At the point at which the Old World and the New came
into definitive
contact in 1492, civilizations occupied a vast territory in the Old
World, but only a small part of the New. In fact, just two areas in the
Americas supported civilizations, though both had done so for a
considerable time. One was Mesoamerica, a region combining the Mexican
highlands with the adjoining lowlands. The other, if we overlook the
absence of writing, was the central Andean region, including the
coastal lowlands—roughly the modern country of Peru plus some territory
to the north and south of it. Though the peoples of this region lacked
writing, they did have something less satisfactory in lieu of it (as we
will see in the final section of this chapter).
Outside these two regions there were no writing systems
at all, no
cities, and no states. The richer farming societies might be ruled by
powerful figures whom we can comfortably, if a little vaguely, call
chiefs. In the southeast of the United States, for example, some of the
large mounds of earth that survive to this day are known from early
European testimony to have had chiefly residences on top of them.
Moundville in Alabama has some twenty major mounds dating from the
thirteenth or fourteenth century A.D.; these earthworks attest the
considerable power of chiefs to mobilize the labour of their subjects.
Similar societies were to be found in South America, notably in the
northern Andes. But none of them were in the same league as the Aztec
or Inca states.
A basic fact about the two civilizations of the New
World is the
absence of relations between them, whether by land or by sea. This did
not preclude the diffusion of a couple of important innovations from
one region to the other. As we saw, maize (but not writing) reached the
Andean region from Mesoamerica; and metalworking (but not the llama)
spread in the relations site direction at a much later date. Yet there
were no direct relations between the two civilizations, and they would
appear to have been ignorant of each other's existence. One reason for
this was the relatively low level of New World maritime technology. On
the Pacific we hear of canoes, rafts, reed boats—but nothing to compare
with the ships that enabled the Spanish to link the two regions in the
course of a mere fourteen years. Another reason for the lack of contact
was that the civilizations of the Americas were separated by latitude,
not by longitude as in the case of Eurasia. Hence any linkages between
the two regions had to cut across the climatic bands.
This means that the context of the New World civilizations
was marked
not just by the absence of technologies taken for granted in the Old
World but also by a much greater degree of isolation. It may be worth
reviewing a few features of these civilizations against this background.
There was an absence of a strong tradition of long-term
political unity
in either of these multi- ethnic civilizations. In Mesoamerica the
Spanish found an uneven patchwork when they arrived. The Aztec empire
in the highlands was extensive, but there were significant territorial
gaps in it; the Mayan lowlands lay outside it, and were divided into a
large number of small states. There were precedents for both
configurations. In the highlands the Toltecs were remembered to have
ruled an empire a few centuries earlier (it may have fallen in the
twelfth century), and archaeology sug gests that the city we know as
Teotihuacan was the center of an empire in the first centuries of our
era. In the lowlands the Mayan inscriptions of the first millennium
A.D. demonstrate a political fragmentation comparable to that
encountered by the Spanish. In short, large- scale political
organization seems to have been intermittent, and a feature of the
highlands rather than the lowlands. The Andean region looks very
different to us because the arrival of the Spanish coincided with the
zenith of the Inca empire, a massive and centralized imperial state
that had recently conquered the entire region, highlands and lowlands.
But we have no reason to think that a state of such dimensions had ever
arisen there before, though there had certainly been states of
considerable size and power.
There was no core ethnic group identified as the originators
or
continuing proprietors of the civilization as a whole. It is likely
that the pioneering role in the development of Mesoamerican
civilization was played by a people of the western lowlands whom modern
scholars have chosen to call the Olmecs. Olmec culture was already
taking shape toward the end of the second millennium B.C., considerably
earlier than comparable developments elsewhere in Mesoamerica (though
the first evidence of writing comes not from the Olmecs but from the
Zapotec area in the highlands, where it dates from the middle of the
first millennium B.C.). But Olmec culture lasted only about a
millennium, and no memory of it was preserved among the historically
known peoples of Mesoamerica.
Instead, at the time the Spanish arrived, the civilization
consisted of
a loose family of cultures, each of which was embedded in its own
ethnic context, and no one of which played a central role. There was no
such thing as a shared classical language, for example; and we have no
reason to think that matters had ever been very different. In the
Andean region the highland Chavin culture of the first millennium B.C.
might be seen as playing the part of the Olmecs (though monumental
architecture goes back to the third millennium). But again, there is no
later memory of the culture, and no clue to the ethnicity of those who
developed it. It
seems likely that a common thread in the background to these features of
the New World civilizations is their isolation. Neither was in contact with other civilizations that
could have served as models or rivals, and thereby acted as a stimulus to political unification
and a heightened sense of identity.
