Part 1: Mayans Part 2: Incas

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Part 1 Mayans Part 2 Incas

• Lsn 6

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Part 1 MayansTheme The connection between
agriculture, religion, and society

• Lsn 6

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ID SIG

• bloodletting rituals, cocoa, maize, Maya, Mayan
  calendar, Mayan decline, Olmec, Popol Vuh, Temple
  of the Giant Jaguar, Tikal

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Olmecs and Mayans
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Olmecs

• Earliest known ceremonial centers of the ancient
  Americas appeared near modern day Veracruz around
  1200 B.C.
• Served as the nerve center for the first complex
  society of the Americas, the Olmecs
• Olmec was not what the people called themselves
• It means rubber people and comes from the
  rubber trees that flourish in the region

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Characteristics of Olmec Civilization

• Intensive agricultural techniques
• Area received abundant rainfall so extensive
  irrigation systems were unnecessary
• Still the Olmecs built elaborate drainage systems
  to divert waters that might otherwise have caused
  floods
• Specialization of labor
• Jade craftsmen
• Cities
• Built around ceremonial centers at San Lorenzo,
  La Venta, and Tres Zapotes
• A social hierarchy
• Society was probably authoritarian
• Common subjects provided labor and tribute to the
  elite

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Characteristics of Olmec Civilization

• Organized religion and education
• Ceremonial centers, priests, temples, altars, and
  human sacrifice
• Development of complex forms of economic exchange
• Imported jade and obsidian and exported small
  jade, basalt, and ceramic works of art
• Development of new technologies
• Excellent astronomers and mathematicians who
  developed a calendar
• Advanced development of the arts. (This can
  include writing.)
• Created colossal human heads sculpted from basalt
  rock

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Olmec Head at La Venta
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Decline of the Olmec

• Olmecs systematically destroyed their ceremonial
  centers at both San Lorenzo and La Venta and then
  deserted the sites
• Statues were broken and buried, monuments
  defaced, and capitals burned
• No one knows why, but some speculate reasons
  involving civil conflicts or doubts about the
  effectiveness or legitimacy of the ruling classes
• By about 400 B.C., Olmec society had fallen on
  hard times and other societies soon eclipsed it

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Mayans

• Began to develop around 300 A.D. in what is now
  southern Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, and
  El Salvador
• Known as The People of the Jaguar

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(No Transcript)
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Olmec Influence on the Mayans

• Maize
• Ceremonial centers with temple pyramids
• Calendar based on the Olmec one
• Ball games
• Rituals involving human sacrifice

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Characteristics of a Civilization

• Intensive agricultural techniques
• Specialization of labor
• Cities
• A social hierarchy
• Organized religion and education
• Development of complex forms of economic exchange
• Development of new technologies
• Advanced development of the arts. (This can
  include writing.)

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Agriculture
Maize
Cacao
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Agriculture

• Soil in Mesoamerican lowlands was thin and
  quickly lost fertility
• Mayans built terraces to retain the silt and
  therefore greatly improved agricultural
  production
• Raised maize, cotton, and cacao
• Cacao was a precious commodity consumed mostly by
  nobles and even used as money

Cacao tree
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Cities
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Cities Tikal

• From about 300 to 900, the Maya built more than
  eight large ceremonial centers
• All had pyramids, palaces, and temples
• Some of the larger ones attracted dense
  populations and evolved into genuine cities
• The most important was Tikal
• Small city-kingdoms served as the means of Mayan
  political organization

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Cities Tikal

• Tikal was the most important Mayan political
  center between the 4th and 9th Centuries
• Reached its peak between 600 and 800 with a
  population of nearly 40,000
• The Temple of the Jaguar dominated the skyline
  and represented Tikals control over the
  surrounding region which had a population of
  about 500,000

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Tikal Temple of the Jaguar

• 154 feet high
• Served as funerary pyramid for Lord Cacao, Maya
  ruler of the late 6th and early 7th centuries

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Social Hierarchy
A Mayan Warrior
A Mayan Priest
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Social Hierarchy

• King and ruling family
• Priests
• Hereditary nobility (from which came the merchant
  class)
• Warriors
• Professionals and artisans
• Peasants
• Slaves

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Social Hierarchy

• King and ruling family
• Ruled from the city-kingdoms such as Tikal
• Ruled by semi-divine right and believed their
  connection with the gods was maintained by ritual
  human sacrifice
• Often had names associated with the jaguar
• Priests
• Maintained an elaborate calendar and transmitted
  knowledge of writing, astronomy, and mathematics

A Mayan King
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Social Hierarchy

• Hereditary nobility (from which came the merchant
  class)
• Owned most of the land and cooperated with the
  kings and priests by organizing military forces
  and participating in religious rituals
• Warriors
• Mayan kingdoms fought constantly with each other
  and warriors won tremendous prestige by capturing
  high-ranking enemies
• Captives were usually made slaves, humiliated,
  tortured, and ritually sacrificed

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Social Hierarchy

• Professionals and artisans
• Architects and sculptors supervised construction
  of the large monuments and public buildings
• Peasants
• Fed the entire society
• Slaves
• Provided physical labor for the construction of
  cities and monuments
• Often had been captured in battle

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Specialization
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Specialization

• Astronomers
• Mathematicians
• Warriors
• Architects and sculptors
• Potters
• Tool manufacturers
• Textile makers

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Religion and Education
Human Sacrifice and Bloodletting Ritual
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Religion Importance of Agriculture

• Mayan religion reflected the fundamental role of
  agriculture in their society
• Popol Vuh, was the Mayan creation myth that
  taught that the gods had created human beings out
  of maize and water
• Gods kept the world in order and maintained the
  agricultural cycle in exchange for honors and
  sacrifices

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Religion Bloodletting Rituals

• Mayans believed the shedding of human blood would
  prompt the gods to send rain to water the maize
• Bloodletting involved both war captives and Mayan
  royals

Mayan queen holds a bowl filled with strips of
paper used to collect blood.
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Religion Bloodletting

• A popular bloodletting ritual was for a Mayan to
  pierce his own tongue and thread a thin rope
  through the hole, thus letting the blood run down
  the rope

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Religion The Ball Game

• Mayans inherited a ball game from the Olmecs that
  was an important part of Mayan political and
  religious festivals
• High-ranking captives were forced to play the
  game for their very lives
• The losers became sacrificial victims and faced
  torture and execution immediately following the
  match
• Object of the game was to propel an 8 inch ball
  of solid baked rubber through a ring or onto a
  marker without using your hands

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Mayan Ball Court
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Economic Exchange
Mayan symbol for movement
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Economic Exchange

• Traveling merchants served not just as traders
  but also as ambassadors to neighboring lands and
  allied people
• Traded mainly in exotic and luxury goods such as
  rare animal skins, cacao beans, and finely
  crafted works of art which rulers coveted as
  signs of special status
• Cacao used as money

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New Technologies
Mayan Calendar
Observatory at El Caracol
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New Technologies

• Excelled in astronomy and mathematics
• Could plot planetary cycles and predict eclipses
  of the sun and moon
• Invented the concept of zero and used a symbol to
  represent zero mathematically, which facilitated
  the manipulation of large numbers
• By combining astronomy and mathematics,
  calculated the length of the solar year at
  365.242 days about 17 seconds shorter than the
  figure reached by modern astronomers

Mayan numerical system
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New Technologies Calendar

• Mayan priests developed the most elaborate
  calendar of the ancient Americas
• Interwove two kinds of year
• A solar year of 365 days governed the
  agricultural cycle
• A ritual year of 260 days governed daily affairs
  by organizing time into twenty months of
  thirteen days each
• Believed each day derived certain characteristics
  from its position on both the solar and ritual
  calendars and carefully studied the combinations
• Lucky and unlucky days

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Art and Writing
Mayan writing
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Writing

• Expanded on Olmec tradition to create the most
  flexible and sophisticated of all early American
  systems of writing
• Contained both ideographic elements and symbols
  for syllables
• Used to write works of history, poetry, and myth
  and keep genealogical, administrative, and
  astronomical records

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Mayan Decline

• By about 800, most Mayan populations had begun to
  desert their cities
• Full scale decline followed everywhere but in the
  northern Yucatan
• Possible causes include foreign invasion,
  internal dissension and civil war, failure of the
  water control system leading to agricultural
  disaster, ecological problems caused by
  destruction of the forests, epidemic diseases,
  and natural disasters

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Part 2 IncasTheme Centralization and the
triumph of the human spirit

• Lsn 6

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ID SIG

• Cuzco, Inca roads, quipu, terrace farming

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Inca
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Inca

• By the 13th Century, the Inca had established
  domination over the regional states in Andean
  South America
• In 1438, Pachacuti launched a series of military
  campaigns that greatly expanded Inca authority
• Success bred success and the Inca empire expanded
• By the late 15th Century, the Inca empire covered
  more than 2,500 miles, embracing almost all of
  modern Peru, most of Ecuador, much of Bolivia,
  and parts of Chile and Argentina

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Characteristics of a Civilization

• Intensive agricultural techniques
• Specialization of labor
• Cities
• A social hierarchy
• Organized religion and education
• Development of complex forms of economic exchange
• Development of new technologies
• Advanced development of the arts. (This can
  include writing.)

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Agriculture
Llamas
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Agriculture

• Intensive agricultural techniques
• Inca empire spanned many types of environments
  and required terraces to make farmland out of the
  mountainous terrain
• Chief crop was the potato
• Herded llamas and alpacas for meat, wool, hides,
  and dung (used as fuel)
• every civilization represents a triumph of the
  human spirit.
• Upshur, p. 14

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Social Hierarchy
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Social Hierarchy

• In order to rule the massive territory and
  populations they had conquered, the Incas
  completely restructured much of Andean society
• Relocated populations
• Reordered the economy
• Constructed an extensive transportation network
• Inculcated a state religion

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Social Hierarchy

• Rulers
• Aristocrats
• Priests
• Bureaucrats
• Peasant cultivators of common birth

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Social Hierarchy

• Chief ruler was a god-king who theoretically
  owned everything and was an absolute and
  infallible ruler
• Dead rulers retained their prestige even after
  death
• Remains were mummified and state deliberations
  often took place in their presence in order to
  benefit from their counsel
• Were seen as intermediaries with the gods

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Social Hierarchy

• Aristocrats lived privileged lives including fine
  foods, embroidered clothes, and large ears spools
• Spanish called them big ears

Inca ear spools
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Social Hierarchy

• Priests often came from royal and aristocratic
  families
• They lived celibate and ascetic lives
• Influenced Inca society by education and
  religious rituals
• Large class of bureaucrats to support centralized
  government
• Bureaucrats administered over sections of the
  population based on numerical rather than
  geographic distribution
• Bureaucrats often were drawn from the loyal ranks
  of conquered people

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Social Hierarchy

• Peasants worked lands allocated to them and
  delivered substantial portions of their
  production to the bureaucrats
• Surplus supported the ruling, aristocratic, and
  priestly classes as well as providing public
  relief in times of famine or to widows
• Also owed compulsory labor services to the Inca
  state
• Men provided heavy labor
• Women provided tribute in the forms of textiles,
  pottery, and jewelry

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Cities
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Cities Cuzco

• Inca capital at Cuzco served as the
  administrative, religious, and ceremonial center
  of the empire
• May have supported 300,000 residents at the
  height of the Inca empire in the late 15th
  Century
• Tremendous system of roads emanated from Cuzco

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New Technologies
Major Roads of the Inca Empire
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New Technologies Roads

• Built an all-weather highway system of over
  16,000 miles
• Ran through deep valleys and over mountains,
  through piles of snow, quagmires, living rock,
  along turbulent rivers in some places it ran
  smooth and paved, carefully laid out in others
  over sierras, cut through the rock, with walls
  skirting the rivers, and steps and rests through
  the snow everywhere it was clean swept and kept
  free of rubbish, with lodgings, storehouses,
  temples to the sun, and posts along the way.
  (Ciezo de Leon)

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New Technologies Roads

• Allowed the Inca government to maintain
  centralized control by moving military forces
  around the empire quickly, transporting food
  supplies where needed, and tying the widespread
  territories together
• Rest stations were built a days walk apart
• Runners were positioned at convenient intervals
  to deliver government messages

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Economic Exchange
Inca gold
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Economic Exchange

• Inca society did not produce large classes of
  merchants or skilled artisans
• Locally they bartered among themselves for
  surplus agricultural production and handcrafted
  goods
• Long distance trade was supervised by the central
  government using the excellent Inca roads

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Economic Exchange

• Gold, the Incas most valuable commodity, proved
  to be their undoing when Spanish conquistadors
  destroyed much of the empire in the early 1500s
  in search of gold
• The Spanish melted down almost all the gold so
  few works of art remain

Arrival of Francisco Pizarro in South America
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Specialization of Labor
Inca textile fragment
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Specialization of Labor

• Large class of bureaucrats to support centralized
  government
• Much fewer skilled craftsmen than other people of
  Mexica and the eastern hemisphere
• Some potters, textile workers, and tool makers
• Inca designated different specialties for
  captured people to meet the societys needs

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Religion and Education
Inti Raymi, the feast of the sun
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Religion and Education

• Main god was Inti, god of the sun
• In the capital of Cuzco, some 4,000 priests,
  attendants, and virgin devotees served Inti
• Sacrificed agricultural produce or animals rather
  than humans
• Inca religion taught that sin was a violation of
  the established or natural order
• Believed sin could bring divine disaster for
  individuals and communities
• Had rituals for confession and penance
• Believed in life after death where an individual
  received rewards or punishments based on the
  quality of his earthly life

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Art and Writing
Quipu (khipu)
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Art and Writing

• The Inca had no writing
• Instead they kept records using a quipu
• A array of small cords of various colors and
  lengths, all suspended from a thick cord
• By tying knots in the small cords, Inca could
  record statistical information

586 on a quipu
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