The history of Andean societies is so rich and complex that it often leaves archaeologists feeling overwhelmed—there is so much to learn that they can never keep up. A single example: scientists did not confirm the existence of the Great Wall of Peru, a forty-mile stone rampart across the Andes, until the 1930s. And it still has never been fully excavated.
(Illustration Credit 7.9)
But then it occurred to me that my views may not have been shared by either the present or the past inhabitants of Norte Chico. I had no idea what people in Wari or Chimor would have thought of the scene before me. So far in this section, I have mainly described the economic and political history of Andean Indians. But people live also in the realm of the affective and aesthetic—that’s why they bury bodies and sometimes dig them up and pour love potions on them. Despite all the knowledge gained by scientists in the last few decades, this emotional realm remains much harder to reach.
An obvious example on the southern coast is the Nazca, famous for the huge patterns they set into the ground. Figures of animals and plants, almost a thousand geometric symbols, arrow-straight lines many miles long—what were they for? Peruvian anthropologist Toribio Mejía Xesspe first brought these famous drawings to the attention of the outside world in 1927. Four decades later, the Swiss writer Erich von Däniken set off an international furor by claiming that the Nazca Indians could not have made these symbols, because they were too big for such “primitive” people to construct, and because they are visible only from the air. Instead, he said, the giant figures were landing signals for space travelers; the whole plain was a sort of gigantic extraterrestrial airport. Expanded in a series of best-selling books, this notion turned the lines into a major tourist attraction. Exasperated scientists pointed out that a) small groups could have constructed the images by moving the dark surface stone to expose the lighter-colored earth beneath, and b) the Nazca did not have to see the figures to experience them, for they can be understood by walking the lines, which it is believed the Indians did. The prevailing theory today is that the straight lines mapped out the area’s many underground faults, which channel water. But nobody knows why the Nazca made the animal and plant figures, which seem less likely to have a direct function. What were the Nazca thinking as they created them? How did they feel when they walked them? To this day, the answers remain frustratingly far away.
Or consider the Moche, leaders of a military state that overran much of the northern coast, submerging the identities of its victims in its own. Huaca del Sol, the Moche capital, contains the largest adobe structure in the Andes, still hauntingly evocative despite centuries of systematic looting. (Unwilling to laboriously dig their way through the palace’s tombs, the Spaniards diverted the Moche River through it, washing out the riches in orthodox Augean-stable style; contemporary thieves have contented themselves with picks and shovels.) After about 300 A.D., Moche artists confined themselves to perhaps half a dozen subjects, painting stories of supernatural figures on pottery and murals with ever more naturalistic technique. Actors reenacted the same stories in grand pageants and ritual celebrations. Individual combat is a common theme; losers were formally stripped of their garments and forced to parade naked. Another oft-repeated tale involves the death and burial of a regal figure. Many of the people in the paintings are sharply individuated. Great effort has gone into studying the Moche, but as Moseley says, their identities and motives often remain “elusive.” The Moche polity broke up around 800 A.D., taking with it our chance to understand.
One of the few moments when I imagined I could encompass something of the inner lives of these long-ago people occurred in Chavín de Huantar, a city of several thousand people that existed between about 800 B.C. and 200 A.D. Its most important feature, a ceremonial temple shaped in a Norte Chico–style U, was a masterpiece of architectural intimidation. Using a network of concealed vents and channels, priests piped loud, roaring sounds at those who entered the temple. Visitors walked up three flights of stairs, growls echoing around them, and into a long, windowless passageway. At the end of the corridor, in a cross-shaped room that flickered with torchlight, was a fifteen-foot-high stone figure with a catlike face, taloned fingers, fierce tusks, and Medusa hair. Nobody today is sure of the god’s identity. Immediately above it, hidden from visitors’ eyes, sat a priestly functionary, who provided the god’s voice. After the long, torchlit approach, walking straight into the gaze of the snarling deity, mysterious bellows reverberating off the stone, the oracular declamation from above must have been spine-chilling.
Most of the complex is open to tourists. Many of the sculptures have been put into museums; others presumably have been looted. Yet walking into the temple still felt to me like entering a mountain of solid rock. Over and over again, Andean stories tell of spirits embodied in stones and giants transformed into natural features. The landscape has an intricate numinous geography; it is charged with meaning that must be respected and heeded. The earth, in this view, is not something to be left alone; the wak’a that litter Peruvian anthropological sites are often partly sculpted, as if they had needed some human attention to manifest their sacred qualities. Thus the human-made tunnels into the temple were part of what made it embody the power of a mountain. As I walked down the dimly lighted corridor toward where the torchlit deity had stood, my fingers ran along the walls created by Chavín craftworkers. They were fit beautifully into place and as cold and hard as the mountains they came from. But they did not gain their power without my hand to close the circuit. The natural world is incomplete without the human touch.
*The statues’ broad lips and flat noses have led “Africanist” historians like Clyde Winters and Ivan Van Sertima to claim that the Olmecs either were visited by Africans or had actually migrated from Africa. The African knowledge gained thereby explains the Olmec’s rapid rise. These views are not widely endorsed. Surprisingly, several noted archaeologists, including Betty Meggers and Gordon Ekholm, have suggested the geographical opposite: that Olmec society was inspired by China. Visitors from the Shang Dynasty are said to have crossed the Pacific to teach the ancient Olmec how to write, build monuments, and worship a feline god. This hypothesis, too, has failed to stir enthusiasm.
*Here, as elsewhere in this book, I am being chronologically inexact. The oldest Zapotec palisade Flannery and Marcus excavated yielded calibrated radiocarbon dates in the range between 1680 and 1410 B.C., which for brevity’s sake I render as “about 1550 B.C.”
*Actually, it didn’t. Inexplicably, the biggest unit, the 144,000-day “millennium,” began with 13, rather than 0. The first day in the calendar was thus 13.0.0.0.0. When I remarked on the peculiarity of this exception to a mathematician, he pointed out societies whose timekeeping systems are so irregular that children have to learn rhymes to remember the number of days in the months (“Thirty days hath September …”) are in no position to scoff at the calendrical eccentricities of other cultures. At least all the “months” in the Mesoamerican calendar had the same number of days, he said.
PART THREE
Landscape with Figures
8
Made in America
ENTERING THE WATER
At some point, Chak Tok Ich’aak must have realized that January 14, 378 A.D., would be his last day on earth. The king of Mutal, the biggest and most cosmopolitan city-state in the Maya world, he lived and worked in a sprawling castle a few hundred yards away from the great temples at the city’s heart. (Now known as Tikal, the ruins of Mutal have become an international tourist attraction.) Audience seekers entered the castle through a set of three richly carved doors in its eastern wall. Inside was a receiving room where petitioners waited for the king’s attention. An inner portal led to a torch-lit chamber, where Chak Tok Ich’aak, flanked by counselors and minions, reclined on an ornate bench. On that bench is, quite possibly, where he met his fate.*
Like most Maya rulers, Chak Tok Ich’aak spent a lot of his time luxuriating in his court while dwarf servants attended t
o his whims and musicians played conch shells and wooden trumpets in the background. But he also excelled at such regal duties as performing ritual public dances, sending out trade expeditions in search of luxury goods, and fighting wars—a celebratory stela has Chak Tok Ich’aak personally stomping a manacled POW. In another portrait, a bas-relief, the king is depicted as an alert man with a long breechclout and a jeweled mass of necklaces, bracelets, anklets, and pendants clicking and clattering about his person. Towering a foot over his skull was an elaborate headdress in the shape of a bird of prey, complete with swirling plumage. Like most Maya art, the portrait is too stylized to regard as a naturalistic rendering. Nonetheless, it effectively makes its point: Chak Tok Ich’aak was a major historical figure.
Mutai (modern Tikal) and the huge city-empire of Teotihuacan had trade relations—peaceful, so far as is known—that dated back to 200 A.D. Matters abruptly changed in January 378, when a force led by the Teotihuacan general Siyaj K’ak’ arrived in the court of the Mutal king Chak Tok Ich’aak As depicted on a painting wrapped around a Mutal vase, the foreign soldiers, shown with bundles of spears and atlatls, marched away from a Teotihuacan-style building (above) and confronted the lightly clad Mutal king on the steps of his palace (near left). The outcome of the meeting—Chak Tok Ich’aak’s death—may be hinted at in the final image (far left), in which longhaired Maya pay their respects to an empty pyramid.
(Illustration Credit 8.1)
By combining scraps of data on several inscriptions, archaeologists have calculated that Chak Tok Ich’aak probably acceded to the throne in 360 A.D. At the time, the Maya realm consisted of sixty or so small, jostling statelets scattered across what is now northern Belize and Guatemala and the Yucatán Peninsula. Mutal was older and wealthier than most, but otherwise not strikingly different. Chak Tok Ich’aak changed that. During the eighteen years of his reign, the city acquired diplomatic stature and commercial clout; its population grew to perhaps ten thousand and it established trade contacts throughout Mesoamerica. As it prospered, Mutal attracted considerable attention—which, in the end, may have been the king’s undoing.
Marching toward him that January day was an armed force from Teotihuacan, 630 miles to the west. Already in control of most of central Mexico, Teotihuacan was looking for new lands to dominate. Leading the expedition was one Siyaj K’ak’, apparently a trusted general or counselor to the ruler of Teotihuacan. Four Maya cities along Siyaj K’ak’’s path recorded his progress in murals, panel paintings, and stelae. Texts and images depict the Teotihuacanos as gaudily martial figures with circular mirrors strapped to their backs and squared-off helmets sweeping protectively in front of the jaw. They were bare-chested but wore fringed leggings and heavy shell necklaces and high-strapped sandals. In their hands were atlatls and obsidian darts to throw with them. Painted panels in one city show Maya soldiers in jaguar uniforms rushing to attack the visitors, but in fact it seems unlikely that any of the small settlements between Teotihuacan and Mutal would have dared to harass them.
No detailed description of the encounter between Siyaj K’ak’ and Chak Tok Ich’aak exists, but it is known that discussion did not go on for long. They two men met on January 14, 378 A.D. On that same day Chak Tok Ich’aak “entered the water,” according to an account carved on a later stela. The Maya saw the afterworld as a kind of endless, foggy sea. “Entering the water” was thus a euphemism on the order of “passed on to a better place.” Readers of the stela would understand that Chak Tok Ich’aak’s old heart had quietly stopped beating after Siyaj K’ak’ or one of his troops slipped a blade into it. Likely the rest of his family perished, as well as anyone else who objected. In any case no one seems to have complained when Siyaj K’ak’ established a new dynasty at Mutal by installing the son of his Teotihuacan master on the vacant throne.
Chak Tok Ich’aak’s death began a tumultuous period in Mesoamerican history. The new, Teotihuacan-backed dynasty at Mutal drove the city to further heights of power and prestige. Inevitably, its expansion was resented. A northern city-state, Kaan (now known as Calakmul), conscripted an army from its client states and launched a series of attacks. The ensuing strife lasted 150 years, spread across the Maya heartland, and resulted in the pillage of a dozen city-states, among them both Mutal and Kaan. After suffering repeated losses, Mutal unexpectedly defeated the superior forces of Kaan, possibly killing its king to boot. The beaten, humiliated Kaan lost the support of its vassals and was reduced to penury.
Mutal once again reclaimed its heritage from imperial Teotihuacan. But its triumph, though long sought, was short-lived. In one of archaeology’s most enduring mysteries, Maya civilization crumbled around it within a century. After a final flash of imperial splendor, the city joined Kaan and most central Maya cities in obscurity and ruin. By about 900 A.D., both Mutal and Kaan stood almost empty, along with dozens of other Maya cities. And soon even the few people who still lived there had forgotten their imperial glories.
“GETTING ALONG WITH NATURE”
Why did the Maya abandon all their cities?
“No words are more calculated to strike dismay in the hearts of Maya archaeologists,” the Maya archaeologist David Webster confessed in 2002. Webster, a researcher at Pennsylvania State University, admitted that during his “incautious younger years” he often told fellow airplane passengers that he was flying to work “at some ancient Maya center. Then, with utter predictability, [would come] the dreaded question. Nowadays, older and wiser, I usually mutter something vague about ‘business’ and then bury my nose in the airline magazine.”
One reason Webster avoided the question is its scope. Asking what happened to the ancient Maya is like asking what happened in the Cold War—the subject is so big that one hardly knows where to begin. At the same time, that very sweep is why the Maya collapse has fascinated archaeologists since the 1840s, when the outside world first learned of the abandoned cities in Yucatán. Today we know that the fall was not quite as rapid, dramatic, and widespread as earlier scholars believed. Nevertheless, according to Billie Lee Turner, a geographer at Clark University, in Worcester, Massachusetts, it was unique in world history. Cultures rise and fall, but there is no other known time when a large-scale society disintegrated—and was replaced by nothing. “When the Roman Empire fell apart,” he said, “Italy didn’t empty out—no cities, no major societies—for more than a thousand years. But the Maya heartland did just that.” What happened?
In the 1930s, Sylvanus G. Morley of Harvard, probably the most celebrated Mayanist of his day, espoused what is still the best-known theory: The Maya collapsed because they overshot the carrying capacity of their environment. They exhausted their resource base, began to die of starvation and thirst, and fled their cities en masse, leaving them as silent warnings of the perils of ecological hubris.
When Morley proposed his theory, it was little more than a hunch. Since then, though, scientific measurements, mainly of pollen in lake sediments, have shown that the Maya did cut down much of the region’s forest, using the wood for fuel and the land for agriculture. The loss of tree cover would have caused large-scale erosion and floods. With their fields disappearing beneath their feet and a growing population to feed, Maya farmers were forced to exploit ever more marginal terrain with ever more intensity. The tottering system was vulnerable to the first good push, which came in the form of a century-long dry spell that hit Yucatán between about 800 and 900 A.D. Social disintegration followed soon thereafter.
Recounted in numberless articles and books, the Maya collapse has become an ecological parable for green activists; along with Pleistocene overkill, it is a favorite cautionary tale about surpassing the limits of Nature. The Maya “were able to build a complex society capable of great cultural and intellectual achievements, but they ended up destroying what they created,” Clive Ponting wrote in his influential Green History of the World (1991). Following the implications of the Maya fall, he asked, “Are contemporary societies any better at controlling
the drive toward ever greater use of resources and heavier pressure on the environment? Is humanity too confident about its ability to avoid ecological disaster?” The history of these Indians, Ponting and others have suggested, has much to teach us today.
Curiously, though, environmentalists also describe Native American history as embodying precisely the opposite lesson: how to live in a spiritual balance with Nature. Bookstore shelves groan beneath the weight of titles like Sacred Ecology, Guardians of the Earth, Mother Earth Spirituality, and Indigenous Traditions and Ecology: The Interbeing of Cosmology and Community. So strongly endorsed is this view of Native Americans that checklists exist to judge whether books correctly depict their environmental values. The Native Cultures Authenticity Guideline, for instance, assesses the portrayal of the “Five Great Values” shared by all “the major Native cultures” (including, one assumes, the Maya), one of which is “Getting Along with Nature”—“respecting the sacred natural harmony of and with Nature.” To be historically accurate, according to the guidelines, major native cultures must be shown displaying “a proper reverence for the gift of life.”
Indians as poster children for eco-catastrophe, Indians as green role models: the two images contradict each other less than they seem. Both are variants of Holmberg’s Mistake, the idea that Indians were suspended in time, touching nothing and untouched themselves, like ghostly presences on the landscape. The first two sections of this book were devoted to two different ways that researchers have recently repudiated this perspective. I showed that they have raised their estimates of indigenous populations in 1492, and their reasons for it; and then why most researchers now believe that Indian societies have been here longer than had been imagined, and grew more complex and technologically accomplished than previously thought. In this section I treat another facet of Holmberg’s Mistake: the idea that native cultures did not or could not control their environment. The view that Indians left no footprint on the land is an obvious example. That they marched heedlessly to tragedy is a subtler one. Both depict indigenous people as passively accepting whatever is meted out to them, whether it is the fruits of undisturbed ecosystems or the punishment for altering them.