by Kevin Reilly
States and Empires of South America
The South American Inca Empire that fell to the Spanish conquistador Pizarro in 1534 was very much like the Aztec in its origins. Like the Aztecs, the Incas were recent conquerors of other kingdoms. Like the Aztecs, they had come from obscurity in the early 1400s to rule a vast area—the four parts of the world, they called it, and it extended from Ecuador to Bolivia and from the Andes to the Pacific coast of South America. Like the Aztecs, the Inca invented ancestry from a previous power to suggest their importance. They came, they said, from Tiwanaku, the state that ruled the highlands of the Andes from around 400 to 1000. In fact, they borrowed ideas and institutions from a number of earlier states of the Andes highlands and the Pacific coast.
Before the Incas . Glancing at a map, it might seem strange that all the cities and states of South America before 1500 developed in the same section of the continent—along the Pacific coast and in the Andes mountains. Today, for instance, the largest cities are along the Atlantic coast, and the largest modern states, Brazil and Argentina, were not even part of these pre-1500 states. It might seem even stranger from ground level. The Pacific coast has some of the driest, most desolate deserts on the planet, and the city sites in the Andes Mountains are in such high and forbidding places that entire cities are still being discovered in dense jungle at very high altitudes.
The earliest dense settlements in South America were along the Pacific coast in what is today northern Peru. There coastal areas were dry (though not as dry as southern Peru and northern Chile), but rivers cascading down from the high Andes provided abundant water for irrigated farming. Nevertheless, farming may have encouraged dense human settlement only after the teeming coastal fisheries had begun the process. The waters off the coast of northern Peru offered the most abundant harvests of small fish, like anchovies, and the larger fish and birds that fed on them found anywhere in the world. This was a result of the cold waters of the Humboldt Current flowing north from Antarctica along the Pacific coast, where they met the warm equatorial waters. This area may have been one of the few in the world where fisheries were abundant enough to allow dense and permanent human settlement before agriculture.9 (The Pacific Northwest was another, as we shall see.)
If early settlements could be formed by groups of villagers who lived by fishing, hunting, and gathering, the first states and kingdoms depended on agriculture and often grazing animals as well. Even more than the pastoral societies of East Africa, the early states and kingdoms of South America were multilevel societies that took advantage of the different resources of widely varying altitudes. Cotton and corn (after it arrived from Middle America) could be grown at low altitudes. The numerous tubers that were domesticated into potatoes and yams grew more easily at higher altitudes in the Andes. Even higher on plateaus of short grasses, llamas and alpacas were raised and grazed. In this way, compact Andean states grew vertically over desert, grasslands, lush valleys, and rugged mountains in irrigated layers of settlement.
Andean civilization seemed to climb up from the shores of the Pacific to the mountain ridges 20,000 feet above sea level. If so, it was not a straight climb, and it was not only onward and upward. First, there are two or more Andean ridges stretching north and south with large tropical rain forests in between. Second, the culture of Andean civilization shows the unmistakable stamp of peoples of eastern tropical rain forests. Places like the Amazon jungle may not have produced highly concentrated settlements, but some of their habitations may have been among the oldest on the continent, and their descendants must have helped shape Andean civilization.
Classical Chavin . The classical, some would even say “mother,” culture of Andean civilization was centered at Chavin de Huantar (around 800-200 BCE). Some of the cultural elements of later Andean life developed earlier, but at Chavin they came together in a formative mix. The site, halfway between sea and mountaintops, at the 10,000-foot-level crossroads of ancient trade routes, was considered especially sacred. The main temple, a U shape of raised platforms with the opening facing east, uphill, and toward the mountain waters, became a model for Andean temples. At Chavin de Huantar, the temple contained secret chambers, tunnels, and a central niche with a totemlike stone pillar that contained the face of the god and imagery connected sea and mountains and earth and sky. The role of forest peoples could be seen in the sacred depiction of jaguars, caiman crocodiles, and snakes, images replicated on stone and pottery for the following millennia that seemed to suggest that the fears and fascinations of the jungle were those of the desert and mountains as well. From the desert came a hallucinatory cactus that, according to friezes on the temple wall, would put the shaman into a sacred trance. Underneath the lower-level garden in the center of the U, one heard the rushing roar of water, the sound of the god’s energy and a reminder of the miracle of irrigation that connected wet and dry and high and low.
Moche Warrior Priests and Divine Emperors . Beginning around 200 BCE, the Andes witnessed a series of ever-larger empires that combined the culture and religious ideas of Chavin with the techniques of military expansion and political domination. The first of these empires, the Moche (200-700), united not only upper and lower realms of the mountains but also entire valleys between mountain ridges. If Chavin was run by priests, the Moche Empire was run by warrior priests and a king who styled himself as a god, demanded human sacrifices, and commanded the work of all and the lives of some to magnify his realm and accompany him after death. Here we also see the first cases of burial distinctions in Andean society. Mummified Moche aristocrats, like the Lords of Sipan, wrapped in clothing that took another’s lifetime to produce and crowned with gold-plated crescent moons, also demanded llamas, wives, and helpers in their tombs. The Moche may have initiated the mit’a system of forced labor for state building projects, especially the pyramid-like tombs of the rulers. They also developed metallurgy in the Americas; they did not smelt ores, but they hammered and soldered gold, silver, and copper into jewelry and ritual objects that would be imitated for millennia afterward.
The end of the Moche came with a series of what we have since recognized as El Niños—sudden warming of the nearby ocean water that drastically reduced the harvests of anchovies and caused extreme conditions of drought (not incidentally causing a series of climatic changes around the world). In addition, the Andes were struck by a major earthquake sometime between 650 and 700. The Moche was not the only civilization destroyed by the desiccation and dust. The Nazca people on the coastal plains of southern Peru, known for their miles-long sand images of hummingbirds, monkeys, whales, and spiders, also disappeared.
Incas and Their Ancestors . When the Incas traced their ancestry back to Tiwanaku, they identified themselves with a state that had dominated the highlands of southern Peru and Bolivia from Lake Titicaca (in modern Bolivia) from around 400 to 1000. This association also meant a declaration of loyalty to Viracocha, the creator god, and to an extensive empire based on further irrigation, widespread mit’a service, U-shaped steppe temples that demonstrated the control of water, human sacrifice, and the imagery of jaguar and evil. In other words, Tiwanaku continued many of the elements of Andean culture from the time of the Moche and even the Chavin.
Yet each new kingdom controlled a larger area than its predecessor. One of the techniques that made this possible was an institution anthropologists call “split inheritance,” which operated like a 100 percent inheritance tax each time a king died. As developed by the Chimu state (1100-1400), the immediate predecessor of the Inca, split inheritance was a system by which all mit’a, taxes, and tribute paid to a particular king, was channeled to his estate and the upkeep of his temple after his death. This meant that whatever son became his successor had to find entirely new sources of revenue. In other words, he had to conquer his own kingdom, adding it to his father’s and those of his predecessors, thus creating his own empire. The capital of the Chimu state, Chan Chan, had 9 or 10 separate enclosed districts, each containing the temple g
rounds and resources of a departed king. And with each new conquest came new subsidiary cities, provincial capitals with their own local subordinates, and new aristocrats. It was an extremely effective system of imperial expansion as long as there were new lands to conquer.
The Incas used the tool of split inheritance to create an empire more than double the size of the Chimu. It encompassed all the coast and the uplands from southern Ecuador to northern Chile and Bolivia. The Inca proved particularly adept at administering such a vast empire on a shoestring. Messengers ran from one station to another throughout the empire, carrying their messages on khipus of knotted string and sometimes (according to an older custom) engraved on lima beans.
If their technology was lean, the Inca compensated with a passion for organization. They created a system in which state sovereignty overrode kinship by dividing the empire into quarters, halves, and provinces. Then they created groups of 10,000, 5,000, 1,000, 500, and 100 taxpayers. Foremen were put in charge of groups of 50 and 10 taxpayers. An annual census ensured proper records for taxation and military service.10 Without wheeled vehicles, writing, or iron metallurgy, the Inca governed an empire that—because of its slopes, terraces, mountains, and valleys—covered far greater distances than the condor flies. It is estimated that the Inca built about 25,000 miles of roads.
Inca taste for organization and centralization contrasts with the loosely organized conquest states of Middle America. The Mayan civilization actually comprised a number of relatively independent cities or city-states separated by jungle and distance. The Aztec state was intentionally not integrated since Aztec sacrificial rites required a continual source of captives from nearby enemies.
States and Peoples of North America
There were no large Native American empires in the area of what is today the United States and Canada—no large bureaucracies or militaristic imperial states on the scale of the Aztec or Inca. There were states, however, and chiefdoms, and there were abundant forms of political and social organization, including stateless societies and alliances of independent states.
The smaller size of North American political units was due in part to a lower population density. Population figures for the Americas before 1500 are largely guesswork, but estimates for North America vary from 2 million to 18 million. The entire Western Hemisphere (North, Middle, and South America) contained 40 million to 100 million people. The lower population density in North America corresponded to the widespread use of slash-and-burn agriculture, especially in the vast woodlands east of the Mississippi and to the limits of the dry and desert lands of the west. Nevertheless, there were areas where hunter-gatherers created large, settled tribal communities of significant sophistication (most notably along the rich fisheries of the Pacific coast) as well as agricultural areas where people created cities without irrigation or plows and draught animals.
Peoples and Places . One of the reasons why it is difficult to know the size of the precontact American populations is that many Native Americans were wiped out by European diseases after 1492. North American estimates pose an additional problem. English colonists in North America created a mythology that they had come to an empty or “virgin land,” largely because they wanted to settle their families permanently in the “new world.” Spaniards in Middle and South America were generally more interested in converting souls and exploiting labor. North American settlers had a greater interest in removing the Indian population—physically and mentally—making later accountings more difficult.
Compared to Middle and South America, North America, at least east of the Mississippi, is a land where the original people are neither seen nor heard. In Mexico, Central America, and most of South America, Indian peoples are everywhere. In much of the United States, outside of Indian reservations, most Indian faces are those of Mexican or Central and South American immigrants. But the signs of a previous habitation line every street and highway as if they were still the Indian trails they frequently trace. The names of 23 states, four Great Lakes, and thousands of rivers, lakes, mountains, and cities in the United States and thousands more in Canada (named after kanata, an Iroquoian word for “settlement”) are Indian words. Dozens of the hundreds of Indian languages once spoken are still in use. Among those that are extinct, many of their words are still used without any idea of their origins. In much of North America, we build our lives in a haunted landscape.
Rich Pacific Fisheries . The first Americans probably settled along the Pacific coast of what is today Canada and the United States after crossing the frozen Bering Strait from Asia. There they encountered the same sort of ideal conditions that others were soon to find farther south along the Pacific coast of Peru. Ocean currents ensured moderate temperatures and abundant fish and wildlife. Salmon (rather than anchovies), seals, and whales provided an almost unlimited source of protein, and (unlike Peru) the banks of the Pacific were rich in animals and plants. Women harvested pine nuts and acorns and ground them into meal. Men harvested abundant forests to build wooden houses and canoes. These peoples enjoyed a comfortable material life, with specialists and chiefs and even slaves who were captured from foreign tribes and used for household duties. Although they grew no crops (except for tobacco), the hunter-gatherers of the Pacific coast reached population sizes and densities that were normally possible only with agriculture. Before 1500, the population of the California coast alone was about 300,000. In Santa Barbara, Chu-mash villages numbered more than 1,000.
Farther north on the Pacific coast, the Chinook, Kwakiutl, Nootka, and other Wakashan speakers enjoyed such affluence that they gave it away in a festival called the potlatch. To mark important events, like the erection of a totem pole or the death of an important elder, the host built a special house for the event. He designed his guest list with special care not to embarrass or slight. Guests of highest rank might be given slaves or large copper shields (each worth five slaves). Those of less rank might receive carved boxes, utensils, tools, or the valuable blankets made of mountain goat hair acquired in trade from the Athabaskan Indians of the northern interior. Hundreds of clan members would enjoy the feast: salmon, haddock, and shellfish, all dipped in the everpresent smelt sauce, and numerous varieties of berries. Following the meal, they would share tobacco, sing songs, dance, and receive the gifts. Sometimes the host ceremonially destroyed some of his wealth as a sign of his generosity (and power). Many guests stayed overnight before returning home in their canoes, which the host had loaded with more food for the journey.11
Pueblos of the Southwest . Nature was not as kind to the dry lands of what became the southwestern United States. Nevertheless, the Indians of New Mexico, Arizona, and southern Colorado developed agriculture about 3,000 years ago as the northern area of a zone of farmers that stretched deep into Mexico. They channeled light rain and generous rivers into irrigation canals where they grew beans, squash, and corn. During the relatively well watered period between 500 and 1200, the ancestors of today’s Navaho, the Anasazi, created dense, well-protected pueblo settlements on highlands like Mesa Verde (Colorado) and veritable “apartment houses” for cliff dwellers at places like Chaco Canyon (New Mexico). From there, they traded with the Great Plains Indians, who hunted bison (without horses), and with Indian miners of turquoise. Sometime after 1200, however, these pueblos were abandoned. There may have been conflict with new migrants from the north (where the Ana-sazi had themselves originated), but the causes probably had more to do with the return of dry climate conditions. As pueblos were abandoned, the descendants of the Anasazi moved, many to the Rio Grande valley, where they became part of new communities like the Hopi. A Spanish expedition to a Hopi town in 1582 found that the Indians of the Southwest had reclaimed a satisfying standard of living:
A thousand Indians greeted us with fine earthen jars full of water, and with rabbits, venison, tortillas, beans, cooked calabashes, corn and pine nuts, so that heaps of food were left over.12
Eastern Woodland Farmers . From the eastern edge of the Gr
eat Plains to the Allegheny Mountains, vast watered woodlands with numerous rivers and streams created a riot of plant and animal life. Much of this area from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico drained into the Mississippi River, bringing melted mountain snows and light loam silt soil to the fertile American Bottom of the Mississippi valley. The Mississippi drainage, including its tributaries like the Ohio and Missouri, covered almost a million and a quarter square miles (about the size of India).13 The Mississippi alone extended almost 4,000 miles, about the length of the Amazon and the Nile, but since it ran almost entirely through a temperate climate zone and woodlands (instead of tropical forest or desert), the entire drainage could support a large population. The numbers elude us, but certainly the majority of Indians north of the Rio Grande lived in this area. Spaniards who accompanied Hernando De Soto’s expedition from Florida to Tennessee to Arkansas and Texas in the 1540s described thousands of towns and villages.
The “Great River,” as the Indian name accurately labeled it, provided for permanent human settlements, fishing, hunting, and gathering as early as 4,500 years ago, not too long after permanent settlements were established in the other great river valley civilizations on the Euphrates, Nile, Indus, and Yellow rivers. The Mississippian culture that developed in North America was, in fact, the only river valley civilization in the Americas. Whereas the other great river valleys of the world grew by domesticating plants and animals, the Americans of the Mississippi woodlands (like their settled cousins on the Pacific coast) were settled hunter-gatherers. They domesticated local grasses and gourds (mainly for the containers) and sometime after 400 began to plant Mexican corn, but not until after around 900 did corn and beans become a staple in their diet and the yeast for their population growth.
