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First Cities of Mesoamerica: From The Olmecs To Teotihuacan
First Cities of Mesoamerica: From The Olmecs To Teotihuacan
We do not know what these people called themselves nor anything more
about them than we can infer from what they built. Centuries later, Nahuatlspeaking explorers from central Mexico, finding the abandoned stoneworks
among the rubber trees, called these mysterious ancients Olmecatl people of the
land of rubber . We know them as Olmecs.
Further downstream, around 800 BC, in the marshy lowlands where the
Tonala river empties into the Gulf of Mexico, near the mouth of the
Coatzacoalcos, other Olmecs raised a conical mound of some 20,000 tons of
earth and rubble, 125 m in diameter and 31.5 m high, on the small island of La
Venta. Just to the north of the mound, they cleared and leveled a space that must
have been a ball court, presumably played with a large, heavy ball of the locally
abundant rubber. The flat playing area is marked off by two parallel banks of
earth 80 m long, pointing north. Just beyond these was a rectangle area, about
300 feet wide (east-west) and 100 across. It was here at La Venta that the Olmecs
perfectly defined their axial concept, culminating in a pyramidal temple with a
regular base and a plaza of regular shape, flanked by low and rectangular
buildings marking the only access to the pyramid. They used the talus as an
architectural element, alternating it with vertical panels on the pyramids lateral
faces.
The Olmec carvers also left ceremonial stone axes, stone figures with
partially human, partially feline features (were-jaguars) and four enormous
basalt heads, some weighing more than 20 tons. Large, flat-topped stone blocks
have variously been described as altars or, more recently (based on depictions of
rulers in other, related cultures), as thrones. On the front of one of these, a stone
man with powerful shoulders sits cross-legged in the cave-like entry of a stone
house. His jaguar-faced crown juts up toward the houses roof, which is carved
in bands that might represent thatching, or (as some scholars believe) the sky. In
his hands he holds a thick stone rope, which extends around the corner of the
house to a seated captive. This entire work was sculpted from a single block of
basalt around 800-900 BC. That was around the time that the Greek poet Homer
is supposed to have composed the Iliad and Odyssey, and the Etruscans,
forerunners of the Romans, were building their first towns in Italy.
[Insert Figure 3. Olmec altar, La Venta]
There is no sign of housing around these ceremonial centers. The settled
population must have lived in nearby villages in shelters of perishable materials,
like many rural Maya to this day houses that quickly dissolve back into the
jungle when not maintained. The high mound, the plaza and ball court, and the
arrangements of massive sculptures serve no apparent practical purpose such as
shelter, defense, or gathering or preparing of food. Some other need compelled
the Olmecs to construct their great sites of stone.
Somebody among them must have been directing this operation a
chief. And the men and/or women involved in the effort must have been free,
at least for a time, from other duties such as hunting and gathering for food or
fighting off other hostile groups. That there were such hostilities with other
bands of humans is apparent from the sculpture of the bound captive. We can
also presume that they would not have invested all that labor without a strong
attachment to that particular site, to which they must have returned periodically
for ceremonies. These works suggest a powerful religious commitment and a
class of specialized artists. The fact that the large stones had to be brought from
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afar, presumably by raft, indicates long-distance trade. And that is about all that
we can say with confidence about these people.
What is clear is that the people who made these things were spending
great effort to bring the chaos and menace of their universe under control, to
domesticate the wild space. The serpent and the jaguar were the foremost
symbols of the wild menace, so the Olmec imagery of men and jaguars merging
in the same being is powerfully ambiguous: either the man is domesticating the
jaguar by taking on its power, or the jaguar is wilding the man, drawing him
back into his beastly state. The stone man squatting in the cave-like opening of
the stone altar or throne at La Venta may originally have represented a fleshand-blood chieftain with his captives, but has become more like a spirit guarding
the entrance to the underworldthe lurking place of serpents and chaos. The
massive stone heads convey strength, calm and wisdom, all that is orderly in
human (domesticated) existence. The great mound not only organized the space
around it by defining its center, it also forestalled chaos by showing the human
community how it was aligned with the cosmos.
The conical mound is a forerunner of the steep, four-sided, flat-topped
pyramids that would become ubiquitous in Mesoamerican settlements. Without
masonry walls to retain the piled up earth, the mounds slope at La Venta could
be no steeper than 35. Only much later, stone and cement would permit the
rectangular shapes and much steeper slopes of the pyramids in the ceremonial
centers of other peoples. The ball court and rectangular open space would
change little in this time. All three elements mound or pyramid, plaza and
ballcourt -- would appear again and again in cities built over the next 2,500 years
throughout Mesoamerica. We shall see them again in Monte Albn, Teotihuacan
and the Maya settlements discussed below, and finally in the great Mexica
(Aztec) metropolis Tenochtitlan and its satellites, begun around AD 1400.
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Monte Albn
The Olmecs continued dominant in the region for about 400 years, their
trade networks and influences extending far, even up the rivers to the south and
west into the highlands around the Oaxaca River, about 250 kilometers (as the
hawk flies) southwest of La Venta and San Lorenzo. There the land is not only
much higher but also drier and the vegetation is not as lush, which may be why
it took people there longer to accumulate enough of a food reserve to support a
large settled population. Somehow, though, those highland people managed to
establish several large villages. A village today known as San Jos Mogote, at the
base of a hill that rises 400 feet above the valley floor, grew to be the largest and
most important trade center in the Oaxaca highlands; archaeological excavations
of hearths and what are presumed to have been public buildings indicate as
many as 1,000 inhabitants. Around 500 BC, people from this village and possibly
others climbed that hill to found a new center with a commanding view of the
valley. They presumably called themselves "The People" (Be'ena'a), as their
descendants do today, but we know them by the name the Nahuas bestowed on
them, tzapoteca or Zapotecs (people of tzapotl or sapodilla, a fruit abundant
in the territory). They called their new city Danipaguache, "Sacred Mountain of
Life." We know it by its Spanish name, Monte Albn.
This appears to have been the first settlement in North America to fulfill
all four of the criteria that Jorge Hardoy, a noted historian of Latin American
urbanism, proposed to identify a settlement as a city rather than a village or
ceremonial center or something else. First, Monte Albn was clearly a center for
the transformation of primary production, including that originating outside
its immediate zone of influence. The town had areas specifically devoted to
particular crafts, such as for the production of mirrors made from magnetite,
suggesting an unusual social complexity and the power to attract goods from
afar. Monte Albn had contact not only with the Olmecs of the Gulf Coast, but
also with people on the Pacific Coast, the source of some exotic goods found in
the village such as the stingray spines, used to draw blood from tongues or ears
in ceremonial rites.
Second, as the largest and dominant settlement in the whole Oaxaca
valley, it must certainly have been a center of services and a daily, periodical
or occasional market place for the neighboring smaller towns and countryside.
Is is easy to imagine a market place crowding the large central plaza, and goods
brought from afar attest to an active trade.
Third, Monte Albn undoubtedly fulfilled a series of functions which are
specifically urban, such as acting as a political, administrative, religious, cultural
or military center, and incorporating the corresponding institutions. Its leaders
military prowess is proclaimed in its famous relief sculptures of combat and
captivity, and its cultural dominance is apparent in the ceramics and other craft
goods of Monte Albn origin, or imitating its patterns, found in villages far from
the center.
And finally, Monte Albn had a high percentage of resident population
who also worked there and exhibited a sharp division of labor. We know this
because, unlike the Olmecs, the people of Monte Albn built permanent
residential quarters for a large population, and workshops for their various
crafts.
Hardoy did not include literacy among his requirements for calling a
place a city, as some scholars do. However in that regard Monte Albn also
qualifies. Its people, or at least their elite, had recently begun using
hieroglyphics. They also kept track of time by a system of two intermeshing
calendar cycles, an early appearance of the calendrical system that came to be
adopted by many different peoples all through Mesoamerica. One cycle, of
obvious use for planning agricultural activities, corresponds almost exactly to the
solar year; it consists of 18 periods of 20 days plus five extra (unlucky) days at
the end of the cycle. The other cycle, determining dates for various rituals, was
made up of 20 periods of 13 days. An especially important date would be
recorded by its name and number in the 365-day cycle and its name and number
in the 260-day cycle, a combination that would not be repeated for 52 years.
Monte Albn appears to have been preplanned. The main buildings and
open spaces of the entire urban layout appear to have been constructed in a very
short period of time, a season or two, suggesting that the whole design had been
thought through and agreed upon before work began. The founders must have
been inspired by what they had seen or heard of the grand centers of the Olmecs,
because they faithfully reproduced, though on a grander scale, the Olmec forms
of pyramid, plaza and ballcourt. However the long, independent history of
development in the highlands also contributed to their urban plan.
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Teotihuacan
While the rulers of Monte Albn were making themselves the dominant
power in the Oaxaca Valley, other large construction projects were underway in
a high plateau far to the northwest. Commonly called the Valley of Mexico, the
plateau and its mountain walls form what geologists call a basin, because -unlike a river valley it has no natural drainage. Rainfall and snowmelt from the
mountains collected in lagoons, the widest and deepest of which lay in the low
southwestern sector, with smaller and more seasonal lagoons in other areas. The
basins 7,500 square kilometers are at an average 2,240 meters above sea level,
and include the largest contiguous area of flat arable land in all of
Mesoamerica.
Human groups have continuously occupied the Basin of Mexico for 25,000
or more years. However the relatively cool temperatures and aridity made it
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difficult for them to produce enough food to stay in one place and to multiply.
The first major built works appeared here much later than in the marshes of the
Olmecs. The first villages arose where water was available year-round, along
small streams or the shallow lagoons.
In 300 BC, the largest population center was in the southwestern, lowest
part of the basin, where water collected in the widest and deepest lagoon of all.
The people there, in a place called Cuicuilco, had built a large, stone-faced
circular pyramid and many smaller sacred structures and artifacts. Perhaps a few
thousand people lived from the crops cultivated in an extensive area around this
center. Elsewhere, communities were much smaller. One was a village called
Oztoyahualco, in the northeastern quadrant of the basin, where a small river
today called the San Juan -- provided a less reliable source of water. Very near to
that village, around 200 BC, some large group of people, motivated by we dont
know what kind of religious fervor, laid out the rectangular base for a huge
pyramid, much larger than the one at Cuicuilco. The remains of four young
warriors in their finest regalia were found buried beneath each of the four
corners, presumably a foundation sacrifice. This was the beginning of what
would become the greatest city of all of North America up to that time.
No record of what its people called it has survived or been deciphered,
nor do we even know what language the rulers spoke probably more than one,
because it became an ethnically diverse city. Nahuatl-speakers who came across
the ruins centuries after they had been abandoned found them so impressive that
they called the place Teotihuacan, birthplace of the gods. They also bestowed
the name Pyramid of the Sun on the massive structure that had begun the
whole development, and Pyramid of the Moon on the somewhat smaller one a
little to the north, and Avenue of the Dead on the grand causeway that passes
before the western face of the Pyramid of the Sun and terminates at the foot of
the Pyramid of the Moon.
Around 50 BC, volcanic eruptions buried Cuicuilcos ceremonial center
under lava and covered its farmlands with ash, thus taking that settlement out of
competition with the growing community around the big construction site to the
northeast. By this time the builders near Oztoyahualco had laid out a long,
broad, paved walkway running north-south and passing before the western face
of the great pyramid. This avenue was apparently designed to become, as it did
in fact, the central axis of a much larger community. At its northern end the
people built a second pyramid, almost as big as the first. This second pyramid
echoes the form and, from close up, appears to rival in size the mountain in the
distance behind it.
Ren Millon, the archaeologist who supervised the thorough mapping of
Teotihuacan in the 1970s, has hypothesized that the construction project of the
great pyramid must have been what drew people here in the first place.
Pasztory accepts this hypothesis, and further suggests that The Pyramid of the
Sun may have been located where it is because of (1) the location of a previous
shrine that was enlarged; (2) a divination or mystic occurrence like the Aztec
vision of an eagle on a cactus for the future city of Tenochtitlan; or (3) a desire to
move away from Oztoyahualco andwithout as yet a grand plan for the rest of
the citysomething of a random or geomantically divined choice of location to
the south.
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Whatever its builders original motivation, they would make this pyramid
one of the two or three largest man-made structures in pre-Columbian
Mesoamerica. It rises 71.2 meters tall from a base 215 meters square. Only the
Great Pyramid of Cholula, Mexico (55 meters tall, 450 square meters base) and La
Danta in El Mirador, Guatemala (70 meters tall, on an immense platform of about
18,000 square meters) are comparable. The work required tens of thousands of
laborers.
The straight, paved 5 km walkway (the Avenue of the Dead) begins
south of the river and continues northerly to the Pyramid of the Moon. The
elite residential complex known as the Ciudadela (citadel) on the south bank
of the river was added some time between AD 100 and 200. The bridge that must
once have connected the northern and southern stretches of the avenue has
disappeared.
[Insert Figures 6: Teotihuacan]
The wide central walkway begins south of the large walled structure now
called the Citadel, which is believed to have been the residence of the ruler and
his household. It runs northward up to the base of the second tallest pyramid,
the Pyramid of the Moon, on its eastern side, to the right of the person
ascending. About midway on his journey, the walker passes the largest
pyramid, the Pyramid of the Sun. The enormous stone structure of the
Pyramid of the Sun was built over an earlier and much smaller sanctuary, whose
shape suggests that at one time its encompassing pyramid supported twin
temples upon its flat top.
It is in this larger pyramid that we find one of the earliest examples of the
talud-tablero, or slope-panel design that was imitated in other pyramids built
by many other cultures throughout Mesoamerica. At regular intervals from the
base to the top of the pyramid, its slope (talud) is interrupted by setbacks; each
setback creates wide shelf running back to a vertical panel (tablero) that forms the
back wall, above which the slope continues up to the next setback. The effect is of
a stack of truncated pyramids, each higher and narrower than the one below. The
setbacks form a series of platforms up to the topmost platform on the narrowest,
highest pyramid. Earlier versions of talud and tablero have been found
elsewhere in central Mexico. In its fully developed form at Teotihuacan, it
consisted of pairs of taludes and framed tableros that pass completely around a
platform, and stairs flanked by balustrades that are capped with finial blocks
(called remates). This form would eventually be emulated in areas influenced
by Teotihuacan, including the distant Maya territories.
While the Avenue of the Dead is clearly of great sacred significance, it
also forms the axis of a grid of streets that served eminently secular, civic
purposes. The grid determined the placement of other structures, facilitated
movement through the city and permitted the clear delineation of neighborhoods
and districts with different functions. The crossing of the north-south avenue and
the east-west river was made the starting point of a grid of paved streets with
regular blocks.
The city reached its peak size and complexity around AD 600, when the
great Pyramid of the Sun and the 600 other pyramids, 2,000 or more apartment
compounds, the workshops and market compound of Teotihuacan, spread over
more than 20 square kilometers (eight square miles). Its population may have
been as large as 150,000 to 200,000, most of them living in the apartment
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Some of the refugees from Teotihuacan must have fled to Xochicalco and
other smaller communities nearby, where they fought over scarce resources, but
other survivors moved further away away. Some of them resettled about 50
kilometers to the southwest, to where rainwater and snowmelt from the
mountains collected in a system of interconnected lakes and swamp and not far
from the ruins of Cuicuilco, abandoned some 800 years earlier. This lakeside area
would become the base for a new urban empire that would reach its peak some
600 years after the fall of Teotihuacan, and would give the Basin of Mexico its
name.
Meanwhile, the sudden disappearance of Teotihuacan also shook another
great cultural system whose fate was intertwined with that of the great city, the
Maya of distant Yucatn, Chiapas, Honduras and Belize.
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