The Great Divide

by Peter Watson

  The Mogollon people, who lived in the arid and mountainous parts of Arizona and south-west New Mexico from about AD 200, were longer-lived than most – they did not die out until 1400 or even later. They lived in relatively small pueblos along the banks of rivers and stood out by the standard of their pottery, of which the best known was produced by the Mimbres people (named after a river). Each village had expert women potters who built up fine, thin-walled bowls from coils of fine river clay. The pots were fired then painted with brushes made of the yucca plant and it is the designs on these pots that have become famous, making them the finest ceramics in all of ancient North America. They show everyday life (people fishing), animals and insects, humans in a variety of clothing, flute players, dancers wearing animal masks, in some sort of shamanistic ritual. The Mogollon people were also interesting for the fact that they are known to have imported copper bells from Mexico, raising the possibility of trade links (and therefore the exchange of ideas) between North America and Mesoamerica.50

  Not all the ancient peoples of North America built pueblos. Many others were mound builders. One of the earliest to be formally excavated was at Snaketown, on the Gila River, near Sacaton in Arizona. Although this is a desert landscape, the river was a fertile oasis attracting deer and water birds in profusion. On top of which, the Hohokam people, who occupied Snaketown from perhaps 200 BC to AD 1450, were expert irrigation engineers, building canals up to three miles long to water their fields. Some archaeologists think the Hohokam people were migrants from Mexico, which would help explain some aspects of their culture, though other archaeologists play down these ideas.

  Their houses were not very sophisticated – pit houses and, above ground, structures built around poles, filled in with brush. But the houses were grouped next to central plazas surrounded by low mounds up to fifty feet across and three feet high, topped with clay and on which were built their altars and shrines. Nearby – and this is what suggests a Mesoamerican link – were two ball courts, about 130 feet long and 100 feet wide. However, the Hohokam ball courts are much less elaborate than the Mesoamerican variety (often built of sand rather than stone) and there are no signs of human sacrifice associated with the game. The trade goods at Snaketown are from the Pacific coast and the Gulf of Mexico and a variety of macaw feathers have been found, part of a dance ritual costume and they too could have come from Mexico.

  Brian Fagan argues that some ‘pervasive’ ideas undoubtedly drifted northwards from Mexico, but that the Anasazi, Mogollon and Hohokam cultures of the North American south-west were indigenous and characterised chiefly by harsh conditions, cycles of drought and occasional plentiful rainfall which together prevented the development of elaborate civilisations. Mostly, they had shamanistic belief systems.51

  MAIZE IN NORTH AMERICA

  When European settlers first encountered the great earth mounds of Ohio and the Midwest, in the early nineteenth century, most of them refused to believe that Native Americans were capable of such achievements, and the idea of a ‘vanished race’ took hold. It was a notion that did not outlast the century, as researchers from the Bureau of American Ethnology excavated more than 2,000 mounds between Wisconsin and Florida and concluded they had all been built by indigenous tribes and their ancestors.52

  The best known of these are the Adena, Hopewell and Cahokia cultures. In 1720, the French explorer Le Page du Pratz called on Chief Tattooed-Serpent of the Natchez, a group of about 4,000 people in seven villages built around a large mound. During the course of the Frenchman’s visit, the chief died suddenly, so du Pratz was able to witness his funeral. He recorded that Tattooed-Serpent lay in state, dressed in his finest regalia, with his face painted and wearing a ‘crown of white feathers mingled with red’. His weapons and his ceremonial pipes were placed by his side. At the main ceremony, in the temple, his two wives and six other sacrificial victims were made to kneel on ritual mats. Their heads were draped with animal skins as they ate tobacco pellets ‘to stupefy them’. They were quickly strangled by chosen executioners, after which, the temple was burned to the ground.53

  Mound-building burials appear to go back to about 2000 BC, with communities burying their dead on ridges often overlooking river valleys. These were usually associated with mythical founders of races and ancestors, ways to claim the land.

  One of the main centres of mound-building came from the ‘Adena’ people in Ohio – of the 2,000 excavated mounds, as many as 500 are Adena mounds. To begin with people were buried singly, and corpses added to the original one. Then, around the time of Christ, simple graves were replaced by larger burial chambers, containing more than one body, and lying under circular houses. Copper bracelets, marine shells and finely carved pipes accompanied the dead. Judging from the quality of the copper goods and the elaborate pipes, these bodies were of important people who were also shamans, the people who helped organise the community.

  By the early centuries AD, the Adena complex had been replaced by the Hopewell, named after a town in Ohio, in which the finely dressed dead were buried in mounds, accompanied by exotic materials from all over North America: copper, silver, quartz crystal, which had been passed along narrow trails (travelled on foot) from as far afield as Florida, the Gulf of Mexico, the Rockies and the Great Lakes.

  Sometimes the mounds hint at something more than burial chambers. At Newark, Ohio, for instance, the mounds are linked by a network of circles, squares and octagons joined by avenues. As with the Nazca lines in Peru, the builders of these monuments could only have truly appreciated them if they could have seen them from a helicopter. The average mound is thirty feet high and a hundred feet across, with a volume of half a million cubic feet. It has been calculated that each would have required 200,000 man-hours of earth moving. The most impressive mound of all is the Great Serpent Mound, where a snake modelled in earth lies with its sinuous body and coiled tail on top of a low ridge. Its mouth is gaping open, as if about to swallow another large oval mound.54

  Analysis has shown that hundreds of people were cremated and their ashes buried in the Hopewell mounds. Their leaders and their shamans received different treatment, being buried in log-lined tombs, sometimes in special burial houses, together with ceremonial artefacts that identify their clan, usually named after game animals and/or birds of prey.

  Despite their elaborate burial customs and their impressive mounds, the Hopewell people subsisted almost entirely by hunting, and by gathering wild plant foods. About AD 500 their way of life went into decline, with various reasons being suspected: the climate turned colder, driving game animals elsewhere; war, after the introduction of the bow and arrow; the development of maize-and-bean-based agriculture.

  This latter was certainly a major factor in the rise of Cahokia. Maize spread into eastern North America during the first millennium AD but it did not become a major staple until about AD 1000, when both maize and beans developed hardier strains and higher yields (see above, chapter eleven). After that, though, it spread rapidly. In fact, the evolution of Cahokia is possibly the only area of the New World where the Old World pattern of agriculture leading to civilisation is at all closely paralleled.55

  Cahokia was the largest town and ceremonial centre ever built in ancient North America. It is now dwarfed by Eastern St Louis, near where it is located, but between AD 1050 and AD 1250 Cahokia occupied more than five square miles, ‘a tangle of thatched houses, earthen mounds and small plazas’ built in the heart of the American Bottom, a low-lying flood plain south of the confluence of the Illinois River and the Mississippi. It is here that Monk’s Mound was constructed, the largest earthwork structure ever built in prehistoric North America, rising in four terraces to more than 100 feet and covering sixteen acres. This is modest by Mesoamerican standards but it still looks impressive against the flat country that surrounds it. It once boasted a large temple that would have been the focus of communal life. The plaza next to it, and various burial mounds and charnel houses were all surrounded by a high wooden pali
sade that effectively isolated the 200-acre central precinct from the outside world. To one side stood a circle comprised of 48 wooden poles, 410 feet across, with a central observation point for calibrating the position of sunrise at the equinoxes and solstices.56

  The chiefs who ruled over these arrangements were buried, at least in one case, on a platform of some 20,000 shell beads, plus 800 arrowheads, copper and mica sheets, plus fifteen polished stone discs. Around him were three other men and women buried nearby, and the bodies of other relatives perhaps sacrificed at the time of his interment. Beyond that were the remains of four decapitated men with their hands cut off and as many as fifty young women aged between thirteen and eighteen lay in a pit nearby, probably strangled to death.

  Cahokia was the main settlement in an agglomeration or network of nine other settlements all large enough to have their own chiefs and burial mounds, and beyond them another forty small, palisaded hamlets and farmsteads, all within the American Bottom. ‘Her artisans’ copper ornaments, masks and fine pots with effigies of humans and animals were known to shamans and chiefs hundreds of miles away.’57

  In general, Cahokia and its associated satellites are attributed to the Mississippian culture, now held to extend beyond the Mississippi Valley into Alabama, Georgia, and as far south and east as Florida. Its flourishing completes this chapter: AD 900 right up to European contact. Other centres emerged, such as Moundville, with large mounds and palisaded communities overlooking the river. Burials indicate that about 5 per cent of the population comprised the elite, who lived in special areas and who, when they died, had their bones stored in special charnel houses, together with regalia that indicated their elevated status.

  Mississippian societies do not appear to have ranked as full-blown states, in the Aztec or Inca sense. In the Midwest all households, even that of the chief, farmed land and fished the rivers. There were few full-time craftspeople, though every village would have found someone more adept than others at working in clay or other materials. But they do seem to have had a tribute-paying hinterland, showing that they did have power over other peoples, so perhaps this was a society beginning the transformation to statehood, which hadn’t occurred by the time of European contact. Studies show that tribute was collected from no more than nine miles away. Without domesticated animals, to carry the tribute, or wheeled carts, or horses, on which warriors might have been mounted, the size of the tribute-hinterland was naturally limited.

  The tribute was still important, though. Exotic luxury goods would have been incorporated into ritual activities, their sheer exoticness adding to the legitimacy and authority of the religious hierarchy.

  There is some slight evidence that the general ideas of the Mississippian cultures derive to some extent from Mexico, though there are as many opponents to this notion as there are adherents. Many of the figurines show long-nosed gods, with weeping eyes and a constant preoccupation with wind, fire, sun and human sacrifice. These ideas are very old and extend over vast stretches of the southern half of North America. Weeping eyes are associated in Mesoamerica with appeals and prayers for rain and where, on occasions, young girls were sacrificed, as mentoned earlier, because their tears were believed to bring rain. Another belief system centred around the fire and the sun: it was the task of Mississippian chiefs – identified with the sun – to rekindle the fire, perhaps during ceremonies honouring the new maize-growing season.

  In the end, although the Mississippi centres were located in a temperate zone, the make-up of North America, the converging nature of its mountain system, the ‘thermal trumpet’ (discussed in chapter five), mean that it suffered exceptionally hard winters with sharp frosts. This naturally confined the number of people the land could support, and true civilisation was simply not able to form there.

  In the first millennium AD, therefore, the western hemisphere was home to many developing cultures, and several civilisations. Perhaps the most interesting thing about these civilisations, in the context of this book, was their paramount concern with social stratification, the determination of the elites to hold on to control of ritual, their obsessions with war and the ubiquity of sacrifice.

  No one would deny that many Old World societies were very hierarchical. But the birth of the democratic idea, via war, and the end of sacrifice, are notable differences. We shall see later on where these differences were to lead.

  •21•

  BLOODLETTING, HUMAN SACRIFICE, PAIN AND POTLATCH

  We now turn to a number of practices and institutions that existed in the New World and not in the Old, and consider their significance. Several of these involve types of violence that seem extraordinary to us today. I stress types of violence rather than levels because the modern world has of course experienced unprecedented amounts of aggression and brutality. In the ancient New World it is the form violence takes that seems so unusual to us, moreover violence that was often directed against the self. First, however, we need to consider the context of this violence, namely the gods that were worshipped in the great Mesoamerican and South American societies and assess if, and how, they differed from deities in the Old World.

  The basic Maya cosmos we have met already. It consisted of an Upper or Over World, a Middle World and an Underworld, the latter entered through caves or bodies of standing water such as lakes or cenotes.1 The Mesoamericans believed that the sea lay under the land and formed lakes as well as the oceans. The Middle World was oriented in four cardinal directions, the principal one being the East, where the sun rose, while the West was associated with black, with night and with death. At the centre stood the World Tree, personified by the ruler, which linked all three worlds.

  The sacred Maya scriptures, Popol Vuh and Chilam Balam – which we know as copies transcribed into the Latin alphabet – and the four surviving indigenous codices, contain literary narratives as well as divination almanacs and, taken together, confirm that there was in Mesoamerica an inseparable link between deities, the calendar and astronomy. Rooted probably in Olmec religion, Maya beliefs had three main elements – the cult of the jaguar, shamanism, and what is known as nahualism, the belief that each deity had an animal double through which it could come into direct contact with human beings by means of hallucinogenic rituals.2 By Maya times, shamans had been supplemented by a priestly caste, in charge of worship and who also guarded the temples and, with the scribes, engaged in divination.

  The most important gods were Chac Tlaloc, the rain and storm god who could be very cruel, Hunab-Ku, conceived as an abstract entity, higher than other gods and so detached that representation was impossible, and Itźámná, worshipped as the first god, the creator god (humans were first formed from maize), an important protector god, and the inventor of writing. Unlike other gods, Itźámná’s role was always positive – he was never linked with death or war.

  Hunab-Ku had elements similar to Old World abstract deities but he was never remotely the only god worshipped in Mesoamerica: indeed there were innumerable other Mesoamerican gods of this period and they fell into one of four categories: worldly phenomena, anthropomorphs, zoomorphs, and animals. Some gods were immutable, some aged, all had particular attributes when shown in art, though those too could change and vary. Boundaries between the different gods were not always sharp.3

  The worldly phenomena reflected the essentially shamanistic view that mountains, rivers, caves and other inanimate objects (as we would say) were in fact alive with spiritual power. However, they did not behave like gods in the sense of having a personality and being able to interact with humans. Instead, they formed part of a sacred environment, a sacred cosmos, with human beings living out their lives within their sacred aura. Blood, clouds, lightning, maize, smoke and mist were all sacred, all shown in Mayan art by scrolls, the squiggly lines of which appear to have represented their mysterious power. They needed to be interpreted according to context.

  Planets, animals, plants and death all appear as gods, mostly in half-human and half-animal or half-plan
t form, none of which is so very different from early gods in the Old World. The two major differences which distinguish New World religions are, first, that they changed much less radically than in the Old World. The jaguar continued to be worshipped, as did the sun and the moon, as did ideas about water and the Underworld. This may have been because of the second great difference – the greatest difference of all, and possibly the greatest difference there was between the Old World and the New. This second difference was the means by which New World peoples accessed their gods. We saw earlier that it was the prerogative of shamans to enter the supernatural world, usually by means of trance, and as often as not induced by hallucinogens. This meant above all that the religious experience was much more vivid, much more absorbing, much more convincing than the techniques of worship in the Old World (animal sacrifice, ritual, prayer). Social conditions in the New World changed more slowly than in the Old World, for a variety of reasons as we have seen, and will see again, later on, but the sheer vividness was surely one reason that beliefs in the Americas changed only slowly and with difficulty.

  Which brings us to the subject matter of this chapter, for there was change and, when that change is considered, one can see why it took the form that it did.

  Among the Mayans, trance still formed the centrepiece of the religious experience, and it remained as vivid as ever. But in addition to hallucinogens, various new means of inducing trance were evolved, means that were more dramatic, that were a better form of theatre, and therefore more suited to the elaborate public ceremonials of city-based cultures with larger populations. These developments in the New World came in the realm of violence and pain.

  ‘FLOATING IN BLOOD’

  The first of these practices was bloodletting, a practice in which individuals deliberately pierced various parts of their own anatomy with knives or stingray spines in such a way as to produce copious amounts of blood, which they would then let fall on to sacred pieces of paper, which were then burned. The most frequent areas of the body which were perforated during bloodletting ceremonies were the ear, the tongue and the penis.