Before Columbus - 2

      II

    The number of people living north of Mexico in 1492 is now generally estimated to have been somewhere berween what one scholar describes as "a conservative total" of more than 7,000,000 and another's calculation of about 18,000,000.47 These figures are ten to rwenty times higher than the estimates of scholars half a century ago, but even the largest of them is dwarfed by the population of central Mexico alone on the eve of European contact. As noted earlier, probably about 25,000,000 people, or about seven times the number living in all of England, were residing in and around the great Valley of Mexico at the time of Columbus's arrival in the New World.

    But the Aztec empire, with its astonishing white city of Tenochtitlan, was at the end of the fifteenth century only the most recent in a long line of magnificent and highly complex cultures that had evolved in Mesaamerica-where more than 200 separate languages once were spokenover the course of nearly three thousand years.

    Some time around 2500 B.C. villages were being established in the Valley of Oaxaca, each of them containing probably no more than a dozen or so houses surrounding a plaza that served as the community's ceremonial center. After about 1000 years of increasing sophistication in the techniques of growing and storing foodstuffs, by 1500 B.C., around the time of Amenhotep I in Egypt and a thousand years before the birth of Pericles in Athens, these people had begun to merge into the Olmec Empire that was then forming in the lowlands off the southernmost point of the Gulf coast in Mexico. Very little detail is known about Olmec culture or social structure, nor about everyday life in the other complex societies that had begun to emerge in northwest Central America at an even earlier time. But there is no doubt that in both regions, between 1500 B.C. and 2000 B.C., there existed civilizations that provided rich cultural lives for their inhabitants and that produced exquisite works of art.48

    The core of the Olmec population was situated in a river-laced crescent of land that stretched out across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec on Mexico's southern Gulf coast. At first glance this appears to be an inhospitable area for the founding of a major population center and civilization, but periodic flooding of the region's rivers created a marshy environment and the richest agricultural lands in Mexico-land that often has been compared to the Nile delta in Egypt. From about 1200 B.C. to 900 B.C. the center of Olmec culture was located in what is now known as San Lorenzo, after which it was moved to La Venta. Here, in the symbolic shadow of their Great Pyramid-about 3,500,000 cubic feet in volume, a construction project that is estimated to have taken the equivalent of more than 2000 workeryears to complete-the Olmecs farmed extensively, worshiped their gods, enjoyed athletic contests involving ball games and other sports, and produced art works ranging from tiny, meticulously carved, jade figurines to enormous basalt sculpted heads more than ten feet tall.

    Neither the jade nor the basalt used for these carvings was indigenous to the areas immediately surrounding either of the Olmec capitals. The jade apparently was brought in, along with other items, through a complicated trade network that spread out across the region at least as far as Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica. The basalt, on the other hand, was available from quarries in the Tuxtla Mountains, a little more than fifty miles away. From here in the mountains, writes archaeologist Michael Coe, in all probability the stones designated to become the huge carvings "were dragged down to navigable streams and loaded on great balsa rafts, then floated first down to the coast of the Gulf of Mexico, then up the Coatzacoalcos River, from whence they would have to be dragged, probably with rollers, up the San Lorenzo plateau." Coe observes that "the amount of labor which must have been involved staggers the imagination," as indeed it does, considering that the finished sculptures formed from these enormous boulders themselves often weighed in excess of twenty tons.49

    Before the dawn of the West's Christian era another great city was forming well north of the Olmec region and to the east of the Lake of the Moon-Teotihuacan. Built atop an enormous underground lava tube that the people of the area had expanded into a giant cave with stairways and large multi-chambered rooms of worship, this metropolis reached its pinnacle by the end of the second century A.D., about the time that, half a world away in each direction, the Roman Empire and the Han dynasty in China were teetering on the brink of ultimate collapse. Teotihuacan was divided into quarters, bisected from north to south and east to west by two wide, four-mile long boulevards. Constructed around a nine-squaremile urban core of almost wall-to-wall buildings made from white stucco that was brightly painted with religious and mythological motifs, the overall alignment of the city-with everything consistently oriented to 15 degrees 25 minutes east of true north-evidently had religio-astronomical meaning that has yet to be deciphered.50 At its peak, the city and its surroundings probably contained a population of about a quarter of a million people, making it at the time one of the largest cities in the world. The density of population in the city itself far exceeded that of all but the very largest American metropolises today.

    Teotihuacan too had its great pyramids-the huge, twenty-story-high Pyramid of the Sun and slightly smaller Pyramid of the Moon. In addition, the city contained numerous magnificent palace compounds. Typical of these was the Palace of Xolalpan, with 45 large rooms and seven forecourts arranged around a sunken central courtyard that was open to the sky. Smaller sunken courts existed in many of the surrounding rooms as well, with light and air admitted through openings in the high columnsupported ceilings, a design reminiscent of Roman atria.51 Those not fortunate enough to live in one of Teotihuacan's palaces apparently lived in large apartment complexes, such as one that has been unearthed in the ruins on the eastern side of the city, containing at least 175 rooms, five courtyards, and more than twenty atria-like forecourts. So splendid and influential was the architecture and artwork of this immense urban center that a smaller, contemporary reproduction of it, a town that Michael Coe says is "in all respects a miniature copy of Teotihuacan," has been found in the highlands of Guatemala-650 miles away.52

    Many other cultures were flourishing in Mesoamerica while Teotihuacan was in its ascendancy, some in areas of lush farming potential, others in regions where complex irrigation techniques were devised to coax life from agriculturally marginal land. The Zapotec civilization in a previously almost uninhabited part of the Valley of Oaxaca is a prime example of this latter situation. And in the heart of Zapotec country another major city emerged-Monte Alban-an urban center that may have been unique in all the world as a politically neutral capital (a so-called disembedded capital) for a confederation of semi-independent and historically adversarial political states.53 Politically neutral or not, however, Monte Alban clearly was an important ceremonial community, spread out over fifteen square miles of land, and containing public plazas, temple platforms, and public buildings, including the Palace of Los Danzantes, constructed around three towering central pyramids.

    The city's many residents, for the most part, lived in homes built on more than 2000 terraces that they had carved into the hillsides from which Monte Alban later took its European name. Monte Alban's population usually is estimated to have been somewhat in excess of 30,000 (about what New York City's population was at the beginning of the nineteenth century), but a recent analysis of the agricultural potential of adjacent farmland has raised some questions about that number that have yet to be addressed: it shows the 30,000 figure to be less than 10 percent of the population that could have been supported by available foodstuffs.54

    All of this, and much more, pre-dates by centuries the rise of classic Maya civilization during the time of what traditionally has been known in Europe as the Dark Ages. Indeed, with every passing year new discoveries are made suggesting that we have hardly even begun to recognize or understand the rich cultural intricacies of pre-Columbian Mesoamerican life. A recent example was the discovery in 1987 of a huge, four-ton basalt monument in a riverbed near the tiny Mexican village of La Mojarra. What made this find so confounding was that the monument is covered with a finely carved inscription of more than 500 hieroglyphic characters, surrounding an elaborate etching of a king-hieroglyphics of a type no modern scholar had ever seen, and dating back almost two centuries before the earliest previously known script in the Americas, that of the Maya. It has long been recognized that several less complex writing traditions existed in Mesoamerica as early as 700 B.C. (and simpler Olmec symbolic motifs date back to 1000 B.C. and earlier), but the monument found in La Mojarra is a complete writing system as sophisticated as that of the Maya, yet so different that epigraphers, who study and analyze hieroglyphics, don't know where to begin in trying to decipher it.

    Whoever created the monument-and whatever other examples may exist of this unknown, but highly literate culture that otherwise has disappeared without a trace-was able to employ a complicated array of very stylized syllabic letters and other geometric symbols that acted as punctuation throughout the text. But as well as the task of attempting to decipher the writing, the concerns of archaeologists have quickly focused on the site itself. After all, La Mojarra today is but a small, remote village and has always been considered a fairly insignificant archaeological site. "Yet," says archaeologist Richard Diehl, "here we have this wonderful monument and incredible text. What happened at La Mojarra?" And how many other La Mojarras were there ? For, as the initial published report on the La Mojarra discovery observes, at the very least "it has added another interesting piece to what has become a very complex mosaic. . . . [in that ] scholars now suspect there must have been many sophisticated local writing traditions before the Maya."55

    Until-if ever-questions like these are answered, however, popular interest in early Mesoamerican society will continue to focus on the Maya. And for good reason. The Maya, after all, created what has to be one of the most extraordinary civilizations the world has ever known, a civilization that governed fifty or more independent states and that lasted in excess of 1000 years.

    The Maya empire stretched out over a vast land area of more than 100,000 square miles, beginning in the Yucatan region of southern Mexico, across and down through present-day Belize and Guatemala toward the borders of Honduras and El Salvador. No one knows how large the Maya population was at its zenith, but scholarly estimates have ranged as high as eight to ten to thirteen million for just the Yucatan portion of the empire, an area covering only one-third of Maya territory.56 Scores of major cities, all of them filled with monumental works of art and architecture, blanketed the lands of the Maya. Cities such as Kaminaljuyu, the key center for the growth of early Maya culture; Yaxchilan, a vibrant arts community; Palenque, with its extraordinary palatial architecture; Copan, with its Acropolis and its elegant and serene statuary, totally absent of any martial imagery; Uxmal, with its majestic Quadrangle and mysterious Pyramid of the Magician; and the great Toltec-Maya cities like Tula and the grandly opulent Chichen Itza-to name just some of the more magnificent of such urban complexes.

    Maya cities were geographically larger and less densely populated than were other Mesoamerican urban centers, particularly those of central Mexico. Thus, for instance, the wondrous city of Tikal, in the middle of the luxuriant Peten rain forest, seems to have contained more than three times the land area of Teotihuacan (more than six times by one recent estimate), and also had a huge population, but a population less concentrated than Teotihuacan's because most of its buildings and residential compounds were separated by carefully laid out gardens and wooded groves. Current research also is demonstrating that Tikal's population-now estimated at between 90,000 and 100,000 people-was sustained by an elaborate system of immense catchment reservoirs that may have been constructed in other lowland urban areas as well. Combined with advanced agricultural techniques that allowed Tikal's farmers to coax enormous crop yields out of raised wetland gardens, the reservoir systems probably enabled population densities in rural Maya communities to exceed 500 people per square mile-that is, as high as the most intensively farmed parts of rural China (and the metropolitan areas of modern-day Albany, Atlanta, Dallas, and San Diego )-while urban core areas attained densities as high as 5000 persons per square mile, more than half the density of the high-rise city of Detroit today.57

    It was with the support of this sort of extraordinary agricultural foundation that Maya populations fanned out well beyond the outer boundaries of their cities, filling thousands of square miles with non-urban peoples, in some cases virtually from the portals of one major city to the gates of the next. To use Tikal as an example once again, a detailed recent archaeological-demographic analysis has shown that at least 425,000 people-four to five times the population of the city itself, and a much higher number than ever before supposed-were under the city's direct control throughout the surrounding countryside.58

    Many thick volumes have been written on the wonders of Maya culture and civilization-its economic organization and trade networks, its fabulous artworks, its religion and literature, its complex calendrical and astrological systems, and more. This is not the place to try to review any of this work, but it is important at least to point out how little we still know of these people. Their involved writing system, combining elements of both phonetic and ideographic script, for example, appears to have been fully expressive of the most intricate and abstract thinking and has been compared favorably to Japanese, Sumerian, and Egyptian-but it continues to defy complete translation.

    Similarly, for many years the absence of a gridwork layout to streets, plazas, and buildings in Maya cities puzzled scholars. Right angles weren't where they logically should have been, buildings skewed off oddly and failed to line up in the expected cardinal directions; everything seemed to twist away from an otherwise generally northward presentation. Apparently, said some archaeologists, Maya builders were incompetent and couldn't construct simple right angles. Given the exquisite and precise alignments of every other aspect of Maya architecture, however, others thought this to be at best a hasty criticism. And now it is beginning to become evident that these seeming eccentricities of engineering had nothing to do with incompetence.

    On the contrary, a complicated and original architectural pattern had always been present-the same pattern, some began to notice, in city after city after city-but its conceptual framework was so foreign to conventional Western perception and thought that it remained effectively invisible. Recently, the "code," as it were, of Maya engineering and construction has begun to be deciphered, and the story it reveals is mind-boggling. So precise were the Maya calendrical measurements and astronomical observations-and so central were these cosmic environmental calculations to their ritual and everyday lives-that the Maya constructed their cities in such a way that everything lined up exactly with specific celestial movements and patterns, particularly as they concerned the appearance and disappearance of the planet Venus in the evening sky.59 We will never understand deeply the world of the ancient Maya. Too much has already been lost. But, in addition to what is known about their exceptional achievements in creating a vast and complex empire of trade, commerce, politics, urban planning, architecture, art, and literature, what anthropologist and astronomer Anthony Aveni has said about the life of the mind among the Maya surely is correct:

      Their cosmology lacks the kind of fatalism present in our existential way of knowing the universe, one in which the purposeful role of human beings seems diminished. These people did not react to the flow of natural events by struggling to harness and control them. Nor did they conceive of themselves as totally passive observers in the essentially neutral world of nature. Instead, they believed they were active participants and intermediaries in a great cosmic drama. The people had a stake in all temporal enactments. By participating in the rituals, they helped the gods of nature to carry their burdens along their arduous course, for they believed firmly that the rituals served formally to close time's cycles. Without their life's work the universe could not function properly. Here was an enviable balance, a harmony in the partnership between humanity and nature, each with a purposeful role to play.60

    If we were fully to follow the course of Mesoamerican culture and civilization after the Maya, we next would have to discuss the great Toltec state, and then the Mixtecs (some of whose history is recorded in those of their bark-paper and deerskin-covered books and codices that survived the fires of the Spanish conquest), and finally the Aztecs-builders of the great cities like Tenochtitlan, with which the previous chapter began. Of course, the empire of the Aztecs was much more extensive than that described earlier, centered on the Lake of the Moon. At its peak the empire reached well over 700 miles to the south of Tenochtitlan, across the Valley of Oaxaca, past the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, and into the piedmont and rich coastal plain of the province of Xoconocho on the border of modern-day Guatemala. Some provinces were completely subservient to the empire's might, while others, such as large and powerful Tlaxcallan to the east retained its nation-within-an-empire independence. Still others warded off Aztec control entirely, such as the immense Tarascan Kingdom to the north, about which little yet is known, but which once stretched out over 1000 miles across all of Mexico from the Gulf on one side to the Pacific Ocean on the other.

    And then in Central America-beyond the reach of Maya or later Aztec influence-there were the culturally and linguistically independent Lenca peoples, the Jicaque, the Paya, the Sumu, and the Chorotega of presentday Honduras. In pre-Columbian times Honduras may easily have had a population in excess of 1,400,000 people-almost a third of what it contains even today.61 Further to the south, Nicaragua's indigenous population probably reached at least 1,600,000 before the arrival of the Spanish-a little less than half of what the country's population is at present.62 In all, current estimates of the size of pre-Columbian Central America's population (Guatemala, Honduras, Belize, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama) range from a low of about 5,650,000 to a high of more than 13,500,000.63 The latter figure represents nearly half the 1990 population (around 29,000,000) of these turbulent and rapidly growing nations. And still we have not yet begun to discuss the entire continent of South America, by itself almost twice the size of China, larger than all of Europe and Australia combined.

    A glance at the South American civilizations might begin with the duster of independent chiefdoms that once dominated the northern Andes, where Ecuador and Colombia are today. These are commonly overlooked cultures in modern history texts, but they were not ignored by the first Europeans in the New World, who were drawn to them because of the fantastic wealth in gold and gems that they promised.

    One story that the conquistadors had heard-and one that turned out to be true-concerned the Muisca people who lived in the vicinity of Lake Guatavita, a lake formed in the distant past by the impact of a falling meteor, high in the mountains of Colombia. Whenever a new leader of the Muisca acceded to power the coronation ritual involved his being anointed with a sticky gum or day to which gold dust would adhere when sprayed on his body, apparently through tubes of cane stalk. Once thus transformed into a living statue of gold, the new leader stepped onto a raft that was laden down with gold and emerald jewelry. Specially garbed priests aboard the raft then directed it to the center of the lake. At the same time, the entire Muisca population surrounded the lake, playing musical instruments and holding many more gold and emerald implements in their hands. At an appointed moment, possibly as dawn broke and the lake's waters and the new leader's gilded body gleamed in the morning sun, he dove into the center of the lake, washing away the gold dust as his people threw their precious offerings into the sacred water-filled meteor crater.

    A small fragment of the Muisca gold that survived the earliest Spanish depredations, along with some gold from other peoples of the region, is now housed in the Museo del Oro of the Banco de Ia Republica in Bogota. It consists of about 10,000 golden artifacts, everything from small animal carvings and masks to spoons and nose rings. As one writer describes the experience of viewing this treasure house, unwittingly donated by a people about whom most of us have never heard:

      You walk down a corridor lined on both sides with display cases, each case packed with these opulent creations. You turn right, walk down another corridor past more of the same. Then more. And more. Finally, instead of going out, you are led into a dark room. After you have been there awhile the lights begin rising so gradually that you expect to hear violins, and you find yourself absolutely surrounded by gold. If all of Tut's gold were added to this accumulation, together with everything Schliemann plucked from Mycenae and Hissarlik, you could scarcely tell the difference.64

    Turning from the northernmost parts of the Andes to the immediate south we encounter the region where, at the time of Columbus, the single most extensive empire on earth was located-the land of the Inca, stretching down the mountainous western spine of South America over a distance equivalent to that now separating New York and Los Angeles. This is a land with an ancient history. More than four thousand years before the flowering of the Incas, other cultures had existed in this region, some of which were built entirely on intricate systems of trade. The earliest of these seem to have been in the Andean highlands, communities-such as La Galgada, Huaricoto, Huacaloma, and others--characterized by large populations and extraordinary multi-storied works of monumental architecture. Many of these sites, just being uncovered and analyzed today, are causing excitement in archaeological circles because, as one scholar points out: "Mesoamerica, long thought to be the precocious child of the Americas, was still confined to the Mesoamerican village during the time we are talking about, and monumental architecture in Peru was a thousand years old when the Olmecs began their enterprise."65 For the sake of world cultural context, this also means that Peruvian monumental architecture was in place by the time the Painted Pottery culture of neolithic northern China emerged, that it existed hefore England's Stonehenge was created, and that it was already about a thousand years old when Tutankhamen's body was being embalmed in Egypt.

    These were societies, as noted, that developed in the Andean highlands. Others, also of ancient origin, emerged in coastal areas. One example, still being excavated by archaeologists today, is a complex of enormous stone structures known as El Paraiso that is. located on the central Peruvian coast. Here, around 3 800 years ago, there stood a large urban center that drew sustenance from fishing and the cultivation of some edible plants, such as beans and peppers, but whose dominant agricultural product was cotton. The inhabitants of El Paraiso used their cotton plantations to produce raw materials for the manufacture of fishing nets and clothing, which they traded with other coastal and highland communities to complement their limited variety of foodstuffs. Of especial interest to political historians is the fact that this large and complex society-whose residential and ceremonial buildings had required the quarrying of at least 100,000 tons of rock from the surrounding hillsides-apparently existed for centuries without a centralized political power structure; all the archaeological evidence uncovered thus far indicates that the people of El Paraiso built their huge stone structures and carried out their highly organized monocrop agriculture and trade while living under remarkably egalitarian political conditions.66

    In contrast, during its relatively brief reign 3000 years later, the Inca empire was directed by a highly structured elite whose powers encompassed and governed, either directly or indirectly, nearly a hundred entirely different linguistic, ethnic, and political communities.67 These included the people who built the splendid, cloud-enveloped, and almost otherworldly Andean city of Machu Picchu high in the remote forested mountains--so high and so remote that once Machu Picchu was deserted it was not found again (at least by non-Indians) until the twentieth century. And then there were and are the Nazca people, whose culture was flourishing 2000 years ago. These are the people who created on the barren desert floor south of present-day Lima enormous etchings of various living things-hummingbirds, condors, dogs, plants, spiders, sharks, whales, and monkeys-as well as spiritual figures, domestic designs (such as a huge ball of yarn and a needle), and precisely aligned geometric patterns, including trapezoids, triangles, zigzags, and spirals. Because of their great size (a single line of a geometric figure may run straight as a ruler for more than half a mile) the full patterns of these perfectly drafted images can only be seen from the air or from very high ground. As a result, outlandish modern theories of origin have circulated widely, betraying once again our unthinking disparagement of the native peoples of this region who, it intuitively is thought, could not possibly have created anything so monumental and precise. Interestingly (and conveniently overlooked by those who believe these great projects to be the work of outsiders), many of the same designs from the desert floor are found decorating ancient Nazca ceramics as well, and additional oversize animal representations and other designs, less famous and smaller in scale, have also been found in North American deserts, 3000 miles away.68

    Compared with Mesoamerican cities, those of the Incas were almost austere. Even the fabulous city of Cuzco at first seemed most brilliant in its superb surface simplicity, its streets laid out on a cruciform plan, its houses mostly single-story affairs with steeply pitched roofs to fend off the heavy rains of the Andes. Apart from its gold, the first Europeans were most impressed with Cuzco's exceptional cleanliness, perhaps exemplified by the dear-water rivers and streams from the mountains that flowed through the center of the Inca capital. Before entering the city these waters' upstream pools and rivulets provided bathing and recreation for Cuzco's inhabitants; for years after the Spanish conquest, wrote one conquistador, it was common to find there "small gold ornaments or pins which [Inca women] forgot or dropped while bathing."69 As the waters ran through Cuzco, however, they were captured and diverted into perfectly engineered stone gutters that followed the routes of the city's many streets, helping to wash away debris and keep the roadways clean.

    At the center of Cuzco was an enormous plaza, large enough to accommodate 100,000 people wrote the Spanish friar Martin de Murua, and here any sense of the city's austerity ended. When the pleasure-loving people of this metropolis held their frequent dances and festivals in the square, it was roped off with a fine cable of gold, immensely long and fringed at both ends with bright red wool. Around the ceremonial square stood Cuzco's palaces, each built by an Inca ruler during his reign. Here lay the dead leaders' mummified remains, along with all their furniture and treasures. There were no locks or keys and nothing in the palaces was hidden: as John Hemming puts it,"the Incas were too confident of the security of their empire and the honesty of its citizens to hide their dead rulers' possessions."70

    All the Inca palaces were different-made of various types of marble, rare woods, and precious metal-but each had at least one common characteristic: enormous halls and ballrooms capable of holding up to 4000 people for banquets and dances when the weather prevented such festivities from being held outdoors. One such hall, which "served on rainy days as a plaza for [Inca] festivals and dances ... was so large," wrote Garcilaso de Ia Vega, "that sixty horsemen could very easily play caiias inside it." More exquisite even than the palaces, however, was the famed temple of the sun, Coricancha. A magnificent masonry structure with precisely curved and angled walls, Coricancha's majesty was crowned with an eightinch-wide band of solid gold that encircled the entire building below the roof line. Along with all the other treasure that it held, at the temple's center was a ceremonial font and a massive altar of gold, surrounded by gold and silver images of the moon, of stars, of thunder-and the great Punchao, a massive golden sun, expertly crafted and encrusted with precious jewels. Of all this, though, it was the garden within its walls that most amazed the chroniclers who wrote about Coricancha: a simple garden of maize-but an artificial garden-with the stem and leaves of each perfect plant delicately fashioned in silver, while each crowning ear of corn was carved in gold.71

    Cuzco's population in pre-Columbian times probably was somewhere between 150,000 and 200,000; beyond the city itself, many more people, living and working on vast maize plantations, filled the surrounding valleys. Although some Mesoamerican cities, such as Tenochtidan, were larger, few cities in Europe at the time even approached the size of Cuzco. Nor would any of them have been able to compete with Cuzco in terms of the treasures it contained or the care with which it was laid out. For we now know that Cuzco was built following a detailed clay-model master plan, and that-as can be seen from the air-the outline of its perimeter was designed to form the shape of a puma with the famed temple-fortress of Sacsahuaman at its head.72

    But if Cuzco was unique within Peru for the lavishness of its appointments, it was far from alone in the large number of its inhabitants. Other cities in other Andean locales were also huge; some are famous today, others are not. Among this latter group was the provincial city of Jauja. Here is a short description of it by Miguel de Estete, one of the earliest Spaniards to set eyes on it:

      The town of jauja is very large and lies in a beautiful valley. A great river passes near it, and its climate is most temperate. The land is fertile. jauja is built in the Spanish manner with regular streets, and has several subject villages within sight of it. The population of the town and the surrounding countryside was so great that, by the Spaniards' reckoning, a hundred thousand people collected in the main square every day. The markets and streets were so full that every single person seemed to be there.73

    A hundred thousand people gathered in the marketplace of a single provincial city each day? Many historians intuitively have supposed this to be an exaggeration, but after conducting the most detailed and exhaustive of Peru's population histories to date, Noble David Cook has concluded that the number "does not appear extravagant."74

    To feed a population as enormous as this, and a population spread out over such a vast area, the Incas cut miles upon miles of intricate and precisely aligned canals and irrigated agricultural terraces from the steep Andean hillsides in their mountain home; and to move those foodstuffs and other supplies from one area to another they constructed more than 25,000 miles of wide highways and connecting roads. Both engineering feats astonished the Spaniards when they first beheld them. And for good reason: modern archaeologists and hydrologists are just as amazed, having discovered that most of these grand public works projects were planned, engineered, and constructed to within a degree or two of slope and angle that computer analyses of the terrain now regard as perfect. At the time of European contact, the thickly populated Andean valleys were criss-crossed with irrigation canals in such abundance, wrote one conquistador, that it was difficult, even upon seeing, to believe. They were found "both in upland and low-lying regions and on the sides of the hills and the foothills descending to the valleys, and these were connected to others, running in different directions. All this makes it a pleasure to cross these valleys," he added, "because it is as though one were walking amidst gardens and cool groves. . . . There is always verdure along these ditches, and grass grows beside many of them, where the horses graze, and among the trees and bushes there is a multitude of birds, doves, wild turkey, pheasants, partridge, and also deer. Vermin, snakes, reptiles, wolves-there are none."75

    Describing the Incas' "grand and beautiful highway" that ran along the coast and across the plains was something in which all the early chroniclers delighted. From fifteen to twenty-four feet in width, and "bordered by a mighty wall more than a fathom high," this "carefully tended" roadway "ran beneath trees, and in many spots the fruit laden boughs hung over the road," recalled Pedro de Cieza de Leon, "and all the trees were alive with many kinds of birds and parrots and other winged creatures."76 The great highway and other roads dipped through steep coastal valleys, hugged the edges of precipitous cliffs, tunneled through rock, and climbed in stepladder fashion up sheer stone walls.

    Encountering rivers and lakes in the paths of their roadways, the peopie of the Andes built large ferries or had engineers design floating pontoon bridges: stretching thick, intertwined cables across the water over distances the length of a modern football field, secured on each side to underground foundations, workmen layered huge bundles of reeds with still more taut cables on top of the original bridge platforms, thus creating secure floating highways usually about fifteen feet in width and riding three feet or so above the water's surface. Even after the Spanish conquest these bridges remained in use, carrying men, horses, and supplies-as did the hundreds of suspension bridges that the Incas had strung across gorges and high mountain passes throughout the Andes. "Such magnificent roads could be seen nowhere in Christendom in country [as] rough as this," wrote Hernando Pizarro, a judgment echoed by modern scholars and engineers who have had an opportunity to study them.77

    Inca roads and bridges were not built for horse traffic, however, but for men and women on foot, sometimes accompanied by trains of llamas. Thus, the ambivalent reactions of many conquistadors-ranging from admiration for Inca ingenuity to terror in the face of their environmentwhen they had to travel these roads in their quests for riches and power. After crossing a river, wrote one such Spaniard,

      we had to climb another stupendous mountainside. Looking up at it from below, it seemed impossible for birds to scale it by flying through the air, let alone men on horseback climbing by land. But the road was made less exhausting by climbing in zigzags rather than in a straight line. Most of it consisted of large stone steps that greatly wearied the horses and wore down and hurt their hooves, even though they were being led by their bridles.78

    Under such exhausting conditions, the Spanish and other latter day intruders no doubt appreciated the more than one thousand large lodging houses and hostels and storehouses-some of them multi-storied, some built into hillside terraces-that had been provided for travelers along the Inca roadways. Like most Inca buildings, these generally were constructed by masons working with large, finely worked stones, carefully honed and finished to such a degree of smoothness that even when not secured by mortar the thinnest blade could not pass between them. "In all Spain I have seen nothing that can compare with these walls and the laying of their stone," wrote Cieza de Leon; they "were so extraordinary," added Bernabe Cobo, "that it would be difficult for anyone who has not actually seen them to appreciate their excellence."79 So massive and stable were the Inca walls built in this way that many of them remain in place as the foundations for buildings throughout modern-day Peru. In Cuzco, after the conquest, the Spanish symbolically built their church of Santo Domingo atop the walls of the ruined Coricancha-and for centuries since, while earthquakes repeatedly have destroyed the church, the supporting walls of the great temple of the sun have never budged.

    Although, as we shall see, the early Europeans appreciated the people of the Andes a good deal less than they did those people's engineering accomplishments, later visitors came to agree with the Spanish historian Jose de Acosta who, after spending many years in Peru, wrote in 1590: "Surely the Greeks and the Romans, if they had known the Republics of the Mexicans and the Incas, would have greatly esteemed their laws and governments." The more "profound and diligent" among the Europeans who have lived in this country, wrote Acosta, have now come to "marvel at the order and reason that existed among [the native peoples]."80

    The life of the mind in the Inca-controlled Andes is beyond the scope or range of this brief survey, but like all the thousands of pre-Columbian cultures in the Americas it was deeply embedded both in the wonders and the cyclical rhythms of the surrounding natural world and in cultural affection for the unending string of genealogical forebears and descendants who had lived and who would live on indefinitely (or so it was thought) in these marvelous mountains and valleys and plains. As one recent analysis of Inca thought and philosophy puts it:

      The relationships Andeans perceived between life and death, and between humankind and the natural environment, were . . . profoundly different from Spanish and Christian equivalents. The land surrounding one told the story of one's first ancestors as much as it told one's own story and the story of those yet to come. It was right that the familiar dead were seen walking through the fields they had once cultivated, thus sharing them with both the living and with the original ancestors who had raised the first crops in the very same fields. Death was thus the great leveler not because, as in Christian thought, it reduced all human beings to equality in relation to each other and before God. Rather, death was a leveler because by means of it humans were reintegrated into a network of parents and offspring that embraced the entire natural order.81

    To the east of the Inca homeland, down from the majestic peaks of the Andes, are the dense jungles of the Amazon, followed by the Brazilian highlands, and then the pampas of present-day Argentina-together, well over four million square miles of earth, an area larger than that of the United States today. Within this land the world's largest river rushes through the world's greatest forest-and within that forest lived peoples so numerous and so exotic to the first Western visitors that the Europeans seemed unable to decide whether they had stumbled onto the legendary Terrestrial Paradise or an evil confederacy of demons, or maybe both.

    Disappointed that there were no great cities in this boundless part of their New World, the earliest travelers let their imaginations run riot. There was evidence, some of them claimed, that the Apostle Saint Thomas had visited Brazil and preached to the natives a millennium and a half ago; if you looked carefully enough, it was said, you still could see his footprints impressed into rock alongside various river banks. Apparently his preaching was successful, since the natives of this region were so generous and kind, the Jesuit missionary Father Manuel Nobrega reported, that "there are no people in all the world more disposed to receive the holy faith and the sweet yoke of the evangel than these," adding that "you can paint on the heart of this people at your pleasure as on a clean sheet of paper."82

    Others thought they found evidence of somewhat stranger things. As one historian summarizes some of the first European reports:

      There were men with eight toes; the Mutayus whose feet pointed backwards so that pursuers tracked them in the wrong direction; men born with white hair that turned black in old age; others with dogs' heads, or one cyclopean eye, or heads between their shoulders, or one leg on which they ran very fast. . . . Then there was Upupiara, half man and half fish, the product of fish impregnated by the sperm of drowned men. . . . Brazil was also thought to contain giants and pygmies.83

    And, of course, there were said to be Amazons, from which the great river derived its name. In fact, however, apart from the sheer mystery of this fabulous and seemingly primeval world, perhaps the thing that most amazed and unnerved the Europeans had nothing to do with fairy tales. It had to do with the fact that this land was covered with innumerable independent tribes and nations of people who seemed inordinately happy and content, and who lived lives of apparent total liberty: "They have neither kings nor princes," wrote the Calvinist missionary Jean de Lery in 1550, "and consequently each is more or less as much a great lord as the other."84

    Many of the people of this vast region-including such linguistically distinct cultures as the Tupian, the Cariban, the Jivaroan, the Nambiquaran, the Arawakan, the Tucanoan, the Makuan, the Tupi-Guarani, and others-lived in cedar planked houses, slept in hammocks or on large palm leaf mats, wore feather cloaks and painted cotton clothing, and played a variety of musical instruments. Very recent and continuing archaeological work in the Amazon lowlands indicates that the people living there have been making pottery for at least 7000 to 8000 years-that is, from about the same time that pottery also was first being made in ancient Iraq and Iran, and around 3000 years earlier than current evidence suggests it was being made in the Andes or in Mesoamerica. Some ancient Amazonian peoples hunted and fished and gathered, others farmed. But there is no doubt that organized communities lived in this locale at least 12,000 years ago, evolving into large agricultural chiefdoms and-more than 1000 years ago--into very populous and sophisticated proto-urban communities, such as Santarem, which, in the words of one recent study, "was a center for complex societies with large, nucleated settlements" in which "people made elaborate pottery vessels and statues, groundstone tools and ornaments of nephrite jade."85

    Because the Amazon climate and land is not conducive to the preservation of the materials of village life, archaeological work is very difficult, and thus retrospective estimates of pre-ColumbiaQ population levels are quite controversial here. No one doubts, however, that the population was large-probably at least 5,000,000 to 7,000,000 people in just the Amazon basin within Brazil, which is only one part of tropical South America, although arguments have been made for individual tribes (such as Pierre Clastres's estimate of 1,500,000 for the Guarani) that, if correct, would greatly enlarge that regional figure.86

    One of the things that has most intrigued some modern anthropologists-Clastres in particular-about the people of the Amazon was their ability to sustain such large populations without resorting to steeply hierarchical political systems, something conventional political theory claims is impossible. In most respects, in fact, these people who appointed chiefs from among their ranks, but made sure that their leaders remained essentially powerless, were the classic exemplars of anthropologist Marshall Sahlins's "original affluent society," where people had relatively few material possessions, but also few material desires, and where there was no poverty, no hunger, no privation-where each person's fullest material wants were satisfied with the expenditure of about fifteen to twenty hours of work each week.87

    Life was far more difficult for the natives of Tierra del Fuego, the cold and blustery islands off the southern tip of South America, between the Strait of Magellan and Cape Horn, and as close to the Antarctic Circle as Ketchikan, Alaska, is to the Arctic. Population densities had to be much thinner in this rugged environment, where the people lived largely off hunted marine mammals, fish, and shellfish that they pried loose from rocky headlands. Unlike the inhabitants of the Amazon, the residents of Tierra del Fuego-the Yahgan, the Alacaluf, the Ona, and the Haush-had to struggle constantly to sustain life. Indeed, so important were their sturdy, migratory canoes to them as they made their way through the icy waters, that they maintained permanent fires in beds of clay on board while they searched for the animal life on which they fed their families.

    Harsh as life was for these peoples, the land and the water were their home. And, though we know little about them as they lived in preColumbian times, it is not difficult to imagine that they revered their homeland much as their relatives all over the hemisphere did, including those in the even more icy world of the far north. The people of Tierra del Fuego, after all, had lived in this region for at least 10,000 years before they were first visited by the wandering Europeans.88

    Tierra del Fuego," along with Patagonia, its immediate mainland neighbor to the north, was the geographic end of the line for the great hemispheric migrations that had begun so many tens of thousands of years earlier. No one in . human history has ever lived in permanent settlements further south on the planet than this. But those countless migrations did not invariably follow a north-to-south pathway. At various times (again, we must recall, over the course of tens of thousands of years) some groups decided to branch off and head east or west, or double back to the north. There is linguistic evidence, for example, seeming to suggest that during one historical epoch the Timucuan peoples of present-day Florida may gradually have migrated from the south (in Venezuela) across the island Caribbean to their new North American homeland. That also is what a people we have come to call the Arawak (they did not use the name themselves) decided to do a few thousand years ago, although, unlike the hypothesis regarding the Timucuans, they did not carry their travels as far as the northern mainland.89

    Arawak is the general, post-Columbian name given to various peoples who made a long, slow series of migrations from the coast of Venezuela to Trinidad, then across open ocean perhaps first to Tobago, then Grenada, and on up the chain of islands that constitute the Antilles-St. Vincent, Barbados, St. Lucia, Martinique, Dominica, Guadeloupe, Montserrat, Antigua, Barbuda, St. Kitts, Anguilla, St. Croix, the Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, Hispaniola, Jamaica, Cuba-then finally off to the Bahamas, leaving behind at each stop populations that grew and flourished and evolved culturally in their own distinctive ways. To use a comparison once made by Irving Rouse, the people of these islands who came to be known as Arawaks are analogous to those, in another part of the world, who came to be known as English: "The present inhabitants of southern Great Britain call themselves 'English,' and recognize that their ethnic group, the English people, is the product of a series of migrations from the continent of Europe into the British Isles, beginning_ with various prehistoric peoples and continuing with the Celts, Angles, Saxons, Vikings, and Normans of protohistoric time."90

    Similarly, Arawak (sometimes "Taino," but that is a misnomer, as it properly applies only to a particular social and cultural group) is the name now given to the melange of peoples who, over the course of many centuries, carried out those migrations across the Caribbean, probably terminating with the Saladoid people sometime around two thousand years ago. By the time of their encounter with Columbus and his crews, the islands had come to be governed by chiefs or caciques (there were at least five paramount chiefdoms on Hispaniola alone, and others throughout the region) and the people lived in numerous densely populated villages both inland and along all the coasts. The houses in most of these villages were similar to those described by the Spanish priest Bartolome de Las Casas:

      The inhabitants of this island . . . and elsewhere built their houses of wood and thatch in the form of a bell. These were very high and roomy so that in each there might be ten or more households. . . . On the inside designs and symbols and patterns like paintings were fashioned by using wood and bark that had been dyed black along with other wood peeled so as to stay white, thus appearing as though made of some other attractive painted stuff. Others they adorned with very white stripped reeds that are a kind of thin and delicate cane. Of these they made graceful figures and designs that gave the interior of the houses the appearance of having been painted. On the outside the houses were covered with a fine and sweet-smelling grass.91

    These large buildings conventionally were arranged to face the great house that was inhabited by the local cacique, and all of them in turn faced an open field or court where dances and ball games and other festivities and ceremonies were held. In larger communities, several such fields were placed at strategic locations among the residential compounds.

    The people of these climate-blessed islands supported themselves with a highly developed level of agriculture-especially on Cuba and Hispaniola, which are among the largest islands on earth; Cuba, after all, is larger than South Korea (which today contains more than 42,000,000 people) and Hispaniola is nearly twice the size of Switzerland. In the infrequent areas where agricultural engineering was necessary, the people of the Indies created irrigation systems that were equal in sophistication to those existing in sixteenth-century Spain.92 Their staple food was cassava bread, made from the manioc plant yuca, which they cultivated in great abundance. But also, through so many long generations in the same benign tropical environment, the Arawaks had devised an array of unique methods for more than satisfying their subsistence needs-such as the following technique which they used to catch green sea turtles weighing hundreds of pounds, large fish, and other marine life, including manatees:

      Noting that the remora or suckerfish, Echeneis naucrates, attached itself to the body of a shark or other larger fish by means of a suction disc in its head, the Arawaks caught, fed, and tamed the remora, training it to tolerate a light cord fastened to its tail and gill frame. When a turtle was sighted the remora was released. Immediately it swam to the turtle, attaching its suction disc to the under side of the carapace. The canoe followed the turtle, the Arawak angler holding a firm line on the remora which, in turn, held tightly to its quarry until the turtle could be gaffed or tied to the canoe.93

    In addition to this technique, smaller fish were harvested by the use of plant derivatives that stupefied them, allowing the natives simply to scoop up large numbers as though gathering plants in a field. Water birds were taken by floating on the water's surface large calabashes which concealed swimmers who would seize individual birds, one at a time, without disturbing the larger flock. And large aquaculture ponds were created and walled in to maintain and actually cultivate enormous stocks of fish and turtles for human consumption. A single one of these numerous reed marine corrals held as many as 1000 large sea turtles. This yielded a quantity of meat equal to that of 100 head of cattle, and a supply that was rapidly replenished: a fertile female turtle would lay about 500 eggs each season. Still, the Arawaks were careful not to disturb the natural balance of these and other creatures; the evidence for this is that for millennia they sustained in perpetuity their long-term supply of such natural foodstuffs. It was only after the coming of the Spanish-and, in particular, their release of dogs and pigs that turned feral and ran wild-that the wildlife ecology of the islands found itself in serious trouble.94

    In sum, as Caribbean expert Carl Sauer once put it, "the tropical idyll of the accounts of Columbus and Peter Martyr was largely true" regarding the Arawak. "The people suffered no want. They took care of their plantings, were dextrous at fishing and were bold canoeists and swimmers. They designed attractive houses and kept them clean. They found aesthetic expression in woodworking. They had leisure to enjoy diversion in ball games, dances, and music. They lived in peace and amity."95