Mayan Uxmal
society that adopted a comparatively large-scale,
Uxmal was one of several Mayan city-states
competing for territory, but by 900 CE it had become
the regional capital and most likely the largest of the
Mayan cities. A network of stone roadways, called
sakbehoob, connected Uxmal to Nohpat and Kabah.
Chichén Itzá was a major ally. Uxmal’s elite lived in
a sprawling palace complex located on the area’s
highest ground. A stone wall with regularly spaced
openings enclosed the area. At the southern end of
the complex, built into a small mound, was the main
platform mound, wedged between a gigantic
platform with the so-called Governor’s Palace to its
east and a series of rectangular courts to its west.
The platform mound faced north, its broad stairs
visible from a great distance. The northern edge of
the palace complex was dominated by a huge
quadrangular palace, called the Nunnery (890–915
CE). To its immediate east, the largest structure, a
steep platform mound with a rare ovalshaped base,
was the so-called Temple of the Magician. Scores of
other buildings, arranged in quadrangles of various
size and shape, were distributed through the
complex; most were residential units, and a few were
platform mounds. Similar structures outside the wall
were dispersed across a much larger urban
residential area. The currently used names for many
of the structures were coined by the conquering
Spanish and do not indicate the actual functions of
the buildings. Chan-Chaak-K’ak’nal-Ajaw (9th
century), who ruled the city, commissioned the
Governor’s Palace, the Nunnery quadrangle, and
very likely a rebuilding of the Temple of the
Magician. The latter, originally built in the 6th
century, was reconstructed at least four times. While
the exact reasons for its unusual shape are still
uncertain, its dramatic profile dominates the setting,
contrasting with the orthogonal geometries of the
Governor’s Palace and the Nunnery quadrangle. Its
limestone core was originally covered with smooth
plaster and painted red with accents in blue, yellow,
and black
Cahokia
By the 11th century, Hopewell Culture cities had
fallen on hard times. The new power centers were
now farther west along the Mississippi River. This
change coincided with the emergence of a chiefdom
intensive, maize-based agriculture. It had taken
about a thousand years for corn cultivation to make
it this far north, and its impact was quite dramatic.
For the first time there is a clear settlement hierarchy
and the construction of truncated pyramid mounds,
with temples or burial buildings atop such mounds.
Soon a network of larger and smaller city cultures
developed in a large triangular area down the
Mississippi River at its western edge and eastward
into Georgia, along other rivers. Farther to the west,
in more arid conditions, were the equally strong
pueblo cultures.
One of the most important of the new cities was
Cahokia (700–1400, near St. Louis). Its residents
benefited from the Mississippi’s alluvial deposits as
well as from the trade that brought copper from the
upper Great Lakes, mica from the southern
Appalachians, and seashells from the Gulf of
Mexico. Twenty thousand people lived in Cahokia at
its peak in the 12th century, making it the largest city
north of Mexico. Its center of its religious precinct
was the so-called Monks Mound. Begun around
1000 CE, it was surrounded by terraces and smaller
mounds roughly on axis. The Cahokians, who
seemed to have known of Central American
advances in astronomy, built several calendrical
circles with posts of red cedar. A circle of 24 posts
was enlarged to one of 36, then to one of 48, and
finally to one of 60 posts. Their last and largest circle
was built only to an arc of 12 posts, but if completed,
it would have had 72 posts. At the equinoxes, the
post marking sunrise, due east, aligns perfectly with
the front of Monks Mound. The city was abandoned
in the 15th century. Overhunting, environmental
degradation, and social conflict may have all played
a part. Whereas Mississippi cultures in Ohio faltered,
they continued to thrive farther south in Georgia and
Alabama until the arrival of the Europeans.
Serpent Mound
In Ohio, where there had once been the Hopewell
Culture, a new and more modest culture emerged,
known by archaeologists as the Fort Ancient Culture
(1000–1650). Settlements composed of circular and
rectangular homes constructed of twigs and thatch
and situated around an open plaza were enclosed
by stockades, suggesting an increase in the level of
conflict that perhaps accounted for the breakdown of
the Hopewell Culture. Settlements were rarely
permanent, usually shifting to a new location after
one or two generations when the resources
surrounding the village were exhausted. The diet
was composed mainly of maize, squash, and beans,
supplemented by hunting and fishing in nearby
forests and rivers.
Though this culture was a step down from Hopewell
Culture, it nonetheless managed to construct some
remarkable earthworks, including Serpent Mound
(ca. 1060), in Adams County, Ohio. The mound
consists of a low berm made of stones and
compacted clay placed on a promontory that rises
30 meters over a small river. Measured along its
coils and curves, it stretches 400 meters. The head
of the serpent was placed at the crest of the bluff.
Several theories have been proposed as to the
meaning of the mound. For some American tribes,
the serpent was considered evil, but for others, it
was thought of as beneficial. In all cases, however,
the snake was considered a potent force. (The Hopi
snake dance was used principally as a prayer for
rain.) Astrological alignments have been proposed,
and indeed, the snake’s head is aligned to the
summer solstice and the various curves to other
celestial events. The village was located across the
river from the mound. The fate of the Fort Ancient
people is not know for sure, but there was a period
of depopulation shortly before the appearance of
early European explorers and missionaries, during
which the Wyandot, Delaware, Shawnee, and Miami
tribes, among others, moved into the area.
The Americas
The Americas in the 15th century were far different
from the Americas in the 17th century, when disease
killed off nearly 90 percent of the population. In the
15th century, from eastern Bolivia and Peru up
through Central America and the western United
States, eastward to the Mississippi and Georgia, and
up to what is now New England, there was what the
first Europeans sailing down the coast of New
England described as a more or less continuous
fabric of habitation. There were major cities that
served as capitals of empires, like Qosqo in Peru
and Tenochtitlán in Mexico; there were secondary
cities that served as regional centers, like Chan
Chan in Peru; Oraibi, a Hopi city in the United States;
as well as other large cities in Georgia. In between,
there were thousands of smaller villages. The
spread of disease was so rapid that some cultures
disappeared even before they themselves
encountered the Europeans. There is a good deal of
debate about the specifics of this terrible loss of life
and culture, but the basic parameters of this tragedy
are not in dispute.
The Hopis
In the 14th century, the Native Americans in North
America were largely seminomadic except for the
major city-dwelling areas in the Mississippi-Georgia
region, which extended all the way to the Atlantic
coast, and the southwestern and western areas
controlled by the Hopis, who had been town dwellers
for many centuries. The Hopi village of Old Oraibi in
Arizona was founded about the year 1100. The
Hopis’ notion of urban culture had much in common
with earlier urban cultures in the area dating back to
the Anasazi and Hohokam. From 700 to 1130 CE,
the area experienced a rapid increase in population
due to consistent and regular rainfall. In the late 13th
century, however, a severe drought, which seems to
have put an end to the nearby Hohokam culture,
forced the Hopis to abandon their smaller villages
and consolidate their population in larger urban
centers. When the the Spanish arrived, nine major
towns existed: Sikyatki, Koechaptevela, Kisakovi,
Sichomovi, Mishongnovi, Shipaulovi, Shungopavi,
Oraibi, and Awatovi.
The word Hopi is a shortened form of Hopituh Shi-
nu-mu, “the peaceful people” or “peaceful little
ones.” To be Hopi is to strive toward a state of
reverence and respect for all things, to be at peace
with these things, and to live in accordance with the
instructions of Maasaw, the creator or caretaker of
earth. The Hopis, like most Native Americans,
assume the souls of the dead go to another part of
the universe where they have a new existence,
carrying on everyday activities as if they were still
alive. Village life revolves around a series of
ceremonies that are performed not only for the
benefit of the village but also for the entire world.
These ceremonies take place according to the lunar
calendar and are observed in each of the Hopi
villages. As with all pueblo cultures, most of the
ceremonies take place in kivas. Pueblo is a Spanish
word derived from the Latin word populus (“people”),
and in this case means “village.” The pueblos were,
however, not villages in the European sense, but
rather microcities with strong hierarchies and
institutional coherencies.
Hopi cities were located at or near the edges of
north-south running, flat-topped mountains known
as mesas. The difficulty of transporting water up to
the cities kept their populations small, but their
location did allow for protection, with access paths to
some pueblos purposely following narrow ravines.
Houses were made of stone and mud and were often
several stories high. The walls were constructed of
undressed stones bound with mud plaster. Wooden
beams rested on the tops of the walls to form flat
roofs that were strengthened with grass thatching, a
layer of plaster, and a covering of dry earth. The
upper apartments were reached by outside ladders.
In the area to the south was another town, Acoma
Pueblo, founded in the 12th century by the Acomas,
who controlled a large area to the south and east of
the Hopis. Though seminomadic, they eventually
began to develop pueblo towns in the Arizona
canyons. In the 17th century, the Navajos built even
more pueblos, especially in their native homeland in
the northwestern corner of New Mexico, as part of
their defenses against the Spanish invaders.
Tenochtitlán
The fall of the Toltec capital of Tula (located about
100 kilometers north-northwest of Mexico City), led
to the founding of a number of semiautonomous
urban centers around Lake Texcoco. The city of
Tenochtitlán (now Mexico City) was founded by one
of these groups, the Mexica, on an islet in the
western part of the lake in the year 1325. By the 14th
century, war between the states had become
systemic, leading in 1428 to an alliance between
three of them that became the basis of the Aztec
Empire. (Historians tend to shy away from the term
Aztec because it only came into use in the 19th
century.) At its height, the empire stretched across
central Mexico from coast to coast. In 1521, the
Triple Alliance was defeated by the Spanish
conquistadores and their native allies under Hernán
Cortés, who described the city before he destroyed
it; his text and drawing were presented to the
Spanish king and widely circulated in Europe, thanks
to the printing press. Cortés told of a city of two
hundred thousand inhabitants on an island in the
middle of a lake, connected by causeways to the
shore. Gigantic stone towers dominated the city’s
center, at the intersection of the causeways.
The Mexica were originally peripheral to the political
world of that region, but under their general,
Tlacaélel, who masterminded the Triple Alliance, the
Mexica remodeled themselves after the Toltecs and
claimed descent from Teotihuacán in order to
legitimate their imperial claims. Their religion saw
the sun as engaged in a violent and perpetual
struggle for existence, a struggle that had to be
nourished by human sacrifice. Several thousand
were killed every year in such rituals. Though later
European conquerors purported to be shocked at
this, 17th-century Europe was, ironically, a
significantly more brutal place; tens of thousands of
people were hanged, quartered, burned, or
impaled—often as part of great public spectacles—
during the various religious wars.
The Mexica settled next to a swamp but were able
to drain the area to create a 10-square-kilometer
lake with an island-city at the center linked to
settlements on the mainland by three raised
causeways. It grew to become an enormous city,
much larger than any European city of the time. A
gridded network of streets and canals teemed with
boats transporting goods and people to its markets.
Two aqueducts brought fresh water into the city. The
ceremonial center consisted of two stepped
pyramids rising side by side on a huge platform
painted red and blue; nearby were palaces painted
a dazzling white. Not far away were the schools for
the sons of the nobility, the houses for the priests, a
ball court, an intimidating tzompantli (or skull rack)
displaying the severed heads of the sacrificed, and
several other pyramids and temples, all surrounded live even after death, a new king never moved into
by protective enclosures. his predecessor’s palace, but instead built a new
one, which then became the home of his extended
The main temple, Templo Mayor, had large incense
family after his own death. But the Chan Chan were
braziers, with serpent heads and cauldrons on all
soon subsumed into the world of the Incas. Not
four sides in front of it to receive offerings. It rose in
much is known about the prehistory of the Incas,
four platforms, representative of the celestial levels
except that like the Mexica, they were originally a
of the cosmos, until it reached the top level where
small peripheral kingdom that became much more
there were two temples dedicated to Tlaloc and
successful than those around it. The Incas borrowed
Huitzilopochtli. Two parallel stairs led up to the
form the Chimu their approach to royalty, with one
summit. Huitzilopochtli, whose temple was to the
exception: their king, or inca, was divine. One of their
south, was the Mayan warrior god who fought his
incas, Pachakuti, who ascended the Incan throne in
brother Centzon Huitznahua and his sister
1438, quickly built an empire that brought the area
Coyolxauhqui immediately after birth. He defeated
of present-day Peru, Bolivia, Chile, Ecuador, and
them and threw their dismembered bodies down the
northern Argentina under Incan control. He did this
mountain, a sacrifice marked by a round tablet at the
by means novel to the South American political
foot of the stairs. Between 1325 and 1521, Templo
scene. In the previous era, regional expansionism
Mayor was reconstructed seven times, with the older
had been limited due to the difficulties involved in
temple encased intact within each new larger
marshalling large armies and moving them from
building. Of all these, the second building has
place to place. (There were, after all, no horses.) The
survived intact, including its two temples, complete
Incas expanded fairly peacefully by assimilating
with the stone to which prisoners were tied before
neighboring areas into their regime, offering stability
being sacrificed. Like their predecessors, the Mexica
and inclusion in exchange for services. Soon they
were dedicated observers of the sun, the stars, the
were able to command enormous teams of people—
cycles of nature, the passing of the seasons, and the
many purposefully displaced from their
death of plant and animal life. And like their
homelands—to build roads and palaces, and work in
predecessors, their architecture and their rituals
craft industries and on farms. The consolidation of
were intended to maintain the integrity of the cosmic
the empire was more or less complete by 1520.
order. Their science of observation was certainly
There was no money, no markets, and no land
very sophisticated, though today it is still
ownership: all land belonged to the king. It was a
incompletely understood. Templo Mayor pointed 7
centralized system akin to modern socialism, except
degrees south of east, so that on the equinoxes the
that the ruling Inca was a god. The result was that in
sun rises exactly between the temples of Tlaloc and
just over a hundred years the Incas became the
Huitzilopochtli. A monolithic calendar stone 1.2
most powerful empire the Americas had ever seen,
meters thick, 3.6 meters in diameter, and weighing
before they were conquered by the Spanish and
over 24 tons, was found in 1790 under the main
depopulated by disease.
square. On its face is a representation of the sun
god. The Incan capital, Qosqo (Cuzco), was located on
the western fringe of the Peruvian highlands. Four
major roads terminated in its center, the Plaza of
The Incas Cusipata. Under Pachakuti, the first of the great
Incan rulers, Qosqo was transformed from a village
In the coastal valleys of northern Peru, the collapse of clay and straw into a city of stone. Wedged
of the Wari kingdom around the year 1000 CE led to between the Tullumayo and Huatanay rivers, the
the emergence of the Chimu (850–1470), also called city’s plan forms the body of a puma, or jaguar. The
the Chimor, who in time came to control the entire head was represented by the fortress, the heart by
northern coast of Peru from the modern border of the central plaza, and the tail by the confluence of
Ecuador to Lima. Their capital, Chan Chan was the two canalized rivers. The Plaza of Cusipata was
spread out across a large plain of the coastal desert. surrounded by the main civic structure of Qosqo, the
Because the Chimu believed their kings continued to palaces, and three temples dedicated to the sun
(Qorikancha), the creator (Kiswarkancha), and
thunder (Pucamarka). The plaza was filled with pure
white sand taken form the coast, and across the
facades of the palaces were enormous plates of
polished gold that reflected the setting sun. The
plaza was the center of the Incan cosmos, with four
highways leading to and from it demarcating the four
sectors of the empire. Also radiating out from the city
was a spider web of forty-one crooked spirit paths
that connected holy features of the landscape such
as springs, caves, shrines, and stones. The Incan
calendar counted forty-one weeks, each eight days
long.
Qosqo seems to have had no defensive wall, even
though the impressively-scaled “head” of the puma,
Sacsayhuamán, that overlooks the valley is
presumed to have been a fortress. It could also have
been a temple to the sun, a water reservoir—or all
three. It has three platforms, one on top of the other,
followed by a triple row of toothed walls made from
gigantic blocks of granite. The walls were precise
works of engineering.
Some of their granite blocks weighed up to 200 tons
and had to be hauled large distances. Each block
was shaped on-site to fit its neighbors exactly.
Additionally, individual stones were shaped and
aligned to create a ceremonial series of waterspouts
and channels. There was also a large circular
meeting plaza with ceremonial buildings perched at
the lip of the cliff overlooking the city.
Machu Picchu
Machu Picchu, 70 kilometers northwest of Qosqo, is
located between two steep peaks 2,750 meters
above a gorge carved by the river Urubamba. It is
the only Incan settlement to have survived intact,
having been completely overlooked by the
Spaniards. It was probably inhabited late into the
16th century, when it was gradually abandoned and
forgotten. (There are other Incan sites in this remote
area, but these have yet to be fully explored.) Some
two hundred buildings arranged on a series of
parallel terraces on both sides of a central plaza
constitute the core of the small settlement that might
have housed at most one thousand people. Access
to the site was difficult; it was a long trek up the steep
gorges, and entry was possible only from one
carefully guarded checkpoint. Because it was a
magnificent site for solar and stellar observation,
some have argued that the city was a royal retreat,
or perhaps even a special temple reserved for the
elite. Key to the success of the site was the artesian
spring at its top that supplied its inhabitants with
water year-round. The genius of Machu Picchu lies
in the terracing and partitioning of the site, which fills
a saddle lying roughly east-west between the two
peaks. The saddle rises sharply in the south and,
after a crest and a short flat plain, slopes gently down
toward the north and the east. It resembles a wave,
with a stable spot at its precarious top. To shore up
the land and to create spaces to build on, the Incan
planners constructed terraces carefully, following
the natural contours of the site. At the eastern end,
there is a sector of terraces, presumably for
cultivation, with a complex network of irrigation
channels.
A long central plaza, gently terracing down toward
the east, sets the stage. On either side of this plaza,
accessed by a complex network of streets and stairs,
are the main buildings. Most are single-room
dwellings; some are clustered around courts, but
most are arranged along narrow pathways limited by
the terrace widths. They are all made of finely fitted
stonemasonry, with wedgeshaped windows and
monolithic lintels, and equipped with water drainage
and harvesting systems. The granite used in the
construction was quarried locally. Gable ends testify
to perishable roofs long gone. There is, however, no
evidence of any adobe construction, suggesting a
highly elite and ceremonial function for the city.
Nestled within this network are some surprising
anomalies: a semicircular, turretlike structure
unexpectedly abuts the residential fabric, and a
series of baths line the central north-south pathway
The high southwestern edge of the saddle is
reserved for a temple, accessed by a long stair from
the east. At the foot of the stair lies what is assumed
to be another temple, with three C-shaped rooms
looking into a central court. At the top of the stair lies
the main temple, the sacred center, dedicated to the
sun. Three steps into an antechamber lead up to the
final terrace, at the center of which lies a huge
granite monolith known as the Intihuatana, or the
“Hitching Post of the Sun.” The Intihuatana stone is
something of a miniature Machu Picchu, resembling
the peak just beyond; it has a series of small
“terraces” culminating in a dramatic outcrop.
Intihuatana stones are believed to have once been
dispersed throughout the Incan world, but they were
destroyed by the Spanish, who considered them
idolatrous. Their exact meaning is uncertain, but
they were likely miniaturized replicas of a sacred
peak to which the Incas imagined the sun could be
tethered by a rope, enabling its circular journey
through the upper and lower worlds. Perhaps Machu
Picchu’s peaks were as close as the Incans thought
they could get to that sacred peak.