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Aztec History Video

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The origins of the Aztec Empire are part legend, part archaeological and historical fact. When the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés arrived in Basin of Mexico in 1517, he found that the Aztec Triple Alliance, a strong political, economic and military pact, controlled the basin and indeed much of central America.

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Sun Stone

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Mayan History

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HistoryWorld contains narrative world history and interactive world history timelines.

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Mayan Architecture Video - Maya - HISTORY.com

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Ancient Mayan structures have lasted thousands of years, and their designs continue to influence modern architecture.

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Farming like the Incas

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

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The History Channel

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The Aztecs, who probably originated as a nomadic tribe in northern Mexico, arrived in Mesoamerica around the beginning of the 13th century. From their magnificent capital city, Tenochtitlan, the Aztecs emerged as the dominant force in central Mexico, developing an intricate social, political, religious and commercial organization that brought many of the region's city-states under their control by the 15th century. Invaders led by the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés overthrew the Aztec Empire by force and captured Tenochtitlan in 1521, bringing an end to Mesoamerica's last great native civilization.

Early Aztec History

The exact origins of the Aztec people are uncertain, but they are believed to have begun as a northern tribe of hunter-gatherers whose name came from their homeland Aztlan, or "White Land" in the Aztec language of Nahuatl. The Aztecs were also known as the Tenochca (from which the name for their capital city, Tenochtitlan, was derived) or the Mexica (the origin of the name of the city that would replace Tenochtitlan, as well as the name for the entire country). The Aztecs appeared in Mesoamerica-as the south-central region of pre-Columbian Mexico is known-in the early 13th century. Their arrival came just after, or perhaps helped bring about, the fall of the previously dominant Mesoamerican civilization, the Toltecs.

Did you know? The Aztec language, Nahuatl, was the dominant language in central Mexico by the mid-1350s. Numerous Nahuatl words borrowed by the Spanish were later absorbed into English as well, including chile or chili, avocado, chocolate, coyote, peyote, guacamole, ocelot and mescal.

When the Aztecs saw an eagle perched on a cactus on the marshy land near the southwest border of Lake Texcoco, they took it as a sign to build their settlement there. They drained the swampy land, constructed artificial islands on which they could plant gardens and established the foundations of their capital city, Tenochtitlán, in 1325 A.D. Typical Aztec crops included maize (corn), along with beans, squashes, potatoes, tomatoes and avocadoes; they also supported themselves through fishing and hunting local animals such as rabbits, armadillos, snakes, coyotes and wild turkey. Their relatively sophisticated system of agriculture (including intensive cultivation of land and irrigation methods) and a powerful military tradition would enable the Aztecs to build a successful state, and later an empire.

The Aztec Empire

In 1428, under their leader Itzcoatl, the Aztecs formed a three-way alliance with the Texcocans and the Tacubans to defeat their most powerful rivals for influence in the region, the Tepanec, and conquer their capital of Azcapotzalco. Itzcoatl's successor Montezuma (Moctezuma) I, who took power in 1440, was a great warrior who was remembered as the father of the Aztec empire. By the early 16th century, the Aztecs had come to rule over up to 500 small states, and some 5 to 6 million people, either by conquest or commerce. Tenochtitlán at its height had more than 140,000 inhabitants, and was the most densely populated city ever to exist in Mesoamerica.

Bustling markets such as Tenochtitlan's Tlatelolco, visited by some 50,000 people on major market days, drove the Aztec economy. The Aztec civilization was also highly developed socially, intellectually and artistically. It was a highly structured society with a strict caste system; at the top were nobles, while at the bottom were serfs, indentured servants and slaves.

Aztec Region

The Aztec faith shared many aspects with other Mesoamerican religions, like that of the Maya, notably including the rite of human sacrifice. In the great cities of the Aztec empire, magnificent temples, palaces, plazas and statues embodied the civilization's unfailing devotion to the many Aztec gods, including Huitzilopochtli (god of war and of the sun) and Quetzalcoatl ("Feathered Serpent"), a Toltec god who served many important roles in the Aztec faith over the years. The Great Temple, or Templo Mayor, in the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan was dedicated to Huitzilopochtli and Tlaloc, the rain god.

The Aztec calendar, common in much of Mesoamerica, was based on a solar cycle of 365 days and a ritual cycle of 260 days; the calendar played a central role in the religion and rituals of Aztec society.

European Invasion & Fall of the Aztec Civilization

The first European to visit Mexican territory was Francisco Hernandez de Cordoba, who arrived in Yucatan from Cuba with three ships and about 100 men in early 1517. Cordobars reports on his return to Cuba prompted the Spanish governor there, Diego Velasquez, to send a larger force back to Mexico under the command of Hernán Cortés. In March 1519, Cortes landed at the town of Tabasco, where he learned from the natives of the great Aztec civilization, then ruled by Moctezuma (or Montezuma) II.

Defying the authority of Velasquez, Cortes founded the city of Veracruz on the southeastern Mexican coast, where he trained his army into a disciplined fighting force. Cortes and some 400 soldiers then marched into Mexico, aided by a native woman known as Malinche, who served as a translator. Thanks to instability within the Aztec empire, Cortes was able to form alliances with other native peoples, notably the Tlascalans, who were then at war with Montezuma.

In November 1519, Cortes and his men arrived in Tenochtitlan, where Montezuma and his people greeted them as honored guests according to Aztec custom (partially due to Cortes' physical resemblance to the light-skinned Quetzalcoatl, whose return was prophesied in Aztec legend). Though the Aztecs had superior numbers, their weapons were inferior, and Cortes was able to immediately take Montezuma and his entourage of lords hostage, gaining control of Tenochtitlan. The Spaniards then murdered thousands of Aztec nobles during a ritual dance ceremony, and Montezuma died under uncertain circumstances while in custody.

European diseases like smallpox, mumps and measles were also powerful weapons against the local population, who lacked immunity to them. A Franciscan monk traveling with Cortés observed the impact of smallpox on the Aztecs: "They died in heaps...In many places it happened that everyone in a house died, and as it was impossible to bury the great number of dead, they pulled down the houses over them, so that their homes became their tombs." By 1520, smallpox had reduced the population of Tenochtitlan by 40% in just one year.

Cuauhtemoc, Montezuma's young nephew, took over as emperor, and the Aztecs drove the Spaniards from the city. With the help of the Aztecs' native rivals, Cortes mounted an offensive against Tenochtitlan, finally defeating Cuauhtemoc's resistance on August 13, 1521. In all, some 240,000 people were believed to have died in the city's conquest, which effectively ended the Aztec civilization. After his victory, Cortes razed Tenochtitla and built Mexico City on its ruins; it quickly became the premier European center in the New World.
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The Aztecs, who probably originated as a nomadic tribe in northern Mexico, arrived in Mesoamerica around the beginning of the 13th century. From their magnificent capital city, Tenochtitlan, the Aztecs emerged as the dominant force in central Mexico, developing an intricate social, political, religious and commercial organization that brought many of the region's city-states under their control by the 15th century.

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Virtually explore Machu Picchu in a fully immersive 360-degree experience.