State-Building in the Americas
(All dates are approximate)
1500 B.C.E.: Cerro Sechin (Peru)
1200 B.C.E.: Sechin Alto
1000 B.C.E.: Chavin civilization emerges
1000 B.C.E.: Olmec cities of San Lorenzo and La Venta flourishing
500 B.C.E.: End of Chavin civilization
300 B.C.E.: Olmec Civilization in Decline
States developed in the Andes the same way they developed in the Old
World – as responses to trade. They followed the model that begins with
intensified agriculture, leading to population density, economic
specialization, growing markets, and trade.
I. Cerro Sechin: 3,500 years ago
One of the most ancient monumental sites in Peru, Cerro Sechin is located
in the Casma Valley, 168 miles north of Lima. The site is best known for its
megalithic architecture and engraved stone slabs, which depict graphic
scenes of human sacrifice and death. Cerro Sechin is part of a larger group
of sites known as the Sechin Complex, a group of contemporaneous
settlements in the Casma Valley that exhibit similar monumental public and
ceremonial architecture, and which practiced small-scale irrigation
agriculture. All of the sites in the Sechin Complex were ideally situated on
or nearby fertile agricultural land and their close proximity to communities
on the coast provided easy access to marine resources.
The stone sculptures, undoubtedly the most famous feature at Cerro
Sechin, depict a possible mythological or historical scene in which a
procession of armed men, probably important personages or warriors,
make their way among the mutilated remains of human victims. Given the
gruesome nature of the stone frieze, it seems likely that some degree of
warfare, violence, and/or raiding existed among these early valley peoples.
Though little is known about Cerro Sechin's demise, the site appears to
have been abandoned by 800 B.C., paralleling the decline of other
important ceremonial and public centers on the Peruvian coast at this time.
These places, and others like them, suggest new experiments to manage
the environment and coordinate food production in numerous small, hilly
areas, each irrigated by a gravity canal and organized from a central seat of
power. The violent carvings of Cerro Sechin show the price paid in blood to
defend or enlarge them.
II. Cupisnique Gorge Culture:
The physical remains here suggest a different culture and different politics.
Huaca de los Reyes, for instance, had dozens of stucco-fronted buildings
and colonnades of fat pillars, guarded by huge, saber-toothed heads in
clay. At Pampa de Cana Cruz, a gigantic mosaic, 170 feet long, made of
thousands of fragments of colored rock, represented a similar head. It was
embedded in the earth, so that a viewer could only appreciate its shape
from a great height- a height the humans who made it could not reach, but
their gods, perhaps, could.
These regions traded with the nearby highlands, where building on a
monumental scale followed soon afterward in the Cajamarca valley and the
Upper Huallaga valley. These sites constitute evidence of extraordinary
cultural diversity among connected communities within a fairly small
space.
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Most Andean experiments in civilization were short lived. With modest
technologies, they struggled to survive in unstable environments. El Nino –
the periodic reversal of the normal flow of Pacific currents – was always a
looming threat. At irregular intervals, usually once or twice a decade, El
Nino drenches the region in torrential rain and kills or diverts the usually
ample supply of ocean fish. Andean civilizations also faced crises their
own success caused when population levels outgrew food supplies, or
overexploitation impoverished the soil, or envious neighbors unleashed
wars.
III. Chavin de Huantar: 1000 B.C.E. (Mosna River)
Had command of trade routes and the availability of diverse foodstuffs that
grow in the microclimates of mountain environments. Gold-working
technology provided objects for luxury trade, and forest products from east
of the mountains were also in demand in the lowland cities. Chavin was in
the middle of these trades, acting as a distribution center.
Chavin Achievements:
a. Architecture
b. Water management
c. Engineering
d. Metal work
e. Ceramics
People from all over the central Andes and lowlands admired and imitated
Chavin and its arts. Sculpture of the culture hint that shamans ruled the
society – the go-betweens who rise above the level of their subjects by
drug induced ecstasies to communicate with the gods.
In Central America stunning experiments in civilization began, as far as we
know, without the benefit of trade.
IV. Olmec:
Arose in the province of Tabasco in southern Mexico in the second
millennium B.C.E.
The Olmec heartland is an area on the south coast of the Gulf of Mexico
coastal plain of southern Veracruz and Tabasco, is thus called because of
the concentration of a large number of Olmec monuments as well as the
greatest Olmec sites.
The area is about 125 miles long and 50 miles wide (200 by 80 km), with the
Coatzalcoalcos River system running through the middle. These sites
include San Lorenzo Tenochtitlán, Laguna de los Cerros, Tres Zapotes, and
La Venta is one of the greatest of the Olmec sites.
La Venta is dated to between 1200 BCE through 400 BCE, which places the
major development of the city in the Middle Formative Period. Located on
an island in a coastal swamp overlooking the then-active Río Palma River,
the city of La Venta probably controlled a region between the Mezcalapa
and Coatzacoalcos rivers.
The site itself is about 18 miles inland with the island consisting of slightly
more than 2 square miles of dry land. The main part of the site is a complex
of clay constructions stretched out for 12 miles in a North-South direction,
although the site is 8° West of true North.
Chose settlement sites near mangrove swamps and rain forest, close to
beach and ocean, where they could exploit a variety of environments. They
dredged mounds for farming from the swamp, and between the mounds,
coaxed canals into a grid for raising fish, turtles, and perhaps caymens.
These agricultural mounds became the model for ceremonial platforms.
The earliest known ceremonial center was built above the Coatzalcos River
around 1200 B.C.E. Two other large centers were built at La Venta, deep
among the mangrove swamps on the Tonala River, and at nearbny San
Lorenzo in what is now the state of Vera Cruz in Mexico.
San Lorenzo and La Venta: 1000 B.C.E.
Extensive reservoirs and drainage systems
Causeways, plazas, platforms, and mounds
Ritual spaces
(Speculation)
Olmec civilization was able to flourish by farming high-yielding varieties of
maize paired with beans and squash. The three plants together were so
important to Olmec life that they depicted them on gods’ and chieftain’s
headgear.
Rulers were buried in the sort of disguises they wore for ritual
performances. They became fantastic creatures with a cayman’s body and
nose, a jaguar’s eyes and mouth, and feathered eyebrows that evoke raised
hands. They lay in pillared chambers with bloodletting tools of jade or
stingray spine beside them. We can still see their images carved on bench
like thrones of basalt, where they sat to shed blood – their own and their
captives’. One of these carvings shows a throne with a submissive figure
roped to a majestic character in an eagle headdress, who leans outward as
if to address an audience.
Olmec influence on Mesoamerica:
a. Mound building
b. Tendency to seek balance and symmetry in art and architecture
c. Ambitious urban planning around angular temples and plazas
d. Specialized elites including chieftains
e. Monumental art
f. Rites of rulership involving bloodletting and human sacrifice
g. A religion rooted in shamanism with bloody rites of sacrifice and
ecstatic performances by kings and priests
h. Agriculture based on maize, beans, and squash