by Peter Watson
Both the Zapotec and the Mixtec, who developed a drought-resistant form of maize, worshipped great natural forces: winds, clouds, lightning, thunder, fire, earthquakes. The pottery of both civilisations featured fire-serpents and were-jaguars. The most feared natural phenomenon appears to have been lightning among the Zapotecs, rain among the Mixtecs. In the Zapotec sierra south of Miahuatlán, communities believed in four types of lightning ‘that reside on certain hills oriented to the major world directions’. Their year was divided into four cocijos, or ‘lightnings’. Kent Flannery, Joyce Marcus and Ronald Spores say that these four world directions, the idea of a rectangular universe with four quarters, each related to a distinctive colour, is so widespread among the Indians of North, Central and South America, as well as vast areas of Asia, ‘as to suggest that it may have been part of the cultural baggage of the first immigrants to cross the Bering Strait’.37
The Zapotec were essentially animistic, considering many things to be alive that we consider inanimate. Marcus says they were not, strictly speaking, monotheistic but they did recognise a supreme being without beginning or end ‘who created everything but was not himself created’. It was this supreme being that had created lightning, sun, earthquakes, clouds and so on. Lightning was the most powerful supernatural to the Zapotecs, the most feared and, say Marcus et al., the oldest. On the summit of a mountain, long before the dawn of the world, lived Cocijojui, the old lightning of fire. At the foot of his throne he had four immense jars, in which he kept (shut up) clouds, wind, hail and rain. Each of these was watched over by a lesser lightning. Under certain circumstances, according to legend, these forces would be released as people petitioned the gods. Clouds were regarded as ancestors, though people had been jaguars at the start of the world. Clouds were the form to which all people would return, and the rainbow was given the name, Pelaquetza, quetzal serpent. Cocijo, the word for lightning, was incorporated into more than one ruler’s name.
Sacrifices were offered (often in remote, rugged mountains) to calm these forces, prisoners of war in particular, or children. Bloodletting was practised, with stingray spines or obsidian blades, the blood being caught on grass or bright feathers, then offered to the gods. The flesh of victims was cooked for eating and their skulls sometimes exchanged as gifts. Their priests had the power to put themselves into ecstatic states, both Zapotec and Mixtec using alcohol and hallucinogens in their rituals. Pulque, made from the sap of the maguey plant, was a favoured alcoholic drink, the main hallucinogens being the mushroom, Psilocybe spp., Morning Glory (Rivera spp.) and Datura spp., or jimsonweed.38
Underlying the Mixtec and Zapotec civilisations, according to Richard Blanton, was an intimate link between religion and warfare. As time went by, the elites of these societies took on an ever-more powerful religious role, in which elites manipulated the ideology, in particular the promotion of ‘inter-polity conflict’. This warfare increased cohesion in their communities, and provided opportunities for ever-greater tribute payments. But, according to Blanton, the chief point of religion was the promotion of conflict – war – because it legitimised the elite’s control over ritual, and maintained their status.
We may ask why this was necessary – constant war was clearly a high-risk strategy. One answer is that war was a threat that the elite could manipulate, at least to an extent. They could choose their opponents, and when to fight. In contrast, the threats from nature, the ‘supernatural’ threats – lightning, torrential rain, hurricane winds, earthquakes and volcanoes – could not be predicted or controlled. In such a scenario, the elite’s standing, as ritual specialists, as calendar specialists, would from time to time be under threat because their methods, whatever they were, did not work. By ‘seeing’ threats in other political groupings, the elite could reassert itself and counter any tendencies on the part of the non-elite segments of the population to question their authority. This explains both the propagandistic nature of their art at the time and their constant preoccupation with genealogy, in particular genealogy that linked the elite to the gods.
Even so, it is not quite clear whether their decline was due to environmental degradation, catastrophe, economic crisis or because people began to question the dominant ideology. Also, their decline coincided with the rise of Tula (see chapter 23).39
A CITY OF 600 PYRAMIDS
Finally, among the Mesoamerican cities, Teotihuácan. The people in the Valley of Mexico had a long-standing relationship with the Olmec, through trade, and two cities benefited from about 1000 BC on. These were Cuicuilco and Teotihuácan, though the former was destroyed by a nearby volcano, whereas the latter prospered. By the time of Christ its population was 40,000 and by AD 500 it was between 100,000 and 200,000, making it one of the largest cities in the world.
Teotihuácan was immense but, unlike many cities, it did not grow haphazardly. Instead it was laid out as a symbolic landscape of artificial mountains and foothills separated by open spaces. The city contained no fewer than 600 pyramids, 500 workshop areas, 2,000 apartment compounds, a great marketplace and numerous plazas anchored by the north-south axis of the three-mile long Street of the Dead. Even today it is an awe-inspiring achievement.
The city’s prosperity and raison d’ĕtre seems related to its proximity to a major obsidian source, the green-black obsidian glass-like stone being much prized by Olmec, Mayan and other stone workers, for sacrificial knives and mirrors. But Teotihuácan was also on an important trade route and its large-scale irrigation infrastructure, in a swampy area, provided sizeable maize and bean crops. All of which made it a sacred city on top of its other advantages. It may well have been a place of pilgrimage.
This could have arisen because the great Pyramid of the Sun was built over a natural cave in the volcanic lava – caves, as we have seen, being regarded as portals to the Underworld in Mesoamerican belief systems, and caves being centres of shamanistic ritual, making it a logical place to build a temple/pyramid. The great pyramids were built in the late second century AD and by AD 500 Teotihuácan covered more than seven square miles. Its mercantile influence was felt all over Mesoamerica.
It was a painted city, the surfaces of its streets and plazas being covered usually in white or red pigment and it was kept meticulously clean. There were many murals, maize and water being common themes as subject matter, but so too its great gods, Quetzalcoatl and Tlaloc. Quetzalcoatl, the Feathered Serpent, was the primeval deity of Mexico, a second god being Tlaloc, the god of rain and water but also, in some places, the god of war. Both these gods would be developed later among the Aztecs.40*
Jaguars are also a common theme at Teotihuácan. ‘They seem on first acquaintance to perform a whole variety of trained animal acts, such as straddling corn-grinding tables, wearing flowers and feathered ruffs, blowing on shell trumpets, swimming among waves, and shaking rattles,’ writes the art historian George Kubler. One ceremony centred on a jaguar-serpent-bird icon – this was first seen at Teotihuácan, then later elaborated at Tula of the Toltecs. Most of the jaguar images at Teotihuácan show people wearing jaguar costumes, sometimes a complete pelt, sometimes a headdress. Either way, the jaguar is always associated with bird and serpent images. Whereas this three-pronged association occurs only with humans at Teotihuácan, later on Toltec and Aztec depictions link the jaguar to the eagle. Judging by the iconography and artistic style, the forerunners of the Teotihuácan jaguars are the Olmec jaguars. In the excavation of the Pyramid of the Moon, Japanese archaeologists found bound sacrificial warriors along with traces of wooden cages and the remains of jaguars, wolves and falcons, which had been entombed alive.41
This underlines the inextricable mixing of jaguar ideas and serpent ideas in Mesoamerican belief. The jaguar, as we have repeatedly seen, represented power and the fertility of the earth, the serpent that which comes from water. These ideas would find later expression in Quetzalcoatl and Tlaloc (again, see the next chapter).42
Between AD 500 and 750, Teotihuácan’s fortunes began to declin
e and, interestingly, the images produced in the city show a great preoccupation with warfare, with armed deities and priests shown bearing shields and spears. In about 750 the city collapsed and the central ceremonial areas were burned. One reason may have been environmental degradation, in that much of the surrounding land was cleared and emptied to make lime and mortar for the extensive building projects, which may have accelerated erosion, bringing about the loss of agricultural land. To this may have been added drought, weakening an already weak state and making it vulnerable to semi-nomadic neighbours.
As we have repeatedly seen, as one city-state, or culture, faltered in Meso- and South America, another rose to prominence. This happened after the Moche disappeared on the Peruvian coast, as a new state, Huari, appeared in the Ayacucho region of the highlands. This eventually became home to between 20,000 and 30,000 souls and was a sharply segregated community, divided into kin groups, social classes and different occupations. Each region of the city had its own residential quarters and its own plaza, for ceremonies, the elite being separated from the artisans, such as potters, who had their own area.44
The Huari were master engineers, who built long canals linking highland springs with steeply terraced fields enabling them to grow maize in plentiful quantities. The city lay astride a major trade route over the Andes and for this reason, perhaps, their deity was the Gateway God, adapted by them to be a maize deity also, images showing corn ears growing from his headdress. The Huari successes in engineering enabled them to colonise land that others could not make much of until, eventually, their territory stretched for 600 miles across a number of mountain basins, in each of which the elite lived and worked with the local inhabitants, but kept themselves separate in administrative enclosures walled off from everyone else. Although they had good trading links with peoples on the coast, they never colonised that area, preferring to maintain their engineering superiority in the highlands.
Huari flourished from about AD 500 to 900 after which it declined, once more, perhaps, as a result of internal revolts.
THE PUEBLO PHENOMENON
In North America (‘Turtle Island’ to many indigenous Indians), no civilisation of the kind that flourished in South or Mesoamerica ever existed. One reason, as was discussed in an earlier chapter, was that wildlife was so abundant that earlier life-ways – hunting and gathering – were sufficient and efficient ways of existing for as many as 800 tribes.45 A second reason may have been that the New World grain, maize, did not reach North America until relatively late: it took time for strains that had emerged in the tropics to adapt themselves to the very different conditions of North America. A third reason was that, in many areas, water was a problem and this further inhibited the development of maize agriculture.
Nonetheless, by the time of the millennium we are considering – AD 1–1000 – in what is now considered to be the south-west and the Midwest, there were small towns, impressive architecture, fine ceramics and evidence of astronomical alignments. Small herbaceous plants, like spearmint and onion, were ‘encouraged’ with small, AD hoc canals which led from rivers to naturally occurring stands of plants. Recently also, ridged fields have been identified, so as to cope with cold environments, not unlike those found in South America. But by AD 200, maize sustained hundreds of village communities, which existed in the same place for generations, isolated but with pit houses dug into the ground.46 Because of the extremes of temperature in North America, very hot summers and very cold winters (the ‘thermal trumpet’, see chapter 5), villages developed in a distinctive way, being constructed of a series of rooms directly abutting one another, this being a thermally efficient way of coping with such a distinctive climate. These are the structures known to archaeologists as pueblos.
The most striking of these was the Anasazi town of Pueblo Bonito in Chaco Canyon (in New Mexico, near Albuquerque). In fact, Chaco Canyon, with stark, vertical cliffs many hundreds of feet high, was home to thirteen pueblos, each with a kiva or ceremonial room, plus another 2,400 archaeological sites nearby of one kind or another. Collectively, these show that the canyon had been inhabited for as much as 8,000 years, but the pueblos themselves did not emerge until between AD 700 and 900 Most of them were built in a semicircular fashion, the main reason appearing to be that in this way each dwelling unit was equidistant from the sunken kiva, the focal point of ceremonial life, in which some people worshipped a plumed serpent. The kivas were sunken so as to represent the primordial underworld ‘from which people emerged to populate the Earth’. According to one Hopi origin myth, ‘In the beginning there was only Tokpella, Endless Space . . . Only Tawa, the Sun Spirit, existed, along with some lesser gods. There were no people, then, merely insect-like creatures who lived in a dark cave deep in the earth.’ According to the rest of the legend Tawa led these creatures through two levels of the world and eventually they climbed up a stalk, through a doorway in the sky into the upper world. ‘The gods gave them corn and told them to place a small sipapuni on the floor of each kiva’ (the sipapuni being a small hole to represent where the primordial creatures emerged into this world). Thus the kiva represents the layered structure of the cosmos, and was the place where both the business of the community was discussed (when to plant the corn, when to harvest it) and where its elaborate ceremonies were conducted.47 It was the equivalent of the World Trees further south.
Pueblos and kivas could reflect astronomical alignments. For example, the great kiva at Casa Rinconada in Chaco Canyon has a main doorway that faces celestial north, the point around which the stars seem to rotate. It also had four post holes that housed great tree trunks symbolising the four trees that the first people climbed up to reach the world. At the solstice sunrise the first rays entered the doorway and shone into a niche that marked the northernmost journey of the sun. Here, as elsewhere in North America, Indian astronomers were also shamans, who used hallucinogens to pass from this world into the spirit world, who turned into animals (wolves in North America, rather than the jaguars of further south), and were sometimes depicted in art as flying between the realms. Human sacrifice was not common but not absent either.
Eventually nine major semicircular ‘Great Houses’ were built in the canyon, all in place by the eleventh century, with many being constructed next to major drainages, to benefit from seasonal floodwaters. The great Pueblo Bonito consisted of 800 rooms surrounding the semi-circular plaza. The size of the undertaking can be gauged from the calculation that each room needed four entire pine tree trunks to make the beams which supported the rooms, each pine taken from forty miles away.48
One early mystery has been ‘solved’. It was estimated that although there were a total of 6,500 rooms in the Chaco pueblos, the soil in the region could support a population of barely 2,000. It seems therefore that Chaco was, for many people, a ceremonial centre only, not unlike Monte Albán, or Chavín de Huántar, a place of pilgrimage where people came to worship but most didn’t stay very long. And this puts into context the discovery of a number of tracks converging on Chaco from the outside. These unpaved prehistoric roadways, often dead straight, sometimes lined with stones, sometimes dug inches deep, link Chaco to about thirty other settlements and some are as much as 40– 60 miles long, forming a network that stretches for 400 miles. This network is less well known than the Inca road system, or the lines of Nazca, but in its way is every bit as impressive.
Chaco was a trade centre as well, turquoise being the main precious substance in the area, used for ritual objects of many kinds. But the Chaco (Pueblo) Phenomenon, as it is called, extends over more than 25,000 square miles of what is now New Mexico and Colorado and appears to have been linked by an extensive ideological system, now lost, but perhaps related to ideas of sacred landscape.
The system collapsed towards the end of the twelfth century. This probably followed a period of prolonged drought that we know affected the San Juan Basin for more than half a century after AD 1100. But here too there is a lingering suspicion that the Chaco communi
ties overextended themselves, in that at least 20,000 pine trees went into the major pueblos, and this does not include the quantities of timber that would have been used up in heating during the harsh winters. So did woodcutting strip hillsides of their tree cover, leading to soil erosion? As we have seen, it happened elsewhere.
Mesa Verde lies in the south-west region of Colorado, a three-hour drive from Chaco Canyon in north-west New Mexico. Here, on a snowy day in 1888, two cowboys searching for stray cattle came across an extraordinary site – a high rocky overhang with a cave beneath it, the cave filled with more than 200 rooms and 23 circular kivas. Later archaeological investigations revealed that Mesa Verde was begun around AD 600 with a population, to begin with, of 150, living in small pit houses. By the ninth century the community had grown and built large kivas and by the eleventh century it had a population of about 2,500 but with an additional 30,000 living nearby. The Anasazi, the people who inhabited Mesa Verde, were good engineers and built a series of ditches and reservoirs to guide and collect water. The culture flourished, to the point where, between AD 1150 and 1250, some thirty cliff dwellings were clustered in three canyons, with 550 rooms and sixty kivas. They farmed the land above the canyons but in ~1300 the Anasazi abandoned the area. Here, the most likely reason was drought, the same drought, post-1150, that wreaked havoc in Chaco Canyon.49
