Whoever created the monument—and whatever other examples may exist of this unknown, but highly literate culture that otherwise has disappeared without a trace—was able to employ a complicated array of very stylized syllabic letters and other geometric symbols that acted as punctuation throughout the text. But as well as the task of attempting to decipher the writing, the concerns of archaeologists have quickly focused on the site itself. After all, La Mojarra today is but a small, remote village and has always been considered a fairly insignificant archaeological site. “Yet,” says archaeologist Richard Diehl, “here we have this wonderful monument and incredible text. What happened at La Mojarra?” And how many other La Mojarras were there? For, as the initial published report on the La Mojarra discovery observes, at the very least “it has added another interesting piece to what has become a very complex mosaic. . . . [in that] scholars now suspect there must have been many sophisticated local writing traditions before the Maya.”55
Until—if ever—questions like these are answered, however, popular interest in early Mesoamerican society will continue to focus on the Maya. And for good reason. The Maya, after all, created what has to be one of the most extraordinary civilizations the world has ever known, a civilization that governed fifty or more independent states and that lasted in excess of 1000 years.
The Maya empire stretched out over a vast land area of more than 100,000 square miles, beginning in the Yucatán region of southern Mexico, across and down through present-day Belize and Guatemala toward the borders of Honduras and El Salvador. No one knows how large the Maya population was at its zenith, but scholarly estimates have ranged as high as eight to ten to thirteen million for just the Yucatán portion of the empire, an area covering only one-third of Maya territory.56 Scores of major cities, all of them filled with monumental works of art and architecture, blanketed the lands of the Maya. Cities such as Kaminaljuyú, the key center for the growth of early Maya culture; Yaxchilán, a vibrant arts community; Palenque, with its extraordinary palatial architecture; Copán, with its Acropolis and its elegant and serene statuary, totally absent of any martial imagery; Uxmal, with its majestic Quadrangle and mysterious Pyramid of the Magician; and the great Toltec-Maya cities like Tula and the grandly opulent Chichén Itzá—to name just some of the more magnificent of such urban complexes.
Maya cities were geographically larger and less densely populated than were other Mesoamerican urban centers, particularly those of central Mexico. Thus, for instance, the wondrous city of Tikal, in the middle of the luxuriant Peten rain forest, seems to have contained more than three times the land area of Teotihuacan (more than six times by one recent estimate), and also had a huge population, but a population less concentrated than Teotihuacan’s because most of its buildings and residential compounds were separated by carefully laid out gardens and wooded groves. Current research also is demonstrating that Tikal’s population—now estimated at between 90,000 and 100,000 people—was sustained by an elaborate system of immense catchment reservoirs that may have been constructed in other lowland urban areas as well. Combined with advanced agricultural techniques that allowed Tikal’s farmers to coax enormous crop yields out of raised wetland gardens, the reservoir systems probably enabled population densities in rural Maya communities to exceed 500 people per square mile—that is, as high as the most intensively farmed parts of rural China (and the metropolitan areas of modern-day Albany, Atlanta, Dallas, and San Diego)—while urban core areas attained densities as high as 5000 persons per square mile, more than half the density of the high-rise city of Detroit today.57
It was with the support of this sort of extraordinary agricultural foundation that Maya populations fanned out well beyond the outer boundaries of their cities, filling thousands of square miles with non-urban peoples, in some cases virtually from the portals of one major city to the gates of the next. To use Tikal as an example once again, a detailed recent archaeological-demographic analysis has shown that at least 425,000 people—four to five times the population of the city itself, and a much higher number than ever before supposed—were under the city’s direct control throughout the surrounding countryside.58
Many thick volumes have been written on the wonders of Maya culture and civilization—its economic organization and trade networks, its fabulous artworks, its religion and literature, its complex calendrical and astrological systems, and more. This is not the place to try to review any of this work, but it is important at least to point out how little we still know of these people. Their involved writing system, combining elements of both phonetic and ideographic script, for example, appears to have been fully expressive of the most intricate and abstract thinking and has been compared favorably to Japanese, Sumerian, and Egyptian—but it continues to defy complete translation.
Similarly, for many years the absence of a gridwork layout to streets, plazas, and buildings in Maya cities puzzled scholars. Right angles weren’t where they logically should have been, buildings skewed off oddly and failed to line up in the expected cardinal directions; everything seemed to twist away from an otherwise generally northward presentation. Apparently, said some archaeologists, Maya builders were incompetent and couldn’t construct simple right angles. Given the exquisite and precise alignments of every other aspect of Maya architecture, however, others thought this to be at best a hasty criticism. And now it is beginning to become evident that these seeming eccentricities of engineering had nothing to do with incompetence.
On the contrary, a complicated and original architectural pattern had always been present—the same pattern, some began to notice, in city after city after city—but its conceptual framework was so foreign to conventional Western perception and thought that it remained effectively invisible. Recently, the “code,” as it were, of Maya engineering and construction has begun to be deciphered, and the story it reveals is mind-boggling. So precise were the Maya calendrical measurements and astronomical observations—and so central were these cosmic environmental calculations to their ritual and everyday lives—that the Maya constructed their cities in such a way that everything lined up exactly with specific celestial movements and patterns, particularly as they concerned the appearance and disappearance of the planet Venus in the evening sky.59 We will never understand deeply the world of the ancient Maya. Too much has already been lost. But, in addition to what is known about their exceptional achievements in creating a vast and complex empire of trade, commerce, politics, urban planning, architecture, art, and literature, what anthropologist and astronomer Anthony Aveni has said about the life of the mind among the Maya surely is correct:
Their cosmology lacks the kind of fatalism present in our existential way of knowing the universe, one in which the purposeful role of human beings seems diminished. These people did not react to the flow of natural events by struggling to harness and control them. Nor did they conceive of themselves as totally passive observers in the essentially neutral world of nature. Instead, they believed they were active participants and intermediaries in a great cosmic drama. The people had a stake in all temporal enactments. By participating in the rituals, they helped the gods of nature to carry their burdens along their arduous course, for they believed firmly that the rituals served formally to close time’s cycles. Without their life’s work the universe could not function properly. Here was an enviable balance, a harmony in the partnership between humanity and nature, each with a purposeful role to play.60
If we were fully to follow the course of Mesoamerican culture and civilization after the Maya, we next would have to discuss the great Toltec state, and then the Mixtecs (some of whose history is recorded in those of their bark-paper and deerskin-covered books and codices that survived the fires of the Spanish conquest), and finally the Aztecs—builders of the great cities like Tenochtitlán, with which the previous chapter began. Of course, the empire of the Aztecs was much more extensive than that described earlier, centered on the Lake of the Moon. At its peak the empire reached well over 7
00 miles to the south of Tenochtitlán, across the Valley of Oaxaca, past the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, and into the piedmont and rich coastal plain of the province of Xoconocho on the border of modern-day Guatemala. Some provinces were completely subservient to the empire’s might, while others, such as large and powerful Tlaxcallan to the east retained its nation-within-an-empire independence. Still others warded off Aztec control entirely, such as the immense Tarascan Kingdom to the north, about which little yet is known, but which once stretched out over 1000 miles across all of Mexico from the Gulf on one side to the Pacific Ocean on the other.
And then in Central America—beyond the reach of Maya or later Aztec influence—there were the culturally and linguistically independent Lenca peoples, the Jicaque, the Paya, the Sumu, and the Chorotega of present-day Honduras. In pre-Columbian times Honduras may easily have had a population in excess of 1,400,000 people—almost a third of what it contains even today.61 Further to the south, Nicaragua’s indigenous population probably reached at least 1,600,000 before the arrival of the Spanish—a little less than half of what the country’s population is at present.62 In all, current estimates of the size of pre-Columbian Central America’s population (Guatemala, Honduras, Belize, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama) range from a low of about 5,650,000 to a high of more than 13,500,000.63 The latter figure represents nearly half the 1990 population (around 29,000,000) of these turbulent and rapidly growing nations. And still we have not yet begun to discuss the entire continent of South America, by itself almost twice the size of China, larger than all of Europe and Australia combined.
A glance at the South American civilizations might begin with the cluster of independent chiefdoms that once dominated the northern Andes, where Ecuador and Colombia are today. These are commonly overlooked cultures in modern history texts, but they were not ignored by the first Europeans in the New World, who were drawn to them because of the fantastic wealth in gold and gems that they promised.
One story that the conquistadors had heard—and one that turned out to be true—concerned the Muisca people who lived in the vicinity of Lake Guatavita, a lake formed in the distant past by the impact of a falling meteor, high in the mountains of Colombia. Whenever a new leader of the Muisca acceded to power the coronation ritual involved his being anointed with a sticky gum or clay to which gold dust would adhere when sprayed on his body, apparently through tubes of cane stalk. Once thus transformed into a living statue of gold, the new leader stepped onto a raft that was laden down with gold and emerald jewelry. Specially garbed priests aboard the raft then directed it to the center of the lake. At the same time, the entire Muisca population surrounded the lake, playing musical instruments and holding many more gold and emerald implements in their hands. At an appointed moment, possibly as dawn broke and the lake’s waters and the new leader’s gilded body gleamed in the morning sun, he dove into the center of the lake, washing away the gold dust as his people threw their precious offerings into the sacred water-filled meteor crater.
A small fragment of the Muisca gold that survived the earliest Spanish depredations, along with some gold from other peoples of the region, is now housed in the Museo del Oro of the Banco de la República in Bogotá. It consists of about 10,000 golden artifacts, everything from small animal carvings and masks to spoons and nose rings. As one writer describes the experience of viewing this treasure house, unwittingly donated by a people about whom most of us have never heard:
You walk down a corridor lined on both sides with display cases, each case packed with these opulent creations. You turn right, walk down another corridor past more of the same. Then more. And more. Finally, instead of going out, you are led into a dark room. After you have been there awhile the lights begin rising so gradually that you expect to hear violins, and you find yourself absolutely surrounded by gold. If all of Tut’s gold were added to this accumulation, together with everything Schliemann plucked from Mycenae and Hissarlik, you could scarcely tell the difference.64
Turning from the northernmost parts of the Andes to the immediate south we encounter the region where, at the time of Columbus, the single most extensive empire on earth was located—the land of the Inca, stretching down the mountainous western spine of South America over a distance equivalent to that now separating New York and Los Angeles. This is a land with an ancient history. More than four thousand years before the flowering of the Incas, other cultures had existed in this region, some of which were built entirely on intricate systems of trade. The earliest of these seem to have been in the Andean highlands, communities—such as La Galgada, Huaricoto, Huacaloma, and others—characterized by large populations and extraordinary multi-storied works of monumental architecture. Many of these sites, just being uncovered and analyzed today, are causing excitement in archaeological circles because, as one scholar points out: “Mesoamerica, long thought to be the precocious child of the Americas, was still confined to the Mesoamerican village during the time we are talking about, and monumental architecture in Peru was a thousand years old when the Olmecs began their enterprise.”65 For the sake of world cultural context, this also means that Peruvian monumental architecture was in place by the time the Painted Pottery culture of neolithic northern China emerged, that it existed before England’s Stonehenge was created, and that it was already about a thousand years old when Tutankhamen’s body was being embalmed in Egypt.
These were societies, as noted, that developed in the Andean highlands. Others, also of ancient origin, emerged in coastal areas. One example, still being excavated by archaeologists today, is a complex of enormous stone structures known as El Paraíso that is located on the central Peruvian coast. Here, around 3800 years ago, there stood a large urban center that drew sustenance from fishing and the cultivation of some edible plants, such as beans and peppers, but whose dominant agricultural product was cotton. The inhabitants of El Paraíso used their cotton plantations to produce raw materials for the manufacture of fishing nets and clothing, which they traded with other coastal and highland communities to complement their limited variety of foodstuffs. Of especial interest to political historians is the fact that this large and complex society—whose residential and ceremonial buildings had required the quarrying of at least 100,000 tons of rock from the surrounding hillsides—apparently existed for centuries without a centralized political power structure; all the archaeological evidence uncovered thus far indicates that the people of El Paraiso built their huge stone structures and carried out their highly organized monocrop agriculture and trade while living under remarkably egalitarian political conditions.66
In contrast, during its relatively brief reign 3000 years later, the Inca empire was directed by a highly structured elite whose powers encompassed and governed, either directly or indirectly, nearly a hundred entirely different linguistic, ethnic, and political communities.67 These included the people who built the splendid, cloud-enveloped, and almost otherworldly Andean city of Machu Picchu high in the remote forested mountains—so high and so remote that once Machu Picchu was deserted it was not found again (at least by non-Indians) until the twentieth century. And then there were and are the Nazca people, whose culture was flourishing 2000 years ago. These are the people who created on the barren desert floor south of present-day Lima enormous etchings of various living things—hummingbirds, condors, dogs, plants, spiders, sharks, whales, and monkeys—as well as spiritual figures, domestic designs (such as a huge ball of yarn and a needle), and precisely aligned geometric patterns, including trapezoids, triangles, zigzags, and spirals. Because of their great size (a single line of a geometric figure may run straight as a ruler for more than half a mile) the full patterns of these perfectly drafted images can only be seen from the air or from very high ground. As a result, outlandish modern theories of origin have circulated widely, betraying once again our unthinking disparagement of the native peoples of this region who, it intuitively is thought, could not possibly have created anything so monumental and precise. In
terestingly (and conveniently overlooked by those who believe these great projects to be the work of outsiders), many of the same designs from the desert floor are found decorating ancient Nazca ceramics as well, and additional oversize animal representations and other designs, less famous and smaller in scale, have also been found in North American deserts, 3000 miles away.68
Compared with Mesoamerican cities, those of the Incas were almost austere. Even the fabulous city of Cuzco at first seemed most brilliant in its superb surface simplicity, its streets laid out on a cruciform plan, its houses mostly single-story affairs with steeply pitched roofs to fend off the heavy rains of the Andes. Apart from its gold, the first Europeans were most impressed with Cuzco’s exceptional cleanliness, perhaps exemplified by the clear-water rivers and streams from the mountains that flowed through the center of the Inca capital. Before entering the city these waters’ upstream pools and rivulets provided bathing and recreation for Cuzco’s inhabitants; for years after the Spanish conquest, wrote one conquistador, it was common to find there “small gold ornaments or pins which [Inca women] forgot or dropped while bathing.”69 As the waters ran through Cuzco, however, they were captured and diverted into perfectly engineered stone gutters that followed the routes of the city’s many streets, helping to wash away debris and keep the roadways clean.
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