ANAHUAC, YUCATAN AND TAWANTINSUYU

A Look at Indigenous America Through Three Civilizations

INTRODUCTION
Each time the European explorers charted a new area in the New World, they also encountered new, previously unimagined cultures and peoples. There were people who lived in cities sometimes subject to imperial governments, people who lived in villages;and practiced horticulture or intensive agriculture, and people who lived in temporary encampments and collected wild plants, hunted, and fished. They astounded the explorers and were equally astounded by them. The cultural diversity of the Americas was enormous. A great variety of languages was spoken by the Native American inhabitants. To attempt to survey all of the Americas in one lesson would be impossible. Three smaller areas will be examined instead: the Aztec and Inca Empires and the area of the Maya city-states.

CULTURE AREAS
The term culture area is used to describe geographic areas where similarities in religion, mythology, government, agriculture and other aspects of life set those peoples apart from those of neighboring regions. More than one nation or civilization can exist in the same culture area. These groups may not themselves recognize the culture area; it is a tool developed by anthropologists to understand cultural variations and similarities. Today, Latin America can be considered a culture area. Europe is another culture area, and the Islamic world yet another.

Civilizations of two culture areas will be explored here: Mesoamerica and Andean America. Both lay in what today is Latin America and were characterized by complex urban societies. Many characteristics of each culture can still be found in the modern peoples of each region.

Mesoamerica

Mesoamerica includes a large portion of Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and western El Salvador and Honduras (See Map 1). The Aztec and the Maya were part of Mesoamerica and shared some of its traditions.

Mesoamerica is a geographically and ecologically diverse area, characterized by volcanic mountain chains and basins which often contain lakes, flat plains and coastal regions. Village and urban life developed mainly in the basins. Settled life depended upon agriculture. The most important crops in Mesoamerica were maize (corn), beans, squash, and chili peppers. Minor crops included tomatoes and avocados. Cacao was another important Mesoamerican crop. Today we make chocolate from its ground kernel. Cacao was highly prized and was even used as a kind of currency. During the colonial period an exchange rate pegged cacao to Spanish currency. Cacao was even known to be counterfeited by filling the center of the seed with dirt and gluing it back shut.

Andean America

Like Mesoamerica, Andean America encompasses several modern nations, including much of Peru, Ecuador, a portion of Bolivia, northern Chile and northwestern Argentina (See Map 1). The region was controlled by the Inca Empire, or Tawantinsuyu, when Spaniards arrived.

Andean America includes the starkly arid Pacific coast which borders the Andes Mountains on the western side. This coastal region is crossed by rivers that descend from the highlands, creating fertile valleys that bisect the desert. Within these valleys, villages and cities developed States arose which linked and controlled several valleys.

Andean America also includes the highlands. Valleys and basins of the highlands were the focus of settlement. Hillsides were frequently terraced to increase the amount of land available for cultivation. Higher up, in the puna (high altitude alpine grasslands), the inhabitants grazed herds of llamas and alpacas that provided wool. Andean terrain is highly diversified; in hours one can travel by car from desert to tropical valleys to the permanent snow and ice of the mountain peaks. The edge of the pre-Columbian urbanized Andes lay in the eastern foothills of the mountain chain. There the vast tropical forest known today as the Amazon took over, stretching east to the Atlantic ocean.

Agricultural life in the Andes evolved separately from Mesoamerica. Some different crops were grown, but several were shared. Maize was grown in the Andes and in Mesoamerica, as were many types of beans, including the lima bean. In both regions cotton was domesticated and was used to make elaborate garments, nets, and other items. However, potatoes and other crops were domesticated and cultivated solely in the Andes. Also, in contrast to Mesoamerica, herd' animals were domesticated in Andean America. The llama and alpaca were sources of food, wool, and hide, and could transport goods.

THE PEOPLES

The peoples of Mesoamerica and Andean America, as well as the other peoples who were encountered by the Europeans, had been living in the Americas since the last glacial period or Ice Age. Small bands of hunter-gatherers are thought to have occupied Siberia by 30,000 years ago or earlier. During periods of low sea level, when a significant portion of the water of the world's northern oceans froze and became mile-thick glaciers*, the area between modern Alaska and Siberia became land. Beringia, named after the Bering Strait, is the term for this -and mass. It is thought to have been a relatively rich ecological zone, where herds of arctic mammals such as mammoth, woolly rhinoceros, reindeer, wild horses, and saber-tooth cats, all roamed.

These herds formed the major source of food for small bands of humans. They followed the herds and crossed Beringia into North America about 13,000 to 14,000 years ago or possibly much earlier. From there, some groups continued to move south, eventually reaching the southern tip of South America about 12,000 years ago. While the exact timing of the passage of these peoples from Asia to the New World is still not adequately resolved, it is well-established that the peoples that the Spanish encountered when they "discovered" the New World had themselves discovered the region thousands of years earlier. The civilizations which the Spanish encountered in Mesoamerica and Andean America had their own histories and had developed from these bands of initial settlers. Consequently, the New World and the Old World had separate and independent histories. But, in the last decade of the 15th century, the two worlds collided.