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Pre-Columbian civilizations
Pre-Columbian civilizations, the aboriginal American Indian cultures that evolved in Mesoamerica (part of Mexico and Central America) and the Andean region (western South America) prior to Spanish exploration and conquest in the 16th century. The pre-Columbian civilizations were extraordinary developments in human society and culture, ranking with the early civilizations of Egypt, Mesopotamia, and China. Like the ancient civilizations of the Old World, those in the New World were characterized by kingdoms and empires, great monuments and cities, and refinements in the arts, metallurgy, and writing; the ancient civilizations of the Americas also display in their histories similar cyclical patterns of growth and decline, unity and disunity.
In the New World the roots of civilization lay in a native agricultural way of life. These agricultural beginnings go back several millennia, to perhaps about 7000 bce and the first experimentations by the early Americans with plant cultivation. The domestication of successful food plants proved to be a long, slow process, and it was not until much later that a condition of permanent village farming life was achieved in the tropical latitudes of the two continents.
Sedentary village farming in Mesoamerica came into being by about 1500 bce. Corn (maize), beans, squashes, chili peppers, and cotton were the most important crops. These early villagers wove cloth, made pottery, and practiced other typical Neolithic skills. It appears that such villages were economically self-contained and politically autonomous, with an egalitarian social order. But rather quickly after this—between about 1200 and 900 bce—the building of large earthen pyramids and platforms and the carving of monumental stone sculptures signaled significant changes in this heretofore simple social and political order. These changes first appeared in the southern Gulf coast region of what is now Mexico; and the sculptures, rendered in a style now called Olmec, are presumed to depict chiefs or rulers. From these and other archaeological indications it has been inferred that a class-structured and politically centralized society developed. There appeared subsequently other large capital towns and cities in neighbouring regions that also displayed a similar Olmec art style. This Olmec horizon (i.e., a cultural diffusion that is contemporaneous at widely scattered sites) represents the first climax, or era of "unification," in the history of Mesoamerican civilization.
After about 500 bce the Olmec "unification" gave way to an era (consisting of the Late Formative and Classic periods) of separate regional styles and kingdoms. These lasted until c. 700–900 ce. Among these are the well-known Maya, Zapotec, Totonac, and Teotihuacán civilizations. While sharing a common Olmec heritage, they also displayed many differences. For example, the Maya excelled in the intellectual pursuits of hieroglyphic writing, calendar making, and mathematics, while the Teotihuacán civilization placed its emphasis on political and commercial power. Teotihuacán, in the Valley of Mexico, was an urban centre of some 150,000 people, and the influence of its civilization eventually radiated over much of Mesoamerica. As such, Teotihuacán constituted a second grand civilizational climax or "unification" (400–600 ce). Teotihuacán power waned after about 600, and a "time of troubles" ensued, during which a number of states and nascent empires competed for supremacy. Among these competitors were the Toltecs of Tula, in central Mexico, who held sway from perhaps 900 to 1200 (the Early Postclassic Period). After their decline (in the Late Postclassic Period), another interregnum of warring states lasted until 1428, when the Aztec defeated the rival city of Azcapotzalco and emerged as the dominant force in central Mexico. This last native Mesoamerican empire was conquered by Hernán Cortés (or Cortéz) and the Spaniards in 1521.
In the Andean area, the threshold of a successful village agricultural economy can be placed at c. 2500 bce, or somewhat earlier than was the case in Mesoamerica. The oldest primary food crops there were the lima bean and the potato, which had long histories of domestication in the area, although corn appeared soon after the beginnings of settled village life. Indications of a more complex sociopolitical order—huge platform mounds and densely populated centres—occurred very soon after this (c. 1800 bce); however, these early Andean civilizations continued for almost a millennium before they participated in a shared stylistic "unification." This has become known as the Chavín horizon, and Chavín sculptural art has been found throughout the northern part of the area.
The Chavín horizon disappeared after about 500 bce, and it was replaced by regional styles and cultures that lasted until about 600 ce. This period of regionalization (called the Early Intermediate Period) saw the florescence of a number of large kingdoms both on the Pacific coast and in the Andean highlands; among them were the Moche, Early Lima, Nazca, Recuay, and Early Tiwanaku. The period was brought to an end by the Tiwanaku–Huari horizon (Middle Horizon; 600–1000), which was generated from the highland cities of Tiwanaku (in modern northern Bolivia) and Huari (in central highland Peru). There is evidence—such as the construction of new centres and cities—that this Tiwanaku–Huari phenomenon, at least in many regions, was a tightly controlled political empire. The horizon and its influences, as registered in ceramics and textiles, died away rather gradually in the ensuing centuries, and it was replaced by the several regional styles and kingdoms of what has become known as the Late Intermediate Period (1000–1438).
The terminal date of the Late Intermediate Period marked the beginning of the Inca horizon and of the Inca conquests, which spread from the Inca capital, Cuzco, in the southern highlands of what is now Peru. By 1533, when Francisco Pizarro and his cohorts took over the empire, it extended from what is now the Ecuador–Colombia border to central Chile.
The synchroneity of horizon unifications and alternating regionalizations in Mesoamerica and the Andean region is striking and prompts the question of communication between these two areas of pre-Columbian high civilization. Although it is known that there were contacts—with the result that knowledge of food plants, ceramics, and metallurgy was shared between the two areas—it is also highly unlikely that political or religious ideologies were so spread. Rather, the peoples of each of these major cultural areas appear to have responded to their own internally generated stimuli and to have followed essentially separate courses of development. There are fundamental differences between the two cultural traditions. Thus, in Mesoamerica there was, from early on, a profound interest in hieroglyphic writing and calendar making. Religious ideology, judged from art and iconography, was more highly developed in Mesoamerica than in the Andean region. In Mesoamerica the market was a basic institution; it does not appear to have been so in the Andes, where the redistributive economy of the Inca empire—with such features as its government warehouses and a system of highways—must have had deep roots in the past. On the other hand, in the early development and deployment of metallurgy and in governmental institutions and empire-building, the ancient Peruvians were much more efficient than their Mesoamerican contemporaries.
Mesoamerican civilization
The term Mesoamerica denotes the part of Mexico and Central America that was civilized in pre-Spanish times. In many respects, the American Indians who inhabited Mesoamerica were the most advanced native peoples in the Western Hemisphere. The northern border of Mesoamerica runs west from a point on the Gulf coast of Mexico above the modern port of Tampico, then dips south to exclude much of the central desert of highland Mexico, meeting the Pacific coast opposite the tip of Baja (Lower) California. On the southeast, the boundary extends from northwestern Honduras on the Caribbean across to the Pacific shore in El Salvador. Thus, about half of Mexico, all of Guatemala and Belize, and parts of Honduras and El Salvador are included in Mesoamerica.
Geographically and culturally, Mesoamerica consists of two strongly contrasted regions: highland and lowland. The Mexican highlands are formed mainly by the two Sierra Madre ranges that sweep down on the east and west. Lying athwart them is a volcanic cordillera stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The high valleys and landlocked basins of Mexico were important centres of pre-Spanish civilization. In the southeastern part of Mesoamerica lie the partly volcanic Chiapas–Guatemala highlands. The lowlands are primarily coastal. Particularly important was the littoral plain extending south along the Gulf of Mexico, expanding to include the Petén-Yucatán Peninsula, homeland of the Mayan peoples.
Agriculture in Mesoamerica was advanced and complex. A great many crops were planted, of which corn, beans, and squashes were the most important. In the highlands, hoe cultivation of more or less permanent fields was the rule, with such intensive forms of agriculture as irrigation and chinampas (the so-called floating gardens reclaimed from lakes or ponds) practiced in some regions. In contrast, lowland agriculture was frequently of the shifting variety; a patch of jungle was first selected, felled and burned toward the end of the dry season, and then planted with a digging stick in time for the first rains. After a few years of planting, the field was abandoned to the forest, as competition from weeds and declining soil fertility resulted in diminishing yields. There is good evidence, however, that the slash-and-burn system of cultivation was often supplemented by "raised-field" cultivation in the lowlands; these artificially constructed earthen hillocks built in shallow lakes or marshy areas were not unlike the chinampas of the Mexican highlands. In addition, terraces were constructed and employed for farming in some lowland regions. Nevertheless, the demographic potential for agriculture was probably always greater in the highlands than it was in the lowlands, and this was demonstrated in the more extensive urban developments in the former area.
The extreme diversity of the Mesoamerican environment produced what has been called symbiosis among its subregions. Interregional exchange of agricultural products, luxury items, and other commodities led to the development of large and well-regulated markets in which cacao beans were used for money. It may have also led to large-scale political unity and even to states and empires. High agricultural productivity resulted in a nonfarming class of artisans who were responsible for an advanced stone architecture, featuring the construction of stepped pyramids, and for highly evolved styles of sculpture, pottery, and painting.
The Mesoamerican system of thought, recorded in folding-screen books of deerskin or bark paper, was perhaps of even greater importance in setting them off from other New World peoples. This system was ultimately based upon a calendar in which a ritual cycle of 260 (13 × 20) days intermeshed with a "vague year" of 365 days (18 × 20 days, plus five "nameless" days), producing a 52-year Calendar Round. The religious life was geared to this cycle, which is unique to them. The Mesoamerican pantheon was associated with the calendar and featured an old, dual creator god; a god of royal descent and warfare; a sun god and moon goddess; a rain god; a culture hero called the Feathered Serpent; and many other deities. Also characteristic was a layered system of 13 heavens and nine underworlds, each with its presiding god. Much of the system was under the control of a priesthood that also maintained an advanced knowledge of astronomy.
Some seven Mesoamerican language families and three language isolates were found in Mesoamerica. Garífuna, a later import, is an Arawakan language. Most Mesoamerican languages are grouped in one of four families: Uto-Aztecan, Mayan, Mixe-Zoquean, and Otomanguean. A dominant role was played by Uto-Aztecan, particularly by speakers of the Nahua groups of which Náhuatl, official tongue of the Aztec empire, was the most important. The Mayan family contains a number of mutually unintelligible languages, at least some of which were spoken by the inhabitants of the great Maya ceremonial centres. The modern Mexican state of Oaxaca is now the centre of the heterogeneous Otomanguean phylum; but the only linguistic groups of that family that played a great part in Mesoamerican civilization were the Mixtec and Zapotec, both of which had large, powerful kingdoms at the time of the Spanish conquest. Tarascan, mother tongue of an "empire" in western Mexico that successfully resisted Aztec encroachments, is now considered a language isolate; that is, it has no known relatives. Huave and Cuitlatec are also language isolates.
Pre-Classic and Classic periods
Early hunters (to 6500 bce)
The time of the first peopling of Mesoamerica remains a puzzle, as it does for that of the New World in general. Until recently it was widely accepted that groups of peoples entered the hemisphere from northeastern Siberia, perhaps by a land bridge that then existed, at some time in the Late Pleistocene, or Ice Age. But radiocarbon dating and other relatively recent tools have complicated the story. Perhaps they entered the West Coast from the sea at multiple points. There is abundant evidence that, at least by 11,000 bce, hunting peoples had occupied most of the New World south of the glacial ice cap covering northern North America. These peoples hunted such large grazing mammals as mammoth, mastodon, horse, and camel, armed with spears to which were attached finely made, bifacially chipped points of stone. Finds in Mesoamerica, however, confirm the existence of a "prebifacial-point horizon," a stage known to have existed elsewhere in the Americas, and suggest that it is of very great age. In 1967 archaeologists working at the site of Tlapacoya, southeast of Mexico City, uncovered a well-made blade of obsidian associated with a radiocarbon date of about 21,000 bce. Near Puebla, Mexico, excavations in the Valsequillo region revealed cultural remains of human groups that were hunting mammoth and other extinct animals, along with unifacially worked points, scrapers, perforators, burins, and knives. A date of about 21,800 bce has been suggested for the Valsequillo finds.
More substantial information on Late Pleistocene occupations of Mesoamerica comes from excavations near Tepexpan, northeast of Mexico City. The excavated skeletons of two mammoths showed that these beasts had been killed with spears fitted with lancelike stone points and had been butchered on the spot. A possible date of about 8000 bce has been suggested for the two mammoth kills. In the same geologic layer as the slaughtered mammoths was found a human skeleton; this Tepexpan "man" has been shown to be female and rather a typical American Indian of modern form. While the association with the mammoths was first questioned, fluorine tests have proved them to be contemporary.
The environment of these earliest Mesoamericans was quite different from that existing today, for volcanoes were then extremely active, covering thousands of square miles with ashes. Temperatures were substantially lower, and local glaciers formed on the highest peaks. Conditions were ideal for the large herds of grazing mammals that roamed Mesoamerica, especially in the highland valleys, much of which consisted of cool, wet grasslands not unlike the plains of the northern United States. All of this changed around 7000 bce, when worldwide temperatures rose and the great ice sheets of northern latitudes began their final retreat. This brought to an end the successful hunting way of life that had been followed by Mesoamericans, although humans probably also played a role in bringing about the extinction of the large game animals.
Incipient agriculture (6500–1500 bce)
The most crucial event in the prehistory of Mesoamerica was the human capture of the food energy contained in plants. This process centred on three plants: Indian corn (maize), beans, and squashes. Since about 90 percent of all food calories in the diet of Mesoamericans eventually came from corn, archaeologists for a long time have sought the origins of this plant—which has no wild forms existing today—in order to throw light on the agricultural basis of Mesoamerican civilization.
The search for Mesoamerican agricultural origins has been carried forward most successfully through excavations in dry caves and rock shelters in the modern southern Mexican states of Puebla and Oaxaca. Sequences from these archaeological sites show a gradual transition from the Early Hunting to the Incipient Cultivation periods. At the Guila Naquitz cave, in Oaxaca, there are indications that the transition began as early as 8900 bce; finds from caves in the Tehuacán valley of Puebla, however, offer more substantial evidence of the beginnings of plant domestication at a somewhat later time. There, the preservation of plant remains is remarkably good, and from these it is evident that shortly after 6500 bce the inhabitants of the valley were selecting and planting seeds of chili peppers, cotton, and one kind of squash. Most importantly, between 5000 and 3500 bce they were beginning to plant mutant forms of corn that already were showing signs of the husks characteristic of domestic corn.
One of the problems complicating this question of the beginnings of early corn cultivation is related to a debate between paleobotanists on wild versus domesticated strains. One school of thought holds that the domesticated races of the plant developed from a wild ancestor. The other opinion is that there was never such a thing as wild corn, that instead corn (Zea mays) developed from a related grass, teosinte (Zea mexicana or Euchlaena mexicana). In any event, by 5000 bce corn was present and being used as a food, and between 2,000 and 3,000 years after that it had developed rapidly as a food plant. It has been estimated that there is more energy present in a single kernel of some modern races than there was in an ear of this ancient Tehuacán corn. Possibly some of this was popped, but a new element in food preparation is seen in the metates (querns) and manos (handstones) that were used to grind the corn into meal or dough.
Beans appeared after 3500 bce, along with a much improved race of corn. This enormous increase in the amount of plant food available was accompanied by a remarkable shift in settlement pattern. In place of the temporary hunting camps and rock shelters, which were occupied only seasonally by small bands, semipermanent villages of pit houses were constructed on the valley floor. Increasing sedentariness is also to be seen in the remarkable bowls and globular jars painstakingly pecked from stone, for pottery was as yet unknown in Mesoamerica.
In the centuries between 3500 and 1500 bce, plant domestication began in what had been hunting-gathering contexts, as on the Pacific coast of Chiapas and on the Veracruz Gulf coast and in some lacustrine settings in the Valley of Mexico. It seems probable that early domesticated plants from such places as the Tehuacán valley were carried to these new environmental niches. In many cases, this shift of habitat resulted in genetic improvements in the food plants.
Pottery, which is a good index to the degree of permanence of a settlement (because of its fragility it is difficult to transport), was made in the Tehuacán valley by 2300 bce. Fired clay vessels were made as early as 4000 bce in Ecuador and Colombia, and it is probable that the idea of their manufacture gradually diffused north to the increasingly sedentary peoples of Mesoamerica.
The picture, then, is one of growing human control over the environment through the domestication of plants; animals played a very minor role in this process, with only the dog being surely domesticated before 1500 bce. At any rate, by 1500 bce the stage was set for the adoption of a fully settled life, with many of the sedentary arts already present. The final step was taken only when native agriculture in certain especially favoured subregions became sufficiently effective to allow year-round settlement of villages.
Early Formative period (1500–900 bce)
Early village life
It is fairly clear that the Mexican highlands were far too dry during the much warmer interval that prevailed from 5000 to 1500 bce for agriculture to supply more than half of a given population's energy needs. This was not the case along the alluvial lowlands of southern Mesoamerica, and it is no accident that the best evidence for the earliest permanent villages in Mesoamerica comes from the Pacific littoral of Chiapas (Mexico) and Guatemala, although comparable settlements also have been reported from both the Maya lowlands (Belize) and the Veracruz Gulf coast.
The Barra (c. 1800–1500 bce), Ocós (1500–1200 bce), and Cuadros (1100–900 bce) phases of the Pacific coasts of Chiapas and Guatemala are good examples of early village cultures. The Barra phase appears to have been transitional from earlier preagricultural phases and may not have been primarily dependent upon corn farming; but people of the Ocós and Cuadros phases raised a small-eared corn known as nal-tel, which was ground on metates and manos and cooked in globular jars. From the rich lagoons and estuaries in this area, the villagers obtained shellfish, crabs, fish, and turtles. Their villages were small, with perhaps 10 to 12 thatched-roof houses arranged haphazardly.
Ocós pottery is highly developed technically and artistically. Something of the mental life of the times may be seen in the tiny, handmade clay figurines produced by the Ocós villagers. These, as in Formative cultures generally throughout Mesoamerica, represent nude females and may have had something to do with a fertility cult. The idea of the temple-pyramid may well have taken root by that time, for one Ocós site has produced an earthen mound about 26 feet (8 metres) high that must have supported a perishable building. The implication of the site is that, with increasing prosperity, some differentiation of a ruling class had taken place, for among the later Mesoamericans the ultimate function of a pyramid was as a final resting place for a great leader.
Eventually, effective village farming with nucleated settlements occupied throughout the year appeared in the highlands. But perhaps from the very beginning of Formative life there were different cultural responses directed toward both kinds of environment. In the highlands, divided into a number of mutually contrasting environments no one of which could have provided sufficient resources for the subsistence of a single settlement, villages were presumably linked to each other symbiotically. In the lowlands, particularly in the littoral, one especially favourable environment, such as the lagoon–estuary system, may have been so rich in resources that villages within it would have been entirely self-sufficient. In effect, the former would have resulted in a cultural integration based upon trade, while the latter would have been integrated, if at all, by a unity of likeness. The two kinds of civilization that eventually arose in each region—the highlands definitely urban, the lowlands less so—reflect the same contrast.
Early religious life
Early religious phenomena can only be deduced from archaeological remains. Numerous clay figurines found in tombs afford little evidence of religious beliefs during the agricultural Pre-Classic periods of Zacatenco and Ticomán (roughly 1500 to the 1st century bce). It is possible, however, that terra-cotta statuettes of women were meant to represent an agricultural deity, a goddess of the crops. Two-headed figurines found at Tlatilco, a site of the late Pre-Classic, may portray a supernatural being. Clay idols of a fire god in the form of an old man with an incense burner on his back date from the same period.
The first stone monument on the Mexican plateau is the pyramid of Cuicuilco, near Mexico City. In fact, it is rather a truncated cone, with a stone core; the rest is made of sun-dried brick with a stone facing. It shows the main features of the Mexican pyramids as they were developed in later times. It was doubtless a religious monument, crowned by a temple built on the terminal platform and surrounded with tombs. The building of such a structure obviously required a protracted and organized effort under the command of the priests.
The final phase of the Pre-Classic cultures of the central highland forms a transition from the village to the city, from rural to urban life. This was a far-reaching social and intellectual revolution, bringing about new religious ideas together with new art forms and theocratic regimes. It is significant that Olmec statuettes have been found at Tlatilco with late Pre-Classic material.
The rise of Olmec civilization
It was once assumed that the Formative stage was characterized only by simple farming villages. Scholars now realize, however, that coexisting with these peasantlike cultures was a great civilization, the Olmec, that had arisen in the humid lowlands of southern Veracruz and Tabasco, in Mexico.
The Olmec were perhaps the greatest sculptors of ancient Mesoamerica. Whether carving tiny jade figures or gigantic basalt monuments, they worked with a great artistry that led a number of archaeologists to doubt their considerable antiquity, although radiocarbon dates from the type site of La Venta showed that Olmec civilization was indeed Formative, its beginning dating to at least 1,000 years before the advent of Maya civilization.
San Lorenzo is now established as the oldest known Olmec centre. In fact, excavation has shown it to have taken on the appearance of an Olmec site by 1150 bce and to have been destroyed, perhaps by invaders, around 900 bce. Thus, the Olmec achieved considerable cultural heights within the Early Formative, at a time when the rest of Mesoamerica was at best on a Neolithic level. The reasons for its precocious rise must have had something to do with its abundant rainfall and the rich alluvial soil deposited along the broad, natural levees that flank the waterways of the southern Gulf coast. Thus, the ecological potential for corn farmers in this counterpart of Mesopotamia's Fertile Crescent was exceptionally high. The levee lands, however, were not limitless, and increasingly dense populations must inevitably have led to competition for their control. Out of such conflicts would have crystallized a dominant landowning class, perhaps a group of well-armed lineages. It was this elite that created the Olmec civilization of San Lorenzo.
In appearance, the San Lorenzo site is a compact plateau rising about 160 feet (about 49 metres) above the surrounding plains. Cutting into it are deep ravines that were once thought to be natural but that are now known to be man-made, formed by the construction of long ridges that jut out from the plateau on the northwest, west, and south sides. Excavations have proved that at least the top 25 to 35 feet (about 8 to 11 metres) of the site was built by human labour. There are about 200 small mounds on the surface of the site, each of which once supported a dwelling house of pole and thatch, which indicates that it was both a ceremonial centre, with political and religious functions, and a minuscule town.
San Lorenzo is most noted for its extraordinary stone monuments. Many of these, perhaps most, were deliberately smashed or otherwise mutilated about 900 bce and buried in long lines within the ridges and elsewhere at the site. The monuments weighed as much as 44 tons and were carved from basalt from the Cerro Cintepec, a volcanic flow in the Tuxtla Mountains about 50 air miles to the northwest. It is believed that the stones were somehow dragged down to the nearest navigable stream and from there transported on rafts up the Coatzacoalcos River to the San Lorenzo area. The amount of labour involved must have been enormous and so would have the social controls necessary to see the job through to its completion.
Most striking are the "colossal heads," human portraits on a stupendous scale. Several of these are now known from San Lorenzo, the largest of which is nine feet (more than 2.5 metres) high. The visages are flat-faced, with thickened lips and staring eyes. Each has a headgear resembling a football helmet, and it is entirely possible that these "helmets" were in fact protective coverings in a rubber-ball game that is known from Olmec figurines to have been played at San Lorenzo.
The central theme of the Olmec religion was a pantheon of deities each of which usually was a hybrid between jaguar and human infant, often crying or snarling with open mouth. This "were-jaguar" is the hallmark of Olmec art, and it was the unity of objects in this style that first suggested to scholars that they were dealing with a new and previously unknown civilization. There is actually a whole spectrum of such were-jaguar forms in Olmec art, ranging from the almost purely feline to the human in which only a trace of jaguar can be seen.
These Olmec monuments were generally carved in the round with great technical prowess, even though the only methods available were pounding and pecking with stone tools. Considerable artistry can also be seen in the pottery figurines of San Lorenzo, which depict nude and sexless individuals with were-jaguar traits.
Exotic raw materials brought into San Lorenzo from distant regions suggest that the early Olmec controlled a large trading network over much of Mesoamerica. Obsidian, used for blades, flakes, and dart points, was imported from highland Mexico and Guatemala. Most items were obviously for the luxury trade, such as iron ore for mirrors and various fine stones such as serpentine employed in the lapidary industry. One material that is conspicuously absent, however, is jade, which does not appear in Olmec sites until after 900 bce and the fall of San Lorenzo.
There is evidence that the Olmec sent groups from their Gulf coast "heartland" into the Mesoamerican highlands toward the end of the Early Formative, in all likelihood to guarantee that goods bound for San Lorenzo would reach their destination. San Lorenzo-type Olmec ceramics and figurines have been found in burials at several sites in the Valley of Mexico, such as Tlapacoya, and in the state of Morelos. The Olmec involvement with the rest of Mesoamerica continued into the Middle Formative and probably reached its peak at that time.
San Lorenzo is not the only Olmec centre known for the Early Formative. Laguna de los Cerros, just south of the Cerro Cintepec in Veracruz, appears to have been a large Olmec site with outstanding sculptures. La Venta, just east of the Tabasco border, was another contemporary site, but it reached its height after San Lorenzo had gone into decline.
Middle Formative period (900–300 bce)
Horizon markers
Once ceramics had been adopted in Mesoamerica, techniques of manufacture and styles of shape and decoration tended to spread rapidly and widely across many cultural frontiers. These rapid diffusions, called horizons, enable archaeologists to link different cultures on the same time level. Good horizon markers for the Early Formative are colour zones of red pigment set off by incised lines; complex methods of rocker stamping (a mode of impressing the wet clay with the edge of a stick or shell); the tecomate, or globular, neckless jar; and Olmec excised pottery. The beginning of the Middle Formative over much of Mesoamerica is marked by the diffusion of a very hard, white pottery, decorated with incised lines, and by solid pottery figurines with large, staring eyes formed by a punch. The people who replaced and probably overthrew the Olmec of San Lorenzo about 900 bce had such pottery and figurines, the ultimate origins of which are still a puzzle.
During the Middle Formative, cultural regionalism increased, although the Olmec presence can be widely detected. The transition to fully settled life had taken place everywhere, and burgeoning populations occupied hamlets, villages, and perhaps even small towns throughout Mesoamerica, both highland and lowland.
Olmec civilization at La Venta
La Venta was located on an almost inaccessible island, surrounded at that time by the Tonalá River; the river now divides the states of Veracruz and Tabasco. As San Lorenzo's fortunes fell, La Venta's rose, and between 800 and 400 bce it was the most important site in Mesoamerica.
At the centre of La Venta is a 100-foot (30-metre)-high mound of earth and clay that may well house the tomb of a great Olmec ruler. Immediately north of the Great Mound is a narrow north–south plaza flanked by a pair of long mounds. Beyond the plaza is a ceremonial enclosure surrounded by a "fence" made entirely of upright shafts of columnar basalt. A low, round mound on the north side of the ceremonial enclosure contained several tombs, one of which was surrounded and covered by basalt columns. In this tomb were found the bundled remains of two children, accompanied by magnificent ornaments of jade. Offerings were not only placed with the dead but were also deposited as caches in the site, especially along the north–south axis of the ceremonial centre.
Among the most beautiful objects manufactured by the Olmec were the concave mirrors of iron ore, which were pierced to be worn around the neck. These could throw pictures on a flat surface and could probably start fires on hot tinder. Olmec leaders at La Venta, whether they were kings or priests, undoubtedly used them to impress the populace with their seemingly supernatural powers. Olmec sculptors continued to produce the basalt monuments, including colossal heads and "altars," that have been found at La Venta. Significantly, an increasing number of monuments were carved in relief, and some of these were stelae with rather elaborate scenes obviously based upon historical or contemporary events.
Olmec colonization in the Middle Formative
From the Middle Formative there are important Olmec sites located along what appears to have been a highland route to the west to obtain the luxury items that seemed to have been so desperately needed by the Olmec elite—e.g., jade, serpentine, iron ore for mirrors, cinnabar, and so forth. Olmec sites in Puebla, the Valley of Mexico, and Morelos are generally located at the ends of valleys near or on major passes; they were perhaps trading stations garrisoned by Olmec troops. The largest of these sites is Chalcatzingo, Morelos, a cult centre located among three denuded volcanic peaks rising from a plain. On a talus slope at the foot of the middle peak are huge boulders on which have been carved Olmec reliefs in La Venta style. The principal relief shows an Olmec woman, richly garbed, seated within the mouth of a cave; above her, cumulus clouds pour down rain.
Similar Olmec reliefs, usually narrative and often depicting warriors brandishing clubs, have been located on the Pacific plain of Chiapas (Mexico) and Guatemala. Since about 1960, spectacular Olmec cave paintings have been found in Guerrero, offering some idea of what the Olmec artists could do when they worked with a large spectrum of pigments and on flat surfaces.
Olmec culture or civilization did not spread eastward from its Veracruz–Tabasco centres into the Maya lowlands, but occasional Olmec artifacts have been found in Formative Maya contexts, such as at Seibal, in southern Petén, Guatemala. Maya Formative Period occupations, represented by settled farming villages and well-made ceramics, date to c. 1000 bce in the lowlands of Guatemala and Belize. It seems reasonably certain, however, that at this early date great ceremonial centres, comparable to those of Olmec San Lorenzo or La Venta, were never constructed in the Maya lowlands.
It was formerly thought that the Olmec worshiped only one god, a rain deity depicted as a were-jaguar, but study has shown that there were at least 10 distinct gods represented in Olmec art. Surely present were several important deities of the later, established Mesoamerican pantheon, such as the fire god, rain god, corn god, and Feathered Serpent. Other aspects of mental culture are less well-known; some Olmec jades and a monument from La Venta have non-calendrical hieroglyphs, but none of this writing has been deciphered.
To sum up the Olmec achievement, not only was this the first high culture in Mesoamerica—one that had certainly achieved political statehood—but either it or cultures influenced by it lie at the base of every other Mesoamerican civilization.
Early Monte Albán
Monte Albán is a prominent series of interconnected hills lying near Oaxaca, Mexico. One of these was completely leveled off in Middle Formative times to serve as the base for a site that was to become the Zapotec people's most important capital. Prior to that time, the Early Formative ancestral Zapotec had lived in scattered villages and at least one centre of some importance, San José Mogote. San José Mogote shows evidence of Olmec trade and contacts dating to the time of San Lorenzo.
At Monte Albán, during the earliest, or Monte Albán I, epoch of that site's history, a peculiar group of reliefs was carved on stone slabs and affixed to the front of a rubble-faced platform mound and around a contiguous court. The reliefs are usually called danzantes, a name derived from the notion that they represent human figures in dance postures. Actually, almost all of the danzante sculptures show Olmecoid men in strange, rubbery postures as though they were swimming in honey. From their open mouths and closed eyes, it is assumed that they are meant to represent dead persons. On many danzantes one or more unreadable hieroglyphs appear near the heads of the figures, most likely standing for the names of the sacrificed lords of groups beaten in combat by the Zapotec. Several slabs also bear calendrical notations, and it can be stated that the Middle Formative elite of Monte Albán were the first in Mesoamerica to develop writing and the calendar (at least in written form).
The Valley of Mexico in the Middle Formative
The cultures of central Mexico tended to lag behind those of southern Mexico in the development of political and religious complexity. The presence of Olmec figurines and ceramics in Early Formative burials in the Valley of Mexico has been noted, but the local communities of that time were of a modest village sort, as were those of the succeeding Middle Formative. On the western shores of the great lake filling the Valley of Mexico, for instance, remains of several simple villages have been uncovered that must have been not unlike small settlements that can be found in the Mexican hinterland today. The people who lived at El Arbolillo and Zacatenco had simply terraced off village refuse to make platforms on which their pole-and-thatch houses were built. Metates and manos are plentiful; pottery is relatively plain—featuring the abundant hard, white-slipped ware of the Middle Formative—and small female figurines are present by the thousands. Subsistence was based upon corn farming and upon hunting. In some Middle Formative sites, however, such as Tlatilco, there is evidence of Olmec influence, as in the previous Early Formative Period. There are also indications that ceremonial pyramid construction began in the latter part of the Middle Formative at Cuicuilco, a site in the southern part of the valley, which was to become a major centre in the succeeding Late Formative Period.
The Maya in the Middle Formative
In the Maya highlands, the key archaeological region has always been the broad, fertile Valley of Guatemala around present-day Guatemala City. The earliest occupation is known as the Arevalo phase, a village culture of the Early to Middle Formative. It was followed by Las Charcas, a Middle Formative culture known largely from the contents of bottle-shaped pits found dug into the subsoil on the western edge of the modern city. Extremely fine ceramics have been excavated from them, including red-on-white bowls with animal figures, effigy vessels, three-footed cups, and peculiar three-pronged incense burners. Solid female figurines are also present.
The earliest Middle Formative cultures of the Maya lowlands are called, collectively, the Xe horizon. They apparently developed from antecedent Early Formative cultures of the Maya lowlands that have been discussed above. The problem of the origin of the Mayan-speaking people has not been solved. It may be that they were Olmec people who had been forced out of their homeland to the west by the collapse of San Lorenzo. There were already peoples in the Maya lowlands in Early Formative times, however, and if the early Maya were Olmec, they brought little of their Olmec culture with them. Another hypothesis is that the earliest Maya descended to their lowland homelands from the Guatemalan highlands.
In the Maya lowlands the Mamom cultures developed out of those of Xe times. Mamom shares many similarities with the highland Maya at Las Charcas: pottery is almost entirely monochrome—red, orange, black, and white—and figurines are female with the usual punched and appliquéd embellishments. Toward the end of the Middle Formative, or after about 600 bce, Mamom peoples began building small ceremonial centres and modest-sized pyramidal platforms.
Late Formative Period (300 bce–100 ce)
Probably the most significant features of the Late Formative are (1) the transformation of Olmec civilization in southeastern Mesoamerica into something approaching the earliest lowland Maya civilization and (2) the abrupt appearance, toward the end of the Late Formative, of fully urban culture at Teotihuacán in the Valley of Mexico. Most of the distinctive cultures that were to become the great Classic civilizations began to take shape at this time. There was no unifying force in the Late Formative comparable to the earlier Olmec; rather, regionalism and local cultural integration were the rule. There were, however, horizon traits, particularly in pottery, that were almost universal. Ceramics became elaborate in shape, often with composite or recurved outlines, hollow, bulbous feet, and flangelike protrusions encircling the vessel. The use of slips of a number of different colours as pottery decoration at times approached the elaborate polychromes of Classic times.
The idea of constructing temple-pyramids was probably also a general trait. It was a Mesoamerican custom to bury a dead person beneath the floor of his own house, which was often then abandoned by the bereaved. As an elite class of noble lineages became distinguished from the mass of the people, the simple house platforms serving as sepulchres might have become transformed into more imposing structures, ending in the huge pyramids of the Late Formative and Classic, which surely had funerary functions. The deceased leader or the gods from which he claimed descent, or both, would then have been worshiped in a "house of god" on the temple summit. These pyramids became the focal point of Mesoamerican ceremonial life, as well as the centres of settlement.
Valley of Mexico
The Cuicuilco-Ticomán culture succeeded the Middle Formative villages of the valley but retained many of their traits, such as the manufacture of solid handmade figurines. Of considerable interest is the type site of Cuicuilco, located on the southwestern edge of the valley. Lava from a nearby volcano covers all of Cuicuilco, including the lower part of the round "pyramid" for which it is best known. Ceramic analysis and radiocarbon dating have proved that the flow occurred at about the beginning of the Common Era. Rising up in four tiers, the Cuicuilco pyramid has a clay-and-rubble core faced with broken lava blocks. The summit was reached by ramps on two sides. Circular temples were traditionally dedicated in Mesoamerica to Quetzalcóatl, the Feathered Serpent, and he may have been the presiding deity of Cuicuilco.
In the Valley of Teotihuacán, a kind of side pocket on the northeastern margin of the Valley of Mexico, Cuicuilco-Ticomán culture eventually took on a remarkable outline, for there is evidence that by the beginning of the Common Era a great city had been planned. There is little doubt that by the Proto-Classic stage (100 ce–300) it had become the New World's first urban civilization (see below Teotihuacán).
Valley of Oaxaca
Occupation of the Monte Albán site continued uninterrupted, but ceramic evidence for Monte Albán II culture indicates that cultural influences from southeastern Mexico were reaching the Zapotec people. On the southern end of the site's main plaza is a remarkable stone structure called Building J, shaped like an arrow pointing southwest and honeycombed with galleries. Some believe it to have been an astronomical observatory. Incised slabs are fixed to its exterior; these include some older danzantes as well as depictions of Zapotec place glyphs from which are suspended the inverted heads of dead chiefs—surely again the vanquished enemies of Monte Albán. Dates are given in the 52-year Calendar Round, with coefficients for days and months expressed by bar-and-dot numerals, a system that is first known for Monte Albán I and that became characteristic of the Classic Maya. Throughout its long Formative and Classic occupation, the dominant ware of Monte Albán is a fine gray pottery, elaborated in Monte Albán II into the usual Late Formative shapes.
Veracruz and Chiapas
La Venta suffered the fate of San Lorenzo, having been destroyed by violence around 400 bce. Olmec civilization subsequently disappeared or was transformed into one or more of the cultures of the southeastern lowlands.
One centre that retained a strong Olmec tradition, however, was Tres Zapotes, near the Tuxtla Mountains in the old Olmec "heartland." Its most famous monument, the fragmentary Stela C, is clearly epi-Olmec on the basis of a jaguar-monster mask carved in relief on its obverse. On the reverse is a column of numerals in the bar-and-dot system, which was read by its discoverer, Matthew W. Stirling, as a date in the Maya calendar corresponding to 31 bce; this is more than a century earlier than any known dated inscription from the Maya area itself. Thus, it is highly probable that this calendrical system, formerly thought to be a Maya invention, was developed in the Late Formative by epi-Olmec peoples living outside the Maya area proper.
Izapan civilization
Izapa, type site of the Izapan civilization, is a huge temple centre near modern Tapachula, Chiapas, on the hot Pacific coast plain. Its approximately 80 pyramidal mounds were built from earth and clay faced with river boulders. A large number of carved stone stelae have been found at Izapa, almost all of which date to the Late Formative and Proto-Classic. Typically, in front of each stela is a round altar, often crudely shaped like a toad.
These stelae are of extraordinary interest, for they contain a wealth of information on Late Formative religious concepts prevalent on the border of the Maya area. Izapan stelae are carved in relief with narrative scenes derived from mythology and legend; among the depictions are warfare and decapitation, ceremonies connected with the sacred world tree, and meetings of what seem to be tribal elders. Many deities are shown, each of which seems derived from an Olmec prototype.
Sites with Izapan-style sculpture are distributed in a broad arc extending from Tres Zapotes in the former Olmec region, across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec into coastal Chiapas and Guatemala, and up into the Guatemalan highlands. Izapan civilization is clearly the intermediary between Olmec and Classic Maya in time and in cultural content, for the following early Maya traits are foreshadowed by it: (1) the stela–altar complex, (2) long-lipped deities, (3) hieroglyphic writing and Long Count dates on some monuments, (4) such iconographic elements as a U-shaped motif, and (5) a cluttered, baroque, and painterly relief style that emphasizes narrative. An important site pertaining to this Izapan culture is Abaj Takalik, on the Pacific slopes of Guatemala, to the east of Izapa. Three sculptural styles are represented there: Olmec or Olmecoid, Izapan, and Classic Maya. Among the latter is one stela with a date read as 126 ce, earlier than any monuments discovered in the Maya lowlands.
Perhaps it was not Izapa itself but the great site of Kaminaljuyú, on the western edge of Guatemala City, that transmitted the torch of Izapan civilization to the lowland Maya. This centre once consisted of more than 200 earth and clay mounds, most of which have been destroyed. The major occupation is ascribed to the Miraflores phase, the Late Formative culture of the Valley of Guatemala. Some of these huge Miraflores mounds contained log tombs of incredible richness. In one, the deceased lord was accompanied by sacrificed followers or captives. As many as 340 objects were placed with him, including jade mosaic masks, jade ear spools and necklaces, bowls of chlorite schist, and pottery vessels of great beauty. Also present in the tombs are peculiar "mushroom stones," which may actually have been used in rites connected with hallucinogenic mushrooms.
The earliest Maya civilization of the lowlands
By the Late Formative, the lowland Maya had begun to shape a civilization that was to become the greatest in the New World. The Petén-Yucatán Peninsula lacks many raw materials and has a relatively low agricultural potential. But what it does have in limitless quantities is readily quarried limestone for building purposes and flint for stonework. Cement and plaster could easily be produced by burning limestone or shells.
The heart of the Maya civilization was always northern Petén, in Guatemala, where the oldest dated Maya stelae are found, although this presents something of a problem in cultural-historical interpretation, since the earliest prototypes for these stelae—as mentioned above—have been found in Pacific-littoral and highland Guatemala. The Late Formative culture of Petén is called Chicanel, evidence of which has been found at many Maya centres. Chicanel pottery includes dishes with wide-everted and grooved rims, bowls with composite silhouette, and vessels resembling ice buckets. Figurines are curiously absent.
Architecture was already quite advanced and had taken a form peculiar to the Maya. Temple platforms were built by facing a cemented-rubble core with thick layers of plaster. At the site of Uaxactún, Structure E-VII-sub affords a good idea of a Chicanel temple-platform. It is a four-sided, stucco-covered, stepped pyramid with pairs of stylized god masks flanking stairways on each side. On its summit was a thatched-roof temple. At Tikal, the giant among Maya ceremonial centres, the so-called Acropolis was begun in Chicanel times, and there was a great use of white-stuccoed platforms and stairways, with flanking polychromed masks as at Uaxactún. Most importantly, there is evidence from Tikal that the Maya architects were already building masonry superstructures with the corbel vault principle—i.e., with archlike structures the sides of which extend progressively inward until they meet at the top. The large sizes of Chicanel populations and the degree of political centralization that existed by this time are further attested to by the discovery in the 20th century of the huge site of El Mirador, in the extreme northern part of Petén. The mass of El Mirador construction dwarfs even that of Tikal, although El Mirador was only substantially occupied through the Chicanel phase.
Chicanel-like civilization is also known in Yucatán, where some temple pyramids of enormous size are datable to the Late Formative. An outstanding site is the cave of Loltún in Yucatán, where a relief figure of a standing leader in pure Izapan style is accompanied by a number of unreadable hieroglyphs as well as a notation in the 260-day count. This inscription raises the question of writing and the calendar among the lowland Maya in the Late Formative. In the early 21st century archaeologists discovered Maya hieroglyphs—in addition to stunning polychrome murals—dating from as early as c. 100 bce at the site of San Bartolo in northeastern Guatemala. The finding suggests that several important intellectual innovations considered to be typically Mayan were developed beyond the Maya area proper and appeared there before the close of the Formative. Izapan civilization nevertheless appears to have played a crucial role in this evolutionary process.
Early Classic period (100–600 ce)
Definition of the Classic
In the study of the Classic stage, there has been a strong bias in favour of the Maya; this is not surprising in view of the fact that the Maya have been studied far longer than any other people in Mesoamerica. But the concept of a "Classic" period is a case of the Maya tail wagging the Mesoamerican dog, since the usual span given to that stage—250–900 ce—is the period during which the Maya were erecting dated stone monuments. This brackets the Maya apogee, but for most areas of non-Maya Mesoamerica only the first half of the period may be accurately called a "golden age." While the famous and yet mysterious Maya collapse took place at about 900 ce, in many other regions this downfall occurred almost three centuries earlier.
Qualitatively, there is little to differentiate the Classic from the Late Formative that preceded it. Various tendencies that were crystallizing in the last centuries before the Common Era reached fulfillment in the Classic. Two cultures stand out beyond all others. One is that of Teotihuacán, which during the Early Classic played a role in Mesoamerica similar to that which Olmec had performed in the Early Formative. The second is the lowland Maya civilization, which during its six centuries of almost unbroken evolution in the humid forests reached cultural heights never achieved before or since by New World natives. The contrast between the two—one urban and expansionist, the other less urban and non-expansionist—exemplifies well the cultural results of the ecological possibilities offered by highland and lowland Mesoamerica.
Teotihuacán, which was located in the Valley of Teotihuacán, a pocketlike extension of the Valley of Mexico on its northeastern side, was probably the largest city of the New World before the arrival of the Spaniards. At its height, toward the close of the 6th century ce, it covered about eight square miles and may have housed more than 150,000 inhabitants. The city was divided into quarters by two great avenues that crosscut each other at right angles, and the entire city was laid out on a grid plan oriented to these avenues. The Avenue of the Dead, the main north–south artery of the city, is aligned to a point 16° east of true north, which may have had astrological meaning.
Because irrigation plays some part in the present-day agricultural economy of the Valley of Teotihuacán, it has been suggested that the Early Classic city also was based upon this subsistence system. It is almost inconceivable, however, that a city of such proportions could have relied upon the food production of its own valley or even upon the Valley of Mexico, whether irrigated or not.
Planning and construction of Teotihuacán began, according to radiocarbon dates, about the beginning of the Common Era, in the Tzacualli phase. At this time, the major avenues were laid out and construction of the major ceremonial structures along the Avenue of the Dead began. Figurines and potsherds extracted from fill inside the 200-foot (61-metre)-high Pyramid of the Sun, the most prominent feature of Teotihuacán, prove that this was erected by the end of the Tzacualli phase. The pyramid rises in four great stages, but there is a fifth and much smaller stage between the third and fourth. An impressive stairway rises dramatically on its west side, facing the Avenue of the Dead. Reexamination suggested the presence of a huge tomb at its base, but this has never been excavated.
On the northern end of the Avenue of the Dead is the Pyramid of the Moon, very similar to that of the Sun but with an additional platform-temple jutting out on the south. This exhibits the talud-tablero architectural motif that is typical of Teotihuacán culture: on each body or tier of a stepped pyramid is a rectangular frontal panel (tablero) supported by a sloping batter (talud). The tablero is surrounded by a kind of projecting frame, and the recessed portion of the panel usually bears a polychrome mural applied to the stuccoed surface.
Near the exact centre of the city and just east of the Avenue of the Dead is the Ciudadela ("Citadel"), a kind of sunken court surrounded on all four sides by platforms supporting temples. In the middle of the sunken plaza is the so-called Temple of Quetzalcóatl, which is dated to the second phase of Teotihuacán, Miccaotli. Along the balustrades of its frontal stairway and undulating along the talud-tablero bodies of each stage of this stepped pyramid are sculptured representations of Quetzalcóatl, the Feathered Serpent. Alternating with the Feathered Serpents on the tableros are heads of another monster that can be identified with the Fire Serpent—bearer of the Sun on its diurnal journey across the sky.
On either side of the Avenue of the Dead are residential palace compounds (probably occupied by noble families), which also conform to the Teotihuacán master plan. Each is a square, 200 feet (61 metres) on a side, and is surrounded by a wall. The pedestrian would have seen only the high walls facing the streets, pierced by inconspicuous doors. Within the compounds, however, luxury was the rule. Roofs were flat, constructed of large cedar beams overlaid by brush and mortar. Interior walls were plastered and magnificently painted with ritual processions of gods and various mythological narratives. Interconnected apartments were arranged around a large, central, open-air court.
These dwellings were the residences of Teotihuacán's elite. Toward the periphery of Teotihuacán, however, the social situation may have been quite different. One excavation on the eastern side of the city disclosed a mazelike complex of much tinier and shoddier apartments that recall the poorer sections of Middle Eastern cities. It may be guessed that there lay the crowded dwellings of the artisans and other labourers who made the city what it was. There is also evidence that certain peripheral sections were reserved for foreigners.
Teotihuacán must have been the major manufacturing centre of the Early Classic, for the products of its craftsmen were spread over much of Mesoamerica. The pottery, particularly during the Xolalpan phase, which represents the culmination of Teotihuacán as a city and empire, is highly distinctive. The hallmark of the city is the cylindrical vessel with three slab legs and cover, often stuccoed and then painted with scenes almost identical to those on the walls of buildings. There are also vessels shaped like modern flower vases and cream pitchers. Thin Orange ware is a special ceramic type produced to Teotihuacán specifications, perhaps in southern Veracruz, and exported by its own traders. Figurines were produced by the tens of thousands in pottery molds.
Among its many commercial specializations, obsidian was probably preeminent, for the Teotihuacanos had gained control of the mines of green obsidian above the present-day city of Pachuca, in Hidalgo. They also had a local but poorer quality source. Millions of obsidian blades, as well as knives, dart points, and scrapers, were turned out by Teotihuacán workshops for export.
The name Teotihuacán meant "City of the Gods" (or, "Where Men Became Gods") in Aztec times, and although the city had been largely deserted since its decline, the Aztec royal house made annual pilgrimages to the site. Teotihuacán culture exerted a profound influence on all contemporary and later Mesoamerican cultures. Many Aztec gods, such as Tlaloc, his consort Chalchiuhtlicue, and Quetzalcóatl, were worshiped by the Teotihuacanos. Like the Aztec, the Teotihuacanos generally cremated their dead. In fact, there are so many congruences between Teotihuacán practices and those of the later Toltec and Aztec that some authorities believe them to have been speakers of Nahuatl language and the precursors of those people. Some linguistic authorities, however, believe that the Teotihuacanos spoke a Totonacan language, similar to what was spoken by the inhabitants of central Veracruz. It is not known whether the people of the city, like the Maya, were literate.
Teotihuacán was the greatest city of Mesoamerica, indeed, of all pre-Columbian America. Authorities are divided as to whether it was the capital of a great political empire. Some believe that Teotihuacán's expansion was carried by force of arms; others believe its power to have been largely economic and religious. In either case, at its height in the 6th century Teotihuacán was the greatest civilization in Mesoamerica, with an influence that far outstripped that of the later Aztec empire. For the archaeologist, the universal spread of Teotihuacán ceramic and other traits constitutes an Early Classic horizon.
The broad, fertile plains surrounding the colonial city of Puebla, to the southeast of the snowcapped volcanoes that border the Valley of Mexico, were from very ancient times an important centre of pre-Hispanic population. The modern traveler, approaching the city, sees to its west, in the distance, what looks like a sizable hill rising from the plain. This is actually the pyramid of Cholula, the largest single structure in Mexico before the Spanish conquest.
Archaeological exploration of the Cholula pyramid has shown that it was built from adobe in four great construction stages. In its final form, the pyramid measured 1,083 by 1,034 feet (330 by 315 metres) at the base and was about 82 feet (25 metres) high. By Late Postclassic times the pyramid had been abandoned for so long that the Spaniards who subdued (and massacred) the residents of Cholula considered it a natural prominence. All four superimposed structures within the pyramid were carried out according to strict Teotihuacán architectural ideas. The earliest structure, for instance, has the usual talud-tablero motif, with stylized insectlike figures painted in black, yellow, and red appearing in the tableros. Similar decoration, also in Teotihuacán style, is to be found in the later structures.
Great quantities of ceramics and pottery figurines have been recovered from the excavations, and these demonstrate a near archaeological identity between Early Classic Teotihuacán and Cholula. Because of the staggering size and importance of its pyramid, it has been suggested that Cholula was some kind of sister city to Teotihuacán. Cholula was surely part of the Teotihuacán cultural sphere and may well have participated in the administration of its empire. Excavations at the base of the pyramid have produced a previously unsuspected cultural element. Several enormous slabs were uncovered, two of which were a kind of altar, while the third was set upright as a stela. All are rectangular but with borders carved in low relief in the complex interlace motif that is the hallmark of the Classic Central Veracruz style.
Classic Central Veracruz
The Mesoamerican ball game was played throughout the area and still survives in attenuated form in northwestern Mexico. On the eve of the conquest, games took place in a rectangular court bordered on the long sides by walls with both sloping and vertical rebound surfaces. There were two teams, each composed of a small number of players. The ball was of solid rubber, of substantial size, and traveled with considerable speed around the court. It could not be hit or touched with the open hands or with the feet; most times the player tried to strike it with the hip. Consequently, fairly heavy protective padding was necessary to avoid injuries, which in some cases were fatal. Leather padding was worn over the hips, and pads were placed on the elbows and knees. A heavy belt was tied around the waist built up from wood and leather, while in some parts of the Maya region and in Late Formative Oaxaca, gloves and something resembling jousting helmets were worn.
The Classic Central Veracruz style is almost purely devoted to the paraphernalia of the ball game and to the ball courts themselves. At the site of El Tajín, which persisted through the end of the Late Classic, elaborate reliefs on the walls of the courts furnish details on how this equipment was used. Yugos ("yokes") were the stone counterparts of the heavy protective belts. During the post-game ceremonies, which may have featured the sacrifice of the captain and other players on the losing side, these U-shaped objects were worn about the waists of the participants. On the front of the yugo was placed an upright stone object that may originally have functioned as a ball-court marker and that took two forms: hachas ("axes"), or thin stone heads, and palmas ("palms"). All are carved in an elaborate low-relief style in which life forms are enmeshed in undulating and interlaced scroll designs with raised borders. All of these items, and the style itself, may have evolved out of late Olmec art on the Gulf coast.
Very often the yugos represent the marine toad, a huge amphibian with swollen poison glands on the head; in its jaws is a human head. The earliest hachas, which were characteristically notched to fit on the yugos, were quite thick human heads and may well date to the Late Formative or Proto-Classic. In time, these become very thin and represent human heads wearing animal headgear. Palmas are paddle-shaped stone objects with trilobed bases and exhibit a much richer subject matter than either hachas or yugos, quite often illustrating brutal scenes of sacrifice and death, two concepts that were closely associated with the ball game on the Gulf coast.
Despite the definite presence of the style at Teotihuacán and Cholula, Classic Central Veracruz is focused upon north central Veracruz, where the type site of El Tajín is located, and contiguous parts of Puebla. Today, this region is dominated by speakers of Totonac, a distant relative of Mayan, and the Totonac themselves claim that they built El Tajín. Whether or not Classic Central Veracruz culture was a Totonac achievement, the style persisted through the Classic period and strongly influenced developments in distant regions.
Southern Veracruz
On the southern Gulf coast plain, Olmec traditions seemed to have lasted into the Early Classic and merged with Teotihuacán artistic canons to produce new kinds of art. Cerro de las Mesas, lying in the plains of the Papaloápan River not far from the coast, is one of these hybrid sites. Dozens of earthen mounds are scattered over the surface in a seemingly haphazard manner, and the archaeological sequence is long and complex. The site reached its apogee in the Early Classic, when the stone monuments for which it is best known were carved. Most important are a number of stelae, some of which are carved in a low-relief style recalling Late Formative Tres Zapotes, early lowland Maya, and Cotzumalhuapa (on the Pacific coast of Guatemala).
Cerro de las Mesas pottery, deposited in rich burial offerings of the Early Classic, is highly Teotihuacanoid, with slab-legged tripods predominating. At this and other sites in southern Veracruz, potters also fashioned large, hollow, handmade figures of the gods. An especially fine representation of the Old Fire God was found at Cerro de las Mesas. The most spectacular discovery, however, was a cache of some 800 jade objects. Many of the specimens in this treasure trove are of Olmec workmanship, obviously heirlooms from the much earlier Olmec civilization, while some are clearly Early Classic Maya.
The entire coastal plain from Cerro de las Mesas north to the borders of Classic Central Veracruz culture is famed for Remojadas-style pottery figurines, which must have been turned out in incredible quantity for use as burial goods. The Remojadas tradition dates to the Late Formative and lasts until the Early Postclassic. Figurines are hollow and largely mold-made in the Late Classic, while they were fashioned by hand in the Early Classic. The best-known Classic representations are the "smiling figures" of grinning boys and girls wearing loincloths, skirts, or nothing at all. All kinds of genre scenes are represented, including even lovers in swings, as well as more grim activities such as the heart sacrifice of victims tied down in what look like beds.
Classic Monte Albán
The cultural phases designated as Monte Albán III-A and III-B mark the Classic occupation of this major site in the Valley of Oaxaca. There can be little doubt that the people of Monte Albán were Zapotec speakers, who during Classic times had unequaled opportunity to develop their civilization unaffected by the major troubles that disturbed Teotihuacán and the Maya at the close of the Early Classic. Instead of the 18 or 19 sites known for the valley during the Late Formative, there now were more than 200, a testimony to Zapotec prosperity.
The Monte Albán Classic Period (III-A and III-B) lasted from 250 to 700 ce. During the earlier (III-A) part of the period (250–450) the site shows considerable influence from Teotihuacán. The Early Postclassic Period at Monte Albán (IV; 700–1000) was a time of significant cultural change; it is still uncertain, however, whether the Mixtec replaced the Zapotec at that time.
The Classic site of Monte Albán is quite spectacular. Stone-faced platforms are fronted by stairways with flanking balustrades and exhibit a close counterpart of the talud-tablero motif of Teotihuacán. The temple superstructures had colonnaded doorways and flat beam-and-mortar roofs. One of the best-preserved ball courts of Mesoamerica can be seen at Monte Albán, with a ground plan fashioned in the form of a capital I. Spectators watched the game from stone grandstands above the sloping playing surfaces.
Subsurface tombs were dug in many parts of the site as the last resting places of Monte Albán's elite. The finest are actually miniature replicas of the larger temples on the surface, complete with facade and miniature painted rooms. The style of the funerary wall paintings is quite close to Teotihuacán, in which areas of flat colour are contained within very finely painted lines in red or black. Teotihuacán presence can also be seen in the finer pottery of Classic Monte Albán, but the manufacture is local as can be proved from the predominance of the fine gray ware that has always typified Monte Albán.
The tradition of literacy dates to Monte Albán I. By Classic times, inscriptions are abundant, appearing on stelae, lintels, slabs used as doors, and wall paintings. The 52-year Calendar Round was the only form of writing dates. The subject matter of these inscriptions can be related to the scenes that they accompany: quite often it is a bound captive standing on a place-glyph, presumably an enemy leader taken in war—an old Monte Albán preoccupation.
The Zapotec of Monte Albán, like the Maya, never exerted much cultural or other pressure on peoples beyond their lands. They did, however, control lands from the Tehuacán Valley in Puebla as far south as the Pacific shore of Oaxaca. Whether they themselves were also controlled by Teotihuacán has not been demonstrated.
The Maya highlands and Pacific coast
Little is known about the Guatemalan highlands between the demise of the Late Formative Miraflores culture and the onset of the Early Classic. But at the ancient site of Kaminaljuyú, on the western side of Guatemala City, a group of invaders from Teotihuacán built a miniature replica of their capital city. This happened about 400 ce, when Teotihuacán was at the height of its power.
This implanted Teotihuacán culture is called Esperanza. Mexican architects must have accompanied the elite, for Kaminaljuyú structures copy the older prototypes down to the last detail, including the support of the lower moldings around tableros with slate slabs. The abundant volcanic building stone, however, so freely used at Teotihuacán, was not present, so that Esperanza temple platforms are built from clay instead.
Each temple platform was rebuilt several times, the later structures being raised over the earlier. Within the stairways fronting each successive platform a great leader was buried. The rich burial furniture in the tombs is informative, for it included three classes of goods: (1) items such as Thin Orange pottery manufactured in Teotihuacán or in one of its satellite areas, (2) hybrid Teotihuacán-Maya pottery and other objects, probably made in Kaminaljuyú, and (3) pottery imported from Petén and of Early Classic Maya manufacture. Also discovered in one tomb was a slate mirror carved in Classic Central Veracruz style. Jade objects occur in abundance in the Esperanza tombs, and in one structure an enormous boulder was recovered; it had been imported from the Maya source along the Motagua River in the southeastern lowlands. The Esperanza elite were enormously wealthy.
What were they doing in the Maya highlands in the first place? Were they an army of imperial conquest? Or were their interests more in the realm of trade? Or both? It is not possible to be definite in these interpretations; but it is known that among the Aztec of the Late Postclassic there was an institution called the pochteca, a hereditary guild of armed merchants who traveled into distant lands looking for luxury goods to bring back to the royal house. Quite often the pochteca would seize lands of hostile peoples through which they passed, or they would provoke incidents that led to the intervention of the regular Aztec army.
It has been suggested that the Teotihuacanos in Kaminaljuyú were also pochteca. They had clear access to the Petén-Yucatán Peninsula and may have exercised political control over it. Kaminaljuyú may have been one of their principal bases of operations in the inclusion of the Maya, both highland and lowland, within the Teotihuacán state.
Within a zone only 75 miles long and 30 miles wide, on the Pacific coast plain of Guatemala, is a cluster of nine compactly built ceremonial centres that together form the Cotzumalhuapa civilization. It forms a puzzle, for there are strong affiliations with most other contemporary civilizations in Mesoamerica. Stylistic influence from the lowland Maya, Classic Central Veracruz, and Teotihuacán can be detected among others. While Cotzumalhuapa took form by the Early Classic, it continued into the Late Classic; but there are great problems in dating individual sculptures.
The problem of Cotzumalhuapa has been linked with that of the Pipil, a shadowy people living in the same region on the eve of the Spanish conquest, who spoke Nahua rather than Maya. It is possible that these Classic sites were actually Pipil capitals, but the case cannot be proved. There is some hieroglyphic writing on Cotzumalhuapa sculptures, mainly dates within what seems to be a 52-year Calendar Round, the glyphs for days being Mexican rather than Maya. There are no real texts, then, to help with the problem.
Classic civilization in the Maya lowlands: Tzakol phase
Archaeologists have divided the entire area occupied by speakers of Mayan languages into three subregions: (1) the Southern Subregion, essentially the highlands and Pacific Coast of Guatemala, (2) the Central Subregion, which includes the department of Petén in northern Guatemala and the immediately adjacent lowlands to the east and west, and (3) the Northern Subregion, consisting of the Yucatán Peninsula north of Petén proper. Between 250 and 900 the most brilliant civilization ever seen in the New World flourished in the forested lowlands of the Central and Northern subregions.
Lowland Maya civilization falls into two chronological phases or cultures: Tzakol culture, which is Early Classic and began shortly before 250 ce, and the Late Classic Tepeu culture, which saw the full florescence of Maya achievements. Tepeu culture began about 600 and ended with the final downfall and abandonment of the Central Subregion about 900. (These dates, based on the correlation of the Long Count system of the Maya calendar with the Gregorian calendar, are the most generally accepted; but there is a slight chance that a rival correlation espoused by the American archaeologist Herbert J. Spinden may be correct, which would make these dates 260 years earlier.)
One of the earliest objects inscribed with the fully developed Maya calendar is the Leiden Plate, a jade plaque, now housed in the National Museum of Ethnology, Leiden, Netherlands, depicting a richly arrayed Maya lord trampling a captive underfoot. On its reverse side is a Long Count date corresponding to 320. Although it was found in a very late site on the Caribbean coast, stylistic evidence suggests that the Leiden Plate was made at Tikal, in the heart of northern Petén. In the mid-20th century the University of Pennsylvania's ambitious field program at the Tikal site produced Stela 29, erected 28 years before, in 292. Both objects and, in fact, almost all early Tzakol monuments draw heavily upon a heritage from the older Izapan civilization of the Late Formative, with its highly baroque, narrative stylistic content.
Because of the Maya penchant for covering older structures with later ones, Tzakol remains in the Central Subregion have to be laboriously dug out from their towering Late Classic overburdens. Nevertheless, it is clear that at sites like Tikal, Uaxactún, and Holmul, Maya civilization had reached something close to its final form. Enormous ceremonial centres were crowded with masonry temples and "palaces" facing onto spacious plazas covered with white stucco. The use of the corbel vault for spanning rooms—a trait unique to the lowland Maya—was by this time universal. Stelae and altars (a legacy from Izapa) are carved with dates and embellished with human figures and perhaps gods. Polychrome pottery, the finest examples of which were sealed in the tombs of honoured personages, emphasizes stylized designs of cranes, flying parrots, gods, and men. These often occur on bowls with a kind of apron or basal flange encircling the lower vessel. Along with these purely Maya ceramics are vessels that show the imprint of distant Teotihuacán: the cylindrical vase supported by three slab legs, the "cream pitcher," and the florero ("flower vase").
Wall painting had already reached a high degree of perfection in the Central Subregion, as attested by an extremely fine mural at Uaxactún depicting a palace scene in which two important lords confer with each other. This mural art is quite different from that of Teotihuacán, being very naturalistic instead of formal and including a definite interest in portraiture. Nonetheless, excavations in Petén sites have shown that Teotihuacán influence was quite pervasive. From Tikal, for example, comes Stela 31, depicting a richly garbed Maya lord, festooned with jade ornaments, standing between two warriors from Teotihuacán. These foreigners carry shields that bear the visage of the Teotihuacán rain god, Tlaloc. It is certain that there was a three-way trading relationship between Tikal, Kaminaljuyú, and Teotihuacán in Early Classic times.
Thus, the Teotihuacán involvement with Tikal and the Central Subregion may have taken, as at Kaminaljuyú, the form of pochteca trading colonies that exerted some control over the lowland Maya. The lord on Stela 31 may have been a puppet ruler manipulated by tough merchant-warriors. Teotihuacán as a city and capital of an empire began to weaken toward the close of the 6th century. It could therefore be expected that the disruptions that effectively ended the life of the great Mexican capital would be reflected in the Maya area. This is exactly the case. In the Guatemalan highlands, Kaminaljuyú declined rapidly after 600 ce, and the entire Southern Subregion was to play little part in Maya culture until the Late Postclassic. The lowland Maya suffered some temporary reverses; few stelae were erected between 534 and 692, and there is evidence that existing monuments were mutilated.
Late Classic non-Maya Mesoamerica (600–900)
The cultural situation in Late Classic Mesoamerica is the reverse of that prevailing in the Early Classic: Central Mexico now played only a minor role, while the lowland Maya reached their intellectual and artistic heights. In contrast to the old Teotihuacanos, however, the Maya were not expansionistic. It is true that Maya cultural influence has been detected along the Gulf coast and in the states of Morelos and Tlaxcala—as in the painted murals of Cacaxtla in the latter state—but it is unlikely that this was the result of a military takeover. The outcome of this state of affairs, with no one people powerful enough or sufficiently interested in dominating others, was a political and cultural fragmentation of Mesoamerica after 600. It was not until the great Toltec invasions of the Early Postclassic that anything approaching an empire was to be seen again.
The decline in fortunes of the Valley of Mexico, and especially of Teotihuacán, cannot now be explained. Climatic deterioration, resulting in drier conditions and thus a diminished subsistence potential, may have been a factor.
Nevertheless, Teotihuacán was never completely abandoned, even though its great palaces had been burned to the ground and its major temples abandoned. People continued to live in some sections, but their houses were mere hovels compared to the dwellings of the Early Classic. In general, the Valley of Mexico was a cultural and political vacuum in Late Classic times.
One of the very few centres of the Late Classic in central Mexico that amounted to much was Xochicalco, in Morelos. Strategically located on top of a hill that was completely reworked with artificial terraces and ramparts, Xochicalco was obviously highly defensible, an indication of the unsettled times then prevailing in central Mexico. The site shows a bewildering variety of cultural influences, particularly Maya. The principal structure of Xochicalco is a temple substructure of masonry that is completely carved in relief with undulating Feathered Serpents, indicating that it was dedicated to the cult of Quetzalcóatl. All indications are that Xochicalco was a cosmopolitan and very powerful centre, perhaps the most influential west of Veracruz and northwest of the Maya area. It was literate and civilized at a time when most other parts of central Mexico were in cultural eclipse.
The Late Classic occupation of Oaxaca, especially of the Valley of Oaxaca, is designated as Monte Albán III-B (450–700). The Mixtec invasions of the valley probably began in earnest around 900. The Mixtec occupied the hilly, northern part of Oaxaca; their records, which extend to the 7th century, show them to have been organized into a series of petty states headed by aggressive, warlike kings. By the Postclassic, they had become the dominant force throughout Oaxaca and in part of Puebla.
The tendencies in central Veracruz art and architecture that began in the Late Formative culminated in the Late Classic at the great centre of El Tajín, placed among jungle-covered hills in a region occupied by the Totonac, whose capital this may well have been. Its most imposing structure is the Pyramid of the Niches, named for the approximately 365 recesses on its four sides. In this and other buildings at El Tajín, the dominant architectural motif is the step-and-fret. There are a number of other temple pyramids at the site, as well as palacelike buildings with flat, concrete roofs, a tour de force of Mesoamerican engineering knowledge. El Tajín's three major ball courts are remarkably important for the reliefs carved on their vertical playing surfaces, for these give valuable information on the religious connotations of the sacred game. Like Xochicalco, El Tajín was in some way linked to the destiny of the lowland Maya, and the collapse of Maya civilization around 900 may have been reflected in the demise of the Veracruz centre.
Further down the Gulf coast plain, the Remojadas tradition of hollow pottery figurines continued to be active in the Late Classic, with a particularly large production of the mysterious smiling figures of dancing boys and girls, which were intended as funerary offerings. But in addition, there was a great deal of pottery and figurines that were fashioned under very strong Maya influence. In fact, much of southern Veracruz at this time was a cultural extension of the lowland Maya. There is no indication, however, that these peoples had any acquaintance with Maya literacy or with Maya building techniques.
Late Classic Lowland Maya (600–900)
Settlement pattern
There is still controversy over whether the Late Classic sites built by the lowland Maya were actually cities or whether they were relatively empty ceremonial centres staffed only by rulers and their entourages. The common people built their simple pole-and-thatch dwellings on low earthen mounds to keep them dry during the summer rains. Thus, total mapping of a particular site should always include not only masonry structures but house mounds as well. Several Maya sites have been so mapped. The mightiest Maya centre of all, Tikal in northern Petén, has a total of about 3,000 structures ranging from the tiny mounds up to gigantic temple pyramids; these are contained, however, within an area of six square miles. The Tikal population has been estimated from this survey to be 10,000–11,000 people, but perhaps as many as 75,000 within an even wider area could have belonged to Tikal.
This sounds very much like a city, but the evidence actually can be differently interpreted. First, at the time of the conquest the Maya generally buried their dead beneath the floors of houses, which were then abandoned. Thus, an increase in number of house mounds could just as easily indicate a declining population in which the death rate exceeded the birth rate. Second, the appearance of even such a tremendous centre as Tikal is quite different from that of such true cities as Teotihuacán. An ordinary Maya family typically occupied two or three houses arranged around a rectangular open space. These were grouped into unplanned hamlets near good water and rich, well-drained soils. A survey of Petén has shown that for every 50 to 100 dwellings there was a minor ceremonial centre; this unit has been called a zone. Several zones formed a district for which a major centre like Tikal acted as the ceremonial and political nucleus. Neither Tikal nor any other such centre shows signs of town planning or neatly laid out streets.
There are also ecological factors that must have set certain limits upon the potential for urban life in the Maya lowlands. Slash-and-burn cultivation would have made for widely settled populations; and, as has been argued, the uniformity of the lowland Maya environment would have worked against the growth of strong interregional trade, always a factor in urban development. Yet these statements must be qualified. It is known that raised-field, or chinampa-type, farming was used in many places and at many times in the Maya lowlands. This would have allowed for greater population concentration. It is also known that there was a brisk trade in some commodities from one lowland Maya region to another.
What, then, can be concluded about lowland Maya urbanism? Clearly, the urban form, even at a metropolis such as Tikal, was not as large or as formally developed as it was at highland Teotihuacán. At the same time, a centre whose rulers could draw upon the coordinated efforts of 75,000 people must inevitably have had some of the functions of a true city—in governance, religion, and trade, as well as in the development of the arts and intellectual life.
Major sites
While there are some important differences between the architecture of the Central and Northern subregions during the Late Classic, there are many features shared between them. A major Maya site generally includes several types of masonry buildings, usually constructed by facing a cement-and-rubble core with blocks or thin slabs of limestone. Temple pyramids are the most impressive, rising in a series of great platforms to the temple superstructure above the forests. The rooms, coated with white stucco, are often little more than narrow slots because of the confining nature of the corbeled vaults, but this was probably intentional, to keep esoteric ceremonies from the public.
The so-called palaces of Maya sites differ only from the temple pyramids in that they are lower and contain a great many rooms. Their purpose still eludes discovery; many scholars doubt that they really served as palaces, for the rooms are damp and uncomfortable, and there is little or no evidence of permanent occupation. The temples and palaces are generally arranged around courts, often with inscribed stelae and altars arranged in rows before them. Leading from the central plazas are great stone causeways, the function of which was probably largely ceremonial. Other features of lowland sites (but not universal) are sweathouses, ball courts, and probably marketplaces.
There are more than 50 known sites that deserve to be called major. Most are in the Central Subregion, with probably the greatest concentration in northern Petén, where Maya civilization had its deepest roots. Tikal is the largest and best-known Classic site of the Central Subregion. It is dominated by six lofty temple pyramids, one of which is some 230 feet (70 metres) high, the tallest structure ever raised by the Mesoamerican Indians. Lintels of sapodilla wood still span the doorways of the temple superstructures and are carved with reliefs of Maya lords enthroned amid scenes of great splendour. Some extraordinary Late Classic tombs have been discovered at Tikal, the most important of which produced a collection of bone tubes and strips delicately incised with scenes of gods and men. Ten large reservoirs, partly or entirely artificial, supplied the scarce drinking water for the residents of Tikal.
Other important sites of northern Petén include Uaxactún, Naranjo, Nakum, and Holmul. To the southeast of Petén are two Maya centres—Copán and Quiriguá—that show notable differences with the Petén sites. Copán is located above a tributary of the Motagua River in western Honduras in a region now rich in tobacco. Its architects and sculptors had a ready supply of a greenish volcanic tuff far superior to the Petén limestone. Thus, Copán architecture is embellished with gloriously baroque figures of gods, and its stelae and other monuments are carved with an extraordinary virtuosity. Copán also has one of the most perfectly preserved ball courts in Mesoamerica. Quiriguá is a much smaller site 30 miles north of Copán. While its architectural remains are on a minor scale, it is noted for its gigantic stelae and altars carved from sandstone.
The principal watercourse on the western side of the Central Subregion is the Usumacinta River, originating in the Guatemalan highlands and emptying into the Gulf of Mexico. For much of its course the Usumacinta is lined with such great Maya ceremonial centres as Piedras Negras and Yaxchilán. Even more renowned is Bonampak, a satellite of Yaxchilán located on a tributary of the Usumacinta. The discovery in 1946 of the magnificent murals embellishing the rooms of an otherwise modest structure astounded the archaeological world. From floors to vault capstones, its stuccoed walls were covered with highly realistic polychrome scenes of a jungle battle, the arraignment of prisoners, and victory ceremonies. These shed an entirely new light on the nature of Maya society, which up until then had been considered peaceful.
In the hills just above the floodplain of the Usumacinta lies Palenque, usually considered to be the most beautiful of Maya sites. The architects of Palenque designed graceful temple pyramids and "palaces" with mansard-type roofs, embellished with delicate stucco reliefs of rulers, gods, and ceremonies. The principal structure is the Palace, a veritable labyrinth of galleries with interior courts; over it looms a four-story square tower that may have served as both lookout and observatory. A small stream flowing through the site was carried underneath the Palace by a long, corbel-vaulted tunnel. The temples of the Cross, Foliated Cross, and Sun were all built on the same plan, the back room of each temple having a kind of sanctuary designed like the temple of which it was a part. It can be supposed that all three temples served the same cult. The most extraordinary feature of Palenque, however, was the great funerary crypt discovered in 1952 deep within the Temple of the Inscriptions. Within a sarcophagus in the crypt were the remains of an unusually tall ruler, accompanied by the richest offering of jade ever seen in a Maya tomb. Over his face had been fitted a mask of jade mosaic, while a treasure trove of jade adorned his body.
Northward from the Central Subregion, in the drier and flatter environment of the Yucatán Peninsula, the character of lowland Maya civilization changes. Just north of Petén is the Río Bec zone, as yet little explored but noted for temple pyramids and palaces with flanking false towers fronted by unclimbable "stairways" reaching dummy "rooms" with blank entrances. Río Bec structures are carved with fantastic serpents in deep relief, a feature that becomes even more pronounced in the Chenes country to the northwest, in the modern state of Campeche. At Chenes sites, Maya architects constructed frontal portals surrounded by the jaws of sky serpents and faced entire buildings with a riot of baroquely carved grotesques and spirals.
This elaborate ornamentation of buildings is far more restrained and orderly in the style called Puuc, so named from a string of low hills extending up from western Campeche into the state of Yucatán. The Puuc sites were for the Northern Subregion what the Petén sites were for the Central, for they are very numerous and clearly were the focal point for Maya artistic and intellectual culture. Uxmal is the most important Puuc ceremonial centre and an architectural masterpiece. It has all of the characteristics of the Puuc style: facings of thin squares of limestone veneer over a cement-and-rubble core; boot-shaped vault stones; decorated cornices around columns in doorways; engaged or half-columns repeated in long rows; and lavish use of stone mosaics in upper facades, emphasizing sky-serpent faces with long, hook-shaped noses, as well as frets and latticelike designs of crisscrossed elements.
The nearby centre of Kabah, connected to Uxmal by a ceremonial causeway, has an extraordinary palace completely faced with masks of the Sky Serpent. Other major Puuc sites are Sayil, with a multistoried palace, and Labná. The Puuc style reaches east across the Yucatán Peninsula, for at Chichén Itzá, a great site that was to occupy centre stage during the Toltec occupation of the Northern Subregion, there are several buildings strongly Puuc in character.
Puuc sites may be said to represent a lowland Maya "New Empire" in the sense that their apogee occurred in the 9th and 10th centuries, a time during which the great Petén, or Central Subregion, centres were in decline or had collapsed. Just how late Puuc sites remained active, with major constructions being dedicated, remains something of a question. About 1000 a major change took place in northern Yucatán. It was marked by the construction of a number of Toltec-style temples and palaces at Chichén Itzá, a site that also has many Puuc-style edifices. It is not known if Toltec Chichén Itzá existed contemporaneously with such Puuc sites as Uxmal and Labná, and if so, for how long. Eventually, Chichén Itzá appears to have dominated northern Yucatán, lasting well into the Postclassic Period (about 1250). Questions also surround the bringers of Toltec-style architecture to Chichén Itzá. They may have been either central Mexican Toltecs or Gulf coast peoples who probably were Maya-speakers and who had adopted central-Mexican ways. In this connection, it should be noted that Puuc sites were under several influences from Gulf-coast Mexico, particularly from central Veracruz.
Maya art of the Late Classic
Maya art, at the height of its development, was fundamentally unlike any other in Mesoamerica, for it was highly narrative, baroque, and often extremely cluttered, unlike the more austere styles found elsewhere. It is essentially a painterly rather than sculptural tradition, and it is quite likely that even stone reliefs were first designed by painters. Much of this art has disappeared for all time because of the ravages of the wet, tropical environment on such perishable materials as wood, painted gourds, feathers, bark, and other substances. There must have been thousands of bark-paper codices, not one of which has survived from Classic times.
Following the downfall of Teotihuacán, Maya artists were free to go their own way. Magnificently carved stelae and accompanying altars are found at most major sites, the greatest achievement in this line being found at Copán, where something approaching three-dimensional carving was the rule. Palenque and Yaxchilán specialized in graceful bas-reliefs placed as tablets or lintels in temple pyramids and palaces. In the Northern Subregion, however, the sculptor's art was definitely inferior in scope and quality and shows strong influence from alien, non-Maya cultures.
A few wooden objects have somehow survived. Particularly noteworthy are the massive wooden lintels of Tikal, with scenes of lords and their guardian deities, accompanied by lengthy hieroglyphic texts. In ancient times, wood carvings must have been vastly more common than sculptures. The wet climate has also destroyed innumerable examples of mural art.
Maya pottery can be divided into two groups: (1) the pots and pans of everyday life, usually undecorated but sometimes with geometric designs, and (2) grave offerings. Vessels meant to accompany the honoured dead were usually painted or carved with naturalistic and often macabre scenes. To achieve polychrome effects of great brilliance, the Maya potters painted in semitranslucent slips over a light background, then fired the vessels at a very low temperature. Relief carving was carried out when the vessels were leather-hard, just before firing.
The most precious substance of all to the Maya was jade, to which their craftsmen devoted great artistry. Jade was mainly fashioned into thin plaques, carved in relief, or into beads. In the absence of metal tools, jade was worked by applying abrasives and water with cane or perhaps other pieces of jade.
The Maya calendar and writing system
It is their intellectual life that established the cultural superiority of the Maya over all other American Indians. Much of this was based upon a calendrical system that was partly shared with other Mesoamerican groups but that they perfected into a tool capable of recording important historical and astronomical information. Most Maya inscriptions that have been interpreted are calendrical inscriptions. Since the late 1950s it has been learned that the content of Classic Maya inscriptions was far more secular than had been supposed. For many years specialists believed that the inscriptions recorded little more than the passage of time and that, in fact, the Maya were time worshipers; but it has been shown that certain inscriptions recorded the birth, accession, marriage, and military victories of ruling dynasties. One very significant advance in following dynastic histories and plotting political territoriality was the discovery in 1958 of "emblem glyphs," symbols standing for royal lineages and their domains.
Yet it would be misleading to contend that the hurly-burly of Maya court affairs and conquests was all that mattered, for some texts must have been sacred and god-oriented. At Palenque, in the similar temples of the Cross, Foliated Cross, and Sun, the dates inscribed on the tablets in the sanctuaries fall into three groups. The very latest seem to refer to events in the lives of reigning monarchs. An earlier group must deal with distant but real ancestors of those kings, while the very earliest fall in the 4th millennium bce and apparently describe the birth of important gods to whom the respective temples were dedicated and who may have been regarded as the progenitors of Palenque's royal house.
The meaning of many non-calendrical signs and even of complete clauses is not known, but there is a difference between this and assigning an actual Maya word to an ancient glyph or a sentence to a glyphic clause. While it is certain that the language of the Classic inscriptions was Mayan, it is also certain that it was more archaic than any of the Mayan languages spoken at the time of the conquest, six centuries after the Classic downfall. The four extant Maya codices—the Madrid Codex, the Paris Codex, the Dresden Codex, and the Grolier Codex—none dating earlier than 1100, contain a strong phonetic component, in fact a kind of syllabary, which can be successfully read as Yucatec Maya, but the Classic peoples of the Central Subregion more likely spoke an ancestor of the Cholan branch of Maya. Furthermore, Maya hieroglyphic writing covers the entire span from about 250 ce to the conquest, during which time both the language or languages and the writing system itself must have undergone extensive evolution.
In writing systems in general, there is usually a development from pictographic signs, in which a picture stands for a word or concept, through logographic systems, in which words are still the basic unit but phoneticism is employed to reduce ambiguities (as in Chinese), to phonetic syllabaries, and finally to alphabets. Probably most Classic Maya hieroglyphs are logograms with a mainly ideographic orientation, and it seems that there was a considerable degree of flexibility in how the words and sentences could be written. By the Postclassic, this had been codified into a much more rigid system closely resembling that of Japanese, in which a well-defined syllabary can supplement or even replace logograms. There are approximately 300 to 500 logograms in Classic Maya (the number varies according to how one separates affixes from so-called main signs), but it will probably be many years before the majority of these are satisfactorily deciphered. Great progress, however, has been made in unraveling their meaning in specific contexts.Michael Douglas Coe Gordon R. Willey
Maya mathematics included two outstanding developments: positional numeration and a zero. These may rightly be deemed among the most brilliant achievements of the human mind. The same may also be said of ancient Maya astronomy. The duration of the solar year had been calculated with amazing accuracy, as well as the synodical revolution of Venus. The Dresden Codex contains very precise Venusian and lunar tables and a method of predicting solar eclipses.
Maya chronology consisted of three main elements: a 260-day sacred year (tzolkin) formed by the combination of 13 numbers (1 to 13) and 20 day names; a solar year (haab), divided into 18 months of 20 days numbered from 0 to 19, followed by a five-day unlucky period (Uayeb); and a series of cycles—uinal (20 kins, or days), tun (360 days), katun (7,200 days), baktun (144,000 days), with the highest cycle being the alautun of 23,040,000,000 days. All Middle American civilizations used the two first counts, which permitted officials accurately to determine a date within a period defined as the least common multiple of 260 and 365: 18,980 days, or 52 years.
The Classic Maya Long Count inscriptions enumerate the cycles that have elapsed since a zero date in 3114 bce. Thus, "18.104.22.168.0," a katun-ending date, means that nine baktuns and six katuns have elapsed from the zero date to the day 2 Ahau 13 Tzec (May 9, 751 ce). To those Initial Series were added the Supplementary Series (information about the lunar month) and the Secondary Series, a calendar-correction formula that brought the conventional date in harmony with the true position of the day in the solar year.
Both Classic and recent Maya held the tzolkin as the most sacred means of divination, enabling the priests to detect the favourable or evil influences attached to every day according to the esoteric significance of the numbers and the day-signs.Jacques Soustelle
Classic Maya religion
It has been denied that there was any such thing as a pantheon of deities in Classic times, the idea being that the worship of images was introduced by the Toltec or Itzá invaders, or both, in the Postclassic. Several gods who played significant roles in the Postclassic codices, however, can be identified on earlier Maya monuments. The most important of these is Itzamná, the supreme Maya deity, who functioned as the original creator god, as well as lord of the fire and therefore of the hearth. In his serpent form he appears on the ceremonial bar held in the arms of Maya rulers on Classic stelae. Another ophidian deity recognizable in Classic reliefs is the Feathered Serpent, known to the Maya as Kukulcán (and to the Toltecs and Aztecs as Quetzalcóatl). Probably the most ubiquitous of all is the being known as Bolon Tzacab (first called God K by archaeologists), a deity with a baroquely branching nose who is thought to have functioned as a god of royal descent; he is often held as a kind of sceptre in rulers' hands.
The Classic Maya lavished great attention on their royal dead, who almost surely were thought of as descended from the gods and partaking of their divine essence. Many reliefs and all of the pictorial pottery found in tombs deal with the underworld and the dangerous voyage of the soul through that land. Classic Maya funerary ceramics show that this dark land was ruled by a number of gods, including several sinister old men often embellished with jaguar emblems, the jaguar being associated with the night and the nether regions.
The Classic, as well as the Postclassic, Maya practiced human sacrifice, although not on the scale of the Aztecs. The victims were probably captives, including defeated rulers and nobles. Self-sacrifice or self-mutilation was also common; blood drawn by jabbing spines through the ear or penis, or by drawing a thorn-studded cord through the tongue, was spattered on paper or otherwise collected as an offering to the gods.Michael Douglas Coe Gordon R. Willey
The four main categories of documents that provide knowledge of the Maya civilization and its religion are: archaeological remains; native books in hieroglyphic writing; books in native languages written in Latin script by learned Indians; and early accounts written in Spanish by conquerors or priests.
From surviving temples, tombs, sculpture, wall paintings, pottery, and carved jades, shells, and bone, a significant amount of valuable information can be gained—e.g., representations of godheads and ritual scenes. Perhaps the most important archaeological source, however, is the hieroglyphic texts carved on stone monuments or stone or bone artifacts and painted on pottery. These, insofar as they can be translated, provide descriptions of ceremonies and beliefs.
Four native hieroglyphic books of pre-Columbian date survived the Spanish conquest. The Dresden, Madrid, and Paris codices are named for the cities in which three of the codices are now housed. The Grolier Codex is named for the Grolier Club in New York City, where the fragment was first displayed to 20th-century scholars. It is housed in Mexico City. Written on bark paper, these codices deal with astronomical calculations, divination, and ritual. They appear to be Postclassic copies of earlier Classic originals.
After the Spanish conquest, books were written by learned Indians who transcribed or summarized hieroglyphic records. Such is the case of the Books of Chilam Balam, in Yucatec Maya, and of the Popol Vuh, in K'iche', a highland Maya language. The former consist of historical chronicles mixed with myth, divination, and prophecy, and the latter (which shows definite central Mexican influences) embodies the mythology and cosmology of the Postclassic Guatemalan Maya. The Ritual of the Bacabs covers religious symbolism, medical incantations, and similar matters.
The most important of the early accounts written by the Spanish themselves is Diego de Landa's Relación de las cosas de Yucatán ("Report on the Affairs of Yucatán"), which dates to 1566. It describes Postclassic rather than Classic religion, but given the deeply conservative nature of Maya religion, it is highly probable that much of this description is pertinent for the earlier period. Landa's account is also an excellent description of other aspects of Maya life in 16th-century Yucatán.
To these archaeological, ethnohistorical, and historical sources may be added the observations of modern ethnologists about the present-day Maya. Thus, in the Guatemalan highlands, the 260-day calendar still survives, as do ancient prayers to and information about Maya gods.
It is likely that a simpler religion of nature worship prevailed in Early Formative times. This probably began to undergo modification during the Middle Formative, as astronomical knowledge became more precise. Certainly by the Late Formative (300 bce, if not earlier), with the appearance of major centres and pyramid and temple constructions, an elaborate worldview had evolved. Deified heavenly bodies and time periods were added to the earlier-conceived corn and rain gods. Concepts derived from priestly speculation were imposed upon the simpler religious beginnings. Religion became increasingly esoteric, with a complex mythology interpreted by a closely organized priesthood.
The Maya, like other Middle American Indians, believed that several worlds had been successively created and destroyed before the present universe had come into being. The Dresden Codex holds that the end of a world will come about by deluge: although the evidence derived from Landa's Relación and from the K'iche' Popol Vuh is not clear, it is likely that four worlds preceded the present one. People were made successively of earth (who, being mindless, were destroyed), then of wood (who, lacking souls and intelligence and being ungrateful to the gods, were punished by being drowned in a flood or devoured by demons), and finally of a corn gruel (the ancestors of the Maya). The Yucatec Maya worshiped a creator deity called Hunab Ku, "One-God." Itzamná ("Iguana House"), head of the Maya pantheon of the ruling class, was his son, whose wife was Ix Chebel Yax, patroness of weaving.
Four Itzamnas, one assigned to each direction of the universe, were represented by celestial monsters or two-headed, dragonlike iguanas. Four gods, the Bacabs, sustained the sky. Each world direction was associated with a Bacab, a sacred ceiba, or silk cotton tree, a bird, and a colour according to the following scheme: east–red, north–white, west–black, and south–yellow. Green was the colour of the centre.
The main act of creation, as stated in the Popol Vuh, was the dawn: the world and humanity were in darkness, but the gods created the Sun and the Moon. According to other traditions, the Sun (male) was the patron of hunting and music, and the Moon (female) was the goddess of weaving and childbirth. Both the Sun and the Moon inhabited the earth originally, but they were translated to the heaven as a result of the Moon's sexual license. Lunar light is less bright than that of the Sun because, it was said, one of her eyes was pulled out by the Sun in punishment for her infidelity.
Because the Maya priests had reached advanced knowledge of astronomical phenomena and a sophisticated concept of time, it appears that their esoteric doctrines differed widely from the popular myths.
The Maya believed that 13 heavens were arranged in layers above the earth, which itself rested on the back of a huge crocodile or reptilian monster floating on the ocean. Under the earth were nine underworlds, also arranged in layers. Thirteen gods, the Oxlahuntiku, presided over the heavens; nine gods, the Bolontiku, ruled the subterranean worlds. These concepts are closely akin to those of the Postclassic Aztec, but archaeological evidence, such as the nine deities sculptured on the walls of a 7th-century crypt at Palenque, shows that they were part of the Classic Maya cosmology.
Time was an all-important element of Maya cosmology. The priest-astronomers viewed time as a majestic succession of cycles without beginning or end. All the time periods were considered as gods; time itself was believed to be divine.
The gods
Among the several deities represented by statues and sculptured panels of the Classic period are such gods as the young corn god, whose gracious statue is to be seen at Copán, the sun god shown at Palenque under the form of the solar disk engraved with anthropomorphic features, the nine gods of darkness (also at Palenque), and a snake god especially prominent at Yaxchilán. Another symbol of the corn god is a foliated cross or life tree represented in two Palenque sanctuaries. The rain god (Chac) has a mask with characteristic protruding fangs, large round eyes, and a proboscis-like nose. Such masks are a common element in Puuc architecture.
The four hieroglyphic manuscripts, especially the Dresden Codex, depict a number of deities whose names are known only through Postclassic documents. Itzamná, lord of the heavens, who ruled over the pantheon, was closely associated with Kinich Ahau, the sun god, and with the moon goddess Ix Chel. Though Itzamná was considered an entirely benevolent god, Ix Chel, often depicted as an evil old woman, had definitely unfavourable aspects.
The Chacs, the rain gods of the peasants, were believed to pour rain by emptying their gourds and to hurl stone axes upon the earth (the lightning). Their companions were frogs (uo), whose croakings announced the rains. Earth gods were worshiped in the highlands, and wind gods were of minor importance in Maya territory.
The corn god, a youthful deity with an ear of corn in his headdress, also ruled over vegetation in general. His name is Ah Mun, and he is sometimes shown in combat with the death god, Ah Puch, a skeleton-like being, patron of the sixth day-sign Cimi ("Death") and lord of the ninth hell. Several other deities were associated with death—e.g., Ek Chuah, a war god and god of merchants and cacao growers, and Ixtab, patron goddess of the suicides.
In Postclassic times, central Mexican influences were introduced—e.g., the Toltec Feathered Serpent (Quetzalcóatl), called Kukulcán in Yucatán and Gucumatz in the Guatemalan highlands.
The ancient Maya's attitude toward the gods was one of humble supplication, since the gods could bestow health, good crops, and plentiful game or send illness and hunger. Prayers and offerings of food, drink, and incense (pom) were used to placate the gods. A strong sense of sin and a belief in predestination pervaded the Maya consciousness. Humankind had to submit to the forces of the universe. The priests, because of their astronomical and divinatory knowledge, determined favourable days for such undertakings as building houses and hunting.
As was noted above, the Classic Maya buried the dead under the floors of their houses. High priests or powerful lords were laid to rest in elaborate underground vaults. The dead were believed to descend to the nine underworlds, called Mitnal in Yucatán and Xibalba by the K'iche'. There is no evidence of a belief among the Maya in a heavenly paradise, such as that which prevailed in central Mexico. The modern Lacandón, however, believe that the dead live forever without work or worry in a land of plenty located somewhere above the earth.
The present world, the Maya believed, is doomed to end in cataclysms as the other worlds have done previously. According to the priestly concept of time, cycles repeat themselves. Therefore, prediction was made possible by probing first into the past and then into the future: hence the calculations, bearing on many millennia, carved on temples and stelae. Evil influences were held to mark most of the katun endings. The Chilam Balam books are full of predictions of a markedly direful character. The priests probably believed that the present world would come to a sudden end, but that a new world would be created so that the eternal succession of cycles should remain unbroken.
Sacrifices made in return for divine favour were numerous: animals, birds, insects, fish, agricultural products, flowers, rubber, jade, and blood drawn from the tongue, ears, arms, legs, and genitals. Evidence of human sacrifice in Classic times includes two Piedras Negras stelae, an incised drawing at Tikal, the murals at Bonampak, various painted ceramic vessels, and some scenes in native manuscripts. Only in the Postclassic era did this practice become as frequent as in central Mexico. Toltec-Maya art shows many instances of human sacrifice: removal of the heart, arrow shooting, or beheading. At Chichén Itzá, in order to obtain rain, victims were hurled into a deep natural well (cenote) together with copper, gold, and jade offerings. Prayers for material benefits (which were usually recited in a squatting or standing position), fasting and continence (often for 260 days), and the drawing of blood from one's body often preceded important ceremonies and sacrifices.
These practices had become so deeply rooted that, even after the Spanish conquest, Christian-pagan ceremonies occasionally took place in which humans were sacrificed by heart removal or crucifixion. The last recorded case occurred in 1868 among the Chamula of Chiapas.
The priesthood
Bejeweled, feather-adorned priests are often represented in Classic sculpture. The high priests of each province taught in priestly schools such subjects as history, divination, and glyph writing. The priesthood, as described by Landa, was hereditary. Ahkin, "he of the sun," was the priests' general title. Specialized functions were performed by the nacoms, who split open the victims' breasts, the chacs who held their arms and legs, the chilans who interpreted the sacred books and predicted the future. Some priests used hallucinatory drugs in their roles as prophets and diviners.
Ritual activities, held on selected favourable days, were complex and intense. Performers submitted to preliminary fasting and sexual abstinence. Features common to most rites were: offerings of incense (pom), of balche (an intoxicating drink brewed from honey and a tree bark), bloodletting from ears and tongues, sacrifices of animals (human sacrifices in later times), and dances. Special ceremonies took place on New Year's Day, 0 Pop, in honour of the "Year-Bearer"—i.e., the tzolkin sign of that day. Pottery, clothes, and other belongings were renewed. The second month, Uo, was devoted to Itzamná, Tzec (fifth month) to the Bacabs, Xul (sixth) to Kukulcán, Yax (10th) to the planet Venus, Mac (13th) to the rain gods, and Muan (15th) to the cocoa-tree god. New idols were made during the eighth and ninth months, Mol and Ch'en, respectively.
Both the Classic and Postclassic Maya practiced a typically Middle American ritual ball game, as evidenced by numerous grandiose ball courts at Tikal, Copán, and Chichén Itzá. No court, however, has been found at Mayapán, and Landa does not mention that game. It appears, therefore, that the Yucatec had ceased to play it, while it remained of the utmost importance in central Mexico.
Archaeological remains at Uxmal and Chichén Itzá point to phallic rites, doubtless imported into the Yucatán from the Gulf coast. The Chilam Balam books strongly condemn the Mexican immigrants' sexual practices, which were quite alien to Maya tradition.
Ahmen, "he who knows," was the name given to sorcerers and medicine men, who were both prophets and inflicters or healers of disease. They made use of a mixture of magic formulas, chants, and prayers and of traditional healing methods, such as administering medicinal herbs or bleeding. Belief in witchcraft is widespread among present-day Maya Indians, as it most probably was in pre-Columbian times.
The evolution of Maya religion parallels that of Mexican religions from the Classic to the Postclassic era, with the sun worship and human sacrifice complex gaining importance as it did in Mexico proper.
The profoundly original feature of Maya religious thought, in comparison with that of other pre-Columbian civilizations, is the extraordinary refinement of mathematical and astronomical knowledge, inextricably mixed with mythological concepts. Even the most learned Aztec priests never reached the intellectual level of their Maya counterparts of the 1st millennium, nor did they conceive of the eternity of time and of its "bearers," the divinized time periods. The ancient Maya may be said to have been among the very few people in history (along with the Zurvanites of Iran) who worshiped time.
The simple, naturalistic religion of the corn-growing peasants, however, subsisted apart from the priesthood's abstract speculations and has partly survived to this day among the Christianized Maya Indians or the unevangelized Lacandón.Jacques Soustelle Gordon R. Willey
Society and political life
There is a vast gap between the lavishly stocked tombs of the Maya elite who ran the ceremonial centres and the simple graves of the peasantry. Careful measurements of the skeletons found in tombs and graves have also revealed that persons of the Maya ruling class were much taller than the tillers of the soil who provided them tribute. It is likely that this gulf was unspannable, for throughout Mesoamerica the rulers and nobility were believed to have been created separately from commoners.
The most revealing testimony to this royal cult is the temple pyramid itself, for almost every one explored has a great tomb hidden in its base. On death, each ruler might have been the object of ancestor worship by members of his lineage, the departed leader having become one with the god from whom he claimed descent. Ancestor worship, in fact, seems to be at the heart of ancient and modern society and religion among the Maya.
The ordinary folk may have participated in the ceremonies of even the greatest Maya centres. The modern highland Maya have a complex ceremonial life in which a man advances through a series of cargos, or "burdens," each one of which brings him greater prestige, costs him a great deal of money, and requires that he reside in the otherwise nearly empty centre for a year at a time carrying out his religious duties. The same may have prevailed in Classic times, though all activities were then under the direction of a hereditary and divine elite class, long since destroyed by the Spaniards.
Warfare apparently was a continuing preoccupation of the Maya lords. Translations of hieroglyphic inscriptions show that in some cases such warfare led to territorial aggrandizement and the domination of one centre or polity by another; however, the principal purpose of war appears to have been to gain captives for slavery and sacrifice.
It has often been said that the Maya realm was a theocracy, with all power in the hands of the priests. That this is a misconception is apparent from the monuments themselves, which show kings, queens, heirs, and war prisoners, but no figures surely identifiable as priests. In 16th-century Yucatán, the priesthood was hereditary, and it is reported that younger sons of lords often took on that vocation. Quite probably such a class was also to be found among the Late Classic Maya, but neither for the Maya nor for any other Classic civilization of Mesoamerica can the term theocracy be justified.
The collapse of Classic Maya civilization
In the last century of the Classic period, Maya civilization went into a decline from which it never recovered. Beginning about 790 in the western edge of the Central Subregion, such ceremonial activity as the erection of stelae virtually came to a standstill. During the next 40 years this cultural paralysis spread gradually eastward, by which time the great Classic civilization of the Maya had all but atrophied. A date in the Maya calendar corresponding to 889 is inscribed on the last dated monuments in the Central Subregion; soon after the close of the 9th century it is clear that almost all of this region was abandoned.
For this event, which must have been one of the greatest human tragedies of all time, there are few convincing explanations. It now seems that the Classic Maya civilization in the region of its greatest development went out "not with a bang but a whimper." Massive foreign invasions can be discounted as a factor, but non-Maya elements did appear in the west at the same time as ceremonial activity terminated. These became the inheritors of whatever was left of the old civilization of the Central Subregion after 900 ce, having established trading colonies and even a few minor ceremonial centres on its peripheries.
Whatever incursions did take place from the west were piecemeal and probably the result of the general decline, rather than its cause. Similarly, there is little reason to believe that there were peasant revolts on a general scale. The only real fact is that most of the inhabitants of the Central Subregion went elsewhere. Probably some were absorbed by such still flourishing ceremonial centres of the Northern Subregion as Uxmal and Kabah, while others might have migrated up into the congenial highlands of Chiapas and Guatemala. Although a population explosion and severe ecological abuse of the land must have played their role in the tragedy, the full story of the decline and fall of this brilliant aboriginal civilization remains to be told.Michael Douglas Coe Gordon R. Willey
Postclassic period (900–1519)
Definition of the Postclassic
The final period of pre-Columbian Meso-American history is referred to as the Postclassic. Its beginning is usually placed at 900, and it terminates with the arrival of the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés in 1519 or with his conquest of the Aztec in 1521. The 900 date is based on two considerations: first, the 10th century was the period of the catastrophic collapse of the lowland Maya civilization and the cessation of the custom of erecting monuments dated by the Long Count; second, 900 was also the approximate date of the founding of the city of Tula in central Mexico and the rise of a people called the Toltec, who, according to the historical annals, built the first great empire in Meso-America. At one time it was thought that the date marked the collapse of all of the regional Classic civilizations of the area as the result of massive population dislocation. But it now appears that some Classic civilizations declined as early as 750, whereas others persisted until as late as 1200. The period is usually divided into two phases: Early Postclassic (900–1200) and Late Postclassic (1200–1519), the former equivalent with the period of the Toltec, the latter with that of the Aztec. The Postclassic civilizations of Meso-America came to an abrupt end with the coming of the Spanish in the early 16th century. For an account of the Spanish conquest, see Latin America, history of: The colonial period.
The Postclassic Period as a whole has also been distinguished from the Classic on the basis of assumed major changes in Meso-American political, economic, and social institutions. It has been asserted, for example, that the Classic period was one of relatively peaceful contact between polities, of the absence of large imperialistic states and empires (and of the militaristic élan and organization that accompanies such states). The Classic has been further characterized by the absence of true cities, by theocratic rather than secular government, and by an overall superiority of arts and crafts, with the exception of metallurgy, which appears for the first time in the Postclassic Period. In contrast, the Postclassic was characterized as a period of intense warfare and highly organized military organization, of empires and cities, of secular government, and of overall artistic decline.
Subsequent research, however, has cast considerable doubt on these conclusions. Many of the contrasts were drawn from events in the lowland Maya area and applied to the entire culture area; others were concluded essentially by a comparison of the Classic Maya of the lowland tropical forest of northern Guatemala and the Yucatán Peninsula with the Postclassic Aztec living in central Mexico in a dry mountain basin 7,000 feet above sea level. The differences, in part, are the product of separate culture evolution, conditioned by ecological factors. Cities and large states comparable to those built by the Toltec and Aztec were present in Early Classic times at Teotihuacán in central Mexico and probably at Monte Albán in Oaxaca. Militarism was at least significant enough to be a major artistic theme throughout the Classic period, even among the lowland Maya. One could also question the criterion of artistic decline, since a number of Postclassic crafts were highly developed, such as Aztec sculpture, Mixtec ceramics and metallurgy, and Zapotec architecture.
The separation between Postclassic and Classic is therefore little more than a convenient way of splitting up the long chronicle of Meso-American cultural development into manageable units for discussion and analysis. The Postclassic is a period also in which historical traditions combine with archaeological data, whereas the Classic either lacks a written history or, in the case of the lowland Maya, provides little more than cryptic biographies of kings. Perhaps this is the best rationale for definition of the period.
Society, culture, and technology
At the time of the Spanish conquest, Meso-America was occupied by a number of peoples speaking languages as distinct from each other as English is from Chinese. On the central Gulf coast and adjacent escarpment were the Totonac; in Oaxaca and adjacent portions of Puebla and Guerrero two major ethnic groups, the Mixtec and the Zapotec, shared the western and eastern portions of the area, respectively; and in Michoacán lived the Tarascan. Various peoples of the Maya linguistic family occupied most of Guatemala, the Yucatán Peninsula, eastern Tabasco, and highland Chiapas; a detached group, the Huastec (Huaxtec), occupied the north Gulf coast. An equally widespread family, the Nahua (to which the Aztec belonged) occupied most of the Central Plateau, a huge area in the northwest frontier, portions of Guerrero, the Pacific coast of Chiapas and Guatemala (where they were known as the Pipil), and the Gulf coast. Some detached groups had spread beyond the frontier of Meso-America into Nicaragua and Panama. The linguistic family to which the Nahua belong (the Uto-Aztecan) is the only Meso-American family with affinities to languages north of the Rio Grande, including those of such western U.S. Indians as the Hopi, Paiute, and Shoshone.
One of the Nahua-speaking nations, the Mexica, or Tenochca (or the Aztec, as they are commonly called), were the dominant people in Meso-America in 1519, having created by conquest an empire estimated as covering some 80,000 square miles (207,000 square kilometres) and having a population of 5,000,000 to 6,000,000 people.
All of these diverse ethnic groups shared a common cultural tradition, but separate historical origins and environmental factors had also produced a substantial degree of regional differentiation. Most of the cultural characteristics of the area go back at least to the beginning of the Postclassic, and many appeared in Classic times. The various regional cultures and languages have great time depths and undoubtedly were present during the Classic period. Common institutional characteristics included organization into centralized polities, including populations minimally in the tens of thousands, with a formal government, supported by a highly organized taxation system; stratification into social classes (including slave and serf classes); occupational specialization—in some areas full time with a guildlike organization; highly organized local and interregional trade involving professional merchants and regularly meeting markets; and a professional priesthood.
The technological base of this elaborate institutional structure seems weak by western European standards, since the primary technology (i.e., the tools used to manufacture other technology) was based on chipped and ground stone, metal being reserved primarily for ornaments. Since draft animals were absent, all power was based on human energy. The economic base of the civilization was a highly productive agriculture, but the basic tools were primitive—stone axes for clearing vegetation and a number of wooden digging tools for working the soil. The crop complex was rich, with corn (maize) serving as the staple food and beans an important source of protein. But the list of secondary crops was large: chili peppers, tomatoes, squashes, sweet potatoes, cassava (manioc), cotton, tobacco, cacao, pineapples, papayas, maguey, nopals (prickly pears), sapotes (zapotes), peanuts (groundnuts), avocados, amates (paper figs), and many others.
Many crops were limited to particular environmental zones, thus acting as a major stimulus to trade. In many areas, particularly the tropical lowlands, the slash-and-burn, or swidden, system of farming was employed: forests were cleared, planted for up to three years, and rested for longer periods to restore fertility and eliminate the more difficult weeds. This regular rotation of fields resulted in high production per capita but had low demographic potential because in any given year most of the land lay fallow. In some lowland areas permanent grain and orchard cropping were practiced. In the drier highlands a number of specialized techniques were used, and agriculture generally was more intensive. Particularly important were terracing, irrigation, and swamp reclamation. The per capita productivity of highland agriculture was probably less (because of the higher labour input), but the demographic capacity was considerably greater than that in the lowlands. As a result of these highly effective approaches to farming, the population was dense when compared to western Europe in the 16th century. Population estimates for the conquest period have varied from 3,000,000 to 30,000,000; a reasonable estimate is between 12,000,000 and 15,000,000.
The diet of the average Meso-American was relatively uniform throughout the area. Dried corn was boiled in lime-impregnated water to soften the hull, ground into a dough on milling stones (manos and metates), and then either made into tortillas or mixed with water and drunk as a gruel called posol. The tortillas were eaten with sauces prepared from chili peppers and tomatoes, along with boiled beans. This was essentially the diet of the peasant, with the addition of pulque, the fermented sap of the maguey, at higher altitudes. To this were added the other crops in minor quantities and combinations depending on the specific local environment. Luxury foods included cocoa drinks, meats (from game or from the only two domestic animals of significance, the hairless dog and the turkey), and fish. The diet of the peasant, as is the case even today, was low in animal protein; but apparently the quantity of vegetable protein ingested made up for this deficiency.
Major Postclassic Meso-American crafts were weaving of cotton and maguey fibre; ceramics for pottery vessels, figurines, and musical instruments; stone sculpture; featherwork used for personal and architectural ornament; lapidary work (jadeite, jade, serpentine, and turquoise); metalwork (using gold, copper, and, more rarely, silver) for ornaments and a few tools; woodworking, the products including large dugout canoes, sculpture, magnificently made drums, stools, and a great variety of household items; baskets for containers and mats; painting; and, most particularly, stone and lime concrete masonry architecture.
Knowledge and belief
On the intellectual, ideological, and religious levels, although some diversity and certain elaborations occurred in some regions, there was a fundamental unity to the Meso-American area, the product of centuries of political and economic ties. The religion was polytheistic, with numerous gods specialized along the lines of human activities. There were gods for basic activities such as war, reproduction, and agriculture; cosmogenic gods who created the universe and invented human culture; and gods of craft groups, social classes, political systems, and their subdivisions. Gods were all-powerful and had to be constantly propitiated with offerings and sacrifices, a concept reaching its peak in personal bloodletting and human sacrifice. Certain gods, such as the god of rain (called Tlaloc in central Mexico), were found throughout the area. A fundamental concept was that of a quadripartite multilevel universe that, by 1519, had gone through five creations and four destructions. Meso-American religion heavily emphasized the astral bodies, particularly the Sun, the Moon, and Venus, and the observations of the movement of these bodies by the astronomer-priests were extraordinarily detailed and accurate. The major purpose of these observations was astrological, and the Meso-American priests had developed a number of time counts, or calendrical rounds, based in part on these observations. Two basic calendars, a 260-day divinatory calendar and one based on the solar year of 365 days, were found throughout the area.
One of the great intellectual achievements of Meso-American civilization was writing; in Postclassic times books were made from the inner bark of the paper-fig tree and used to record calendars, astronomical tables, dynastic history, taxes, and court records.
Religion was a pervasive force in Meso-American life, as the art demonstrates; and considerable surplus energy was devoted to it (e.g., temple construction, support of a numerous professional priesthood). Many writers have stated that the major focus of Meso-American culture was in this sphere. In fact, the contrast between Postclassic and Classic was in part based on the presumed even greater emphasis on religion in the art and architecture of the latter period.
The historical annals
The rise of the Aztec
A major characteristic of the Postclassic, in contrast to the Classic, is the abundant historical documentation. The Aztec record is particularly rich, and much of it is undoubtedly genuine, although there is always the possibility that records were rewritten or tampered with for political reasons. One of the functions of Meso-American writing was to record the succession and achievements of dynastic lines, and consequently it served as a validation of power. Virtually all of the dynasties of the local states recorded their history. A problem in the utilization of these documents, other than the low number of survivals, is the fact that many of them have strong mythological overtones. The Aztec themselves, for example, as creators of a great empire, explained their rise in part to the fact that they were the chosen people of the war god Huitzilopochtli and were the sustainers of the sun god Tonatiuh. They started their history as a poor, nomadic tribe from the north, who entered the Basin of Mexico, led by a magician-priest, and ultimately settled on the lake islands because of a series of astrological predictions and signs. They lived for a while as a subject people and then embarked on their destined role as conquerors and priests of the sun god. Virtually all historical traditions of local groups begin with a migration, a period of trials, and ultimate success—and some records even claim that the people were hunters and gatherers during the early part of their history.
On the northern frontier of Meso-America, in the arid Mexican Plateau, true hunters and gatherers, referred to as the "Chichimeca" by the civilized peoples, did actually reside in 1519. The name Chichimeca was frequently applied to the migrant groups. It is difficult to see how hunting and gathering bands could successfully invade areas of dense civilized populations; but agricultural groups, during periods of dynastic weakness, undoubtedly could. In fact, the term Chichimeca was also applied to agricultural but less civilized peoples (such as the Otomí in central Mexico) and thus connoted a lack of polish or a rustic life-style. Since the northwestern portion of Meso-America was occupied by such people and since they were Nahua in speech, the legends of periodic north–south migrations of invaders, though they may have a factual basis, probably refer to movements of agricultural rather than hunting and gathering peoples.
The histories of these invading groups take on a more convincing historical character after the legends of migration. In the Aztec case they record the founding of Tenochtitlán in 1325. By 1376 the Aztec had increased in numbers and prestige sufficiently to obtain a member of the ruling family of Culhuacan, a neighbouring state, to rule as their tlatoani, or king. His name was Acamapichtli. The Aztec at this time were paying tribute to another state, Azcapotzalco, on the lake shore; and they remained under this obligation through the reigns of his two successors, Huitzilhuitl (c. 1390–1415) and Chimalpopoca (1415–26). During the reign of Chimalpopoca, Maxtla, the ruler of Azcapotzalco, attempted to secure tighter control over subject states by replacing their tlatoanis with his own men. He succeeded in arranging the assassination of Chimalpopoca and the exile of Nezahualcóyotl, ruler of Texcoco, a state on the east shore of Lake Texcoco. In response to these acts, a coalition was formed between Nezahualcóyotl, Itzcóatl (Chimalpopoca's successor), and another small state (Tlacopan), and the power of Azcapotzalco was broken.
A triple alliance was then formed between Tenochtitlán, Texcoco, and Tlacopan, which by 1519 resulted in the dominance of Aztec Tenochtitlán. Under the Aztec rulers Itzcóatl (1428–40), Montezuma I (1440–69), Axayacatl (1469–81), Tizoc (1481–86), Ahuitzotl (1486–1502), and Montezuma II (1502–20), and the two Texcocan rulers—Nezahualcóyotl (1431–72) and Nezahualpilli (1472–1516)—the triple alliance succeeded in conquering the vast domain described above. Tlacopan seems to have been relegated to an inferior political role early in the history. The records of the Aztec and neighbouring states in the Basin of Mexico between 1300 and 1519 are relatively free from mythological tales and have sufficient cross-referencing to present a reasonably clear picture of military events, dynastic succession, institutional changes, and economic development. The period from 1200 to 1300 is essentially one of migration legends of the dynasties of the various states, the historical traditions of which are discussed below.
The question of the Toltec
The historical traditions also state that these migrations were responsible, along with a series of natural disasters, for the collapse of a great empire ruled by a people called the Toltec from their capital of Tollan, or Tula. Many dynasties of the conquest period, not only in central Mexico but even as far afield as highland Guatemala and the Yucatán Peninsula, claimed descent from the Toltec, apparently as a result of their dispersion after the fall of Tula.
The traditions describe the Toltec as the first civilizers, the first city builders, and the originators of craft skills and astrological knowledge. The major questions are: Did the Toltec really exist as a people? Where was Tula? Did these people actually play the extraordinary political and cultural role ascribed to them? To begin with, the annals themselves are in fundamental disagreement with respect to dates and the lists of Toltec kings. There are at least three major chronologies of the Toltec Empire (see below table). The dates by Ixtlilxóchitl, a learned mestizo of the post-conquest period, place the Toltec well within the Classic period of Meso-American archaeology, but the others correlate them with the early portion of the Postclassic. Most writers favour the later dates, but this would mean that the Toltec were not the first civilized peoples in central Mexico, as they claim.
|Chronologies of the Toltec empire
|Anales de Cuauhtitlán
|Codex Ramírez
Adding further doubt to the veracity of the Toltec history is the admixture of myth and magic in the annals, not only at the beginning (which, like the histories of later dynasties, begins with a migration under a magician priest) but throughout the narrative. The ruler Topiltzin, for example, is also called Quetzalcóatl (the Nahua name for the Feathered Serpent god); he is opposed by Tezcatlipoca (also an Aztec god) and is driven out of Tula. He flees with his followers to the Gulf of Mexico and embarks on a raft of serpents. The story sounds like a duplicate of the cosmic myth or conflict between the two gods (see below Cosmogony and eschatology). Notably, the Maya in Yucatán had a tradition of a landing on the west coast made by foreigners, under a leader named Kukulcán (which is the Maya word for Feathered Serpent), who founded a city at Chichén Itzá and ruled over the Maya.
In spite of all the objections, the traditions of a great empire and of the city of Tula are so persistent that they must refer to some historical event and, indeed, have some archaeological support.
Archaeological remains of Postclassic civilization
The early Postclassic period (900–1200) in central Mexico is associated with three major sites, all of which began in Classic times: Cholula in Puebla, Xochicalco in Morelos, and Tula in Hidalgo. Cholula was a major centre as far back as Early Classic times, probably as a political dependency of Teotihuacán. It reached its maximum growth in Late Classic times, following the collapse of Teotihuacán, when the largest structure ever built by Meso-Americans was erected (see above Cholula).
In Postclassic times Cholula continued as a major religious and cultural centre. Xochicalco probably was of minor significance in Early Classic times; but it went through a phase of explosive growth in the Late Classic and was probably abandoned by 1200, possibly earlier. Tula, on the other hand, a small centre in the Late Classic, went through a rapid growth during the period 900–1200 and then declined to a provincial centre in the Late Postclassic. There is a strong suggestion that the demise of Classic Teotihuacán was in part related to the emergence of one or all of these major centres.
The location of the Toltec capital of Tollan, or Tula, is not certain. The archaeological site located on a low ridge near the modern town of Tula has been the persistent choice of all historians since the conquest, in part because of the coincidence of place-names. There is further support for this identification in that the annals provide a great number of place-names near the modern Tula that have persisted since the conquest. There is also support for the identification in that the glyph Ce Acatl, the birthday and birth name of the great Toltec leader Topiltzin, has been found carved on a hill near Tula. Moreover, the sculpture from the site is heavily loaded with symbolism that relates to the Quetzalcóatl cosmology and cosmogony. It clearly was the city of the god Quetzalcóatl. The confusion between the god and the ruler can be ascribed to the fact that the name Quetzalcóatl may have served as a title of office carried by all Toltec rulers. The archaeological dates are in agreement with the Anales de Cuauhtitlán and the Codex Ramírez (see below The nature of the sources).
The major factors that have made some researchers reluctant to accept this identification lie in the claim that Tula was the capital of a great pan-Meso-American empire and that the Toltec were the first civilizers in central Mexico. Archaeologically, it is quite clear that Tula was preceded by the great Classic centre of Teotihuacán. Tula as a site does not really approach the earlier Teotihuacán or the later Tenochtitlán in size, in the number of public buildings, or in estimated population, although studies indicate that Tula had a population of between 30,000 and 60,000. Furthermore, although some basic stylistic elements of the art and architecture of Tula are widespread, the style, in an integrated specific sense, is limited (with one notable exception) to a small area in central Mexico. These facts make it difficult to accept Tula as the capital of a great empire. But archaeological evidence of even the Aztec empire is skimpy. In both cases, this may mean that the expansion was a rapid, explosive one that failed to last long enough to register these effects. But at least in the case of Tenochtitlán it did result in the rapid growth of a truly gigantic urban centre.
Because of these objections and because Teotihuacán fits better the description of the Toltec as the builders of the first truly civilized society in central Mexico, that site must still be considered a possible candidate.
The art and architecture of Tula shows a striking similarity to the later art and architecture of Tenochtitlán, and the themes represented in the art indicate a close approximation in religious ideology and behaviour. The symbols of sun sacrifice and the marching predators represented in sculpture both suggest that the concept that the Aztec had of themselves as the warrior-priests of the sun god was directly borrowed from the people of Tula.
On the basis of the symbolism represented in the carvings on a temple pyramid at Tula called Structure B, it has been concluded that the pyramid was dedicated to the god Quetzalcóatl, lending further support to the identification of the site as the Toltec capital.
Chichén Itzá
Also in support of the identification of Tula as the Toltec capital are the architectural characteristics and stylistic features of the sculpture of a large site in northern Yucatán called Chichén Itzá. The resemblance between the two sites is extraordinarily close. At Chichén are found flat beam and masonry roofs (contrasting sharply with the typical Maya corbeled vault), serpent columns, colonnaded halls attached to the bases of temples, altars with Atlantean figures, sculptured representations of skulls and crossbones, marching felines, canines and raptorial birds devouring human hearts, and depictions of warriors with typical Toltec accoutrements. Furthermore, there are even scenes showing Toltec and Maya warriors in combat. The Temple of the Warriors at Chichén Itzá looks like an attempt to duplicate Structure B at Tula.
One of the puzzling aspects of the relationship between the two sites is that the public architecture of Chichén Itzá is actually more monumental than that at Tula, leading at least one Meso-American specialist to believe that Tula's style was derived from Chichén. Many of the stylistic features themselves, however, have prototypes in Classic Teotihuacán, whereas there is little in Classic Maya culture that could be considered as the source. What is more probable—and this agrees with the Toltec version of the relationship—is that the Toltec state in Yucatán was politically independent from Tula and was larger in area and population. The presence of rival states in central Mexico such as Xochicalco and Cholula may have kept the core of the Toltec polity relatively restricted in space. The much larger area and population controlled by the Toltec state at Chichén would explain the differences in the scale of architecture. The superior military organization and equipment of the Toltec perhaps explains their apparent success in Yucatán.
Archaeological unity of the Postclassic
The Postclassic period of Meso-American archaeology generally is a period characterized by considerable regionalism combined with a certain degree of uniformity. To a great extent, the latter was the product of the large states and extensive trade networks centred in the central plateau region. The Early Postclassic in some areas may be described as a continuation of the Late Classic; on the Gulf coast, for example, sites like El Tajín continued to be occupied, while in the Valley of Oaxaca (although Monte Albán was abandoned) the Zapotec tradition continued with the new centre at Mitla. In other areas, new styles either began or reached their climactic development, such as the Mixteca–Puebla style in painting, ceramics, and metallurgy, which evolved either in western Oaxaca or, more probably, at Cholula in Puebla. On the Guatemalan Pacific piedmont and in Tabasco, two specialized ceramic traditions (both of which began in Late Classic times) evolved: (1) plumbate (so called because of its slip, which had an unusually high iron content in the natural clay that fired to a lead-colour glaze); and (2) Fine Orange (so called because of its fine-grained, temperless paste). Wares of these two styles were widely traded.
The unity of the Postclassic consisted primarily of the diffusion of religious ideology, particularly the sun god–warfare–sacrificial complex and of the related institutional development such as the military orders (the latter probably originated at Classic Teotihuacán). This ideology clearly originated in central Mexico, at either Cholula or Tula or both. The specific artistic style of representation of the themes in painting and sculpture spread as well. Along with this was diffused a specific style of representation of the social calendar and writing generally and much greater emphasis on the 52-year cycle. The specific style most probably originated at Cholula.
In the highland areas of Meso-America the Late Postclassic was a period of maximum population growth. The Early Postclassic was, however, the period of maximum expansion of sedentary peoples on the northern frontier, probably the product of minor changes in climate as a result of increased rainfall. This frontier retracted substantially in Late Postclassic times, possibly because the rainfall decreased. This was perhaps the major factor in the precipitate arrival of barbarous tribes into the plateau, as the annals state.
The Postclassic, over large areas of the lowlands, on the other hand, was strikingly different. One of the most intriguing problems of Meso-American archaeology is the peculiar sequence of events in the lowland Maya area. At the time of European contact much of the northern portion of Yucatán was well settled. A narrow band of densely settled country also extended along the east coast south to modern Belize City and along the entire length of the west coast (where it joined another area of substantial settlement in the south Gulf coast). Most of the heart of the peninsula, the department of Petén in Guatemala, and large portions of the states of Campeche and Quintana Roo in Mexico (the most densely settled portion of the Classic Maya territory) were virtually abandoned.
One of the major problems of Meso-American archaeology is the explanation of this massive population decline. The immediate causes are clear: it must have been the product of migrations out of the area or a set of internal factors that caused a decline in situ or both. Various hypotheses as to processes and causes have been suggested. These may be grouped in the following categories: natural disasters (earthquakes, famines, epidemics, and hurricanes have all been suggested); ecological processes (primarily the deterioration of the natural environment by overintensification of land use in response to population pressure); and sociopolitical processes (internal warfare, invasion from outside, peasant revolts, breakdown of critical trade networks). Some of these hypotheses are clearly derivations from others or are not explanations but rather are descriptions of events that were produced by other processes. It seems certain that the causes were multiple and in some way related. Of great interest is the fact that at least one other lowland area, the Pacific Coastal Plain of Guatemala, experienced a comparable Postclassic decline.William T. Sanders
Aztec culture to the time of the Spanish conquest
The nature of the sources
At the time of the Spanish conquest the dominant people of Meso-America were the Aztec. This description is based primarily on written documents from the 16th century but also includes some archaeological data. The literature, both published and unpublished, of the 16th century is enormous and takes in all aspects of Aztec culture. Much of it covers the period within a few decades after the conquest, and it is uncertain how much change had occurred because of the introduction of Spanish culture. Some Aztec institutions, such as the military orders, were immediately abolished by the Spaniards; and the sources, therefore, give only the barest outline of their organization. This information, however, combined with archaeological data, gives a fairly detailed picture of Aztec culture at the time of the Spanish conquest. The sources can be classified by content and purpose into five categories, each of which is described below.
Accounts written by the conquistadores
Eyewitness accounts of Aztec culture on the eve of the conquest are, of course, the most directly pertinent sources because they describe Aztec culture before it became transformed by the Spanish conquest. Important among these are the Cartas de Relación ("Letters of Information"), sent by Hernán Cortés to the Holy Roman emperor Charles V, and the Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España (1632; The True History of the Conquest of New Spain) by Bernal Díaz del Castillo. Religious rites and ceremonies, temples, and paraphernalia of the cults are often described in these accounts. Their value, however, is lessened by the writers' ignorance of Náhuatl (the Aztec language at the time of the conquest), their lack of understanding of the Indian way of thinking, and their deep hostility to the native religion, which they considered to be inspired by the devil. These documents, therefore, have been interpreted with utmost caution.
Roman Catholic missionaries also wrote accounts of the Aztec. Paradoxically, the priests generally showed more understanding and tolerance than did the laymen. Thanks to their training and theological knowledge, they were able to analyze the Indian mind and to gain insight into the meaning of the myths and ritual. The missionaries, as a rule, learned the native languages, especially Náhuatl.
Postconquest histories of the Aztec written in Spanish
Within a few decades of the conquest, a series of histories had been written in the Spanish language, based in part on Aztec books and in part on information supplied by the upper class. Among the most detailed of these is the three-part Historia de las Indias de la Nueva España e Islas de Tierra Firma ("History of the Indies of New Spain"), written in about 1580 by the Dominican friar Diego Durán.
Postconquest ethnographic accounts written in Spanish and Náhuatl
These works are comparable in methodology and subject matter to the kinds of studies of native peoples conducted by present-day anthropologists. Probably the finest of them was written by Bernardino de Sahagún. Sahagún was a Franciscan priest who arrived in Mexico very early (1529), learned the Náhuatl tongue, and spent his life building a wonderful monument, a real encyclopaedia called the Historia general de las cosas de Nueva España ("General History of the Things of New Spain"). His work covers virtually all aspects of Aztec culture. It contains particularly detailed accounts of religion, ethnobotany, folk medicine, and economics, dictated to him in Náhuatl by Aztec noblemen and priests. As a source, it has the added value of being written in both Náhuatl and Spanish. One of the most complete versions of this work, written in Náhuatl, is called the Florentine Codex.
The codices
Aztec sacred books and works, which were kept in the temples, and other native books have become known in Western scholarship as codices. Sacred books were written (or rather, painted) on deerskin or agave-fibre paper by scribes (tlacuiloanime), who used a combination of pictography, ideograms, and phonetic symbols and dealt with the ritual calendar, divination, ceremonies, and speculations on the gods and the universe. Because of their religious content only a small fraction of these escaped destruction by the Spaniards; the few specimens that have survived—such as the Codex Borbonicus, the Codex Borgia, the Codex Fejérváry-Mayer, and the Codex Cospi—usually come accompanied by Spanish notations. These sources are limited in scope and subject matter but nevertheless are valuable documents. Their interpretation is far from easy. Only a few of them, such as the Borbonicus, are truly Aztec, while others, such as the Borgia, seem to emanate from the priestly colleges of the "Mexica-Puebla" area, between the central highlands and the Oaxaca Mountains.
Other native books, either pre-Cortesian or post-Cortesian, also afford valuable material. Examples include such manuscripts as the Codex Telleriano-Remensis, the Azcatitlan, and the Codex of 1576, which describe the history of the Aztec tribe and state and occasionally depict religious scenes and events; the Codex Badianus, an herbal with magnificent drawings of medicinal plants; and the Codex Mendoza and the Matrícula de tributos, both tax documents of the Aztec empire. A number of books were written in the Latin alphabet—either in Náhuatl or in Spanish—by learned Aztec chroniclers, who used ancient pictographic manuscripts as their basis. Among those that were prepared in central Mexico are the Codex Chimalpopoca (also called the Anales de Cuauhtitlán; "Annals of Cuauhtitlán"), in Náhuatl, and the Codex Ramírez (also called the Historia de los mexicanos por sus pinturas; "History of the Mexicans Through Their Paintings"), in Spanish; both are anonymous compilations.
Official ecclesiastical and government records
Much of this literature is unpublished. Its purpose was administrative rather than intellectual, but it has provided an extraordinarily rich source of information for all 16th-century ethnic groups. The documents vary from tax lists, censuses, and marriage and baptismal records to broad geographic-economic surveys. Among the most valuable of the last type are the Relaciones geográficas of 1579–85, a series of surveys ordered by Philip II of his overseas possessions. Formal questionnaires were drawn up that demanded information from each town in the empire on virtually all aspects of Meso-American life: questions on the natural environment and resources, crops, population history, settlement patterns, taxes paid, markets and trade, the language, native history and customs, and progress of the missionization program.William T. Sanders Jacques Soustelle
The homeland of the Aztec, from which they ruled their vast domain, was a large (about 3,000 square miles), mountain-rimmed basin with a floor at approximately 7,000 feet above sea level. The surrounding ranges reached a maximum elevation of 18,000 feet in the volcano of Popocatépetl. The annual rainfall varied from 20 to 35 inches (500 to 900 millimetres) in the valley floor to a maximum of 50 inches on the southern escarpment. Approximately 80 percent of the rain fell between May 1 and October 1. Because of the high elevation, the area suffered from severe winter frosts that normally began in mid-October and lasted until the end of March. Normally, the rainfall was adequate for corn, even in the drier portions of the basin, but a major problem was the timing of the rains and the frosts. A delay of the rainfall to mid- or late June, accompanied by early autumn frosts, could produce crop disasters.
Another major problem for the pre-Hispanic cultivator was the paucity of level land. Much of the land surface is sloping, and the problem of soil erosion was acute. Furthermore, of the 1,600 square miles of relatively level land, 400 square miles were occupied by a chain of lakes; and much of the immediate lakeshore plain was waterlogged.
Because of the effect of elevation on the growing season, the areas above 8,300 feet were also unsuitable for cultivation, removing an additional 400 square miles from the agricultural resource. Even within zones of cultivation, the presence of steep slopes and thin soil further reduced the area of cultivation. It is doubtful that more than 50 percent of the basin was suitable for labour-intensive methods of cultivation. Yet in 1519 it supported a population of 1,000,000 to 1,500,000; i.e., a density of 500 people per square mile (200 per square kilometre), the densest population in Meso-American history. This was achieved by an extraordinarily intensive system of farming that involved a number of specialized techniques. Soil fertility was maintained by plant and animal fertilizers, by short-cycle fallowing, and by irrigation. In gently sloping terrain, erosion was controlled by earth and maguey terraces, in steeper areas by stone terracing. The problem of humidity was solved by canal irrigation of both the floodwater and permanent type. Much of the irrigation was done just before planting in April and May in order to give crops a head start and hence avoid the autumn frosts. Terracing functioned also as a method of conserving moisture. There is also evidence that dry-farming techniques were applied to store moisture in the soil. The most significant achievement of Aztec agriculture, however, was that of swamp reclamation, even including colonization of the lakes. This system of farming, called chinampa, was first applied to Lake Chalco. The lake covered approximately 60 square miles and apparently varied in its character from swamps to ponds of fairly deep, open water. By a process varying from digging drainage ditches to artificial construction of land from lake mud and vegetation, most of the lake was converted to highly productive agricultural land. A series of masonry causeway dikes were constructed across the lake to control flooding. By a system of dikes and sluice gates the Aztec even managed to convert a portion of saline Lake Texcoco, the largest and lowest lake in the basin, to a freshwater bay for further chinampa colonization.
The total area colonized was probably in the neighbourhood of 30,000 acres, and Tenochtitlán, the Aztec capital, depended on these lands for much of its food. By a comparable method, much of the waterlogged lakeshore plain was also converted into agricultural land. Particularly notable is the fact that all of these techniques of food production were achieved by human power and simple hand tools.
Aside from agriculture, the basin had a number of major resources, some of which were exploited not only for local consumption but also to supply other areas of Meso-America. Obsidian, natural glass of volcanic origin, was a superb material for a great variety of stone tools; and the northeastern ranges of the basin contained one of Meso-America's major deposits. Basalt for manos and metates (milling stones) was also abundant. Lake Texcoco was a major source of salt, and the lakes generally provided waterfowl, fish, and other aquatic foodstuffs. The great pine forests above the limits of agriculture were a major source of lumber. On the other hand, the basin, because of its high elevation, was unsuitable for a great variety of tropical products, including cotton, paper, tropical roots and fruits, tobacco, copal incense, rubber, cacao, honey, precious feathers and skins, and such prized goods as metal, jade, and turquoise. The major motivation of Aztec conquest was to obtain control of these resources.
Social and political organization
Aztec technology differed little from that of other Meso-American groups. One of its distinctive aspects was differentiation by status levels. The use of most of the extra-local resources noted above was limited to a small upper and middle class; and there were striking differences in dress, housing, and diet by social class. Commoners, for example, wore clothing woven from maguey fibre, while the upper classes wore cotton garments. The use of imported foods, at least on a regular basis, was limited to the upper and middle classes. Commoners lived in small adobe or stone and mud huts, the upper and middle class in large multiroomed palatial houses of cut stone, lime plaster, and concrete.
Aztec social and political organization can be divided into a number of levels of increasing size and complexity of organization. The nuclear family—that is, a pair of cohabiting adults and their unmarried children—formed the lowest level of organization. The nuclear family functioned in procreation, education of children, and as a unit of food preparation and consumption, with a well-defined division of labour between husband and wife. Among the Aztec, however, a number of nuclear families usually resided together in a single cooperating household, or extended family. Such a family usually consisted of a man, his married sons or brothers, and their families. The average peasant household of this type was small. Up to three nuclear families occupied a small multiroom house divided into apartments for each family. The houses were usually placed within a courtyard fenced with organ cactus or adobe walls, forming a compound. The extended family household probably functioned as a unit of land use and food production. In the towns, however, some households could be considerably larger, and the household of Montezuma II included several thousand people.
A number of households, varying from a few score to several hundred, were organized into an internally complex corporate group referred to as a calpulli by the Aztec and translated as barrio ("ward") by the Spaniards. Questions about the structure and function of this level of Aztec organization have caused a great deal of debate among Meso-American specialists. It is clear, however, that it was a physical and territorial unit as well as a socially organized one. It was a unit of land tenure. Calpulli lands were owned communally but were distributed among various households. The household retained the right of usufruct, but only the calpulli as a whole could sell or rent lands.
The calpulli rural communities varied considerably in physical appearance. Some were isolated, tightly nucleated physical settlements surrounded by their agricultural land, whereas in others houses were dispersed through the land holdings. In a few cases, they were physically attached as wards to one or more other calpulli. These differences corresponded to ecological, economic, and political factors. Rural, dispersed settlements were found on terraced hillsides in which houses were tightly integrated with the terrace; in the chinampa area, each house was placed on its chinampa holding. On the other hand, nucleated, isolated calpulli were found in areas of level land, and the ward type was usually found in the towns and cities. In the latter case, many lost their agricultural character and became units of craft specialization. The calpulli was a unit of political administration within the larger unit that will be referred to here as the state. It was ruled by a council of household heads presided over by a chief selected by the council from within a particular lineage. The calpulli functioned as a unit of taxation to the central government, as a unit of corvée labour, and as a military regiment.
The structure of the calpulli is open to question. Some sources call it a kin group, "a lineage" with a common ancestor; and as a result some anthropologists have referred to it as a clan, or sib. There is no evidence, however, of either exogamy or unilineal descent; in fact, marriage records from the post-conquest period show a strong tendency toward endogamy. There is some evidence of internal ranking and significant status differentiation, another non-clanlike feature. The sources also mention smaller territorial subdivisions, referred to as barrios pequeños, or "little wards." If these are descent lines, then the calpulli resembled quite closely a type of kin group called by anthropologists a ramage, or a conical clan. This is a group with a myth of common descent, divided into ranked senior and junior lineages based on the seniority of older versus younger brother in the group genealogy. In support of this reconstruction is the statement that the calpulli god was a deified ancestor.
The calpulli also functioned as a unit of education, for each possessed a school for young men—the telpuchcalli—primarily for military and moral instruction.
Above the level of the calpulli was the state. With the exception of those historical periods when larger polities, such as the Aztec empire, emerged, such states in Meso-America, including the Basin of Mexico, were small. Just prior to the Aztec expansion there were 50 or 60 such states in the basin, with an average size of about 50 to 60 square miles. In 1519 these once independent domains had an average population of 25,000 to 30,000 people. In less densely settled areas, the territories were larger and populations smaller. The range of size was from a few thousand up to 100,000.
The average small state included a central town with a population of several thousand, the balance of the population consisting of the rural calpulli. The central town was divided into wards that corresponded in size and to a certain degree in structure to the rural calpulli but were clearly different in function; they in turn were divided into barrios pequeños. At the head of the state was an official called the tlatoani, to whom all household heads owed allegiance, respect, and tax obligations. The tlatoani's position was fixed within a particular lineage, the particular choice varying from state to state. In some areas, succession passed from father to son; in others, the succession went through a series of brothers and then passed to the eldest son of the eldest brother. In still other states, the office was elective, but the choice was limited to sons or brothers of the deceased ruler. The office was accompanied by all of the trappings and sumptuary behaviour typical of despotic states. The ruler resided in a large, multiroom masonry palace inhabited by a great number of wives, servants, and professional craftsmen. He was carried in a sedan chair in public and treated with exaggerated respect by his subordinates. The tlatoani held considerable power: he appointed all lesser bureaucrats, promoted men to higher military status, organized military campaigns, and was the distributor of booty and tribute; he collected taxes in labour, military service, and goods from his supporters; he owned private estates manned by serfs; he was the final court of appeal in judicial cases; and he was titular head of the religious cult and head of the town market.
Many of these functions were delegated to a large staff of professional administrators: priests, market supervisors, military leaders, judges, tax collectors, and accountants. The tax collectors, or calpixque, were especially important administrators because they acted as the rulers' agents in collecting goods and services from the calpulli chiefs.
Most of these positions were appointed and selected from two classes—the pipiltin (plural of pilli), and the professional warriors. Society was divided into three well-defined castes. At the top were the pipiltin, nobles by birth and members of the royal lineage. Below them was the macehual class, the commoners who made up the bulk of the population. At the base of the social structure were the mayeques, or serfs, attached to private or state-owned rural estates. Within these three castes, a number of social classes could be differentiated, according to wealth, occupation, and political office. The Aztec system made a distinction between ascribed and achieved status. By a system of promotions, usually as a reward for military deeds, commoners were appointed to such political offices as calpixque and judges. Many pipiltin held no political office and, unless they had inherited private estates, were forced to live off the largess of the ruler. Commoners who had captured four enemy warriors in combat were promoted to the rank of tecuhtli, entered one of the military orders, were assigned a private estate with serfs for their maintenance, and acted as an elite professional army. The children of both pipiltin and tecuhtli could enroll in the religious college, or calmecac, where they could be trained as priests or political administrators. The calmecac apparently was also open to certain other commoners, such as wealthy and influential merchants and craftsmen.
Aside from the commoner-warriors, the macehual class was further differentiated into class levels. Certain occupations were accorded higher prestige than others (merchants, lapidarians, goldsmiths, and featherworkers are mentioned, and the list probably included stone sculptors); and all urban occupations were assigned higher status as compared with rural farming. Since occupations were restricted to calpulli membership and since the calpulli were kin groups, it follows that crafts tended to be hereditary. In small towns the craft specializing group would have to be the barrio pequeño. In the cities it was definitely the larger unit, but in either case crafts would be found within hereditary corporate groups.
The system of social stratification emphasized ascribed status but also permitted considerable vertical mobility. The land-tenure system was an important aspect in maintaining both processes, as could be expected in a basically agrarian society. Although most of the land was held in common by the calpulli, private estates with serfs helped to maintain the prestige of the pilli class and similar estates assigned to political office; and the tecuhtli positions freed able commoners from the necessity of subsistence procurement.
The taxation system also helped to maintain the social system. All heads of households owed military service to the tlatoani. For the pipiltin and tecuhtli, this was the only tribute demanded. Urban craftsmen also paid tribute in their craft products but were exempt from corvée labour. That obligation, plus taxes in agricultural products, were the burdens of the rural peasants, and the mayeques owed their labour and agricultural produce to their overlord.
Two other elements in the Aztec social system were pawns and slaves. The former were poor men who could sell themselves or members of their household for a specified period of time. Their rights were carefully defended by Aztec law, and they were not slaves but more like indentured servants. True slaves did exist and in some parts of Meso-America were used as workers or servants. Among the Aztec, the mayeques were their counterpart. Slaves were bought in lowland markets and used primarily for human sacrifice.
The high development of craft specialization—much of it full-time—in Aztec towns has been noted above. But many rural communities also had part-time specialities, a feature due in part to the heterogeneity of the highland environment, with its highly local distribution of resources. Foreign goods were brought into the Aztec homeland by great caravans of professional merchants called pochteca, who frequently undertook journeys exceeding a year in length. As a group the merchants enjoyed very high prestige and even had their own tribunals. Various merchant wards of a great number of towns and cities in central Mexico were organized into one great trading guild that had its centre at Tenochtitlán. They also organized and administered the town markets, another highly evolved aspect of Aztec institutions. These markets were held in great open plazas—in smaller towns every fifth day, in larger towns and cities daily, although in the latter case the market population reached a peak every fifth day.
The centres and the political organization of large states such as the Aztec empire were fundamentally similar in character to small ones; but the vast differences in size (Tenochtitlán, the Aztec capital, may have had 140,000 to 200,000 inhabitants in 1519) demanded some changes. Generally, when one central Mexican state conquered another, the ruler of the conquering town extorted an annual tribute, but there was little attempt at political integration. In the case of the Aztec, this policy was generally maintained, but many conquered states were given Aztec governors. Furthermore, conquest was usually accompanied by an exchange of women from the two ruling lineages (conqueror and conquered), and successors to the throne of the conquered states were through these women, from the royal lineage of Tenochtitlán. As a result, the ruling class gradually tended toward a single kin group. Because of the great number of states conquered by the Aztec (400 to 500), some form of intermediate-level territorial and administrative organization became imperative. The states conquered by the Aztec were grouped into 38 provinces. One town in each province served as capital, and an Aztec tax collector-governor was placed there to supervise the collection, storage, and disposition of the tribute. In many provinces, the Aztec established garrisons. These consisted of warriors and their families culled from all of the towns of the Valley of Mexico, and they were assigned lands in the conquered province. Since they supported themselves, they were colonists as well as troops. The planting of colonists, combined with such factors as the merchant guild and royal family intermarriage, suggests that the Aztec elite were attempting to integrate more closely the population of the Valley of Mexico as a kind of core nationality for the empire. Other indications that the Aztec were in the process of achieving further political integration are statements in several relaciones that the tax collectors served as courts of appeals in serious judicial cases and also that the Aztec introduced the cult of their national god Huitzilopochtli to conquered provinces.
Tenochtitlán itself was a huge metropolis covering more than five square miles. It was originally located on two small islands in Lake Texcoco, but it gradually spread into the surrounding lake by a process, first of chinampa construction, then of consolidation. It was connected to the mainland by several causeway dikes that terminated in smaller lakeside urban communities. The lake around the city was also partly covered with chinampas with numerous rural settlements. Together, the complex of settlements—the city, the chinampa villages, and the settlements along the lakeshore plain—must have appeared from the air as one gigantic settlement. The population in 1519 was about 400,000 people, the largest and densest concentration in Meso-American history.
The majority of people in the city were non-food-producing specialists; i.e., craftsmen, merchants, priests, warriors, and administrators. In Tenochtitlán, as in other larger towns, the larger calpulli formed craft guilds. Guild organization was internally complex, an economic development related to the higher level of political integration and the greatly expanded trade and tax base that accrued from it. The great market in the barrio of Tlatelolco was reported by the Spaniards to have had 60,000 buyers and sellers on the main market day. The Spaniards also described the enormous canoe traffic on the lake moving goods to the market. There is even evidence that many chinampa cultivators, in response to the expanded market, were shifting from the production of staple crops to truck gardening.
The Aztec capital was originally two separate cities, Tlatelolco and Tenochtitlán, which merged into one through the conquest of Tlatelolco. The division was maintained for administrative purposes, however, and with further growth it became necessary to divide Tenochtitlán into four great wards (also referred to as calpulli). Each ward contained 12 to 15 calpulli, some 50 to 60 in all. Tlatelolco must have had 10 to 20 calpulli as well, bringing the total up to perhaps 80.
With this enormously expanded tax base, the central government became internally complex. The Spaniards described the palace of Montezuma II as containing 300 rooms grouped around three courts. Land titles dating from after the conquest give it an area of 10 acres. Aside from the private apartments of the king, the palace included libraries, storehouses, workshops for royal craftsmen, great halls for justice and other councils, and offices for an army of accountants. The sources even describe a royal zoo and aviary and a number of country retreats. The internal organization of the taxation, military, and judicial departments must have been far more complex than in small states; but precise data is lacking.
Within the city there were literally hundreds of temples and related religious structures. There were at least two large complexes, religious centres of the dual cities of Tenochtitlán and Tlatelolco. Each of the four great wards of Tenochtitlán, as well as each calpulli, had smaller temple complexes, so that the total number must have run into the hundreds. The great temple complex of Tenochtitlán consisted of three large pyramid temples (the principal temple platform, dedicated to Huitzilopochtli and Tlaloc, was 100 feet high and measured 300 feet on a side at its base). There were also six small pyramid temples, three calmecac buildings (dormitories and colleges for priests), a ball court, a great wooden rack for the skulls of sacrificed victims, a sacred pool, a sacred grove, and several large open courts. All of these structures were placed within a vast walled enclosure, 1,200 feet on a side. The temple complex at Tlatelolco was at least half as large.
Aztec religion
Perhaps the most highly elaborated aspect of Aztec culture was the religious system. The Aztec derived much of their religious ideology from the earlier cultures of Meso-America or from their contemporaries. This was particularly true during the final phase of their history, when their foreign contacts broadened. Indeed, much confusion about Aztec religious ideology stems, in part, from the fact that Aztec civilization was still in a process of assimilation and reorganization of these varied religious traditions. Moreover, as the empire expanded and Tenochtitlán evolved into a heterogeneous community, the religious needs correspondingly changed from those of a simple agrarian society. The ruling class, particularly, demanded a more intellectual and philosophical ideology.
The Aztec approach to contact with the supernatural was through a complex calendar of great ceremonies, which were held at the temples and were performed by a professional priesthood that acted as the intermediary between the gods and human beings. Many of these were public in the sense that the populace played the role of spectators. Elements in all the ceremonies were very similar and included ritual ablutions to prepare the priests for the contact; offerings and sacrifices to gain the gods' favour; and theatrical dramas of myths by masked performers in the form of dances, songs, and processionals. Each god had his special ceremony that, considering the richness of the pantheon, must have filled the calendar. These ceremonies must have played a significant recreative function, as do ceremonies held in honour of patron saints in present-day Mexico.
Aztec religion heavily emphasized sacrifice and ascetic behaviour as the necessary preconditions for approaching the supernatural. Priests were celibate and were required to live a simple, spartan life. They performed constant self-sacrifice in the form of bloodletting as penitence (by passing barbed cords through the tongue and ears). This pattern of worship reached its climax in the practice of human sacrifice; it was in this aspect of Aztec culture that religion, war, and politics became closely related. Ideologically at least, Aztec warfare was waged for the purpose of obtaining sacrificial victims. The tribute lists, of course, demonstrate that there was a more mundane purpose as well, and it would be a serious mistake to think of Aztec warfare as functioning primarily in the religious sphere.
The cult of the gods required a large professional priesthood. Spanish documents indicate that the priesthood was one of the most elaborate of Aztec institutions. Each temple and god had its attendant priestly order. At Tenochtitlán the high priests of Tlaloc and Huitzilopochtli served as heads of the entire priestly organization. Within the orders were priests in charge of ceremonies, of the education of novices, of astrology, and of the temple lands. (These consisted of specific rural communities assigned by the state to particular temples.) Furthermore, there were several grades of priests. As noted above, the priests maintained a number of schools, or calmecacs, where sons of the nobility and certain commoners were given instruction. Most of the novices ultimately left the priesthood and carried out economic and political functions; others remained, joined the priesthood on a permanent basis, and lived at the calmecac.
Much of Aztec religion probably was practiced at home at special household altars. Common archaeological artifacts are small baked-clay idols or figurines, representing specific gods apparently used in these household ceremonies, along with incense burners.William T. Sanders
Cosmogony and eschatology
The Aztec believed that four worlds had existed before the present universe. Those worlds, or "suns," had been destroyed by catastrophes. Humankind had been entirely wiped out at the end of each sun. The present world was the fifth sun, and the Aztec thought of themselves as "the People of the Sun." Their divine duty was to wage cosmic war in order to provide the sun with his tlaxcaltiliztli ("nourishment"). Without it the sun would disappear from the heavens. Thus the welfare and the very survival of the universe depended upon the offerings of blood and hearts to the sun, a notion that the Aztec extended to all the deities of their pantheon.
The first sun was called Nahui-Ocelotl, "Four-Jaguar," a date of the ritual calendar. Humankind was first destroyed by jaguars. The animal was considered by the Aztec as the nahualli ("animal disguise") of the creator god Tezcatlipoca.
At the end of the second sun, Nahui-Ehécatl, "Four-Wind," a magical hurricane transformed all people into monkeys. That disaster was caused by Quetzalcóatl (the Feathered Serpent) in the form of Ehécatl, the wind god.
A rain of fire had put an end to the third sun, Nahuiquiahuitl, "Four-Rain." Tlaloc as the god of thunder and lightning presided over that period.
The fourth sun, Nahui-Atl, "Four-Water," ended in a gigantic flood that lasted for 52 years. Only one man and one woman survived, sheltered in a huge cypress. But they were changed into dogs by Tezcatlipoca, whose orders they had disobeyed.
Present humanity was created by Quetzalcóatl. The Feathered Serpent, with the help of his twin, Xólotl, the dog-headed god, succeeded in reviving the dried bones of the old dead by sprinkling them with his own blood. The present sun was called Nahui-Ollin, "Four-Earthquake," and was doomed to disappear in a tremendous earthquake. The skeleton-like monsters of the west, the tzitzimime, would then appear and kill all people.
Two deeply rooted concepts are revealed by these myths. One was the belief that the universe was unstable, that death and destruction continually threatened it. The other emphasized the necessity of the sacrifice of the gods. Thanks to Quetzalcóatl's self-sacrifice, the ancient bones of Mictlan, "the Place of Death," gave birth to men. In the same way, the sun and moon were created: the gods, assembled in the darkness at Teotihuacán, built a huge fire; two of them, Nanahuatzin, a small deity covered with ulcers, and Tecciztécatl, a richly bejeweled god, threw themselves into the flames, from which the former emerged as the sun and the latter as the moon. Then the sun refused to move unless the other gods gave him their blood; they were compelled to sacrifice themselves to feed the sun.
According to the Aztec cosmological ideas, the earth had the general shape of a great disk divided into four sections oriented to the four cardinal directions. To each of the four world directions were attached five of the 20 day-signs, one of them being a Year-Bearer (east, acatl, "reed"; west, calli, "house"; north, tecpatl, "flint knife"; south, tochtli, "rabbit"), a colour (east, red or green; west, white; north, black; south, blue), and certain gods. The fifth cardinal point, the centre, was attributed to the fire god Huehuetéotl, because the hearth stood at the centre of the house.
Above the earth, which was surrounded by the "heavenly water" (ilhuicáatl) of the ocean, were 13 heavens, the uppermost of which, "where the air is delicate and frozen," was the abode of the Supreme Couple. Under the "divine earth," teotlalli, were the nine hells of Mictlan, with nine rivers that the souls of the dead had to cross. Thirteen was considered a favourable number, nine extremely unlucky.
All of the heavenly bodies and constellations were divinized, such as the Great Bear (Tezcatlipoca), Venus (Quetzalcóatl), the stars of the north (Centzon Mimixcoa, "the 400 Cloud-Serpents"), the stars of the south (Centzon Huitznáua, "the 400 Southerners"). The solar disk, Tonatiuh, was supposed to be borne on a litter from the east to the zenith, surrounded by the souls of dead warriors, and from the zenith to the west among a retinue of divinized women, the Cihuateteo. When the night began on the earth, day dawned in Mictlan, the abode of the dead.
The ancient tribes of central Mexico had worshiped fertility gods for many centuries when the Aztec invaded the valley. The cult of these gods remained extremely important in Aztec religion. Tlaloc, the giver of rain but also the wrathful deity of lightning, was the leader of a group of rain gods, the Tlaloques, who dwelt on mountaintops. Chalchiuhtlicue ("One Who Wears a Jade Skirt") presided over fresh waters, Huixtocíhuatl over salt waters and the sea. Numerous earth goddesses were associated with the fertility of the soil and with the fecundity of women, as Teteoinnan ("Mother of the Gods"), Coatlicue ("One Who Wears a Snake Skirt"), Cihuacóatl ("Serpent-Woman"), and Itzpapálotl ("Obsidian-Butterfly"). Their significance was twofold: as fertility deities, they gave birth to the young gods of corn, Centéotl, and of flowers, Xochipilli; as symbols of the earth that devoured the bodies and drank the blood, they appeared as warlike godheads. Tlazoltéotl, a Huastec goddess, presided over carnal love and over the confession of sins.
Xipe Totec, borrowed from the faraway Yopi people, was a god of the spring, of the renewal of vegetation, and at the same time the god of the corporation of goldsmiths. Human victims were killed and flayed to honour him.
The concept of a supreme couple played an important role in the religion of the old sedentary peoples such as the Otomí. Among the Aztec it took the form of Intonan, Intota ("Our Mother, Our Father"), the earth and the sun. But the fire god Huehuetéotl was also associated with the earth. In addition, Ometecuhtli ("Lord of the Duality") and Omecihuatl ("Lady of the Duality") were held to abide in the 13th heaven: they decided on which date a human being would be born, thus determining his destiny.
Among the fertility gods are to be counted the "400 Rabbits" (Centzon Totochtin), little gods of the crops, among which are Ometochtli, the god of octli (a fermented drink), and Tepoztécatl, the god of drunkenness.
The Aztec brought with them the cult of their sun and war god, Huitzilopochtli, "the Hummingbird of the Left," who was considered "the reincarnated Warrior of the South," the conquering sun of midday. According to a legend probably borrowed from the Toltec, he was born near Tula. His mother, the earth goddess Coatlicue, had already given birth to the 400 Southerners and to the night goddess Coyolxauhqui, whom the newborn god exterminated with his xiuhcoatl ("turquoise serpent").
Tezcatlipoca, god of the night sky, was the protector of the young warriors. Quetzalcóatl, the ancient Teotihuacán deity of vegetation and fertility, had been "astralized" and transformed into a god of the morning star. He was also revered as a wind god and as the ancient priest-king of the Toltec golden age: the discoveries of writing, the calendar, and the arts were attributed to him.
Mythology of death and afterlife
The beliefs of the Aztec concerning the other world and life after death showed the same syncretism. The old paradise of the rain god Tlaloc, depicted in the Teotihuacán frescoes, opened its gardens to those who died by drowning, lightning, or as a result of leprosy, dropsy, gout, or lung diseases. He was supposed to have caused their death and to have sent their souls to paradise.
Two categories of dead persons went up to the heavens as companions of the sun: the Quauhteca ("Eagle People"), who comprised the warriors who died on the battlefield or on the sacrificial stone, and the merchants who were killed while traveling in faraway places; and the women who died while giving birth to their first child and thus became Cihuateteo, "Divine Women."
All the other dead went down to Mictlan, under the northern deserts, the abode of Mictlantecuhtli, the skeleton-masked god of death. There they traveled for four years until they arrived at the ninth hell, where they disappeared altogether.
Offerings were made to the dead 80 days after the funeral, then one year, two, three, and four years later. Then all link between the dead and the living was severed. But the warriors who crossed the heavens in the retinue of the sun were thought to come back to earth after four years as hummingbirds. The Cihuateteo were said to appear at night at the crossroads and strike the passersby with palsy.
The world vision of the Aztec conceded only a small part to man in the scheme of things. His destiny was submitted to the all-powerful tonalpohualli (the calendrical round); his life in the other world did not result from any moral judgment. His duty was to fight and die for the gods and for the preservation of the world order. Moreover, witchcraft, omens, and portents dominated everyday life. That such a pessimistic outlook should have coexisted with the wonderful dynamism of Aztec civilization is in itself a remarkable achievement.
Aztec ritual calendar
Tonalpohualli, an Aztec term meaning "the count of days," was the name of the ritual calendar of 260 days. It ran parallel to the solar calendar of 365 days, which was divided into 18 months of 20 days and five supplementary unlucky days. The word tonalli means both "day" and "destiny": the 260-day calendar was mainly used for purposes of divination. The days were named by the combination of 20 signs—natural phenomena such as wind and earthquake, animals like rabbit and jaguar, plants such as reeds, and objects like flint knife and house—with the numbers 1 to 13. Thus the calendrical round included 20 series of 13 days.
Specialized priests called tonalpouhque interpreted the signs and numbers on such occasions as birth, marriage, departure of traders to faraway lands, and election of rulers. Each day and each 13-day series were deemed lucky, unlucky, or indifferent according to the deities presiding over them. Thus Ce-Coatl ("One-Snake") was held as favourable to the traders, Chicome-Xochitl ("Seven-Flower") to the scribes and the weavers, and Nahui-Ehécatl ("Four-Wind") to the magicians. The men who were born during the Ce-Ocelotl ("One-Jaguar") series would die on the sacrificial stone, those whose birth took place on the day Ometochtli ("Two-Rabbit") would be drunkards, and so on. The tonalpohualli dominated every aspect of public and private life.Jacques Soustelle