In this video we will be discussing the region of the Americas known as Mesoamerica, which
roughly refers to Mexico and Central America.
Together, North and South America stretch for about eleven-thousand miles in length
from north to south.
That grand scope of land encompasses multiple climates and ecosystems, including mountains;
plains; deserts; rainforests; jungles – and the diversity of the geography, the diversity
of the terrain has resulted in diverse societies emerging.
From the Inuit Eskimos of northern Canada to the sophisticated city-builders of Central
America, there is no one American experience or Native American experience that we can
talk about in the period prior to the arrival of the Europeans.
Rather, we must talk about a variety of experiences, and in this video we’ll be focusing on the
experiences of the civilizations of Mesoamerica.
The first Native Americans arrived in the New World much later than Homo sapiens emerged
elsewhere.
Reliable evidence suggests to the population of the Americas through three migratory waves.
Those waves occurred between 30,000 and 10,000 BCE and arrived from Asia, crossing over a
land bridge that connected Siberia with modern-day Alaska, a land bridge called Beringia, and
during the last Ice Age – the Pleistocene Era – these migrants would make their way
southward, moving between glaciers along the Pacific coastal plain to eventually populate
the entirety of the Americas.
By the late 15th century, three types of American societies had emerged.
There were nomadic groups, sedentary or semi-sedentary groups, and groups living in large population
settlements supported by agricultural surpluses.
This third group really only existed in Mesoamerica, supported by the vitality and fertility of
the soil in what is modern-day Mexico and Central America.
The agricultural revolution emerged in the central part of Mexico around 5500 BCE and
spread relatively quickly throughout Mexico, Central America, and down into the coastal
highlands of South America in the region of Peru.
The agricultural revolution in Mesoamerica supported a variety of crops, including maize;
potatoes; pumpkins; beans; squash – and it was incredibly productive.
Many archeologists suggest that the average farmer in Mesoamerica was able to grow enough
in eight to ten weeks to support his family for an entire year.
Now obviously they didn’t just grow for eight to ten weeks, and so the result were
tremendous surpluses, stockpiling and trading goods to create vibrant and thriving civilizations,
like the Olmec, the Maya, the Aztecs, the Toltec, or the Inca.
So let’s look at a few of the characteristics of some of these civilizations so that you
can understand what united, or what these Mesoamerican civilizations had in common,
and how they differed.
So I’ll start with the Olmec.
The Olmec established the first major civilization in Mexico.
They lived in the tropical lowlands of south central Mexico and dominated the region from
1500 to about 300 BCE.
We have a number of holes in the historical record, so there’s a lot we don’t know
about the Olmecs, but what we do know is that they set a foundation for many of the later
civilizations of the region.
For example, the archeological record suggests that the Olmec had an organized religion with
a priesthood; human sacrifices; and pyramids – all of which would be borrowed by the
Maya and later civilizations.
The Olmec built significant cities, such as San Lorenzo and La Venta, and traded goods
like obsidian; jade; and rubber.
They didn’t necessarily consider themselves a united group.
There is evidence of infighting within the Olmec civilization.
But the things that they shared – like social organization; religion; trade; urban life
– would become a foundation for later Mesoamerican civilizations, like the Maya.
Around 300 BCE, a weakened Olmec civilization fell to the rise of the Maya.
As the Olmec civilization collapsed, the Mayan civilization began to emerge, and the Mayan
civilization would build one of the world’s most advanced civilizations.
For a long time historians only knew – historians and archaeologists only knew about the Mayan
world by virtue of elaborate stonework in pictures that were left by the Maya as they
recorded their daily activities.
They did have a written language – that is the Mayan script – which was deciphered
piecemeal by archeologists; linguistic experts; and historians.
Deciphering that written language took most of the 20th century and in spite of very recent
advancements still only about ninety percent of the Mayan script has been deciphered.
So there is still much to learn about the Mayan world, but what we do know is that they
had a written language; an accurate calendar; a complex understanding of mathematics, far
more advanced than much later Europeans.
We know that by about 300 CE the Yucatan Peninsula in Mexico was governed by a hierarchy of Mayan
city states ruled by hereditary kings, and that as many as fourteen-million people lived
in this group of cities, villages, and the surrounding countryside – making it one
of the largest civilizations in the world of its day.
We know that they were organized around elaborate cities and that urban life was at the core
of the Mayan existence.
The Maya built public buildings of amazing dimensions.
They had temples; palaces; ball courts; assembly grounds; places where people gathered for
religious purposes, for economic purposes, for social purposes.
We know that religious belief ordered society.
The Mayan religion was polytheistic, meaning that they believed in many gods, and it wasn’t
what we would consider to be ethical – instead they believed that the gods could intervene
in peoples’ lives.
Gods played multiple roles in human affairs and those roles weren’t always beneficial,
so these gods needed to be appeased – and one of the ways of keeping the gods happy
was with a steady diet of human blood – and so this resulted in the practice, the ritualistic
practice of human sacrifice.
Human sacrifices were common, but he Maya emphasized quality over quantity, meaning
that it was more important to sacrifice a powerful individual than to sacrifice a hundred
nobodies.
Their advanced knowledge of science and mathematics allowed them to date events for more than
two-thousand years, creating one of the most accurate calendars of the pre-modern world.
And then we know that somewhere around the year 900 they began to decline.
There have been a variety of suggestions as to why this happened.
Was it drought, overextension of the empire, decades of nearly constant warfare?
We don’t know.
But what we do know is that beginning around 900 CE this once great civilization began
to break up, and by the time the Europeans arrived, by the time the Spanish arrived – in
the 15th and 16th centuries – there would be little more than a few villages remaining
of this once-great civilization.
Another civilization of Mesoamerica were the Aztecs, and the Aztecs developed out of a
group known as the Mexica, or more specifically they grew out of a triple alliance between
the Mexica, the Texcoco, and the Tlacopan.
The Mexica were the dominant tribe and would become an important force in the expansion
of the Aztec Empire, from a group of nomadic people to a huge state that organized millions
of Mesoamericans.
In this Aztec Empire they governed from the city of Tenochtitlan, one of the largest in
the world, and they built on earlier civilizations like the Olmec and the Maya but they also
developed their own unique characteristics, particularly pertaining to militarism.
In many ways the Aztec world was organized around conquests, so that their ruling group
was a militaristic group of aristocrats.
They, too, practiced a polytheistic religion that engaged in ritualistic human sacrifice,
believing that their gods needed to be appeased with a steady diet of human blood and in this
case it was often quantity over quality in order to keep nature functioning the way that
it was supposed to, to avoid catastrophe.
The Aztec would be conquered by the Spanish when they arrived in the central part of Mexico
in the 16th century.
The last great civilization that we want to talk about today were the Inca, and the Inca
were in coastal South America in the region of Peru.
Incan civilization developed out of the fertile valleys of the Incan – of the Peru highlands.
Archeologists don’t really know how the Inca people, how the people of the Andes Mountains
developed agriculture but they know that it arrived somewhere around 200 BCE, so significantly
later than in the northern part of Mesoamerica, in the central part of Mexico.
But this agriculture, this mountain agriculture would become essential to the vitality and
power of the Incan civilization.
The Inca believed that their ruler descended from the sun god, and that meant nearly absolute
authority for the Incan emperors.
The emperors would use this power to expand their empire until it included more than sixteen-million
people and extended from modern-day Ecuador and Columbia down to the southern part of
modern-day Peru.
Incan society was organized around the ayllu, or clan¸ which were more or less self-sustaining
regions normally inhabited by extended family members.
They were organized and kind of worked on the basis of obligations.
All members of the ayllu had obligations to each other.
Marriage was mandatory and the Inca practiced polygamy.
Women were often charged with procreating, with having children.
Men performed public duties called the Mita system, and paid tribute – in the form of
taxes – to the Incan emperor.
As the Incan empire grew, this system was imposed on conquered people, and land was
often used as a bribe or as a mechanism of control.
This rapid expansion and conflict over land produced political and social stress so that
by the time the Spanish arrived in 1532 the Incan empire had been weakened by nearly a
decade of civil war, and would eventually fall to Spanish conquest.
So we see, with our concluding thoughts here, we see that Mesoamerica gave rise to vibrant
civilizations who shared some common characteristics, but also had some differences – and those
differences would set them apart from other parts of North and South America, from those
nomadic; sedentary; and semi-sedentary groups that we referenced earlier in the video.
So it’s important to understand that there was no such thing as a singular Native American
experience prior to the arrival of the Europeans, but rather these Native American experiences
must be understood as the complicated and diverse systems that they actually entailed.
Thank you.