©1996, Richard Hooker
For information contact: Richard Hines
Updated 6-6-1999
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The culture of the Native Americans was complex, rich, and diverse, displaying unique and profound patterns of thought and life. Urbanization, however, came rather late in the Americas and, like so much else of Native American culture, took on forms never seen elsewhere. Many of the aspects of urban culture were established in the Americas: living in cities, the use of writing, complex social structures, and so on. But there are also some intriguingly unique aspects: several American civilizations did not develop writing systems; all urban American cultures, while adopting an abstract class system, never abandoned kinship as the primary way of organizing society; the growth of urban centers never shifted the economy away from agriculture. In the bustling city of Tenochtitlan, the largest and most complex city of the Native Americans, the bulk of the population left the city in the morning to go farm and returned at night.
Civilization means one and only one thing: urbanization and its attendant social changes. From this standpoint, civilization as a cultural form predominated in only two areas in the Americas: Mesoamerica and South America along the western slopes and hills of the Andes mountain range. Not all of the American civilizations represent true urbanization. While the Olmecs developed most of the cultural forms of Mesoamerican civilization, they really didn't urbanize. The Mayas built incredible cities under difficult conditions throughout Guatemala and Honduras, but only the priests lived in the cities while Mayan life centered on agricultural villages. This life did not essentially change when the Mayas abandoned their cities around 900 AD. Three cultures stand out as "fully urbanized" cultures: the culture of Teotihuacán (200 BC-700 AD) and the Aztecs (~1400-1524) in the Valley of Mexico, and the Incas in South America. The two geographical regions present radically different climates and living conditions. Mesoamerica, which is not the same as Central America, describes an area that begins around Vera Cruz and extends to Honduras. There is a wide diversity of altitudes, rainfalls, and climate types in this region ranging from desert to alpine to low-lying tropical rain-forest. The two areas which were culturally most active were the Valley of Mexico and the Guatemalan lowlands. The western South American coast, on the other hand, was urbanized in the high altitudes along the slopes and foothills of the Andes from Ecuador to Chile. This is a harsh, frequently dry, and cold area. Farmland is scarce, so the administration of human labor reached its most complex levels in the Andean cultures. Mesoamerican and Andean civilizations are talked about in two different terms. The history of Mesoamerican civilizations is oriented around the Classic Period, which ranges from the efflorescence of Teotihuacán in the Valley of Mexico around 300 AD to the decline of the Mayas in the Guatemalan lowlands in 900 AD. The period leading up to this is called the Pre-Classic period, and the period which follows is the post-Classic period. We believe that the bulk of Mesoamerican culture—religion, architecture, social structure, etc.—was formed in the Classic period; the pre-Classic evolves towards the Classic and the post-Classic essentially conserves Classic culture. No one city or peoples dominated Mesoamerica at any time in its history; certain cultures did dominate in a cultural sense as their thought, religion, architecture, art, and social organization was diffused throughout the area. For South American history, we speak of Horizons. No civilization in South America politically dominated the area (the same is true of Mesoamerica), but there were periods of cultural homogenization. During these periods, a single people seem to dominate the cultural "horizon" but do not dominate politically (like an empire). In these periods, there is a cultural center and the civilizations up and down western South America turn to that cultural center for their cultural forms. There are three Horizons in South American history interspersed with two Intermediate periods in which no single people or city dominate the cultural scene. The last of the South American Horizons (the Late Horizon) is dominated by the Inca who, among all the Native Americans, came the closest to building an empire in the Western sense of the word. Richard Hooker |