Contact: John Kicza, Professor of History, WSU Pullman, 509-335-4581, jekicza@wsu.edu
Resilient Cultures: A New Understanding of the World
The Codex Nuttall, a widely studied pre-Columbian Mexican manuscript, provides an intriguing glimpse into the art and culture of the early Americas. It depicts the events in the life of a great military and political hero, 8-Deer Tiger Claw, the second ruler of the second dynasty of Tilantongo. He lived from 1011 A.D. to 1063 A.D.
During the Columbian Quincentenary of 1992, I was disturbed by common misconceptions, held even by scholars, concerning the character of European-Native American interactions in the colonial period. I decided that my next major research project would be an interpretive synthesis of the colonial encounters in the Americas and of the ways in which native peoples responded to these encounters and maintained their separate cultures. In order to make valid comparisons of the encounters over such a vast area and involving so many distinct peoples, my first task was to classify the indigenous cultures based on their systems of agricultural production and the types of societies that resulted.
Sedentary societies
Sedentary peoples practiced agriculture on land of sufficient quality to enable them to reside in one location. They could thereby develop large urban populations that were subdivided into different social ranks and craft specializations. In the Americas, all of the sedentary societies were located in Mexico and Central America-an area commonly termed Mesoamerica-and in the Andean Zone, the mountain highlands and adjacent coastal lowlands that extend from Colombia into northern Chile. Many people lived in communities that numbered in the thousands and even tens of thousands. Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital, contained over 200,000 residents when the Spanish arrived; Cuzco, the Inca capital, contained around 60,000.
Both sedentary zones contained dozens of distinct ethnic provinces, many of which spoke mutually unintelligible languages. These provinces had developed state structures, complete with royal dynasties and governmental bureaucracies, well over a thousand years before contact with Europe. They frequently conducted warfare against neighboring provinces, and the victors sought to construct empires, demanding tribute payments or labor service from the vanquished.
Many Mesoamerican societies maintained official scribes who composed their records and histories. (Unfortunately, no similar group seems to have emerged in the Andes.) Most of the surviving documents and carvings from the pre-contact era have been translated, providing insights into provincial and dynastic histories. Soon after the Spanish conquest, some members of these Mesoamerican societies learned to write their indigenous languages in the Spanish alphabet, producing a vast body of documentation, much of which has been preserved.
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