Pre—
Columbian
Americas

Two continents. Tens of thousands of years. Maya, Inca, Aztec, Mississippian — civilisations that built cities, mapped stars, and farmed altitudes that no Old World agriculture had imagined.

Contents

1. Cover
2. Contents
3. Two hemispheres, separately
4. The first Americans
5. The Olmec, c. 1500 BCE — 400 BCE
6. The Maya, c. 250 — 900 CE (and after)
7. Teotihuacan
8. The Aztecs / Mexica, 1325 — 1521
9. The Inca, c. 1438 — 1572
10. The Mississippian world & Cahokia
11. Mesoamerican mathematics & calendars
12. Inca engineering: roads, terraces, quipu
13. Foods that fed the world
14. Comparative timeline
15. Reckoning with what was lost
16. Read & watch

Two hemispheres, separately

The Americas were settled — at the latest — between roughly 16,000 and 13,000 years ago, by populations crossing from Beringia and rapidly diffusing south. By the time Christopher Columbus reached the Bahamas in October 1492 the two American continents contained, by best modern estimates, somewhere between 50 and 100 million people: as many as Europe. They spoke perhaps 2,000 distinct languages, organised themselves into everything from band-level hunter-gatherer societies to centralised tributary empires, and had developed agriculture, metallurgy, urbanism, mathematics, astronomy, and literature in complete independence from the Old World.

The encounter was, demographically, a catastrophe. Within 150 years perhaps 80 to 95 percent of the indigenous population was dead, mostly of imported disease. The civilisations described in this deck were already ancient, layered, and changing when European arrival reset the clock. Every page that follows is a reminder of what an honest history of "the world" must include.

The mother culture

The Olmec, in the lowland tropical forest of the Gulf coast of Mexico, are usually called the "mother culture" of Mesoamerica — though the term oversimplifies, since contemporaneous developments at sites like Tlatilco and Teopantecuanitlán were also under way. The Olmec sites of San Lorenzo (peak c. 1200 BCE) and La Venta (c. 900 BCE) display the basic Mesoamerican pattern that every later culture would inherit: monumental ceremonial architecture, ranked social organisation, ballgames, jaguar iconography, and a pantheon of recurring gods (rain, maize, the feathered serpent).

The Olmec colossal heads — seventeen of them so far excavated, ranging from 1.5 to 3.4 metres tall, carved from basalt boulders transported up to 90 km — are the signature surviving art. Each is a portrait, possibly of a ruler. The Olmec also developed an early form of writing (the Cascajal Block, c. 900 BCE, contains 62 glyphs) and almost certainly the long count calendar that the Maya later perfected. By 400 BCE the major Olmec centres had been abandoned. Their religious vocabulary lasted three thousand more years.

A civilisation in glyphs

The Maya occupied the Yucatán peninsula and the highlands of present-day Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, and southern Mexico. They are not a single empire but a long-lived civilisation comprising scores of city-states — Tikal, Calakmul, Palenque, Copán, Caracol, Bonampak — that warred, allied, traded, and intermarried for over a thousand years. At its Classic peak (c. 250–900 CE) the central Maya population may have reached 10 to 15 million.

Maya hieroglyphic writing was a fully developed logosyllabic system; its decipherment, beginning seriously with Yuri Knorozov in the 1950s and accelerated by the work of Linda Schele, David Stuart, and others from the 1980s, has reshaped the field. The Maya wrote dynastic histories, ritual calendars, astronomical tables, and trade records on stone stelae and on bark-paper books. Of those books, all but four were burned by Spanish friars; the Dresden Codex, Madrid Codex, Paris Codex, and Maya Codex of Mexico are the four survivors of perhaps thousands.

The Classic Maya collapse (c. 800–900) emptied the southern lowland cities, possibly through some combination of drought, deforestation, and warfare. But the Maya did not vanish. The Postclassic centres of Chichén Itzá and Mayapán flourished after 900. The last Maya city, Nojpetén on Lake Petén Itzá, fell to the Spanish in 1697 — two centuries after the conquest of the Aztec. There are about six million Maya speakers today.

Tenochtitlan

The Mexica, a Nahuatl-speaking people who arrived late on the central Mexican plateau, founded their capital Tenochtitlan in 1325 on a marshy island in Lake Texcoco — according to legend, on the spot where they saw an eagle perched on a cactus eating a snake. The image survives on the modern Mexican flag. Through alliance, war, and tribute, the city grew into the centre of the Triple Alliance (with Texcoco and Tlacopan), which by 1500 dominated central Mexico from the Atlantic to the Pacific coasts.

Tenochtitlan was, by 1500, one of the largest cities on earth. Estimates of its population range from 150,000 to 400,000. It was built on raised lake-bed gardens (chinampas) of extraordinary productivity, connected to the mainland by three causeways with drawbridges. It had a network of canals, an aqueduct from Chapultepec, a botanical and zoological garden, schools (telpochcalli for commoners, calmecac for elites), and the Templo Mayor, a twin pyramid dedicated to Huitzilopochtli (war and sun) and Tlaloc (rain and fertility). Bernal Díaz del Castillo, who saw it in 1519, wrote that "we said that it was like the enchantments they tell of in the legend of Amadís."

"AND SOME OF OUR SOLDIERS ASKED WHETHER THE THINGS THAT WE SAW WERE NOT A DREAM."— Bernal Díaz del Castillo, Historia verdadera de la conquista de la Nueva España, c. 1568

Tawantinsuyu

The Inca empire — Tawantinsuyu, "the four quarters together" — was, at its 1525 peak, the largest empire ever to exist in the Americas: roughly 2 million square kilometres, 12 million subjects, stretching 4,000 kilometres along the Andean spine from southern Colombia to central Chile. It was assembled in less than a century, beginning with Pachacuti's conquests from 1438. The capital was Cuzco, the "navel of the world."

Tawantinsuyu's administrative achievement is the deeper marvel. With no written language (in the Old World sense), no wheel, no draft animals other than the llama, and no money, the Incas governed through the quipu, a knotted-cord recording system that could track tribute, populations, and possibly narrative; through the runner system of chasquis, who carried messages along the 40,000-kilometre road network at perhaps 240 km/day; through the resettlement of populations (mitmaq) and the institutionalised labour service (mit'a). Storehouses (qollqa) along the road network held food and cloth against famine and war.

The Incas were also engineers of extraordinary mountain-side adaptation: the terraces of Pisac and Moray, the dry-stone masonry of Sacsayhuamán and Machu Picchu (built c. 1450 as a royal estate of Pachacuti, abandoned a century later, never found by the Spanish, "discovered" by Hiram Bingham in 1911), and the suspension bridges of Apurímac that lasted into the twentieth century. Pizarro's 168 men found a state already weakened by a smallpox epidemic that had killed the previous emperor Huayna Capac and triggered a civil war between his sons. Even so, the conquest took forty years; the last Inca, Túpac Amaru, was beheaded in 1572.

Mississippian Cahokia

For most of the twentieth century the Americas north of the Rio Grande were imagined as the home of "primitive" societies. They were nothing of the kind. The Mississippian cultural tradition (c. 800–1600 CE), centred on the floodplains of the Mississippi River, built mound complexes, intensively cultivated maize, and supported populations far denser than the European colonists who would later misrecognise the landscape.

The largest of these was Cahokia, near present-day St Louis, which at its 1100 CE peak housed perhaps 15,000 to 20,000 people — larger than London at the same date. Its central mound, Monks Mound, is the largest pre-Columbian earthwork in the Americas: 30 metres high, 290 by 240 metres at the base. The site contains some 120 known mounds and a vast plaza. It was abandoned around 1400 for reasons that included drought, environmental degradation, and possibly political collapse.

Other northern complex societies included the Pueblo civilisations of the Four Corners region (Chaco Canyon, Mesa Verde, Bandelier), the Iroquoian Confederacy of the Northeast (whose constitution may have influenced the framers of the US one), the Hopewell mound-builders of the Ohio Valley, and the dense fishing and clan societies of the Pacific Northwest (Haida, Tlingit, Salish), among many others.

Zero, the count, the calendars

Mesoamerican mathematics, like its writing, was an independent invention. The Maya — building on Olmec and Zapotec foundations — used a base-20 (vigesimal) positional number system that included a true zero. The earliest unambiguous Maya zero glyph dates to the 1st century BCE; the Old World, depending on how strictly one defines "zero," reached the same conclusion in India around the 5th to 7th century CE.

The calendar systems were equally ingenious. The 260-day Tzolkin (ritual calendar) interlocked with the 365-day Haab (solar calendar) on a 52-year cycle ("Calendar Round"). The 360-day Tun, multiplied to the K'atun (20 tuns) and B'ak'tun (400 tuns), gave the Long Count, which records dates from a base date corresponding to 11 August 3114 BCE. Maya astronomers calculated the synodic period of Venus to within 14 seconds per cycle, predicted solar eclipses, and tracked the movement of Mars. This is not minor incidental knowledge. It is centuries of professional astronomy supported by a literate priesthood.

Roads, terraces, quipu

The Inca state's administrative coherence — across 4,000 km of vertical Andean terrain, without writing, without the wheel, without money — is among the more remarkable achievements of any pre-modern state.

Foods that fed the world

The Americas domesticated a portfolio of crops that the Old World would, after 1492, find indispensable. Maize, of which there are at least 60 indigenous landrace types, was bred from teosinte over thousands of years; today it is the world's largest cereal crop by tonnage. The potato, of which Andean farmers cultivated and still cultivate over 4,000 varieties, became after 1700 the staple food of much of northern Europe. Cassava (manioc), domesticated in the Amazon basin, feeds about 800 million people in Africa and Asia today. Tomatoes, peppers, beans, peanuts, sunflowers, squash, vanilla, cacao, pineapple, avocado, and tobacco are all American.

The Italian kitchen without tomatoes; the Hungarian kitchen without paprika; the Indian curry without chili; the Belgian frites; the Irish potato; American chocolate; Swiss cocoa; West African cassava — none of these were possible before 1492. The Columbian Exchange ran in both directions, but the American export of food crops fed, by some estimates, the population growth on which the Old World industrial revolution depended.

A chronology

What was lost

The demographic catastrophe that followed European arrival has no precedent. Within a century smallpox, measles, influenza, typhus, and other Old World diseases — against which American populations had no immunological history — had killed perhaps 80 to 95 percent of the indigenous population of the Americas. The figure is large enough that some climatologists have argued the resulting reforestation of farmland measurably cooled the global climate (the "Little Ice Age" minimum of c. 1610). It is one of the few human events visible in ice cores.

The cultural and institutional losses are harder to quantify. We lost almost all the Maya books. We lost the languages of Teotihuacan and the Olmec. We lost most of the medical, agricultural, and astronomical knowledge that pre-Columbian societies had accumulated over thousands of years. We have, however, kept much: 600 Mesoamerican languages still spoken, 4,000 potato varieties still cultivated, the survival of indigenous religions in the syncretic forms of the Day of the Dead and Andean Catholic festivals, and the descendants of the Maya, Mexica, Quechua, Aymara, and Mississippian peoples who are still here, still telling their own histories, and still teaching the rest of us how to listen.

Where to go

Charles Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus · David Stuart, The Order of Days (Maya) · Matthew Restall, When Montezuma Met Cortés · Terence D'Altroy, The Incas · Timothy Pauketat, Cahokia: Ancient America's Great City on the Mississippi.

↑ A useful overview. Watch · Maya civilization documentary →.