Ancient North America Part of the magnificent Chichen Izta site, ruins of a Mayan city-state in southern Mexico. (Source unknown) Everything was shining with lime and decorated with different kinds of stonework and paintings which were a marvel to gaze on.... I say again that I stood looking at it, and thought that no land like it would ever be discovered in the whole world, because at that time Peru was neither known nor thought of. But today all that I then saw is overthrown and destroyed; nothing is left standing." -- Bernal Diaz, "The Conquest of New Spain" (1568), on the sight of the fabulous city of Tenochtitlan-- Mexico City-- before the Europeans destroyed it.  A reconstruction of the city of Mexico, called Tenochtitlan by the Mexica (Aztecs). Taken when I was 15, in Mexico City. >From my Photography page. It's a poorly known fact that there were vast civilizations scattered up and down the Americas. Trade and culture stretched from Southern Ontario and the copper mines north of Lake Superior (in modern-day Canada), the West Coast, through the Mississippi and Ohio valleys, to Florida, the American South and Southwest, the Valley of Mexico and the Yucatan. It may even have extended right into South America. The West Coast had classic city-states. Mexico was home to such a fantastically rich series of civilizations it has to be called one of the few cradles of civilization, along with China, the Middle East and the Mediterranean. The American South-Western deserts and canyons were home to the "anasazi", "Old Ones", who built great desert cities. In South America, the Andes mountains housed magnificent societies, eventually controlled by the united rule of the Incan Empire. Colombia was home to complex agricultural centres, and the raised fields of Colombia's native societies are still visible. The Caribbean islands were densely populated and prosperous, with the farmers and fishers of Haiti (the ancient Taino, Carib and Arawak), Cuba and the many other tropical islands.  Teotihuacan, Mexico For pictures of the modern ruins, see my Photography page.  Reconstruction of the city of Cahokia at its height, A.D. 1200. Illinois, U.S.A. (click for more) The ruins builtby these settled, agricultural peoples and their legacies are everywhere; we only have to look. As well as settled peoples, there were also dozens of highly accomplished non-agricultural and mobile cultures. These include the Inuit of the Canadian north, able to survive in an extreme climate using sophisticated and elegant social and material technologies; the migratory plains peoples, clever hunters following their prey and raiding the more settled peoples on the finges of the Great Plains; the jungle hunters of the Amazonian basin, living deep within the rainforest. The cultural loss that was the result of the European invasion of the Americas may be irreplaceable. |