Arthur Demarest, Ancient Maya The Rise and Fall of a Rainforest Civilization, p 1
When Cortes arrived in Mexico with his 600 Spaniards, or when Pizarro landed on the coast of Peru with his army of 168, they each faced opponents that far outnumbered them, who inhabited cities that, at times, were the largest in the entire world. The fact that these populations had already been seriously impacted by smallpox and yet still were immense testifies to the enormous civilization that inhabited the New World at the time of the Conquest. The Spaniards were truly frightened in the face of this seemingly innumerable enemy, and succeeded due to their access to advanced technology, such as horses, steel swords and armor, and guns, with the aid of certain indigenous groups.
Jared Diamond, in his Pulitzer Prize winning book Guns, Germs, and Steel, shares an eyewitness account that demonstrates this numerical disparity. He has woven together excerpts from six of Pizarro’s companions. The following is a portion of that text, on page 69:
“Governor Pizarro wished to obtain intelligence from some Indians who had come from Cajamarca, so he had them tortured. They confessed that they had heard that Atahuallpa was waiting for the Governor at Cajamarca. The Governor then ordered us to advance. On reaching the entrance to Cajamarca, we saw the camp of Atahuallpa at a distance of a league, in the skirts of the mountains. The Indians’ camp looked like a very beautiful city. They had so many tents that we were all filled with great apprehension. Until then, we had never seen anything like this in the Indies. It filled all our Spaniards with fear and confusion. But we could not show fear or turn back, for if the Indians had sensed any weakness in us, even the Indians that we were bringing with us as guides would have killed us. So we made a show of good spirits, and after carefully observing the town and the tents, we descended into the valley and entered Cajamarca.
We talked a lot among ourselves about what to do. All of us were full of fear, because we were so few in number and we had penetrated so far into a land where we could not hope to receive reinforcements. We all met with the Governor to debate what we should undertake the next day. Few of us slept that night, and we kept watch in the square of Cajamarca, looking at the campfires of the Indian army. It was a frightening sight. Most of the campfires were on a hillside and so close to each other that it looked like the sky brightly studded with stars. There was no distinction that night between the mighty and the lowly, or between foot soldiers and horsemen. Everyone carried out sentry duty fully armed. So too did the good old Governor, who went about encouraging his men. The Governor’s brother Hernando Pizarro estimated that the number of Indian soldiers there at 40,000, but he was telling a lie just to encourage us, for there were actually more than 80,000 Indians.”
Who were these people who populated the Americas, and from where did they originate?
The inhabitants of Mesoamerica, our particular area of interest, at the time of Conquest were the descendants of people who thrived for centuries in a varied environment that seems inhospitable to our modern eyes. These people, while varying in language and certain elements of specific culture and tradition, shared identifiable traits that can be called Pan-Mesoamerican. In The Maya, the eminent Michael Coe summarizes these traits thusly:
“All the Mesoamerican Indians shared a number of traits which were more or less peculiar to them and absent or rare elsewhere in the New World: hieroglyphic writing, books of fig-bark paper or deerskin which were folded like screens, a complex permutation calendar, knowledge of the movements of the planets (especially Venus) against the background of the stars, a game played with a rubber ball in a special court, highly specialized markets, human sacrifice by head or heart removal, an emphasis upon self-sacrifice by blood drawn from the ears, tongue, or penis, and a highly complex, pantheistic religion which included nature divinities as well as deities emblematic of royal descent. Also in all Mesoamerica religions was the idea of a cosmic cycle of creation and destruction, and of a universe oriented to the four directions with specific colors and gods assigned to the cardinal points and to the center.” (p 13)
The New World was initially colonized around 11,000 B.C via the Bering Strait. Societies proceeded to evolve to varying degrees of complexity in the subsequent millennia. In Mesoamerica, by 1600 B.C. the Olmec culture had begun to evolve and eventually included advanced chiefdoms. The scholarly community is somewhat divided in regards to whether this Olmec culture was the “mother culture” that seeded other, later Mesoamerican cultures, or whether the Olmecs simply shared a larger culture with other Mesoamerican groups evolving around the same time period.
Regardless of that question, other Mesoamerican cultures, notably the Mayan culture, did begin to grow in complexity after the apparent decline of the Olmec culture. These groups continue to grow until around 900 A.D., when there appeared to occur some sort of decline in population, accompanied by a shift in occupation away from the previously concentrated centers. During the centuries of growth prior to this decline, some cities may have even attained a city-state level of complexity.
So far, this information does not seem to be inherently contradictory to the claims of the BoM. A complex civilization is described therein, as well. As always, the devil is in the details. This article is devoted to certain details that are of particular interest to me.
