New World the roots of civilization lay in a native agricultural way of life. These agricultural beginnings go back several millennia, to perhaps about 7000 bce and the first experimentations by the early Americans with plant cultivation. The domestication of successful food plants proved to be a long, slow process, and it was not until much later that a condition of permanent village farming life was achieved in the tropical latitudes of the two continents.

Sedentary village farming in Mesoamerica came into being by about 1500 bce. Corn (maize), beans, squashes, chili peppers, and cotton were the most important crops. These early villagers wove cloth, made pottery, and practiced other typical Neolithic skills. It appears that such villages were economically self-contained and politically autonomous, with an egalitarian social order. But rather quickly after this-between about 1200 and 900 bce-the building of large earthen pyramids and platforms and the carving of monumental stone sculptures signaled significant changes in this heretofore simple social and political order. These changes first appeared in the southern Gulf coast region of what is now Mexico; and the sculptures, rendered in a style now called Olmec, are presumed to depict chiefs or rulers. From these and other archaeological indications it has been inferred that a class-structured and politically centralized society developed. There appeared subsequently other large capital towns and cities in neighbouring regions that also displayed a similar Olmec art style. This Olmec horizon (i.e., a cultural diffusion that is contemporaneous at widely scattered sites) represents the first climax, or era of "unification," in the history of Mesoamerican civilization.

After about 500 bce the Olmec "unification" gave way to an era (consisting of the Late Formative and Classic periods) of separate regional styles and kingdoms. These lasted until c. 700-900 ce. Among these are the well-known Maya, Zapotec, Totonac, and Teotihuacán civilizations. While sharing a common Olmec heritage, they also displayed many differences. For example, the Maya excelled in the intellectual pursuits of hieroglyphic writing, calendar making, and mathematics, while the Teotihuacán civilization placed its emphasis on political and commercial power. Teotihuacán, in the Valley of Mexico, was an urban centre of some 150,000 people, and the influence of its civilization eventually radiated over much of Mesoamerica. As such, Teotihuacán constituted a second grand civilizational climax or "unification" (400-600 ce). Teotihuacán power waned after about 600, and a "time of troubles" ensued, during which a number of states and nascent empires competed for supremacy. Among these competitors were the Toltecs of Tula, in central Mexico, who held sway from perhaps 900 to 1200 (the Early Postclassic Period). After their decline (in the Late Postclassic Period), another interregnum of warring states lasted until 1428, when the Aztec defeated the rival city of Azcapotzalco and emerged as the dominant force in central Mexico. This last native Mesoamerican empire was conquered by Hernán Cortés (or Cortéz) and the Spaniards in 1521.

In the Andean area, the threshold of a successful village agricultural economy can be placed at c. 2500 bce, or somewhat earlier than was the case in Mesoamerica. The oldest primary food crops there were the lima bean and the potato, which had long histories of domestication in the area, although corn appeared soon after the beginnings of settled village life. Indications of a more complex sociopolitical order-huge platform mounds and densely populated centres-occurred very soon after this (c. 1800 bce); however, these early Andean civilizations continued for almost a millennium before they participated in a shared stylistic "unification." This has become known as the Chavín horizon, and Chavín sculptural art has been found throughout the northern part of the area.

The Chavín horizon disappeared after about 500 bce, and it was replaced by regional styles and cultures that lasted until about 600 ce. This period of regionalization (called the Early Intermediate Period) saw the florescence of a number of large kingdoms both on the Pacific coast and in the Andean highlands; among them were the Moche, Early Lima, Nazca, Recuay, and Early Tiwanaku. The period was brought to an end by the Tiwanaku- Huari horizon (Middle Horizon; 600-1000), which was generated from the highland cities of Tiwanaku (in modern northern Bolivia) and Huari (in central highland Peru). There is evidence-such as the construction of new centres and cities-that this Tiwanaku-Huari phenomenon, at least in many regions, was a tightly controlled political empire. The horizon and its influences, as registered in ceramics and textiles, died away rather gradually in the ensuing centuries, and it was replaced by the several regional styles and kingdoms of what has become known as the Late Intermediate Period (1000-1438).

The terminal date of the Late Intermediate Period marked the beginning of the Inca horizon and of the Inca conquests, which spread from the Inca capital, Cuzco, in the southern highlands of what is now Peru. By 1533, when Francisco Pizarro and his cohorts took over the empire, it extended from what is now the Ecuador- Colombia border to central Chile.

The synchroneity of horizon unifications and alternating regionalizations in Mesoamerica and the Andean region is striking and prompts the question of communication between these two areas of pre-Columbian high civilization. Although it is known that there were contacts-with the result that knowledge of food plants, ceramics, and metallurgy was shared between the two areas-it is also highly unlikely that political or religious ideologies were so spread. Rather, the peoples of each of these major cultural areas appear to have responded to their own internally generated stimuli and to have followed essentially separate courses of development. There are fundamental differences between the two cultural traditions. Thus, in Mesoamerica there was, from early on, a profound interest in hieroglyphic writing and calendar making. Religious ideology, judged from art and iconography, was more highly developed in Mesoamerica than in the Andean region. In Mesoamerica the market was a basic institution; it does not appear to have been so in the Andes, where the redistributive economy of the Inca empire-with such features as its government warehouses and a system of highways-must have had deep roots in the past. On the other hand, in the early development and deployment of metallurgy and in governmental institutions and empire-building, the ancient Peruvians were much more efficient than their Mesoamerican contemporaries.

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Pre-Columbian civilizations | Definition, Map, Empires, Art, & Architecture

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Pre-Columbian civilizations, the aboriginal American Indian cultures that evolved in Mesoamerica (part of Mexico and Central America) and the Andean region (western South America) prior to Spanish exploration and conquest in the 16th century. Learn more about pre-Columbian civilizations in this article.

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Nova

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"Land of the Four Quarters" or Tahuantinsuyu is the name the Inca gave to their empire. It stretched north to south some 2,500 miles along the high mountainous Andean range from Colombia to Chile and reached west to east from the dry coastal desert called Atacama to the steamy Amazonian rain forest. At the height of its existence the Inca Empire was the largest nation on Earth and remains the largest native state to have existed in the western hemisphere.

The wealth and sophistication of the legendary Inca people lured many anthropologists and archaeologists to the Andean nations in a quest to understand the Inca's advanced ways and what led to their ultimate demise.

opulent wealth

To imagine oneself living in the world of the Inca, one would have to travel back 500 years into a magnificent society made up of more than 10 million subjects. Cuzco, which emerged as the richest city in the New World, was the center of Inca life, the home of its leaders. "The riches that were gathered in the city of Cuzco alone, as capital and court of the Empire, were incredible," says an early account of Inca culture written 300 years ago by Jesuit priest Father Bernabe Cobo, "for therein were many palaces of dead kings with all the treasure that each amassed in life; and he who began to reign did not touch the estate and wealth of his predecessor but .... built a new palace and acquired for himself silver and gold and all the rest."

Money existed in the form of work-each subject of the empire paid "taxes" by laboring on the myriad roads, crop terraces, irrigation canals, temples, or fortresses. In return, rulers paid their laborers in clothing and food. Silver and gold were abundant, but only used for aesthetics. Inca kings and nobles amassed stupendous riches which accompanied them, in death, in their tombs. But it was their great wealth that ultimately undid the Inca, for the Spaniards, upon reaching the New World, learned of the abundance of gold in Inca society and soon set out to conquer it-at all costs. The plundering of Inca riches continues today with the pillaging of sacred sites and blasting of burial tombs by grave robbers in search of precious Inca gold.

Growth of an Empire

The first known Incas, a noble family who ruled Cuzco and a small surrounding high Andean agricultural state, date back to A.D. 1200. The growth of the empire beyond Cuzco began in 1438 when emperor Pachacuti, which means "he who transforms the earth," strode forth from Cuzco to conquer the world around him and bring the surrounding cultures into the Inca fold.

Consolidation of a large empire was to become a continuing struggle for the ruling Inca as their influence reached across many advanced cultures of the Andes. Strictly speaking, the name "Inca" refers to the first royal family and the 40,000 descendants who ruled the empire. However, for centuries historians have used the term in reference to the nearly 100 nations conquered by the Inca. The Inca state's domain was unprecedented, its rule resulting in a universal language-a form of Quechua, a religion worshipping the sun, and a 14,000 mile-long road system criss-crossing high Andean mountain passes and linking the rulers with the ruled.

Referred to as an all-weather highway system, the over 14,000 miles of Inca roads were an astonishing and reliable precursor to the advent of the automobile. Communication and transport was efficient and speedy, linking the mountain peoples and lowland desert dwellers with Cuzco. Building materials and ceremonial processions traveled thousands of miles along the roads that still exist in remarkably good condition today. They were built to last and to withstand the extreme natural forces of wind, floods, ice, and drought.

This central nervous system of Inca transport and communication rivaled that of Rome. A high road crossed the higher regions of the Cordillera from north to south and another lower north-south road crossed the coastal plains. Shorter crossroads linked the two main highways together in several places. The terrain, according to Ciezo de Leon, an early chronicler of Inca culture, was formidable. By his account, the road system ran "through deep valleys and over mountains, through piles of snow, quagmires, living rock, along turbulent rivers; in some places it ran smooth and paved, carefully laid out; in others over sierras, cut through the rock, with walls skirting the rivers, and steps and rests through the snow; everywhere it was clean swept and kept free of rubbish, with lodgings, storehouses, temples to the sun, and posts along the way."

the beginning of the end

With the arrival from Spain in 1532 of Francisco Pizarro and his entourage of mercenaries or "conquistadors," the Inca empire was seriously threatened for the first time. Duped into meeting with the conquistadors in a "peaceful" gathering, an Inca emperor, Atahualpa, was kidnapped and held for ransom. After paying over $50 million in gold by today's standards, Atahualpa, who was promised to be set free, was strangled to death by the Spaniards who then marched straight for Cuzco and its riches.

Ciezo de Leon, a conquistador himself, wrote of the astonishing surprise the Spaniards experienced upon reaching Cuzco. As eyewitnesses to the extravagant and meticulously constructed city of Cuzco, the conquistadors were dumbfounded to find such a testimony of superior metallurgy and finely tuned architecture.

Temples, edifices, paved roads, and elaborate gardens all shimmered with gold. By Ciezo de Leon's own observation the extreme riches and expert stone work of the Inca were beyond belief: "In one of (the) houses, which was the richest, there was the figure of the sun, very large and made of gold, very ingeniously worked, and enriched with many precious stones....They had also a garden, the clods of which were made of pieces of fine gold; and it was artificially sown with golden maize, the stalks, as well as the leaves and cobs, being of that metal....Besides all this, they had more than twenty golden (llamas) with their lambs, and the shepherds with their slings and crooks to watch them, all made of the same metal. There was a great quantity of jars of gold and silver, set with emeralds; vases, pots, and all sorts of utensils, all of fine gold....it seems to me that I have said enough to show what a grand place it was; so I shall not treat further of the silver work of the chaquira (beads), of the plumes of gold and other things, which, if I wrote down, I should not be believed."

Machu Picchu and Living at Heights

What remains of the Inca legacy is limited, as the conquistadors plundered what they could of Inca treasures and in so doing, dismantled the many structures painstakingly built by Inca craftsmen to house the precious metals. Remarkably, a last bastion of the Inca empire remained unknown to the Spanish conquerors and was not found until explorer Hiram Bingham discovered it in 1911. He had found Machu Picchu, a citadel atop a mountainous jungle along the Urubamba River in Peru. Grand steps and terraces with fountains, lodgings, and shrines flank the jungle-clad pinnacle peaks surrounding the site. It was a place of worship to the sun god, the greatest deity in the Inca pantheon.

Perhaps most unique about Inca civilization was its thriving existence at altitude. The Incas ruled the Andean Cordillera, second in height and harshness to the Himalayas. Daily life was spent at altitudes up to 15,000 feet and ritual life extended up to 22,057 feet to Llullaillaco in Chile, the highest Inca sacrificial site known today. Mountain roads and sacrificial platforms were built, which means a great amount of time was spent hauling loads of soil, rocks, and grass up to these inhospitable heights. Even with our advanced mountaineering clothing and equipment of today, it is hard for us to acclimatize and cope with the cold and dehydration experienced at the high altitudes frequented by the Inca. This ability of the sandal-clad Inca to thrive at extremely high elevations continues to perplex scientists today.

The Conquest

How did Pizarro and his small army of mercenaries, totaling less than 400, conquer what was becoming the world's largest civilization? Much of the "conquest" was accomplished without battles or warfare as the initial contact Europeans made in the New World resulted in rampant disease. Old World infectious disease left its devastating mark on New World Indian cultures. In particular, smallpox spread quickly through Panama, eradicating entire populations. Once the disease crossed into the Andes its southward spread caused the single most devastating loss of life in the Americas. Lacking immunity, the New World peoples, including the Inca, were reduced by two-thirds.

With the aid of disease and the success of his initial deceit of Atahualpa, Pizarro acquired vast amounts of Inca gold which brought him great fortune in Spain. Reinforcements for his troops came quickly and his conquest of a people soon moved into consolidation of an empire and its wealth. Spanish culture, religion, and language rapidly replaced Inca life and only a few traces of Inca ways remain in the native culture as it exists today.

This feature originally appeared on the site for the NOVA program Ice Mummies.

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"Land of the Four Quarters" or Tahuantinsuyu is the name the Inca gave to their empire. It stretched north to south some 2,500 miles along the high mountainous Andean range from Colombia to Chile and reached west to east from the dry coastal desert called Atacama to the steamy Amazonian rain forest.

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Smithsonian

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The Incas were masters of their harsh climate, archaeologists are finding-and the ancient civilization has a lot to teach us today

smithsonian.com

The Andes are some of the tallest, starkest mountains in the world. Yet the Incas, and the civilizations before them, coaxed harvests from the Andes' sharp slopes and intermittent waterways. They developed resilient breeds of crops such as potatoes, quinoa and corn. They built cisterns and irrigation canals that snaked and angled down and around the mountains. And they cut terraces into the hillsides, progressively steeper, from the valleys up the slopes. At the Incan civilization's height in the 1400s, the system of terraces covered about a million hectares throughout Peru and fed the vast empire.

Over the centuries, cisterns fell into disrepair, canal beds dried up and terraces were abandoned. This process began when the Spanish imposed their own crops and forced people off traditional lands to farm and mine for the conquistadors. The local populations were devastated by war and, more significantly, by disease. Some researchers estimate that as many as half of the Incan population died soon after the Spanish conquest. Much of the traditional farming knowledge and engineering expertise was lost.

The ghost of the Incas' farming achievements still shadows the Andes. The remnants of ancient terraces appear as lines of green on the mountains. Former irrigation canals carve hollows into the land. Today, in a corner of the Andes, people are breathing new life into ancient practices. Inspired by recent archaeological research, they are rebuilding terraces and irrigation systems and reclaiming traditional crops and methods of planting. They do this in part because Incan agricultural techniques are more productive and more efficient in terms of water use. But these modern farmers also believe the Incan ways can offer simple solutions to help protect communities' food supply in the face of climate change.

Archaeologist Ann Kendall began studying terraces in the Cuzco region of Peru in 1968. She intended to focus on Incan architecture and stonework, but she was soon captivated by the dry canal beds and terraces that beckoned from across the valley. "I thought about the problem that local people had no water and didn't cultivate this [agricultural system]," she says. She remembers thinking, "if only one could study traditional technology and rehabilitate all this in the Andes, wouldn't it be wonderful."

She decided to study the development and technology of the Incan agricultural systems with the idea of rehabilitating them. Over the years, she learned how the Incan builders employed stones of different heights, widths and angles to create the best structures and water retention and drainage systems, and how they filled the terraces with dirt, gravel and sand.

In the 1600s, Garcilaso de la Vega, the child of a conquistador father and an Incan noblewoman, described the Incan terracing system in The Royal Commentaries of the Incas: "In this way the whole hill was gradually brought under cultivation, the platforms being flattened out like stairs in a staircase, and all the cultivable and irrigable land being put to use."

The terraces leveled the planting area, but they also had several unexpected advantages, Kendall discovered. The stone retaining walls heat up during the day and slowly release that heat to the soil as temperatures plunge at night, keeping sensitive plant roots warm during the sometimes frosty nights and expanding the growing season. And the terraces are extremely efficient at conserving scarce water from rain or irrigation canals, says Kendall. "We've excavated terraces, for example, six months after they've been irrigated, and they're still damp inside. So if you have drought, they're the best possible mechanism." If the soil weren't mixed with gravel, points out Kendall, "when it rained the water would log inside, and the soil would expand and it would push out the wall." Kendall says that the Incan terraces are even today probably the most sophisticated in the world, as they build on knowledge developed over about 11,000 years of farming in the region.

Over the past three decades, using archaeological details about the construction of terraces and irrigation systems, a development charity called the Cusichaca Trust, which Kendall formed in 1977, rehabilitated and irrigated 160 hectares of terraces and canals in the Patacancha Valley, near Cuzco. The project was a success: it improved water access and agricultural production, and local families maintain the structures today. Lessons from the Patacancha Valley are now being employed to restore Incan agricultural systems in other areas of Peru.

The thud of hammer on rock reverberates in a remote valley in the Apurímac region. A worker from a nearby village swings a mallet and chips off the edges from a massive stone that has been hauled into the bed of an ancient irrigation channel. That rock will form one wall of the repaired channel. He and a half-dozen workers have been hard at work for a month already, and have rebuilt about a third of the channel.

The work is part of a two-year project to mitigate the effects of climate change. Kendall and her local partners in Cusichaca Andina (an independent Peruvian nonprofit formed in 2003) began activities in the remote regions of Apurímac and Ayacucho because they wanted to expand past Cusco. The area is blanketed with terraces, most unused for centuries. It also was the center of power for the Sendero Luminoso, or Shining Path, during the 1980s and early 1990s. Many locals fled from the guerrilla fighters, abandoning farms and leaving the area with little farming expertise.

The exact age of this particular channel hasn't been determined, but Adripino Jayo, the regional director of Cusichaca Andina, which leads the restoration with funding from the World Bank, estimates that it's been used to funnel water from a nearby spring perhaps since the time of the Wari, whose civilization spread over the Andes for hundreds of years before the Incan empire.

Trainers from Cusichaca Andina schooled the community on how to repair the canal using local materials, which are cheaper than concrete and avoid the need to import materials from the city. One worker swings a pickax to carve out dirt and then shovels it aside. Another worker lines up stones evenly on the channel's sides. They use local clay to fill the gaps between boulders and alongside the earthen banks. When it hardens, the clay is watertight.

Yellowing stalks of corn, quinoa and amaranth drape over and obscure the stone walls that have already been repaired. From September through December last year, local workers rehabilitated 54 hectares of terraces. By the spring of 2012, the teams hope to rebuild nearly two miles of irrigation channels.

In the few restaurants that can be found in nearby villages, rice trucked in from cities and the coast is on offer more frequently than the local quinoa. Jayo quotes a common city refrain that can keep those in the mountains from celebrating their own bounty: only the poor eat quinoa. In the latter half of the 1900s, as remote mountain towns gained increasing access to radio, television and communication with the cities, local crops fell out of favor.

But local grains are more nutritious and better suited to the Andean land and climate. So Cusichaca Andina has conducted educational training campaigns and given away seeds for quinoa, corn and amaranth. The seeds have been planted over 45 hectares, now used as demonstration sites to highlight how traditional farming practices of planting corn, quinoa and squash together, instead of in individual plots, can yield better results, as the crops symbiotically protect and nourish each other.

The organization has also focused on rescuing seeds and varieties that have been in danger of disappearing, such as huaña, a bitter potato variety that resists hail, frost, droughts and excess rain. After being soaked for days and frozen outdoors overnight to remove the bitterness, the potato is dried and can be stored for years.

Jayo highlights the strength and resistance of this crop: "Now that we're facing the crisis of climate change, it's worth recovering crops such as these." Clemente Utani, the mayor of the nearby town of Pomacocha, focuses on the historic significance of Cusichaca's work, saying, "We're recovering what we lost from our ancestors."

Approaches such as these might be crucial for poor Peruvian farmers. Glacial melt and the seasonal rains, the key suppliers of water, are already affected by climate change. Rains have already shown signs of decreasing, temperature swings have become more extreme and Peru's glaciers have shrunk about 20 percent since the 1970s.

The need for water conservation and agricultural development far outstrips the efforts and the available funding, Jayo says. But the idea does seem to be catching on. The Peruvian Ministry of the Environment, in a recent report to the United Nations Framework on Climate Change, highlighted the importance of practices such as reclaiming diverse native Andean crops and rebuilding the infrastructure of pre-Hispanic irrigation.

"At first people thought I was a bit of a nutter with my terraces," says Kendall with a laugh, "but now this is the word everywhere it seems in Peru." And not only in Peru. The Andes stretch from Venezuela and wind down South America as far as Argentina and Chile. Kendall says some countries have terraces that have been maintained, and groups in Bolivia and elsewhere are expressing interest in learning from Cusichaca's rehabilitation experience.

Mountainous regions around the world have a history of terracing. Kendall spoke at a terracing conference in southern China in 2010. She and 50 experts were taken by bus to view the extensive irrigated rice terraces and meet with farmers. These are not, however, the dry mountain terraces that are Kendall's particular expertise. But through the bus windows, Kendall saw evidence of dry terraces lining the hills and mountainsides, mostly abandoned and covered with vegetation-terraces potentially ripe for rehabilitation.

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smithsonian.com The Andes are some of the tallest, starkest mountains in the world. Yet the Incas, and the civilizations before them, coaxed harvests from the Andes' sharp slopes and intermittent waterways. They developed resilient breeds of crops such as potatoes, quinoa and corn.

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Villagers in Cuzco, Peru, dressed in colorful shawls, or chompas, mingle with city-folk and tourists during a festival..

Credit: Jesse Lewis

The Inca Empire was a vast empire that flourished in the Andean region of South America from the early 15th century A.D. up until its conquest by the Spanish in the 1530s. Even after the conquest, Inca leaders continued to resist the Spaniards up until 1572 when its last city, Vilcabamba, was captured.

The Incas built their empire without the wheel, powerful draft animals, iron working, currency or even what we would consider to be a writing system. One of the Inca civilization's most famous surviving archaeological sites is Machu Picchu, which was built as a retreat for an Incan emperor.

The Incas called their empire Tawantinsuyu, the "Land of the Four Corners," and its official language was Quechua. The empire was divided up into four "suyu," which intersected at the capital, Cuzco. These suyu in turn were divided into provinces. By the time of the Spanish conquest, much of the Inca Empire was made up of numerous non-Inca groups.

The empire reached its peak after the conquests of Emperor Huayna Capac, who reigned from 1493 until around 1527, when he apparently died of smallpox. At its peak, the empire extended from "the border of Ecuador and Colombia down to about 50 miles [80 kilometers] south of modern Santiago, Chile," said Terence D'Altroy of Columbia University, in a 2007 PBS Nova interview. "In terms of square miles, we're probably talking something like 300,000 square miles [more than 775,000 square km]," he said, adding that its population was as high as 12 million people.

To support this empire, a system of roads stretched for almost 25,000 miles (roughly 40,000 km), about three times the diameter of the Earth.

As the Spanish conquered the Inca Empire, they were impressed by what they saw. "Inca cities were as large as those of Europe, but more orderly and by all accounts much cleaner and more pleasant places in which to live," writes Gordon McEwan of Wagner College, in his book "The Incas: New Perspectives" (ABC-CLIO, 2006), also noting that the road and aqueduct systems the Spanish encountered in the Andes were superior to those in Europe.

The Inca Empire originated at the city of Cuzco in what is today southern Peru. It appears to have started out as a small local state until it rapidly expanded into a vast empire during the 15th century A.D.

The origins of the Inca are murky, but McEwan points that, in pre-Inca times, Cuzco was located at a nexus point between two earlier empires, one called the Wari and another based at the city of Tiwanaku. This central location gave the Inca a number of advantages when they were able to expand, one of the most important being the availability of infrastructure, which these earlier empires had already created. "The hydraulic and highway systems of the earlier empires would have provided the basis for rapid expansion of the early Inca state," McEwan writes.

Inca oral history, recorded by the Spanish, suggests that the expansion of the Inca began in earnest during the reign of the emperor Pachacuti, who reigned 1438-1471. Oral traditions say that he became emperor after he halted an invasion of Cuzco that was being carried out by a rival group called the Chancas. Subsequently, he worked to expand the territory the Inca controlled, extending their influence beyond the Cuzco region.

D'Altroy notes that the Inca tried to get their rivals to surrender peacefully and only used military conquest as a last resort. They "worked very hard in diplomacy, negotiating relationships with neighbors or with people who were targets for incorporation into their expanding territory, and they tried to work out amicable relationships through gift exchanges, marital exchanges, or political alliances. Failing that, they would threaten those people with military conquest, and that having failed, they would actually undertake military conquest," he said in the PBS interview.

While the Inca did not develop what we would consider a formal system of writing, they did use recording devices, the best known being quipu, a cord with strings suspended from it. While modern-day scholars are unable to read them, it is known that they would have been used for creating records such as a census.

The Inca capital, Cuzco, was ordered rebuilt by Pachacuti, who allegedly had the city completely razed so that it could be rebuilt in the shape of a puma.

"The animal was represented in profile, with the residential blocks of the city forming its body ... the great fortress or temple complex on the hill above Cuzco representing its head, and the confluence of the Tullu and Saphi rivers representing its tail," McEwan writes, paraphrasing the account recorded by the Spanish chronicler Juan de Betanzos. "Between the fore and hind legs of the puma were located the two great plazas of Cuzco, where the highways to the four imperial quarters of the empire, called suyus, converged."

McEwan adds that commoners were not allowed to live in the city and had to reside in the outlying settlements.

Perhaps the greatest religious sanctuary in Cuzco was a sun temple called "Coricancha." The Spanish chronicler Bernabé Cobo wrote (in translation), "This temple was called Coricancha, which means 'house of gold,' because of the incomparable wealth of this metal which was embedded in the temple's chapels and wall, its ceilings and altars." (From "Ancient Cuzco" by Brian Bauer, University of Texas Press, 2004)

The presence of gold led the Spanish to plunder it thoroughly, but Cobo did record that it was dedicated to the Sun god Inti with other Inca deities also being honored in the temple.

After the Spanish conquered Cuzco, they built a new city in its place, one that survives to present day.

[Gallery: Tracing the Ancient Incan Empire]

The Inca pantheon had an array of gods that, McEwan notes, included the creator god Viracocha, sun god Inti, thunder god Illapa and earth-mother goddess Pachamama, among others. There were also regional deities worshipped by people whom the Inca conquered.

He notes that the Inca gods could be honored in many ways, including prayers, fasting and animal sacrifice, but the most powerful form was that of human sacrifice, typically those of children and teenagers.

In 1999, archaeologists discovered the mummies of three children who had been left as sacrifices at a shrine near the summit of a volcano in Argentina. A teenage girl whom we call "the maiden" appears to have been the main sacrifice with the other two, a boy and girl, being her attendants. Recent research has revealed that, in the year before their sacrifice, the three consumed a special diet rich in maize and dried llama meat and were drugged with coca leaves and alcohol.

The mummification of individuals was an important part of Inca funerary rites, even for those who were commoners.

After the Spanish conquest, a man named Guaman Poma, who spoke Quechua and was native to the Andes, published a chronicle that described November as being the "month of carrying the dead," a time when people would try to feed the mummies of their ancestors.

"In this month they take their dead out of their storehouses which are called pucullo and they give them food and drink and they dress them in their richest apparel ... and they sing and dance with them ... and they walk with them from house to house and through the streets and the plaza," (In translation, from the book "Food, Power and Resistance in the Andes" by Alison Krögel, Lexington Books, 2011).

Krögel notes that while the mummies of commoners were only fed on special occasions those of royalty "received their own specially prepared meals [including corn beer] on a daily basis."

Maize and meat were generally considered the elite food of the Incas and were consumed by the "maiden" and her attendants in the year before they were sacrificed. In addition to these elite food products, other goods consumed in the Inca diet include sweet potatoes, quinoa, beans and chili peppers.

In exchange for labor, the Inca government was expected to provide feasts to the people at certain times of the year, acting as a form of payment in a society that lacked currency.

"The requirements of reciprocity dictated that large feasts be held at different times of the year in various parts of the empire to ensure cooperation and goodwill at all levels," writes Tamara Bray in her book "The Archaeology and Politics of Food and Feasting in Early States and Empires" (Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003). "Inca state-sponsored feasts were held in open plazas, while food preparation was carried out in narrow chambers that flanked them."

The "most unusual aspect of the Inca economy was the lack of a market system and money," writes McEwan, with only a few exceptions there were no traders in the Inca Empire. "Each citizen of the empire was issued the necessities of life out of the state storehouses, including food, tools, raw materials, and clothing, and needed to purchase nothing."

There were no shops or markets, McEwan notes and, as such, "there was no need for a standard currency or money, and there was nowhere to spend money or purchase or trade for necessities."

Objects made out of gold and silver survive from the Inca Empire but the most striking examples of Inca art were its textiles. "Cloth, above all else, was especially prized by the Incas and represents their greatest artistic achievement," writes McEwan. Textile making is popular among Andean cultures, and the Inca were no exception.

McEwan notes that the Inca grew cotton, sheared wool and used looms to create elaborate textiles. The finest grade of cloth was called cumpi, being reserved for the emperor and nobility. "Made of alpaca or vicuna wool and cotton, or sometimes more exotic materials such as bat hair or hummingbird down, it was a tapestry weave decorated with complex multicolored designs," he writes.

Inca stone-working is also considered to be very fine. Their "craftsmen fitted building stone together perfectly without using any mortar, such that an object as thin as a razor blade could not be inserted between the stones," writes Peter V. N. Henderson in his book "The Course of Andean History" (University of New Mexico Press, 2013).

Today, many of the traditions the Inca carried out live on in the Andes. Textile making is still popular, the foods they ate are consumed around the world, archaeological sites like Machu Picchu are popular tourist attractions and even their official language, Quechua, is still widely spoken.

"Today, Quechua, or runa simi ('people's speech'), is the most widely spoken of the indigenous tongues surviving in the Americas," writes Judith Noble and Jaime Lacasa in their book "Introduction to Quechua: Language of the Andes" (Dog Ear Publishing, 2007).

"Six to ten million people in the Andean area from southern Columbia through Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia, to northwestern Argentina and northern Chile use Quechua as their everyday tongue."

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The Inca Empire was a vast empire that flourished in the Andean region of South America from the early 15th century A.D. up until its conquest by the Spanish in the 1530s. Even after the conquest, Inca leaders continued to resist the Spaniards up until 1572 when its last city, Vilcabamba, was captured.

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Britannica

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People and society

Inca society was highly stratified. The emperor ruled with the aid of an aristocratic bureaucracy, exercising authority with harsh and often repressive controls. Inca technology and architecture were highly developed, although not strikingly original. Their irrigation systems, palaces, temples, and fortifications can still be seen throughout the Andes. The economy was based on agriculture, its staples being corn (maize), white and sweet potatoes, squash, tomatoes, peanuts (groundnuts), chili peppers, coca, cassava, and cotton. They raised guinea pigs, ducks, llamas, alpacas, and dogs. Clothing was made of llama wool and cotton. Houses were of stone or adobe mud. Practically every man was a farmer, producing his own food and clothing.

The Inca built a vast network of roads throughout this empire. It comprised two north-south roads, one running along the coast for about 2,250 miles (3,600 km), the other inland along the Andes for a comparable distance, with many interconnecting links. Many short rock tunnels and vine-supported suspension bridges were constructed. Use of the system was strictly limited to government and military business; a well-organized relay service carried messages in the form of knotted cords called quipu (Quechua khipu) at a rate of 150 miles (240 km) a day. The network greatly facilitated the Spanish conquest of the Inca empire.

The Inca religion combined features of animism, fetishism, and the worship of nature gods. The pantheon was headed by Inti, the sun god, and included also Viracocha, a creator god and culture hero, and Apu Illapu, the rain god. Under the empire the Inca religion was a highly organized state religion, but, while worship of the sun god and the rendering of service were required of subject peoples, their native religions were tolerated. Inca rituals included elaborate forms of divination and the sacrifice of humans and animals. These religious institutions were destroyed by the Spanish conquerors' campaign against idolatry.

The descendants of the Inca are the present-day Quechua-speaking peasants of the Andes, who constitute perhaps 45 percent of the population of Peru. They combine farming and herding with simple traditional technology. Rural settlements are of three kinds: families living in the midst of their fields, true village communities with fields outside of the inhabited centres, and a combination of these two patterns. Towns are centres of mestizo (mixed-blood) population. Communities are close-knit, with families usually intermarrying. Much of the agricultural work is done cooperatively. Religion is a kind of Roman Catholicism infused with the pagan hierarchy of spirits and deities.

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Inca | History, Achievements, Culture, & Geography

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Inca, South American Indians who ruled an empire that extended along the Pacific coast and Andean highlands from the northern border of modern Ecuador to the Maule River in central Chile. Their descendants today remain in and around the Andes and make up the largest ethnic group in Peru.

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USHISTORY.ORG

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The Inca Empire: Children of the Sun [ushistory.org]

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Get access to files anywhere through secure cloud storage and file backup for your photos, videos, files and more with Google Drive.

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The Valley of Mexico is part of the central highlands and lies at an altitude of about a mile and a half. At the low point of the Valley there is a large lake that made human life sustainable in the generally dry country.

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A kingdom of blood.

SEP, Department of Education.

The capital city of the Aztecs, Tenochtitlán, was an engineering masterpiece. Aqueducts and canals snaked through the city, channelling pure water to possibly 200,000 inhabitants each day.

In 1978, while digging in the basement of a bookstore, workers for Mexico City's power company hit a huge stone disk. Almost 11 feet across, engraved on its surface was the dismembered body of Coyolxauhqui, the Aztec moon goddess. In the center lay her torso, naked but for a belt of snakes. Around the edges were scattered her severed arms, legs and head. She had been slain and cut to pieces by her brother Huitzilopochtl moments after his birth.

Huitzilopochtl, God of the Sun, was the Aztec principal god. He had an insatiable appetite for blood. Under his urging, the Aztecs rose from a band of primitive farmers to become the bloodiest civilization of the early Americas. Many Central America cultures indulged in human sacrifice. The Aztec practiced it on an industrial scale, sacrificing tens of thousands of victims each year.

The Aztec empire of 1519, shown in orange, ruled over vast expanses of central Mexico.

Tenochtitlan: A Legendary City

The Aztecs dominated the Valley of Mexico for 100 years, until their downfall at the hands of Hernan Cortez and his conquistadors in 1521. They built their capital in the most unlikely of places - the center of a lake. Tenochtitlan was a city surrounded by water, with temples and pyramids - sparkling white monuments and ceremonial squares gleaming in the tropical sun. It sat in Lake Texcoco, criss-crossed by canals and connected by three broad causeways to the shore. Along the lake edge the Aztec created chinampas, or raised fields of rotting vegetation and lake-mud. Extraordinarily fertile, they yielded many crops per year.

One story central to the Aztec belief system was the tale of their origins. Aztecs believed that one day while doing housework, the ancient Earth goddess Coatlicue (Serpent Skirt) was impregnated by a ball of feathers. Coyolxauhqui and the 400 stars of the southern sky, her children of the night, grew jealous and determined to kill her. They sliced off her head.

Her unborn child, Huitzilopochtl, learned of the plot. He leapt from her body fully grown. In his hand he brandished a club lined with slivers of razor-sharp black volcanic glass called obsidian. He chopped up Coyolxauhqui and her brothers - a metaphor for the way the sun overwhelms the moon and stars when it rises at dawn each morning.

Huitzilopochtl commanded the Aztecs to travel south until they found a cactus with an eagle nesting in its branches. After many adventures and much misery, they discovered an island with a prickly pear cactus in the year 1 Flint (1324 AD). Sitting upon it was an eagle with outstretched wings and a snake held tightly in its talons. This became the site of Tenochtitlan, now Mexico City. The Aztecs believed the oval red fruit of the cactus symblolized the human heart. Today an eagle, cactus, and snake are the national emblems of the Republic of Mexico.

Rise and Fall of an Empire

Within 50 years of founding Tenochtitlan, the Aztec had extended their rule all across the valley. They formed political alliances with other states, skillfully intermarried with their nobles, and fought tenaciously in battle. Their empire was created by a culture of war. Boys were taught from an early age to be warriors. A warrior who captured four or more prisoners could become a Jaguar or Eagle Knight, and wear brightly colored body-suits of feathers. Girls were prepared for the battle of childbirth. Women who died in labor became goddesses, accompanying the sun across the sky each day from noon until sunset.

Quetzalcoatl was the most influential god of the Aztec religion. Called the "Feathered Serpent of Ancient Mexico," he was claimed to have invented fire and discovered maize, the staple food of the Aztec people.

By 1519, the Aztec cycle of conquest and exploitation was at its peak. More and more conquered peoples provided tribute, the basis of the Aztecs' immense wealth. More and more prisoners were captured for human sacrifice. Conquistadors were astonished by Aztec marketplaces. They found dealers in gold, silver and precious stones. They saw embroidered clothing and cotton goods and cacao beans for chocolate drinks. Jaguar pelts and deerskins, as well as the brilliant blue plumes of the cotinga bird lined the marketplace. Food included vegetables and fruits, turkeys, young dogs, wild game and many kinds of honey. There were sellers of tobacco, liquid amber, and herbs. All this and more poured into Tenochtitlan. At the same time, the conquistadors heard tales of the day 20,000 captives, some roped together through their noses, wound through the streets to be sacrificed at the top of the Great Temple steps.

Within two years, the Aztec culture was destroyed by the Spanish. Tenochtitlan lay in ruins. There would be no more human sacrifices. And, as the Aztec feared, without life-sustaining blood their gods deserted them and darkness descended on their cosmos.

Quetzalcoatl: The Man, The Myth, The Legend
Many Westerners think of the Aztec god Quetzalcoatl as that "feathered serpent of Ancient Mexico" who is supposed to come from the East to take back his power. To the Aztecs however, Quetzalcoatl plays a huge role in their religious and cultural beliefs. This detailed article from Encyclopedia Britannica includes some fabulous illustrations of the great Aztec god.

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A kingdom of blood. SEP, Department of Education. The capital city of the Aztecs, Tenochtitlán, was an engineering masterpiece. Aqueducts and canals snaked through the city, channelling pure water to possibly 200,000 inhabitants each day. In 1978, while digging in the basement of a bookstore, workers for Mexico City's power company hit a huge stone disk.

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Britannica

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Aztec, Nahuatl-speaking people who in the 15th and early 16th centuries ruled a large empire in what is now central and southern Mexico. The name Aztec is derived from Aztlán (variously translated as "White Land," "Land of White Herons," or "Place of Herons"), an allusion to their origins, probably in northwestern Mexico. They were also called the Tenochca, from an eponymous ancestor, Tenoch, and the Mexica, probably from Metzliapán ("Moon Lake"), the mystical name for Lake Texcoco. From Tenochca was derived the name of their great city, Tenochtitlán, founded on an island in Lake Texcoco, in the Valley of Mexico. From Mexica came the name for the city that superseded the Aztec capital and for the surrounding valley, which was applied later to the whole Mexican nation. The Aztecs referred to themselves as Culhua-Mexica, to link themselves with Colhuacán, the centre of the most-civilized people of the Valley of Mexico. See also pre-Columbian civilizations: Aztec culture to the time of the Spanish conquest.

Origins of the Aztec people

The origin of the Aztec people is uncertain, but elements of their own tradition suggest that they were a tribe of hunters and gatherers on the northern Mexican plateau before their appearance in Mesoamerica in perhaps the 12th century ce; Aztlán, however, may be legendary. It is possible that their migration southward was part of a general movement of peoples that followed, or perhaps helped trigger, the collapse of the highly developed Toltec civilization of central Mexico and its capital, Tula, a spectacular urban centre that featured pyramids, temples, public buildings, and statuary.

At the beginning of the 12th century, catastrophe befell Toltec civilization when Tula was attacked and destroyed, as were other important Toltec centres. Tribes of hunters and gatherers, including a group of Chichimec under the leadership of Xólotl, took advantage of the situation and traveled from the arid plateau of northern Mexico toward the fertile, heavily settled central zone. Xólotl's Chichimec joined forces with the remaining Toltecs, resulting in a period of relative peace and cultural progress in the Valley of Mexico. During this time the Aztecs, who, according to legend, had been wandering in search of a new place to settle, established a precarious home near the ruins of Tula. There they improved their approach to agriculture and acquired other technological knowledge.

However, their stay was temporary. Aztec tradition holds that the god Huitzilopochtli instructed them to depart again in search of a permanent home, the location of which would be revealed by the appearance of an eagle perched on a nopal cactus with a serpent in its beak (an image that is memorialized on Mexico's national flag). A long pilgrimage ensued that ended in 1325 on a small island in Lake Texcoco, where, it is said, elder members of the people spotted the eagle, the cactus, and the serpent. There they built a temple and, around it, on islands in Lake Texcoco, the first dwellings of what was to become the powerful city of Tenochtitlán.

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Aztec | History, Empire, Facts, Location, & Culture

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Aztec, Nahuatl-speaking people who in the 15th and early 16th centuries ruled a large empire in what is now central and southern Mexico. The ninth emperor, Montezuma II, was taken prisoner by Hernan Cortes and died in custody. His successors were unable to stave off Cortes, and the empire came to an end in 1521.

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Ancient History Encyclopedia

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The Aztec Empire flourished between c. 1345 and 1521 CE and, at its greatest extent, covered most of northern Mesoamerica. Aztec warriors were able to dominate their neighbouring states and permit rulers such as Motecuhzoma II to impose Aztec ideals and religion across Mexico. Highly accomplished in agriculture and trade, the last of the great Mesoamerican civilizations was also noted for its art and architecture which ranks amongst the finest ever produced on the continent.

The Aztec state is actually the most well documented Mesoamerican civilization with sources including archaeology, native books (codices) and lengthy and detailed accounts from their Spanish conquerors - both by military men and Christian clergy. These latter sources may not always be reliable but the picture we have of the Aztecs, their institutions, religious practices, warfare and daily life is a rich one and it continues to be constantly expanded with details being added through the endeavours of 21st century CE archaeologists and scholars.

Historical Overview

Sometime around 1100 CE the city-states or altepetl which were spread over central Mexico began to compete with each other for local resources and regional dominance. Each state had its own ruler or tlatoani who led a council of nobles but these small urban centres surrounded by farmland soon sought to expand their wealth and influence so that by c. 1400 CE several small empires had formed in the Valley of Mexico. Dominant amongst these were Texcoco, capital of the Acholhua region, and Azcapotzalco, capital of the Tepenec. These two empires came face to face in 1428 CE with the Tepanec War. The Azcapotzalco forces were defeated by an alliance of Texcoco, Tenochtitlan (the capital of the Mexica) and several other smaller cities. Following victory a Triple Alliance was formed between Texcoco, Tenochtitlan and a rebel Tepanec city, Tlacopan. A campaign of territorial expansion began where the spoils of war - usually in the form of tributes from the conquered - were shared between these three great cities. Over time Tenochtitlan came to dominate the Alliance, its ruler became the supreme ruer - the huey tlatoque ('high king') - and the city established itself as the capital of the Aztec empire.

Masters of the world, their empire so wide and abundant that they had conquered all the nations. Diego Durán

The empire continued to expand from 1430 CE and the Aztec military - bolstered by conscription of all adult males, men supplied from allied and conquered states, and such elite groups as the Eagle and Jaguar warriors - swept aside their rivals. Aztec warriors wore padded cotton armour, carried a wooden or reed shield covered in hide, and wielded weapons such as a super sharp obsidian sword-club ( macuahuitl), a spear or dart thrower ( atlatl), and bow and arrows. Elite warriors also wore spectacular feathered and animal skin costumes and headdresses to signify their rank. Battles were concentrated in or around major cities and when these fell the victors claimed the whole surrounding territory. Regular tributes were extracted and captives were taken back to Tenochtitlan for ritual sacrifice. In this way the Aztec empire came to cover most of northern Mexico, an area of some 135,000 square kilometres.

The empire was kept together through the appointment of officials from the Aztec heartland, inter-marriages, gift-giving, invitations to important ceremonies, the building of monuments and artworks which promoted Aztec imperial ideology, and most importantly of all, the ever-present threat of military intervention. Some states were integrated more than others whilst those on the extremities of the empire became useful buffer zones against more hostile neighbours, notably the Tarascan civilization.

TenochtitlAn

The Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan on the western shore of Lake Texcoco flourished so that the city could boast at least 200,000 inhabitants by the early 16th century CE, making it the largest city in the Pre-Columbian Americas. These inhabitants were divided into several social strata. At the top were local rulers ( teteuhctin), then came nobles ( pipiltin), commoners ( macehualtin), serfs ( mayeque), and finally slaves ( tlacohtin). The strata seem to have been relatively fixed but there is some evidence of movement between them, especially in the lower classes.

Not only the political and religious capital, Tenochtitlán was also a huge trading centre with goods flowing in and out such as gold, greenstone, turquoise, cotton, cacao beans, tobacco, pottery, tools, weapons, foodstuffs (tortillas, chile sauces, maize, beans, and even insects, for example) and slaves. The Spanish invaders were hugely impressed by the city's splendour and magnificent architecture and artwork, especially the Templo Mayor pyramid and massive stone sculptures. Dominating the city was the huge Sacred Precinct with its temples and monumental ball court. Tenochtitlan's water management was also impressive with large canals criss-crossing the city which was itself surrounded by chinampas - raised and flooded fields - which greatly increased the agricultural capacity of the Aztecs. There were also anti-flood dykes, artificial reservoirs for fresh water, and wonderful flower gardens dotted around the city.

The whole city was designed to inspire awe in the people, especially visiting nobles who, entertained with lavish ceremonies, could see that the Mexica Aztecs truly were:

Masters of the world, their empire so wide and abundant that they had conquered all the nations and that all were their vassals. The guests, seeing such wealth and opulence and such authority and power, were filled with terror. (Diego Durán, the Spanish friar, quoted in Nichols, 451)

Religion

Mythology and religion, as with most ancient cultures, were closely intertwined for the Aztecs. The very founding of Tenochtitlán was based on the belief that peoples from the mythical land of plenty Aztlán (literally 'Land of White Herons' and origin of the Aztec name) in the far northwest had first settled in the Valley of Mexico. They had been shown the way by their god Huitzilopochtli who had sent an eagle sitting on a cactus to indicate exactly where these migrants should build their new home. The god also gave these people their name, the Mexica, who along with other ethnic groups, who similarly spoke Nahuatl, collectively made up the peoples now generally known as the Aztecs.

The Aztec pantheon included a mix of older Mesoamerian gods and specifically Mexica deities. The two principal gods worshipped were Huitzilopochtli (the war and sun god) and Tlaloc (the rain god) and both had a temple on top of the Templo Mayor pyramid at the heart of Tenochtitlan. Other important gods were Quetzalcoatl (the feathered serpent god common to many Mesoamerican cultures), Tezcatlipoca (supreme god at Texcoco), Xipe Totec (god of Spring and agriculture), Xiuhtecuhtli (god of fire), Xochipilli (god of summertime and flowers), Ometeotl (the creator god), Mictlantecuhtli (god of the dead) and Coatlicue (the earth-mother goddess).

This sometimes bewildering array of gods presided over every aspect of the human condition. The timing of ceremonies in honour of these deities was dictated by a variety of calendars. There was the 260-day Aztec calendar which was divided into 20 weeks, each of 13 days which carried names such as Crocodile and Wind. There was also a Solar calendar consisting of 18 months, each of 20 days. The 584 day period covering the rise of Venus was also important and there was a 52 year cycle of the sun to be considered. The movement of planets and stars were carefully observed (albeit not as accurately, though, as the Maya had done) and they provided the motive for the specific timing of many religious rites and agricultural practices.

The sun, not surprisingly, had great significance for the Aztecs. They believed that the world went through a series of cosmic ages, each had its own sun but finally each world was destroyed and replaced by another until the fifth and final age was reached - the present day for the Aztecs. This cosmic progression was wonderfully represented in the famous Sun Stone but also crops up in many other places too.

The gods were honoured with festivals, banquets, music, dancing, decoration of statues, burning of incense, the ritual burial of precious goods, penances such as blood-letting, and animal sacrifices. Humans, both adults and less often children, were also frequently sacrificed to metaphorically 'feed' the gods and keep them happy lest they become angry and make life difficult for humans by sending storms, droughts etc. or even just to keep the sun appearing every day. Victims were usually taken from the losing side in wars. Indeed, the so-called 'Flowery Wars' were specifically undertaken to collect sacrificial victims. The most prestigious offerings were those warriors who had shown great bravery in battle. The sacrifice itself could take three main forms: the heart was removed, the victim was decapitated, or the victim was made to fight in a hopelessly one-sided contest against elite warriors. There were also impersonators who dressed in the regalia of a specific god and at the climax of the ceremony were themselves sacrificed.

Architecture & Art

The Aztecs were themselves appreciative of fine art and they collected pieces from across their empire to be brought back to Tenochtitlán and often ceremonially buried. Aztec art was nothing if not eclectic and ranged from miniature engraved precious objects to massive stone temples. Monumental sculptures were a particular favourite and could be fearsome monstrosities such as the colossal Coatlicue statue or be very life-like such as the famous sculpture of a seated Xochipilli.

Organised in guilds and attached to the main palaces, artisans could specialise in metalwork, wood carving or stone sculpture, with materials used such as amethyst, rock crystal, gold, silver, and exotic feathers. Perhaps some of the most striking art objects are those which employed turquoise mosaic such as the famous mask of Xuihtecuhtli. Common forms of pottery vessels include anthropomorphic vases in bright colours and of special note was the finely made and highly prized Cholula ware from Cholollan.

Aztec art depicted all manner of subjects but especially popular were animals, plants and gods, particularly those related to fertility and agriculture. Art could also be used as propaganda to spread the imperial dominance of Tenochtitlan. Examples such as the Sun Stone, Stone of Tizoc, and Throne of Motecuhzoma II all portray Aztec ideology and seek to closely correlate political rulers to cosmic events and even the gods themselves. Even architecture could achieve this aim, for example, the Templo Mayor pyramid sought to replicate the sacred snake mountain of Aztec mythology, Coatepec, and temples and statues bearing Aztec symbols were set up across the empire.

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The Aztec empire, which controlled some 11,000,000 people, had always had to deal with minor rebellions - typically, when new rulers took power at Tenochtitlan - but these had always been swiftly crushed. The tide began to turn, though, when the Aztecs were heavily defeated by the Tlaxcala and Huexotzingo in 1515 CE. With the arrival of the Spanish, some of these rebel states would again seize the opportunity to gain their independence. When the conquistadors finally did arrive from the Old World sailing their floating palaces and led by Hernán Cortés, their initial relations with the leader of the Aztecs, Motecuhzoma II, were friendly and valuable gifts were exchanged. Things turned sour, though, when a small group of Spanish soldiers were killed at Tenochtitlan while Cortés was away at Veracruz. The Aztec warriors, unhappy at Motecuhzoma's passivity, overthrew him and set Cuitlahuac as the new tlatoani. This incident was just what Cortés needed and he returned to the city to relieve the besieged remaining Spanish but was forced to withdraw on the 30th of June 1520 CE in what became known as the Noche Triste. Gathering local allies Cortés returned ten months later and in 1521 CE he laid siege to the city. Lacking food and ravaged by disease, the Aztecs, now led by Cuauhtemoc, finally collapsed on the fateful day of 13th of August 1521 CE. Tenochtitlan was sacked and its monuments destroyed. From the ashes rose the new capital of the colony of New Spain and the long line of Mesoamerican civilizations which had stretched right back to the Olmec came to a dramatic and brutal end.

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The Aztec Empire flourished between c. 1345 and 1521 CE and, at its greatest extent, covered most of northern Mesoamerica. Aztec warriors were able to dominate their neighbouring states and permit rulers such as Motecuhzoma II to impose Aztec ideals and religion across Mexico.