Native Americans of Middle and South America, indigenous peoples of
Middle America (Mexico, Central America, and the West Indies) and South
America. Native Americans were the first humans to inhabit these regions,
arriving thousands of years before European explorers laid claim to the “New
World.”
The story of Native Americans begins in the
ancient past. Scientists believe that the first human settlers of the Americas
migrated from northeastern Asia during the last ice age, which ended 10,000
years ago. Whereas today the waters of the Bering Strait separate Asia and
North America, during the ice age sea levels were much lower, and a wide land
bridge, called Beringia, connected the continents. Anthropologists believe one
or more waves of people crossed this bridge to North America, and through
countless generations, eventually made their way down to Central America and
across the Isthmus of Panama into South America.
In what in evolutionary terms was a brief flash of
time, the descendants of those first migrants adapted to nearly every
environment throughout Middle and South America, from the temperate highlands
of Mexico and tropical rain forest of the Amazon Basin to the grassy pampas of
Argentina and frigid islands of southernmost Chile. In Middle America and in
the Andes mountains of South America, Native Americans began to grow maize
(corn), beans, squash, and many other crops. As agriculture and food production
intensified, populations soared, eventually developing into great states and
empires of immense size, wealth, and complexity. The largest and best known of
these were the Maya civilization, the Aztec Empire, and the Inca Empire. Other
important civilizations included the Olmec, Teotihuacán, Toltec, and Zapotec
cultures of Middle America; and the Chavín, Moche, Nazca, Tiwanaku
(Tiahuanaco), and Chimú cultures of the Andes.
When Italian-Spanish explorer Christopher Columbus
landed in the Bahamas in 1492, he thought he had reached islands off the
eastern coast of Asia, which was then known as the Indies. Perhaps because of
this belief, he called the villagers who greeted him indios, which later
became the English word Indian. During the colonial period in
Spanish-speaking Middle and South America, many indigenous peoples came to
detest the name indio because it was accompanied by their subjugation
and maltreatment at the hands of European conquerors. Although the use of indio
persists to the present, anthropologists today generally use the term indigenous
peoples when referring to the native inhabitants of Latin America and their
ancestors; some also use the English terms Indian or Native American
in scholarly writing. Like their counterparts in North America, the indigenous
peoples themselves prefer to be identified by their specific tribal name, such
as Huichol, Maya, Ynomamö, or Aymara. This article uses the terms Native
Americans, indigenous peoples, and native peoples
interchangeably when referring generally to the indigenous inhabitants of
Middle and South America.
Intermarriage between Native Americans and Europeans began
almost immediately from the time of European conquest. The children of these
unions became known as mestizos. Mestizos now constitute a large
proportion of the population in many Latin American countries, including
Mexico, Guatemala, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia. It is often very difficult to
distinguish people who are of pure indigenous ancestry from those who are
mestizo. In fact, the classification of people as indigenous is usually more of
a cultural distinction than a biological one, counting only those people who
have not yet abandoned their indigenous ways of life. Today, the majority of
indigenous people in Middle and South America live in villages away from urban
areas.
This article divides its discussion of Native
Americans into three main parts. The Culture Areas section describes
indigenous cultures and ways of life, primarily as they existed before European
contact, in seven geographic regions. The History section chronicles the
earliest migrations to Middle and South America, the rise of civilizations, the
European conquests, and the modern history of indigenous groups. The Native
Americans Today section discusses many of the political, social, and
cultural issues that indigenous people face in contemporary Middle and South
America.
For a discussion of the indigenous peoples of
North America, see Native Americans of North America.
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II
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CULTURE AREAS
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In anthropology, the term culture refers to
a society or group of people with shared beliefs, customs, practices, and
social behaviors. When European explorers began arriving in Middle and South America
in the late 15th and early 16th centuries, hundreds of indigenous cultures
existed across the land, from present-day Mexico to the southern tip of South
America. The people of these diverse cultures had, over the centuries,
developed ways of life well suited to the physical environment in which they
lived.
To study these diverse cultures in a meaningful
way, many anthropologists divide Middle and South America into different culture
areas, distinct geographic regions whose inhabitants shared many cultural
traits. The concept of culture areas assumes that geography and culture are
intimately connected, and that cultures are best understood by reference to
their environment. For example, a principal reason why complex states arose in
Mesoamerica and the central Andes is the higher food productivity these regions
had compared to other areas, which was due in part to the richness of the soil,
rainfall patterns, and temperature. Intensive agriculture produced enough food
to support large, dense populations, and with greater numbers of people there
arose a corresponding need for more complex social and political systems.
However, neither a perfect nor totally predictable
correlation exists between geographic areas and the societal types or cultural
traits found within them. For example, if we follow the culture area concept
too blindly we might tend to think of Mesoamerica as a place where only states
or empires existed in ancient times. The fact is that there existed isolated
groups, especially near the northern and southern boundaries of Mesoamerica,
that never went beyond the village level of sociopolitical organization. Thus,
culture areas provide a way of studying the general characteristics of people
in a large geographic area, but at the risk of overlooking some of the details
of cultural variability in that area.
This article divides Middle and South America into
seven culture areas. These are Mesoamerica, the Caribbean and Northern Andes,
the Central and Southern Andes, the Amazon Basin, the Brazilian Highlands, the
Gran Chaco, and Southern South America.
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A
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Mesoamerica
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This section gives a broad overview of the
Mesoamerica culture area. For a more detailed treatment, see Mesoamerica.
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A1
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Land and Habitat
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The Mesoamerica culture area stretches from present-day
central Mexico southeast through much of Central America. It includes the
Yucatán Peninsula; all of Belize, Guatemala, and El Salvador; and parts of
Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica. The primary geographic features of
Mesoamerica include a lowland belt of tropical rain forest that runs along the
Gulf of Mexico, and a cooler, drier highland belt parallel to it. Within the
highland belt are the central Mexican highlands, including the Valley of Mexico;
the southern Mexican highlands, including the Valley of Oaxaca; and the hills
and valleys of the southeastern highlands of Guatemala.
No major rivers are found in Mesoamerica, in
contrast to other areas of the world where early civilizations arose. Ample
rainfall occurs throughout the region, however. A line that snakes across
central Mexico near the Tropic of Cancer forms the northern boundary of
Mesoamerica; north of this line rainfall sharply declines and the climate is
much drier. The ancient civilizations of Mesoamerica all arose and developed in
the area between this line and the Guatemalan highlands far to the south. Rich
volcanic soils are found throughout much of the region.
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A2
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People and Languages
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Mesoamerica was a great melting pot, home to many
peoples and interrelated cultures. In the centuries before European contact, it
was the most densely populated region in the Americas. Nearly 40 distinct
indigenous languages were spoken in Mesoamerica, including dialects of the
following language families and stocks: Chinantecan, Manguean, Mayan,
Mixe-Zoquean, Mixtecan, Otomian, Popolocan, Tequistlatecan, Tlapanecan,
Totonacan, Uto-Aztecan, and Zapotecan.
The best-known Mesoamerican cultures include—in roughly
sequential order from 1500 bc to
the Spanish conquest of Mexico in ad
1519—the Olmec, Zapotec, Teotihuacán, Maya, Toltec, and Aztec. Civilizations
would flourish for a time, sometimes in tandem, and then decline as other
cultures rose to dominance. Great cities were built and inhabited by successive
groups, then abandoned. Forms of art and religion developed and shared by
earlier groups profoundly influenced cultures that followed.
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A3
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Early Peoples
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The human history of Mesoamerica reaches back
many thousands of years. The first inhabitants of the region were nomadic
hunter-gatherers, whose ancestors are believed to have migrated from Asia.
Stone spearpoints found with ancient animal remains, including mammoth, provide
evidence that early Mesoamericans hunted large game for at least part of their
diet. By about 8000 bc, at the
beginning of what is known as the Archaic period, Mesoamericans began to make
numerous specialized tools and ceremonial objects, and they hunted a wide variety
of game, including pronghorn antelope, rabbits, and gophers. They were expert
foragers and harvested fruits, nuts, and the seeds of wild plants.
Drawing on their extensive knowledge of edible wild
plants, Archaic Mesoamericans gradually learned to cultivate a variety of food
crops, including maize (see Corn). Precisely when farming began
in Mesoamerica is unknown, but agriculture had become widespread in the region
by 4000 bc. Over time,
Mesoamerican peoples came to rely on farming as their primary food source, and
they settled in permanent villages. By about 2000 bc, many peoples of Mesoamerica were living principally on
varieties of maize, beans, and squash. Intensive agriculture supported large
populations and complex societies began to develop.
After about 1500 bc Mesoamericans
began to build ceremonial pyramids and temples in the larger towns, and these
settlements grew into religious and political centers. As towns grew in size,
Mesoamerican tribes became increasingly complex, and fixed classes of priests,
bureaucrats, merchants, and craftspeople emerged. Some towns had many thousands
of citizens; empires with millions of subjects were established. Agricultural
wealth fostered a network of trade. Merchants in urban centers sold tools,
cloth, and luxury items imported over long land and sea routes. Great heights
were achieved in the arts and sciences. Ancient Mesoamericans developed systems
of writing and highly accurate calendars based on their astronomical
observations.
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A4
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Diet and Subsistence
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Agriculture provided the principal source of food
throughout Mesoamerica, with the variety of crops increasing toward the south.
The main staple everywhere was maize, but other crops were important as well,
especially beans and squash. Eaten together, maize, beans, and squash offered a
diet rich in vegetable protein and carbohydrates.
Mesoamerican farmers cultivated many other plant
species. Among the better known are tomatoes, sweet potatoes, chili peppers,
tobacco, cotton, and peanuts. Lesser-known plants include amaranth, bottle
gourd, and a type of edible cactus called prickly pear. The sap of the century
plant, a species of agave, was fermented to make alcoholic beverages,
including a drink called pulque. A plant called manioc (also known as cassava
or yucca), was used, among other things, to make tapioca. Mesoamerican peoples
also exploited many native fruits, including papayas, avocados, and cacao (to
make chocolate). Fruit-producing trees were frequently planted in high
concentrations in and around Mesoamerican cities.
In the tropical lowlands, Mesoamericans practiced
slash-and-burn agriculture, in which areas of jungle were cleared and burned to
make fields for crops. When the soil was depleted and crop yields declined, the
plots were abandoned and new ones were cleared. In some highland areas,
particularly in the Valley of Mexico, the people constructed irrigation systems
and established gardens on artificially made islands, known as chinampas,
in lakes and swampy areas. Wild plants, game, and domesticated animals,
including dogs, turkeys, ducks, geese, and quail, were also used as food in
various areas. Fish and shellfish were eaten along the coasts.
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A5
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Social and Political Organization
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During the long Archaic period, which lasted until
about 2000 bc, small villages of
extended families were at the center of Mesoamerican society. Village resources
were generally shared, and permanent social classes did not exist. Families
directed the growing of corn and other village work, and most adult villagers
were capable of performing all the tasks required to sustain life.
As agriculture became more intensive and efficient, and
helped to ensure a stable food supply, Mesoamerican village life became more
diverse. New gods that could assure bountiful crops—including deities believed
to control rainfall, flooding, or fertility—grew in importance. At the same
time, knowledge of various crafts—including weaving, basketry, and
pottery—expanded, and a specialization of labor slowly emerged.
The first signs of social stratification in
Mesoamerica appeared shortly after 1000 bc.
At Olmec sites in the swampy rain forests of eastern Mexico, for example, the
ancient architecture signals the beginning of a division of society into elite
and commoner groups. The sites contain a complex of plazas, pyramids, courts
for sacred ball games, and temples, which were used for prayer and religious
ceremonies, as well as finely built stone dwellings for the upper classes.
These sites mark the beginning of an evolutionary sequence characterized by
ever larger, more complex, and more stratified societies in Mesoamerica.
As settlements grew larger, Mesoamerican societies
became increasingly stratified according to social rank. The ranks of these
societies typically included a large lower class of farmers, miners, and
craftspeople; a middle class of merchants and government officials; and an
upper class of priestly elites who directed religious and political life and
maintained armies. In many of these societies, children were educated in formal
schools. Most children were trained to follow their parents’ occupations, but
talented youth might be selected for more suitable work. Citizens supported the
state religion, although in the empires local religious observances were
sometimes permitted to coexist with the state religion. War captives and
debtors often became slaves.
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A6
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Settlement and Housing
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Although Mesoamerica contained many impressive cities,
most of the area’s population was rural. The region encompassed thousands of
communities, ranging from small villages of perhaps 100 people to great urban
centers such as Tenochtitlán, an Aztec city that—at its peak—was home to an
estimated 200,000 people. Several hundred localities large enough to be called
cities by modern standards emerged in Mesoamerica, although some of them served
mainly as religious centers for a rural population living near them; their
principal inhabitants were priests who gathered there to fast and purify
themselves before important ceremonies.
In agricultural settlements, people typically lived in
single-room round or rectangular huts made with poles covered by thatch or
sometimes grass. In some areas homes were constructed of sun-dried adobe bricks
or wattle and daub (interwoven twigs plastered with clay). Roofs were
frequently gabled for protection against the heavy downpours that occurred
every year during the rainy season. Each residence usually had a cooking
hearth, storage pit, and workshop area where pottery and tools were made.
Mesoamerican cities often covered large areas. At their
centers were great plazas surrounded by massive public buildings, including
flat-topped pyramids, palaces, sanctuaries, monasteries, temples, baths, dance
platforms, reviewing stands, bridges, terraces, and astronomical observatories.
There were also ball courts, on which a game roughly resembling modern
basketball and soccer was played for ceremonial purposes. Near the center of
cities were the large stone houses and walled compounds of wealthy elites; the
common people and the poor lived on the outskirts, often in single-room
structures with earthen floors. By ad
200 in the city of Teotihuacán, many commoners were living in a new type of
structure in Mesoamerica—one-story apartment buildings that could house up to
100 people.
Buildings in the cities were large and impressive,
although rarely were they spacious enough inside to hold more than a few dozen
people. The buildings often had façades crafted from stone and gleaming stucco.
Sometimes the façades were elaborately carved with abstract geometric designs
and with both stylized and naturalistic masks and figures of birds, humans, and
other animals. The towering pyramids, made of mounds of earth and rubble faced
with stone, were topped by temples, reached by steep flights of steps.
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A7
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Transportation
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Since Mesoamericans did not domesticate draft animals or
use wheeled vehicles, most loads transported between settlements were carried
on the backs of people. In the low-lying jungles of present-day Guatemala,
Belize, and southeastern Mexico, the Maya built roads paved with stones, called
sacbe, between some of the major cities. However, transport and travel
throughout most of ancient Mesoamerica was carried out on rough trails that
crisscrossed the vast area. Porters with backpacks carried loads of commodities
such as maize, beans, cotton, feather ornaments, animal skins, and firewood,
from rural areas to the cities. In some areas, including Lake Texcoco in
central Mexico, canoes were used for transport and travel. The Maya carried
trade goods along coasts and rivers in large dugout canoes.
Official messages were frequently carried between
settlements by runners working in relays. These trained athletes, similar to
the chasquis used by the Inca Empire in South America, could cover
several hundred kilometers in a single day. Rulers and other elites were often
carried by teams of men on fancy mats known as litters.
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A8
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Clothing and Ornamentation
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Mesoamerican clothing was varied and colorful. Cloth was
woven from cotton and from the fiber of the agave plant. In the warm tropical
lowlands, there was little need for elaborate clothing. Among the Maya, men
wore a woven loincloth; women wore an outer dress fashioned from a single piece
of cloth with holes cut in it for the head and arms, as well as a loincloth
undergarment beneath. In cooler weather, both sexes wrapped a heavier square
cloth around their shoulders.
The clothing of highland people was similar to that
worn in the lowlands. Among the Aztec, for example, men wore a loincloth
and—given the cooler temperatures—often added a cape for warmth. Women wore
ankle-length dresses fastened at the waist with embroidered belts. Over their
dresses, they wore hip-length blouses.
Clothing and decoration reflected a person’s social
status. Commoners wore simple garments. The clothing of priests and members of
the nobility was much more elaborate, including robes made from jaguar skins,
feathers, or cotton; elaborate necklaces; and ornaments of copper, gold, jade,
and turquoise. They wore jeweled plugs in their earlobes, lips, and noses, and
large headdresses made of brilliant quetzal feathers placed on woven frames.
Warriors had their own costumes, including carved masks that depicted jaguars,
fish, and reptiles.
It was fashionable among Mayan nobles to have an
elongated head, which was produced by compressing an infant’s head between two
boards. The Maya also considered it beautiful to have crossed eyes—an effect
that was achieved by hanging a ball of wax on a string in front of a child’s
face until the child’s eyes became permanently crossed.
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A9
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Religious Beliefs and Practices
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As farming peoples, Mesoamericans frequently
worshiped the forces of nature as gods, including agricultural deities. Most of
the elaborate rituals and ceremonies conducted by Mesoamerican priests were
intended to secure the goodwill and support of these gods. Among some groups.
human sacrifice was used to appease the gods. Rulers were seen as religious
leaders who served as intermediaries between humans and the gods, or spiritual
forces. As a result, the civil and religious aspects of life in Mesoamerica were
often inseparable. See also Pre-Columbian Religions.
The complex religion of the Maya included belief in
a supreme god, called Hunab Ku. This deity was seen as too remote from
humans to have any effect on their daily activities. His son, a sky deity called
Itzamna, was believed to be the god who gave humans food, medicine, and
the art of writing. Numerous other deities—including the gods of rain, maize,
war, medicine, wind, death, Moon, and Sun—were thought to control the specific
affairs of humans. These deities all had a dual aspect: they could bring good
things to humans, such as rain, a plentiful harvest, or peace, but they could
also bring harm, such as drought, famine, or war. Many rituals and ceremonies
performed by the Maya, including human sacrifices, were intended to secure
favorable treatment from these gods.
Among the people of Teotihuacán, religious
ceremonies included sacrifices of birds, flowers, dogs, and sometimes humans,
to feed hungry gods and keep them strong. Doing so was necessary, they
believed, to continue life and keep the world in harmony. A principal deity was
Quetzalcoatl, also known as the Plumed, or Feathered, Serpent, a
beneficial god who was frequently locked in combat with evil gods.
The Aztec worshipped a pantheon of gods, including
more than 60 major deities and numerous lesser spirits. The ancient deity
Quetzalcoatl, among others, was revered, but the principal god was the Aztecs'
own, Huitzilopochtli, the god of war and of the Sun. The gods were
ranked in importance, and each one had its own cult and special hierarchies of
priests. Many Aztec ceremonies entailed sacrificing human victims to the gods,
whose strength needed perpetual renewal with human blood. Sacrificial victims,
sometimes large numbers at once, were led up the steps of pyramids to temples
on top, where their hearts were cut out and their heads impaled on skull racks;
others were flayed, and their skins were worn by priests. Victims were usually
war captives, although Aztecs themselves sometimes volunteered for important
sacrificial rituals.
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A10
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Arts and Sciences
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Mesoamericans produced arts and crafts of great refinement
and sophistication. Many Mesoamerican societies had full-time craftspeople and
urban laborers. These workers built cities filled with monumental architecture,
remarkable sculptures, and brilliantly painted murals. Mesoamerican arts also
included painted scenes on pottery; carving in jade and other precious stones;
feather and stone mosaics; basketry, textiles, and featherwork; and metalwork,
a technology that arrived in Mesoamerica from South America sometime before ad 1000. They also fashioned elaborate
painted books, or codices, that opened up as a long, continuous sheets of
paper. Colorfully painted with hieroglyphs (a pictorial form of
writing), human figures, and images of gods, these books were collections of
religious lore and rituals for study by priests and their apprentices.
The intellectual and scientific accomplishments of
Mesoamerica surpassed those of any other region in the Americas before European
contact. The ancient Olmec, among other peoples of the period, devised a system
of writing and a calendar based on astronomical observations. Later groups
built on these accomplishments to achieve great heights, including the Maya,
Zapotec, and the people of Teotihuacán. For example, during the Classic period
of the Maya (about ad 300 to 900),
the highest stage of Mayan civilization, Mayan philosophers and mathematicians
developed a highly accurate calendric system. They recorded this system using a
complex form of hieroglyphic writing, which was carved on stele, or stone
slabs, up to 9 m (30 ft) high. The Maya conceived of the concept of zero, an
advanced mathematical concept, centuries before the symbol for zero was used by
Hindu mathematicians in India. Mayan astronomers carefully observed the heavens
and worked out the movements of celestial bodies and the recurrences of
eclipses.
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A11
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Post-Contact History
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The Spanish were the first Europeans to arrive
in Mesoamerica, sailing from settlements in the Caribbean in the early 1500s.
Rumors of a wealthy, advanced civilization in what is now Mexico soon reached
the Spanish, and in 1519 the Spanish explorer Hernán Cortés set sail from Cuba
in search of gold and new lands to colonize. When Cortés landed near
present-day Veracruz in eastern Mexico, the Aztec Empire was still intact, and
its rule extended across much of Mesoamerica. Marching with indigenous allies
who had been subjugated by the Aztecs, Cortés advanced on the Aztec capital of
Tenochtitlán in central Mexico. By 1521 Cortés and his small army had conquered
the empire. The Spaniards seized the Aztecs’ gold and other treasures and razed
Tenochtitlán, which became the foundation of Mexico City, capital of the
Spanish province of New Spain.
From Mexico City other Spanish explorers and
soldiers extended Spain’s power to the south. As the Spanish pushed into new
areas, they exposed indigenous peoples to smallpox and other European diseases,
and many perished. In the 1520s Pedro de Alvarado conquered Guatemala, and
between 1527 and 1546 Francisco de Montejo and his son conquered the declining
Mayan cities in the Yucatán Peninsula. From 1540 on, the Spanish also pushed
north. As Spaniards claimed military control of Mesoamerica, they leveled
temples and used the stones to build Roman Catholic churches, burned indigenous
books as idolatrous, and enslaved many native people to work under harsh
conditions in fields and mines. As a result of starvation, overwork,
occupational hazards, and disease, the indigenous population of Mesoamerica
plummeted. The Spanish crown abolished the harshest forms of forced labor in
the early 18th century, and the indigenous population gradually increased; most
indigenous peoples survived as peasants governed by Spanish overlords.
After Mexico achieved independence from Spain in 1821,
indigenous peoples came under Mexican rule. Forced by extreme poverty, many
native inhabitants continued to work for Mexican landowners. The Mexican Revolution
of 1910 set in motion reforms that eventually returned thousands of hectares of
land to indigenous peoples and gave them access to schooling and medical
services. Today, most of the population living within the Mesoamerican culture
area is mestizo, people of mixed Spanish and Native American descent.
Despite efforts of the colonizers to stamp out indigenous culture, many
traditional ways of life continued, mostly in modified form. The mixing of
Spanish and indigenous cultural practices—including language, food, religion,
clothing, and music—have made Mexico, Guatemala, and other modern nation-states
of the area the vibrant, fascinating places they are today.
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B
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Caribbean and Northern Andes
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B1
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Land and Habitat
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The Caribbean and Northern Andes culture area is a
tropical region that extends over a huge area between the Tropic of Cancer and
the equator. In the north lie the Antilles islands, which run in a chain from
the larger islands of Cuba and Hispaniola down through the tiny volcanic
islands of the Lesser Antilles to Trinidad and Tobago. The western part of the
area includes the rugged volcanic uplands of Central America to the south of
Mesoamerica, from Honduras through Panama. The southern part of the area lies
in South America and includes the northern Andes and adjacent coasts of Ecuador
and Colombia, as well as the mountains of northern Venezuela and extensive
savanna grasslands north of the Orinoco River.
Although the volcanic soils of the Lesser Antilles and
Central America are rich and well watered, the Caribbean and Northern Andes
culture area generally lacks extensive areas of land suitable for agriculture.
Rainfall is heavy throughout the Antilles and Central America, and increases to
even greater amounts along the Pacific coast of Colombia and Ecuador, where
extensive mangrove swamps are found. In general, human settlement was sparsest
in these swampy areas and in the llanos, a Spanish term for the savannas
of Venezuela and Colombia. Throughout the rest of the culture area, the
development of agriculture in prehistoric times allowed larger populations.
However, compared to Mesoamerican and Central Andean peoples, native groups
were confined to relatively smaller and more isolated local habitats.
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B2
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People and Languages
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At the time of European contact the larger
indigenous groups of the Caribbean and Northern Andes culture area included the
Ciboney, Taíno (Island Arawak), and Carib, of the Antilles islands; the
Jicaque, Kuna, Lenca, Miskito (Mosquito), and Cuna-Cueva, of Central America;
the Chibcha (Muisca), San Agustín, Pasto, Esmeralda, Manta, and Colorado, of
the Andes and coastal regions of Colombia and Ecuador; and the Tairona, Kogi,
Goajiro, Caquetío, Motilones, Paez, and Warrau, of the Caribbean coast and
highlands of Colombia and Venezuela. Major language families included Arawakan,
Cariban, Chibchan, and Paezan. The last two language groups were confined to
smaller regions of the culture area, whereas the Arawakan and Cariban languages
extended beyond the culture area to include northern areas of the Amazon Basin.
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B3
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Early Peoples
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Judging from archaeological excavations at sites in
Colombia and Venezuela, hunter-gatherer groups reached the southern part of the
Caribbean and Northern Andes culture area by some 12,000 years ago. For
example, at Tequendama rock shelter in the Colombian highlands, human
occupation dating to this time period includes stone tools and hearths found in
association with the remains of deer, rabbit, armadillo, and guinea pig. An
even earlier date of 13,000 years ago has been claimed for a mastodon kill at
the site of Taima-Taima along the Venezuela coast, but the evidence for this
claim is controversial. By 10,000 years ago, it is likely that humans were
dispersed throughout most of the mainland area. The Caribbean islands were
apparently inhabited much later; the earliest evidence of human settlement
there traces to only 5,000 to 6,000 years ago.
The origin of agriculture in the Caribbean and
Northern Andes culture area is uncertain. Current evidence suggests that
important food crops such as maize (corn), beans, squash, and potatoes were
first domesticated in Mesoamerica and the central Andes, and that people living
between these regions probably received these crops through trade, rather than
domesticating the wild plants themselves. There is direct evidence for maize
cultivation by about 2300 bc at
the Real Alto site on the southwest coast of Ecuador. It is possible, however, that
people of the northern Andes domesticated manioc, a starchy root. By about 1100
bc people at the Malambo site on
the Caribbean coast of Colombia had developed clay griddles called budares,
which are associated with the processing of manioc. At the site of Momil in
northern Colombia, maize grinding stones replaced budares around 100 bc, suggesting that maize had replaced
manioc as a staple by that time. In the Caribbean islands, manioc cultivation
probably began around 250 bc,
after agricultural peoples in northern Venezuela had begun migrating to the
Lesser Antilles.
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B4
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Diet and Subsistence
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Most of the people throughout the central and
northern parts of the Caribbean and Northern Andes culture area practiced
small-scale irrigation farming. Crops were watered by canals or by flooding. In
the highland areas, the Chibcha and other peoples grew nutritious and
productive crops, such as maize, potatoes, and quinoa (a high-protein grain),
that supported large numbers of people. In the moist lowlands, the staple crop
was manioc. Other foods of the lowlands and middle altitudes included tropical
fruits, yams, sweet potatoes, beans, peanuts, and maize. In the Santa Marta
mountain range in northern Colombia, the Tairona exploited resources at a
variety of altitudes. They fished from the Caribbean Sea, built extensive
rock-faced terraces to make steep land suitable for farming, and planted fruit
trees in the tropical forest to supplement a diet already rich in proteins and
carbohydrates.
Most peoples hunted and fished to supplement
farming. The primary hunting weapon was the bow and arrow. To paralyze or kill
their prey, hunters tipped their arrows with poison derived from rotted animals
rather than with the plant poisons used in other parts of South America. For
fishing, men used nets and hooks; they also placed poisons in the water to stun
fish, which were then easily collected from the surface.
|
B5
|
Social and Political Organization
|
By about 1000 ad the Caribbean
and Northern Andean peoples had developed a way of life centered around towns
and cities, whose populations usually did not exceed several thousand people.
Most societies were chiefdoms, or groups in which people were divided
into at least two main strata, or classes: a chiefly elite and non-chiefly
commoners. A person’s social rank was determined at birth by the class of his
or her family. Local chiefs ruled towns and tribes, some of which were grouped
into confederations with tens of thousands of subjects. The chief lived a life
of idleness and luxury. He lived with several wives in the largest residence in
town, was waited on by servants, and was carried around in a litter (a fancy
seat or mat carried by teams of men). In some areas the chief had the power of
life and death over his subjects, and at his death, some of his wives,
concubines, and slaves might be sacrificed. The largest chiefdoms were those of
the Chibcha, who formed the largest and most highly developed society between
Mexico and Peru. Chibcha culture developed after ad 1200 and flourished until the arrival of the Spaniards in
1537. The largest Chibcha cities were located near the present-day cities of
Bogotá and Tunja in Colombia.
|
B6
|
Warfare
|
The Caribbean and Northern Andean peoples were
renowned as fierce warriors. As with the Aztec, male warriors captured in
battle were taken back to the victors’ settlements, where they were killed and
their bodies were eaten. The heads of such captives often were kept as trophies
that enhanced the prestige of the men who had captured them. Captured women
were not usually killed, instead serving their captors as wives and servants in
the household. Children captured in battle, on the other hand, met the same fate
as the men. They were sacrificed to the gods and their bodies were eaten. The
Taíno people were peaceful compared to others in the Caribbean, but their peace
was disrupted by invasions of the more warlike Carib from Venezuela.
|
B7
|
Settlement and Housing
|
Similar to the two-level system of social ranking,
the settlement systems of the Caribbean and Northern Andes culture area
consisted usually of two types of settlements—larger towns, ruled by local
chiefs, whose population numbered at most in the several thousands, and smaller
rural sites where several hundred or fewer people lived. In the cool mountains
of the northern Andes, people generally lived in small, dispersed villages and
in scattered homes made of stone or of a wickerwork frame plastered with mud.
In lower, tropical areas, people lived in larger towns that were sometimes
surrounded by palisades (fences) to provide protection from enemies.
Lowland houses were generally made of poles and thatch (plant material used as
roofing) and were open-sided to allow air to pass through the structure. Houses
were usually arranged around a central plaza containing a temple and the home
of the chief and nobles. Many towns had roads paved with stone.
|
B8
|
Transportation
|
The dugout canoe was the primary means of
transportation for Caribbean island peoples and for those on the mainland who
lived near rivers or the sea. Coastal peoples around the Caribbean were expert
navigators and traveled in large, elaborately ornamented, seagoing canoes that
were equipped with sails. There was a regular sea trade among the islands of
the Caribbean and between the Caribbean and South America, as well as along the
eastern coast of Central America. Elsewhere, people transported goods on their
backs, making use of trails, roads, and bridges that threaded through the
mountains. To the south, in the Central and Southern Andes culture area, llamas
were used for transportation, but these animals could not be adapted to the
warmer rainy climates of the Caribbean and Northern Andes culture area.
|
B9
|
Clothing and Ornamentation
|
Clothing differed according to region. Most of the
people wove cotton on backstrap looms, a type of loom in which the warps
(vertical strands) are strung between two sticks. One stick was attached to a
fixed object, such as a post or roof beam, while the other end was attached to
the weaver’s back with a leather or cloth strap. By leaning against the strap,
the weaver could maintain tension on the warps as she or he wove in the wefts
(horizontal strands). In the hot tropical lowlands, women wore apronlike
garments around the waist, while the men wore breechcloths. In the cool
highlands and middle altitudes of Colombia and Ecuador, people supplemented
wraparounds and breechcloths with sleeveless tunics, capes, and blankets.
Peoples of highland Colombia, such as the Tairona,
produced beautiful gold-and-copper ornaments and religious objects using the
lost-wax technique. The artisan would mold a beeswax core in the shape of an
animal or a human, enclose this figure in clay, and then pour molten gold mixed
with copper through a hole in the clay. The molten metal replaced the wax,
which melted away. After the metal had cooled the clay was broken away to
reveal the object.
|
B10
|
Religious Beliefs and Practices
|
Religion centered on temple cults that were led by
priests of the chiefly class. The priests made offerings to deities represented
by idols, acting as mediators between the gods and the people to ensure that
the society’s needs (such as agricultural fertility and success in trade and
war) were met. Among the principal deities of the mainland societies was the
jaguar, the most feared and awe-inspiring animal of tropical rainforests given
its tendency to prey on humans. Religious practices involved a sophisticated
understanding of the cycles of the Moon and the Sun, including knowledge of the
solstices and equinoxes as well as the length of the solar year. Human
sacrifices to the gods were common. When a chief died, he was either buried
with sacrificial victims—who included his wives and servants—or his body was
desiccated (dried out) and placed on display in temples.
The Taíno, an Arawakan-speaking tribe who inhabited
Hispaniola and Cuba, had neither priests nor temples. People were thought to be
in individual communication with their own guardian spirit, which was
represented by an idol in their house and was given offerings of food and
valuables. The power of the guardian spirit varied with the importance of the
person. The chief’s spirit was the most powerful of all.
|
B11
|
Post-Contact History
|
In 1492 the Spanish, led by Christopher Columbus,
arrived on a small island in the Bahamas, where they encountered the Taíno.
During the same expedition Columbus and his crew explored parts of Cuba and
Hispaniola. Although initial relations between native peoples and the Spanish
were friendly, relations deteriorated when, in subsequent expeditions to the
Americas, Columbus enslaved indigenous peoples as laborers and Spanish settlers
raided their villages in search of gold and other riches.
Drawn by reports of gold and wealth, Spaniards
flocked to the Caribbean. Although they themselves were fierce warriors, the
Spaniards were horrified by the cannibalism of the native inhabitants, and they
regarded their religious practices as heathen and uncivilized. The Spaniards
thus found ample justification to enslave them, kill them, and stamp out their
religions and cultures. For example, after their first landing in 1514 along
the northern coast of Colombia, the Spaniards proceeded to burn most of the
Tairona towns and kill many of their inhabitants. Even the native people who
escaped this onslaught were not free from disaster, as immense numbers of them
died from diseases introduced by the Europeans, such as smallpox. After a few
decades, there were so few native people left that the Spanish began to import
slaves from Africa. Although most of the indigenous groups of the Caribbean are
now extinct, many Central American and Northern Andean indigenous
groups—especially smaller-scale societies such as the Miskito of Nicaragua and
the Colorado of Ecuador—have survived and prospered to modern times.
|
C
|
Central and Southern Andes
|
|
C1
|
Land and Habitat
|
The Central and Southern Andes culture area extends
from northernmost Peru down to south central Chile. Except for the narrow shore
that lies along its entire western coast, most of the area is dominated by the
high peaks of the Andes. In western Peru and Bolivia these peaks run in two
great chains, or cordilleras, that are situated roughly 200 km (120 mi)
apart. The highest peaks soar more than 6,100 m (20,000 ft) above sea level.
Between the two cordilleras lies a series of high plains at elevations of 3,600
to 4,000 m (12,000 to 13,000 ft) that is known as the puna in Peru and
the Altiplano in Bolivia. In Peru three major rivers—the Marañón, the Mantaro,
and the Urubamba—cross through the mountains before descending into the Amazon
Basin. Farther to the south, the Andean chains come closer together as they
extend down into Chile and the westernmost edge of Argentina.
Composed primarily of recently eroded materials, the
soils of the puna and river basins of highland Peru are rich, and rainfall here
is moderate. The adjacent coast, on the other hand, receives almost no rain at
all and is one of the driest deserts in the world. However, human habitation
was possible here, in a series of some 50 narrow river valleys whose headwaters
are in the nearby Andes. An even more hostile place for human habitation was
the Atacama Desert in northern Chile, which receives rainfall only two to four
times a century.
|
C2
|
People and Languages
|
The central Andes were home to some of the greatest
civilizations in South America. In northern Peru between 1000 bc and ad
1532, a series of spectacularly accomplished cultures developed, including the
Chavín (see Chavín de Huantar), Vicús, Moche (Mochica), Recuay, and
Chimú. Farther south in Peru and Bolivia, during the same period, the equally
impressive Paracas, Nazca, Huari (Wari), and Tiwanaku (Tiahuanaco) cultures
developed. Beginning in the mid-1400s, the Incas built a powerful empire of
extraordinary wealth and complexity, which spanned a vast region from Chile to
Ecuador (see Inca Empire). Important groups in the southern Andes prior
to European contact included the Atacameños, Diaguitas, and Araucanians
(Mapuche, Huilliche, and Picunche). Major language groups in Peru were Quechua
(the official language of the Inca), Aymaran, Muchic, and Uru, while those of
Chile included Atacama, Diaguita, and Araucanian. Today, Quechua and Aymará are
still widely spoken; indigenous people who speak these languages are called
Quechua and Aymara Indians, respectively.
|
C3
|
Early Peoples
|
The archaeological site of Monte Verde in southern
Chile, dating to 12,500 years ago, is the earliest well-documented site of
human settlement in the Americas. Buried under sediments by the boggy
conditions along a creek bed, this small settlement was home to perhaps 20 to
30 people. Archaeologists excavating the site found the preserved remains of a
great variety of plants (both food and medicinal), the wood foundations of what
appeared to be permanent dwellings, wooden implements of various kinds, stone
tools, hearths, and a human footprint. Although animal remains at the site indicate
that the inhabitants hunted mastodon and prehistoric llamas, the people of
Monte Verde appear to have relied more heavily on plants that were gathered
during various seasons of the year from places as far as 65 km (40 mi) away.
There are many other important sites of early
human habitation in this culture area. Among them are Tagua-Tagua on the coast
of Chile, Viscachani in highland Bolivia, and Quebrada Jaguay, Pachamachay
Cave, Lauricocha Cave, and Guitarrero Cave in the Peruvian Andes. At the
Guitarrero Cave site, archaeologists have found some of the oldest evidence of
cultivated plants anywhere in the Americas. The remains of these plants, dated
to as early as 7,000 years ago, include several Andean tubers and fruits such as
oca, ulluco, pacae, and lucuma, as well as two varieties of beans and the chili
pepper.
|
C4
|
Diet and Subsistence
|
The people of the Central and Southern Andes
culture area ate a rich variety of domesticated plant foods. On the Andean
coast, these included maize, beans, squash, chili peppers, peanuts, sweet
potatoes, manioc, avocados, and papayas, as well as lesser-known plants such as
achira, cherimoya, guava, guanábana, pacay, and algarroba bean. The
domesticated crops of the Andean highlands included quinoa, a high-protein
grain, and a host of tubers, or root crops, such as potato, oca, ulluco, maca,
and mashua, all of which grow well at higher elevations. Aside from North
American groups that domesticated the wild turkey, the people of the central and
southern Andes were the only Native Americans to domesticate animals before
European contact. They used the llama for transportation, the alpaca for meat
and wool, and the cuy, or guinea pig, for meat. The manure of llamas, alpacas,
and birds was used for fertilizer.
On the steep-sided slopes of Andean river basins,
the Inca and their predecessors constructed flat, rock-faced terraces to extend
the area available to grow crops. There was not always enough rainfall to water
the crops, however, so the Inca engineered canals to bring water to fields that
were often far above the river valley bottoms. Irrigation and farming were much
easier to accomplish in the low valleys of the Peruvian coast. There, the remains
of canal systems and ancient field lines indicate that the prehistoric
inhabitants of this area farmed every irrigable part of the valley floor, as
well as flatter parts of the adjacent desert areas, to support their burgeoning
populations.
|
C5
|
Social and Political Organization
|
In the central Andes, as in Middle America, a
highly efficient system of agriculture permitted the growth of a large, dense
population and the rise of complex political systems such as states and
empires. Food surpluses released large numbers of people from agricultural
labor, allowing them to work in government, the military, religious
institutions, and art. With centralized state authorities to plan construction
and direct masses of laborers, societies could undertake huge public projects,
such as the construction of irrigation systems, roads, bridges, forts, and
temples.
State societies such as the Moche, Huari, Tiwanaku,
Chimú, and Inca had at least three social classes. These included a small group
of ruling elite, larger numbers of administrative officials positioned
throughout the state, and huge numbers of people who belonged to a commoner
class. The Moche state, which flourished on the northern coast of Peru from
about ad 100 to 800, was
apparently structured as a three-tier hierarchy. At the top were a supreme
ruler and an elite group of warrior priests who were believed to be invested
with supernatural powers. Beneath them were social and occupational classes of
state officials, healers, architects, engineers, and lesser religious
officials. At the lowest level was the mass of the population, which produced
the food, served in the army, and provided labor for the construction of public
works. The population of the Moche state may have reached 650,000 people by ad 450.
The Inca Empire, with an estimated 6 million to 11
million people at its height, was by far the largest and most highly
centralized civilization in South America before the arrival of Europeans. It
was ruled by an emperor who inherited his office and was thought to be a direct
descendant of the sun god. The empire was divided into four quarters, each led
by one of the emperor’s relatives. Each quarter was subdivided into smaller
provinces or districts ruled by a governor. Below the governors was a
descending hierarchy of local officials in charge of 10,000, 5,000, 1,000, 100,
or 10 people. Officials used knotted strings called quipus (pronounced
KEE-pooz) to keep accurate records on such matters as population, the number of
men in the army, the quantities of corn or potatoes in the storehouse, and the
size of herds of alpacas and llamas.
In the southern Andes, social and political systems
were considerably less developed than in the central Andes. The large state centers
were absent and the population was less dense. In the Atacama Desert, one of
the world’s driest regions, small, isolated groups of Atacameños inhabited a
narrow coastal strip and a few watered oases. South of them, Diaguita farmers
and herders lived in autonomous towns. The mild valleys of central Chile were
more favorable for farming and supported a large population of Araucanians.
Rather than being concentrated in towns or cities, however, the population was
spread out among small, autonomous hamlets.
|
C6
|
Warfare
|
Most Andean states expanded their political
boundaries by conquering neighboring populations. Paintings on Moche pottery,
for example, depict bloody battles between the state army and warriors from
provincial valleys. Following the defeat of a group, Moche warriors removed
their captives’ clothing and tied their hands behind their backs. Then the
captives were marched across the desert to be presented to the warrior priest
before being sacrificed and dismembered.
Because the Spanish conquerors actually engaged in
battles with the Inca, and described their tactics in detail, much is known
about Inca warfare and the nature of its army. Estimates of the army’s size
range from 70,000 men, at the start of the empire around ad 1438, to some 250,000 men a few years
later during the Inca conquest of northern Peru. The army was organized in
squadrons of men who specialized in the use of different kinds of weapons,
including slings, bows and arrows, dart throwers, clubs, and spears. On most
occasions, Inca generals sent emissaries to the enemy prior to a battle in an
attempt to achieve a bloodless conquest. If diplomacy failed, the first
soldiers to engage the enemy were the squadrons of slingers, who attacked from
long range. As the two armies got nearer to each other, the bowmen and dart
throwers attacked. Finally, the squadrons specializing in the use of clubs and
short spears engaged the enemy in hand-to-hand fighting.
|
C7
|
Settlement and Housing
|
Settlements of commoners in the Central and Southern
Andes culture area consisted of densely packed, multiroomed dwellings. In the
highlands, dwellings were made of stone with gabled (peaked) roofs to protect
against rain. In contrast, dwellings on the rainless coast were simple
wattle-and-daub structures, consisting of mud plastered over stick-and-mat
frames, with flat roofs to protect against sun, wind, and blowing sand. In
Andean states, there were at least three different sizes of settlements: a
primary city, or capital; smaller cities that served as administrative centers;
and smaller towns, villages, and hamlets where most of the people lived.
Capital sites ranged in size from about 5 to 20 sq km (2 to 8 sq mi), and
contained palaces surrounded by high-walled compounds, plazas where state
ceremonies were held, and religious structures. Chan Chan, the capital city of
the Chimú kingdom (12th to 15th century), had a
population of at least 25,000 people.
With an estimated population of 100,000, the Inca
capital city of Cuzco was the largest urban center of South America prior to
European contact. The Incas built magnificent palaces, temples, and forts of
stone blocks sculpted to fit together so precisely that no mortar was
necessary. The religious focus of the city was the Cori Cancha (meaning
“Golden Enclosure”) where life-sized golden llamas and maize plants were placed
along with the idols of conquered populations. The Spaniards called this
building the Temple of the Sun. Arranged around the main plaza of Cuzco were
temples, public buildings, and the palace compounds of the emperor and the
descendants of deceased emperors. The entire city was laid out in the shape of
a giant puma whose head was formed by the hilltop site of Sacsahuaman, ancient
South America’s greatest stone fortress.
|
C8
|
Transportation
|
Throughout most of the Central and Southern Andes
culture area, llamas were used as the principal means of transport. They were
able to carry loads of up to 32 kg (70 lb). Moche traders used caravans of
these pack animals to carry goods along rock-lined roads. At regular intervals
along the roads, small settlements served as stopping places.
The most remarkable Andean road system belonged to
that of the Inca Empire. The Capac Ñan, or Royal Road, consisted of two
principal routes, a coastal and a highland one, that ran the length of the
empire. These routes were connected by a great number of secondary roads that
ran between coast and highlands. Suspension bridges made of rope were used to cross
the more dangerous Andean rivers, such as the Apurímac near Cuzco, and on
adjacent canyon slopes the main route of travel often was nothing more than a
narrow trail. As much as possible, however, the Inca built their highways
across higher puna flatlands to permit efficient travel by state functionaries,
the army, and the runners (called chasquis), who carried the
quipu-string messages. The total length of the Inca highway system is estimated
at more than 23,000 km (14,000 mi).
|
C9
|
Clothing and Ornamentation
|
Throughout the coast and highlands, men wore
breechcloths, wraparound kilts, and shirts, adding a shawl (or poncho) when
temperatures were cooler. Women wore wraparound dresses and shawls that were secured
on the chest with a large pin called a tupu. In the warmer coastal
climate, clothing was generally was made of cotton; in the cooler highlands
most garments were made of alpaca wool, although cotton and llama wool were
also used. Elite people wore more elaborate clothing decorated with gold,
silver, and semiprecious stones. The elite also wore jewelry known as earplugs.
These consisted of decorated disks 7.5 to 10 cm (3 to 4 in) in diameter, with
an attached metal tube that was placed through a perforation in their earlobes.
Ultimately, the weight of the plugs stretched the lobes so much that the
Spaniards dubbed the higher-class Inca orejones, or “long ears.” In the
service of such elite needs, miners of precious metals and stones were needed
as well as fulltime artisans who were expert at smelting and working the metals
to make the jewelry and other ornamentation.
|
C10
|
Arts and Crafts
|
Among the earliest evidence of art in the Central
and Southern Andes culture area are 13 decorated gourds from the ancient site
of Huaca Prieta, on the northern coast of Peru. These gourds, which are dated
to about 2000 bc, feature
intricate geometric designs, including stylized human faces that were burned
into their exterior surfaces, a technique called pyrography. Simple
woven cotton textiles also were found at Huaca Prieta, one of which depicts a
condor with a fish in its stomach.
Pottery making in the Central and Southern Andes
culture area began around 1800 bc,
and ceramic vessels quickly became one of the principal forms of Andean
artistic expression. For example, the Chavín culture (about 900 bc to 200 bc) is well known for its 'stirrup spout' vessels. These
vessels have a spherical base topped by an inverted U-shaped tube—similar to an
upside-down stirrup from a saddle—to which a vertical spout is attached. The
Moche continued the stirrup spout vessel tradition begun in Chavín times and
also made a variety of other vessel forms. They painted or modeled pottery
depicting almost every aspect of their culture, including their daily life,
religious beliefs, and political system. These pots have provided scholars with
important clues about Moche clothing, social statuses, ceremonies, and the
roles of rulers and warriors in the formation and maintenance of the Moche
state.
On the southern coast of Peru, the Nazca (200 bc to ad
600) were expert textile weavers, continuing a tradition of weaving that had
begun with their predecessors, the Paracas, shortly after 1000 bc. Wool from llamas, alpacas, and possibly
vicuñas, along with cotton, was employed in the production of tapestries,
brocades, laces, embroidery, and braided work. The textiles were decorated with
multicolored designs, sometimes showing as many as 190 different hues in a
single fabric. Textiles were used for elaborate turbans, togas, and other
articles of clothing and for wrapping of corpses in mummy bundles.
By the time the Inca state emerged in the
mid-15th century, cloth had assumed a central role in Andean society
and was among the most valued of all items. The state used textiles to clothe
army soldiers in fine garments, to reward citizens for meritorious service, and
as symbolic items in important rites and ceremonies. Inca women, and less
commonly men, spun cotton and wool and wove textiles using the traditional
Andean backstrap loom. Scholars have estimated that it could take a weaver as
long as 500 hours to make a single poncho.
In pottery making, the Inca built on centuries-old
Andean traditions, but they were also great innovators. Their best-known
pottery form, the aryballoid jar, appears to have no precursors in pre-Inca
Peru. An aryballoid jar has a wide, roughly spherical base with handles on each
side, a long, narrow neck, and a flat, flaring rim. To carry the jars, ropes
were placed through the handles and around a person’s head or body. In
metallurgy, the Inca worked gold and silver, as well as alloys of copper-gold,
copper-silver, copper-tin-bronze, and gold-silver-copper. Only the ruling
elite, such as the Inca emperor and nobility, could use objects made from
precious metals. Gold and silver objects, such as figurines of llamas, alpacas,
and humans, were also used as offerings in the Inca ritual of child sacrifice.
See also Pre-Columbian Art and Architecture: Central Andean
Area.
|
C11
|
Religious Beliefs and Practices
|
The complex societies in the Central and Southern Andes
culture area practiced temple-oriented religions that focused on a variety of
gods, including those identified with the Sun, the Moon, and figures that
combined—often in intimidating and monstrous fashion—features that were both
human and animal. For example, the main religious figure of Chavín culture is
shown with a human face and body, but has long, Medusa-like snake hair writhing
out of the top of its head, and its fingers and toes have the talons of a
predatory animal. Judging from the iconography on stone tablets, Chavín priests
ingested the hallucinogenic San Pedro cactus in the belief that it would make
them turn temporarily into jaguars.
One of the most fascinating aspects of Inca
religion was the sacrifice of children on high Andean peaks, a ritual called Capac
Hucha or Capacocha (Quechua for “royal obligation”). Among
other reasons, children were sacrificed to commemorate festivals, to promote
the fertility of the empire’s cultivated lands, and to appease the gods.
Because of the dry, cold conditions on the summits of peaks that rise above
5,200 m (17,000 ft), where the sacrifices took place, archaeologists have
sometimes discovered the extremely well-preserved bodies of sacrificial
victims.
|
C12
|
Post-Contact History
|
Although the Inca army was the largest and best
fighting force in all of South America—perhaps in all of the Americas—it was
defeated by a few hundred Spanish soldiers led by the conquistador Francisco
Pizarro. This was accomplished primarily through treachery. In 1532, at a
peaceful meeting with the Inca, Pizarro and his soldiers seized the emperor
Atahualpa and killed most of the other leaders of the empire. Pizarro held
Atahualpa prisoner to force the payment of a vast ransom in gold and silver,
then killed him in 1533 after amassing an incredible fortune. With the head of
its totalitarian political and religious institutions suddenly gone, the empire
was helpless before the newcomers. There was no clear rule concerning the
emperor’s successor, and three years passed before the Incas could organize an
effective opposition. By that time it was too late, and the entrenched
Spaniards suppressed the revolt. A large part of the population withdrew to
less accessible regions in the interior and founded a new Inca state that
lasted another 40 years; but in 1572, it too was destroyed, and Inca power was
at an end.
Despite the Spanish conquest—which introduced
European culture, intermarriage, and diseases such as smallpox—the indigenous
people of the highland areas of the central and southern Andes survived and
flourished to modern times. Today, there are about the same number of
indigenous people in this region as there were on the eve of the conquest in
1532. Indigenous people of the central and southern Andes primarily speak
Quechua or Aymara, wear homespun and other traditional clothing, and practice
small-scale farming and a pastoral way of life.
|
D
|
Amazon Basin
|
|
D1
|
Land and Habitat
|
The Amazon Basin culture area is defined by the
Amazon River Basin, which contains the world’s largest tropical rain forest.
Covering an estimated 7 million sq km (2.7 million sq mi), this area accounts
for slightly more than 40 percent of the South American continent’s landmass.
With temperatures that rarely go below 27°C (80°F) and heavy rains throughout
the year, the Amazon Basin is a hothouse of animal and plant species. For
example, there are 3,000 fish species, more than 100 species of New World
monkeys, and 5,000 species of trees. The Amazon River, measuring 6,400 km
(4,000 mi) long, is the second longest river in the world, and together with
its principal tributaries—the Xingú, Tapajós, Negro, Madeira, Napo, and Ucayali
rivers—it accounts for one-fifth of all the fresh water that flows into the
oceans.
Ninety-eight percent of the basin consists of land away
from the rivers. Called the terra firme, this land has nutrient-poor
soils because torrential rainfall leaches out the minerals. In contrast to the
terra firme, the remaining 2 percent of the Amazon Basin’s landmass is
exceptionally productive. Called the várzea, this land consists of the
levee banks alongside the main channel of the Amazon River. Each year, during
the period of maximum flood, the river deposits massive amounts of
nutrient-rich silt that flows down out of the eroding Andes.
|
D2
|
People and Languages
|
Among the better-known indigenous groups of the terra
firme part of the basin are the Yanomami (comprising the Ynomamö, Yanomam,
Ninam, and Sanema), Waiwai, Makiritare, Cubeo, of the northern basin; the
Desana, Shuar (formerly Jívaro), Conibo, Shipibo, and Amahuaca, of the eastern
basin; and the Machiguenga, Mundurucú, Kayapó, and Tupinambá, of the southern
basin. At the time of Spanish and Portuguese contact in the 1540s, the
best-known várzea groups were the Tapajós and the Omagua. Major language groups
included Arawakan, Cariban, Panoan, and Tupian (which included the Tupí-Guaraní
language family), but at least 100 separate, mutually unintelligible languages
were spoken throughout the vast area of the Amazon Basin.
|
D3
|
Early Peoples
|
The most important site of early human settlement
in the Amazon Basin is Caverna da Pedra Pintada (Cave of the Painted Rock). It
is located near the modern city of Santarém, Brazil, near the mouth of the
Tapajós River. Evidence of human occupation here comes from cave-wall paintings
and from objects found in the lowest levels of the cave, including stone tools,
projectile points, red paint pigments, and fossilized animal bones and fruit
seeds. These remains, dated to various times between 11,200 and 9,800 years
ago, suggest that the cave inhabitants were hunter-gatherers who ate a rich and
varied diet that included fruits, Brazil nuts, fish, tortoises, mussels,
snakes, birds, and larger land mammals. Caverna da Pedra Pintada demonstrates
that the earliest human migrants successfully adapted to the tropical forest
environment.
Between 4,000 and 2,000 years ago, people living
along the rivers of the Amazon Basin established ways of life similar to those
of indigenous peoples in the Amazon today. As before, fishing and hunting were
important for subsistence, but now the cultivation of root crops provided an
important addition to the diet.
|
D4
|
Diet and Subsistence
|
People adapted to the poor soils of the terra firme
by practicing slash-and-burn agriculture. This farming method involves
clearing a small section of the rain forest by cutting down trees and other
vegetation, then burning them to release nutrients to the soil. Farming is then
possible on the land for about three years, after which the land must be
abandoned and a new area of forest cleared.
Of the many plants raised by indigenous Amazon
groups, manioc (cassava) provided the most food. It contains a starch, tapioca,
which was extracted from the roots of the plant and baked into cakes. Another
important root crop was the sweet potato, which was boiled whole. Maize, beans,
squash, peppers, peanuts, cotton, tobacco, arrowroot were also cultivated. In
other spots, wild plants supplied important quantities of edible fruits and
nuts, including palm fruits, cashews, and Brazil nuts.
In many areas, fish were plentiful and served
as the main food; they were caught with nets, by poisoning the water in
streams, or by shooting them with arrows. In other regions, peccaries, tapirs,
monkeys, armadillos, caimans, manatees, turtles, and deer were numerous enough
to become important parts of the diet. Birds and other animals were hunted with
spears, bows and arrows, and blowguns. Darts used with blowguns were tipped
with poison made from certain vines; the best known of these poisons was
curare.
|
D5
|
Social and Political Organization
|
Because food productivity was relatively limited on
terre firme soils, most cultures of the Amazon Basin were village-level
societies. In contrast to the large chiefdoms and states of the Andes, these
societies consisted of isolated, politically autonomous settlements ranging in
size from 100 to 500 people. All people were born with the same social status,
but they could achieve higher status depending on their individual talents. The
usual leader of a village society was a headman, whose charisma and prowess in
societal activities made him “first among equals.” Headmen were often also
shamans (religious leaders and healers) who performed various rites. In the
Amazon várzea, greater agricultural productivity along the riverbanks supported
the development of two large chiefdom societies, the Tapajós and the Omagua.
Each of these societies included dozens of settlements, populations of many
thousands of people, and powerful chiefs.
|
D6
|
Warfare
|
Warfare and raiding were common among indigenous
groups in the Amazon Basin, although the nature of warfare varied widely. For
example, the Mundurucú of the southern Amazon Basin carried out long-distance
warfare. Every year large groups of men traveled more than 1,000 km (600 mi)
from their territory in the headwaters of the Xingú River, to raid villages
near its confluence with the Amazon River. The Mundurucú killed large numbers
of people and cut off their victims’ heads. They brought the heads home as
trophies used to magically enhance hunting success. Warfare among the Ynomamö
of the northern Amazon Basin, on the other hand, involved small numbers of
deaths and long-running feuds between villages. These feuds meant that villages
had to continually establish political alliances, however shaky, with other
villages. Conflict among the Ynomamö ran along a scale of violence. In its
most benign form, conflict consisted of chest and kidney pounding between pairs
of men. At the other end of the spectrum, on occasion the Ynomamö practiced a
treacherous trick called nohomori, in which they invited their neighbors
over for a feast but killed as many of them as possible shortly after their
arrival.
The Shuar of the western Amazon Basin were
known as fierce warriors and became famous for their practice of preserving and
shrinking their victims’ heads. Upon attacking a local household and killing
one or more of its occupants, the Shuar immediately cut off their victims’
heads. The face and hair were peeled from the skull, then boiled, dried, and
heated until the head had shrunken down to the size of a human fist. These
heads, called tsantsas, were kept as trophies that were believed to have
magical powers and bring good fortune. In the late 19th century, demand by
European tourists and curio collectors created a brisk trade in shrunken heads,
which for a time actually encouraged the Shuar to kill their enemies. In the
early 20th century, to curb the problem, the governments of Ecuador and Peru
outlawed trading in human heads.
|
D7
|
Settlement and Housing
|
The houses of the Amazon Basin were usually
made of a framework of poles or logs covered with palm thatch. They ranged in
size from small lean-tos used for a single family to huge, vaultlike structures
up to 60 m (200 ft) long that sheltered large groups of people. In the hotter
areas the houses had no walls. Villagers often slept in hammocks suspended in
the air, in part to avoid poisonous insects and snakes on the ground beneath.
Many indigenous people in the Amazon Basin still live much in this manner
today.
The layout of villages varied widely throughout the
Amazon Basin. Mundurucú villages consisted of a circular distribution of houses
around a clearing. All of the men lived in a large, open-sided structure on the
western edge of the circle, while the women, girls, and young boys lived in
smaller enclosed dwellings around the rest of the clearing. The open sides of
the men’s house reflected the Mundurucú belief that men should be dominant and
in control of everyone else in the village. Ynomamö villages, in contrast,
consisted of a single circular structure called a shabono that contained
about 125 people and surrounded a large plaza. Because of the constant threat
of surprise attacks by nearby villages, the outer walls were constructed of
closely spaced poles to provide protection against arrows. Shuar settlements
were single household dwellings containing one man, his several wives, and
their children. Like the Ynomamö structures, the walls were built with closely
spaced poles for protection against attack. Further security was provided by
dry ditches around the settlement, which were filled with sharpened sticks designed
to wound or kill unwary attackers.
|
D8
|
Transportation
|
The dugout canoe was the principal means of
transportation for people living along or near rivers and streams. Canoes
varied in size and quality. The várzea chiefdoms—the Tapajós and the Omagua—built
large, sturdy canoes for long-distance war expeditions up and down the Amazon
River. On one occasion, the Spaniards counted as many as 8,000 warriors in 130
canoes (equal to about 60 men per canoe), which were paddled out to attack the
intruding Europeans. On the other hand, the Ynomamö built far less reliable
canoes, reflecting the fact that they lived far from rivers and, like other
terre firme groups, traveled mostly on foot.
|
D9
|
Clothing and Ornamentation
|
In the warm, humid climate of the Amazon
Basin, most indigenous groups wore little or no clothing. Among groups that
wore clothing, garments were made of cotton or plant fibers and usually
consisted of a small breechcloth for men and a short wraparound skirt for
women. Amazonian people often painted or tattooed parts of their body,
including their arms, legs, torso, and face. Ynomamö women placed sticks in
their perforated ear lobes, and Kayapó men wore large wooden plugs in their
lower lip. The Kayapó and other groups of the southern Amazon made large
headdresses of brilliantly colored feathers from tropical birds to wear during
ceremonial activities.
|
D10
|
Religious Beliefs and Practices
|
Religion for Amazonian peoples centered around multiple
spirits, many of which were believed to have great influence on people. Those
of the rivers and bush were considered evil and were feared and shunned. Some
of the spirits were celestial beings, identified with the Sun, Moon, stars,
sky, and clouds, but they were mythical in nature and were generally considered
to have little connection with everyday life. Many Amazonian peoples believed
in a multilayered cosmos. For example, according to Ynomamö belief, the cosmos
has four levels. The topmost layer is duku kä misi, the “tender layer,”
where all things on Earth were created, and which now lies empty. Below this is
hedu kä misi, the “sky layer,” a place similar to Earth where Ynomamö
souls go after death. The Earth layer, hei kä misi (“this layer”), is
where the Ynomamö and all other humans live. The lowest layer is called hei
tä bebi, the “bottom layer.” Nothing is found here except one village
structure, or shabono, which came crashing down long ago when a piece of the
sky layer broke off and fell through the Earth layer. Some Ynomamö came down
with it, but since only their shabano and garden fell with them, and not the
forest in which they hunt, they are thought to have turned into cannibalistic
monsters.
Shamans, who were believed to have close contact
with the supernatural world, conducted the ceremonies, rituals, and healing in
most Amazon Basin societies. Shamans often ingested hallucinogenic substances
to aid them in their activities. One role of the shaman was the acquisition of
magical darts to use against enemies or other undesirables. The shaman hurled
these invisible darts—called caui, hekura, and tsentsak,
respectively, by the Mundurucú, Ynomamö, and Shuar—out away from their
settlements to catch stray enemies by surprise and cause them illness and
death. In their healing activities, shamans were responsible for sucking these
darts out from the skin of people in their own group.
|
D11
|
Post-Contact History
|
Although Europeans may have sighted the Amazon delta
region in 1500, exploration of the river did not begin until decades later. In
1541 and 1542 Spanish explorer Francisco de Orellana and a crew of some 50 men
navigated the entire length of the river over a period of eight months, encountering
the Omagua and other peoples. Lured by rumors of cinnamon and gold, the
Spaniards moved eastward from the Andes and founded small forest settlements.
Meanwhile, the Portuguese, beginning in the early 17th century, slowly settled
the Amazon Basin moving westward from the eastern coast of Brazil. Both the
Spanish and Portuguese enslaved or coerced indigenous groups to search for gold
or perform other labor. However, the Europeans found the Amazon peoples harder
to subdue than Andean highland groups. In contrast to the top-heavy state
apparatus of the Inca Empire, the Amazon Basin was divided into hundreds of
small societies, which could not be collectively conquered in a single stroke.
In addition, the Europeans also usually met with fierce resistance; the Shuar,
for example, destroyed a number of European settlements in eastern Ecuador in
1599. Many Amazon Basin peoples were protected by nearly impenetrable jungle
and if attacked, could move their villages further into the jungle.
As the European presence increased, however,
serious epidemics of disease wiped out large numbers of indigenous peoples. The
Omagua and Tapajós, who lived along the main channel of the Amazon River,
nearly became extinct. By the 20th century the indigenous population of the
Amazon Basin had been reduced to a mere 10 to 15 percent of its size prior to
European contact. In the past century, as urban Latin American countries have
experienced massive population growth, more and more nonindigenous people have
moved into the Amazon Basin in search of better places to live. Corporations
and individuals have also sought to exploit the precious resources of the rain
forest, including gold, oil, and iron. These encroachments continue to imperil
Amazonian peoples by reducing forest habitat and spreading disease.
|
E
|
Brazilian Highlands
|
|
E1
|
Land and Habitat
|
Covering most of southern and southeastern Brazil,
the Brazilian Highlands are the eroded remnants of mountains that existed
millions of years ago. The climate is subtropical, meaning there is less
rainfall here and temperatures, while still warm year-round, are generally not
as hot as in the tropical lowlands of the Amazon Basin. The northern inland
part of the highlands is called the caatinga (a Tupí word meaning “white
forest”) because of the grayish-white color the forests take on during the dry
season. The caatinga is the driest area in Brazil, receiving light to moderate
rainfall. Most indigenous people in the Brazilian Highlands lived in the
southern inland part of the highlands, a vast sandstone plateau called the mato
grosso. Although rainfall is moderate to heavy here, the soil consists of
heavily eroded, nutrient-poor clays that mainly support grassy savannas.
Thicker vegetation grows here as well, but it is confined to narrow forests
that grow along the banks of rivers that crisscross the area. In eastern
Brazil, the narrow coastal plain receives moderate rainfall throughout the
year, and is more suitable for intensive agriculture than either of the inland
areas.
|
E2
|
People and Languages
|
At the time of European contact major
indigenous groups of the Brazilian Highlands culture area included the Krahó,
Apinayé, Shavante, Akwé-Shavante, Sherente, Bororo, southern Kayapó, Guayakí
(Aché), Kaingang, Guaraní, and Tupinambá. Major language groups included Ge and
Tupian; the most widespread of the Tupian language families was Tupí-Guaraní.
When Europeans arrived in Brazil in 1500, the Tupinambá occupied nearly the
entire Atlantic coast of Brazil, as well as some inland areas. Ge-speaking
groups lived in the interior, south of the jungles of the Amazon Basin.
|
E3
|
Early Peoples
|
Of the small number of early human settlements
found to date in the Brazilian Highlands, the most interesting is Pedra Furada
rock shelter, located near the São Francisco River in the heart of the northern
caatinga. Discovered in the early 1970s and noted for its beautiful
multicolored pictographs, which are clearly prehistoric in date, this site is
nevertheless controversial because of claims made by its principal excavator
that stone tools dating from 14,300 to more than 48,000 years ago were found in
its lowest levels. During a visit to the site in the late 1990s, a group of
archaeologists examined these “tools” and concluded they were more likely to be
naturally formed rocks that had been washed by rainfall off the top of a cliff
above the site. However, other materials recovered from Pedra Furada—hearths
that contain charcoal, animal bones, wood, and plant remains—provide good
evidence of human occupation of the site between 10,400 and 6,150 years ago.
|
E4
|
Diet and Subsistence
|
The arid, relatively unproductive soils of the
Brazilian Highlands supported limited slash-and-burn agriculture based on manioc,
sweet potatoes, and maize (see corn). The major portion of the diet was
provided by hunting and gathering. Among the animals hunted were birds,
rabbits, armadillos, peccaries, deer, and tapirs. Wild plant foods included
palm fruits, pine nuts, and seeds from various plants. Insect larvae and wild
honey were both considered delicacies.
|
E5
|
Social and Political Organization
|
Most cultures of the Brazilian Highlands were
egalitarian, village-level societies similar to those of the Amazon Basin,
usually consisting of hundreds of people. Yet many villages had complex social
systems. For example, the Ge-speaking peoples (Kayapó, Sherente, and Bororo) of
the southern highlands divided their villages in two halves, called moieties,
which were further divided into a complex system of clans, age grades, and
gender groups. The moieties were often structured so that a person could only
marry someone of the opposite moiety. Kayapó men and women were divided into a
series of seven age grades, or categories, that reflected the differing
responsibilities and statuses of people throughout their lives. The youngest
age grade included small children and the oldest included people who were more
than 45 years of age and had grandchildren.
|
E6
|
Warfare
|
Warfare was common among most indigenous groups of
the Brazilian Highlands. The Tupinambá were among the fiercest warriors and
engaged in cannibalism as a form of revenge against their enemies. Before an
attack, villagers checked the necessary omens, prepared themselves with magical
rites, then fell on their enemies with flaming arrows and clubs. Captured
warriors were brought back to the village, where they were mocked and jeered.
They made no attempt to escape because the rules of war dictated that they
would be killed by the people of their home village if they attempted to return
there. The ultimate fate of captives was always the same. Sooner or later the
captors prepared an elaborate feast, the captive was decorated and led out to
join in the singing and dancing, an executioner killed him with a special club,
and he was eaten in a cannibalistic banquet.
Ge-speaking peoples also undertook wars for vengeance or
the continuation of traditional feuds, but they did not take prisoners or eat
their enemies. Instead, a man who had killed an enemy was required to go into
seclusion and observe ritual food restrictions for 10 to 30 days. At the end of
this period, the man took a ceremonial bath and his heroic exploit was
announced to the village from a central plaza.
|
E7
|
Settlement and Housing
|
Many villages in the western Brazilian
Highlands had separate housing for women and men. Women and children lived in
thatched houses around a central plaza, while the men lived in a separate structure
in the middle of the plaza. The houses around the circle were further grouped
according to moiety and clan affiliation. As recently as the late 19th century,
many Brazilian Highlands peoples lived in villages only during the times of the
year when food was plentiful. During the dry season, they would break up into
smaller bands that trekked in search of game far from the village.
|
E8
|
Transportation
|
In contrast to the extensive waterways of the
Amazon Basin, the Brazilian Highlands have fewer major rivers. Thus, highland
peoples did not use canoes much, although both men and women were excellent
swimmers and easily crossed most rivers. Most people lived on the savannas away
from the rivers and transported loads by foot on roads and trails. The
Ge-speaking peoples of the southern highlands constructed roadways that
extended out in straight lines up to 16 km (10 mi) from their villages. Smaller
roads were used to travel to nearby farming plots and hunting grounds. The
larger roads were used for a favorite game of Ge peoples—relay racing with
heavy logs, in which the two moieties competed against each other. Each
contestant sprinted with a heavy log on his shoulder until he was worn out,
then passed it on to a teammate.
|
E9
|
Clothing and Ornamentation
|
In the warm climate of the Brazilian
Highlands, most people wore minimal clothing. Both men and women decorated
themselves on the arms, legs, and chest with dyes from native plants called genipa
and urucú. Many individuals wore earplugs, as well as labrets, or
ornaments worn through a pierced lower lip. The Bororo attached bird feathers
to their arms with a sticky resin, although this was done not as a decoration
but to cure sores. Like the people of the Amazon Basin, men commonly wore fancy
feather headdresses.
|
E10
|
Religious Beliefs and Practices
|
Religious systems throughout the Brazilian Highlands
were oriented especially toward prayers or supplications to the gods, such as
the Sun and the Moon. Villagers prayed for rain, for plentiful harvests, and
for success in hunting. For example, the Kaingang believed in a “Master of the
Animals” spirit who controlled the number of game animals and could take
offense if the men overhunted these animals. The Kaingang also had a ceremony
of the dead that took place when the maize crop had ripened. Among other
purposes, the ceremony served to sever connections between the dead and the
living so the spirits of the dead could not harm people. Shamans were less
common among most of the highland groups, in contrast to many Amazonian groups.
|
E11
|
Post-Contact History
|
The Portuguese, led by Pedro Álvares Cabral,
arrived on the eastern coast of Brazil in 1500. At first the Portuguese made
only a half-hearted attempt at colonization, using Brazil principally as a
source of brazilwood, which supplied a red dye, and as a way station for trade.
But in the mid-1500s colonization increased, the Tupinambá villages were
captured one by one, and the native inhabitants were enslaved and put to work
on coastal sugar plantations. In a few decades, Native Americans who did not
die of European diseases and forced labor fled to the interior and largely
disappeared from the coastal areas occupied by the Portuguese. Slave raids on
indigenous groups encouraged them to flee all the faster, and soon African
slaves imported by the Portuguese outnumbered the Native Americans on the
plantations.
Many indigenous peoples have nearly disappeared from the
Brazilian Highlands since the beginning of the 20th century. For example, the
Apinayé, Sherente and Shavante were estimated to number 12,000 people in the
early 19th century, but European diseases and contact had reduced their numbers
to a few hundred by the mid-20th century. Because the poor land in the interior
is generally unattractive to the nonindigenous population, scattered indigenous
groups still live along the western edges of the Brazilian Highlands.
|
F
|
Gran Chaco
|
|
F1
|
Land and Habitat
|
The Gran Chaco culture area corresponds with the
Gran Chaco (or simply Chaco) region in south central South America, which
encompasses part of Argentina, Paraguay, and Bolivia. It is one of the most
challenging environments for human occupation in South America. Summer
temperatures are hotter here than anywhere else on the continent. Although
rainfall is low, it occurs in such copious amounts during the summer that the
three main rivers of the area—the Pilcomayo, Bermejo, and Salado—flood their
banks and create large swampy areas. During the dry winter season, temperatures
drop so low that tropical vegetation does not thrive. Such seasonal extremes of
rainfall and temperature favor mostly cacti and deep-rooted scrub vegetation,
which grow in scattered thickets across the grassy savannas.
|
F2
|
People and Languages
|
A number of indigenous groups occupied the Gran
Chaco at the time of European contact, including the Chiriguano, Zamuco,
Chamacoco, Tapieté, Guana, Mbayá, Chané, Angaité, and Lengua, in the north; and
the Lule, Vilela, Macá, Pilagá, Mataco, Mocoví, and Abipón, in the south. The
main language groups from north to south included Zamucoan, Matacoan,
Lule-Vilelan, Mascoian, and Guaicuruan.
|
F3
|
Early Peoples
|
Almost no archaeological research has been done in the
Gran Chaco. It is possible, however, that human occupation here began around
11,000 years ago, which is the date of the earliest human settlement found on
the pampas (grassy plains) of northern Argentina, just to the south of the Gran
Chaco.
|
F4
|
Diet and Subsistence
|
People throughout most of the Gran Chaco relied on wild
plant foods as their main food source, although they supplemented their diet
with very limited farming. Plant foods included beans from the pods of the
algarroba, or honey mesquite tree, as well as cactus fruits, wild rice, and
tubers. As in the Brazilian Highlands, honey and insect larvae were also part
of the diet. In the grasslands of the eastern and southern parts of the Chaco,
people hunted peccaries, deer, guanacos, rheas (South American ostriches), and
numerous smaller animals. Fishing supplemented the diet of people throughout
the Chaco, and was especially important for those who lived near the Pilcomayo,
Bermejo, and Salado rivers. After the flooding rivers receded at the start of
the dry season, it was relatively easy for people to catch the fish stranded in
the remaining swamps and lagoons, using baskets, harpoons, bows and arrows, and
other techniques.
Women and men usually had different
responsibilities for obtaining food. Women primarily gathered fruits, roots,
seeds, and algarroba beans, while men collected palm fruits, nuts, and honey.
Men had responsibility for hunting. In addition to using spears and bows and
arrows to hunt game, men used a weapon called a bola, which consisted of
two or three grooved stones tied to a strong rawhide cord. When the bola was
thrown at the legs of a running animal, it wound around them and tripped the
animal, making it an easy victim for the arrows and clubs of the hunters.
|
F5
|
Social and Political Organization
|
Most indigenous groups in the Gran Chaco were band
societies that moved frequently to search for food. The leader of each band was
a headman, who rose to this position by virtue of his age, wisdom, and survival
skills. Ranging up to 200 people in size, many bands were large enough to
permit marriage between the members of the same band. Smaller bands required
individuals to marry outside of the band. Both boys and girls underwent puberty
rites to mark their passage into adulthood. To gain full status as hunters and
warriors, boys were required to go through painful rites that involved the
extraction of blood from their genitals. Girls’ puberty rites were accompanied
by dancing and singing and could last as long as a month. During this
initiation, the girls had to live in isolation from the rest of the group and
observe dietary restrictions.
|
F6
|
Warfare
|
Chacoan groups fought frequently. The main causes of
conflict were trespassing onto another group’s territory to obtain food,
revenge for killings and witchcraft, and the desire to capture women and
children for one’s own band. In ritual dances prior to a raid, warriors worked
themselves into a frenzy to aid in the success of the raid. Warriors usually
took the heads or scalps of killed enemies to bring back to camp as war
trophies.
|
F7
|
Settlement and Housing
|
Since most Chacoan groups moved frequently in
search of limited and scattered food supplies, they relied on simple houses
such as pole-and-thatch windbreaks or lean-tos. Although scarcer materials like
poles might be carried from camp to camp, it was usually an easy matter to
quickly construct a temporary dwelling from materials available near the
campsite. Larger groups often constructed long communal huts on opposite sides
of a wide walkway or plaza. The decision about where to construct a camp
involved how well it could be defended from enemies as well as the proximity of
water and food supplies.
|
F8
|
Transportation
|
Prior to the arrival of Europeans, the people
of the Gran Chaco relied almost entirely on foot travel, transporting material
possessions on their backs. In spite of the importance of fishing, most groups
lacked any form of water transport other than the simplest rafts or skin tubs
used as ferries. Groups in the central Chaco, between the Pilcomayo and Bermejo
rivers, acquired horses soon after the arrival the Spanish in the 16th century.
Like the Indians of the North American plains and those of the Argentine
pampas, the Chacoan horse people quickly expanded the areas in which they
sought out food, and began moving south and west of the Pilcomayo-Bermejo area
to raid Spanish settlements located on the edge of their territory. Although
they had earlier relied on hunting and limited agriculture for food, these
newly mounted groups eventually focused almost entirely on hunting. Guanacos,
deer, peccaries, and rheas could be surrounded by horsemen much more easily
than in the days before the horse, when hunters had to approach animals
stealthily on foot. With horses to carry large loads from one camp to another,
people could also own and carry more material possessions than before.
Settlements continued to be temporary, however, because grazing horses tended
to use up pastures quickly, requiring groups to travel greater distances than
in pre-horse days to find new sources of grass.
|
F9
|
Clothing and Ornamentation
|
During the periods of colder weather, Chacoan
people wore cloaks made of otter, deer, or fox skins, with the fur side worn
against the body for greater warmth. Cloaks were decorated on the outside with
painted black-and-red designs. People who lived in the foothills of the Andes,
along the northwestern edge of the Chaco, wore clothing made from llama and
alpaca wool. Women in the central Chaco wore simple knee-length skirts made of
animal skins with the fur scraped off. To protect the feet during the hot
summertime or when crossing a patch of thorns, various groups wore wooden
sandals or animal-hide moccasins. Where the cactus and thorn thickets were
worst, people used deer-hide leggings to protect their legs.
Many of the Chacoan people wore some sort of
headgear. This usually consisted of a single feather from a rhea or egret, but
for special occasions could involve much fancier arrangements of feathers,
toucan beaks, and snail shells placed in woven caps. Both men and women wore
large earplugs that were placed in their pierced ear lobes. Shamans of the
Lengua people attached mirrors to these earplugs in an effort to see the
reflections of spirits. Lengua people also inserted a semicircular piece of
wood in a hole in their lower lip, which made it look as if they had a second
tongue (this custom led the Spanish to call them Lengua, a Spanish word
meaning “tongue”). Chacoan people variously wore necklaces, pendants, armlets,
bracelets, as well as ornaments around their waists and legs. Women throughout
the Gran Chaco decorated their faces, breasts, and arms with tattooed designs.
|
F10
|
Religious Beliefs and Practices
|
Chacoan peoples did not believe in a supreme being.
Many, however, felt that celestial bodies such as the Sun and the Moon could
affect individual humans. The most widespread belief was that settlements were
surrounded by evil spirits. These spirits could bring about great harm unless
they were effectively controlled not only by adult members of the group, but
also by shamans. To protect themselves against these spirits, people would
chant, shake gourd rattles, whip bullroarers (a kind of noisemaker) around in
the air, blow on whistles, and perform ritual dances. They also wore amulets
and scarred the body with special designs as forms of protection. In spite of
these measures, people believed that shamans from hostile enemies were capable
of causing illness or other bodily harm by sending the spirits into their
bodies. The only way people could be cured, according to traditional belief,
was by having their own shaman suck the evil spirits out of the body.
|
F11
|
Post-Contact History
|
The Gran Chaco has long been a route of travel
between the Bolivian Andes and the coastal regions of Uruguay and southern
Brazil. The first known European to enter the area was a shipwrecked Portuguese
sailor named Alejo García, who crossed the northern Chaco with a group of
Guaraní people sometime between 1521 and 1526. He made it as far as the high
Andes of southern Bolivia, near modern Sucre, but was killed by native
inhabitants upon returning to the Atlantic Coast.
Except in the far northwest, very few
indigenous people of the Gran Chaco retain any semblance of their traditional
culture. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries white populations gradually
pushed into the peripheries of the Chaco, resulting either in the assimilation
of native populations or in their outright disappearance.
|
G
|
Southern South America
|
|
G1
|
Land and Habitat
|
The Southern South America culture area is
characterized by great extremes of environment and climate. It extends from a
point just south of the Tropic of Capricorn, at 23° south latitude, to the tip
of South America some 3,500 km (2,200 mi) to the south. The cold, rain-drenched
Tierra del Fuego archipelago (chain of islands) lies at the southern extreme of
the continent. It consists of a large main island, sometimes called Tierra del
Fuego Island, and many smaller islands. Glaciers in this area reach down to sea
level, and the channels of the archipelago are dotted with icebergs. On the
southwestern side of the continent, the islands of the rainy Chilean
archipelago contain dense stands of beech and coniferous trees, which kept the
indigenous inhabitants of the area mostly confined to the narrow beaches for
their settlements and to the channels for shellfish gathering. To the north of
Tierra del Fuego and to the east of the Andes lies Patagonia, a cold, dry, and
windswept region of treeless plains and thin vegetation. North of Patagonia
lies the vast pampas, or grassy plains, of northern Argentina and Uruguay.
|
G2
|
People and Languages
|
The aboriginal cultures of the Southern South America
culture area at the time of European contact included the Charrúa and Guaraní
of the Uruguayan pampas, the Puelche of the Argentinean pampas, the Tehuelche
of Patagonia, the Ona and Aush of Tierra del Fuego Island, the Yahgan of the
islands south of Tierra del Fuego Island, the Alacaluf of the southern part of
the Chilean archipelago, and the Chono of the northern Chilean archipelago. The
Yahgan, who lived at roughly 56° south latitude, were the southernmost
inhabitants of the world prior to the occupation of Antarctica in modern times.
The Charrúa and the Puelche belonged to the Puelche language group, while the
other six groups belonged to the Tehuelche language group.
|
G3
|
Early Peoples
|
Archaeologists have discovered dozens of sites of
ancient human settlement in the Southern South America culture area. Although
evidence indicates that Paleo-Indians (the earliest inhabitants of the
Americas) were in the northern pampas by about 10,600 years ago, even earlier
dates are associated with sites in the extreme south. For example, at Los
Toldos Cave in southern Patagonia, stone tools associated with animal bones
have been dated to 12,600 years ago (although this date is controversial),
making this site roughly contemporaneous with the Monte Verde site 800 km (500
mi) to the northwest in Chile. And at Fell’s Cave, located just to the north of
the Strait of Magellan, the earliest human occupation has been securely dated
to between 11,000 and 10,800 years ago. Excavated by American archaeologists
Junius and Peggy Bird in the 1930s, Fell’s Cave was one of the first Paleo-Indian
sites found in South America, and the first to demonstrate that humans hunted
now-extinct animals such as the giant ground sloth and the prehistoric horse.
Moreover, the presence of rounded, grooved stones at both Monte Verde and
Fell’s Cave strongly suggests that the earliest indigenous peoples of southern
South America used the bola.
|
G4
|
Diet and Subsistence
|
Agriculture was mostly unknown in the Southern South
America culture area because weather conditions were too cold or too wet, or
else the soil conditions were unsuitable for farming. Indigenous peoples of the
pampas and Patagonia survived primarily by hunting land animals and gathering
wild plants. The Charrúa relied primarily on guanaco, rhea, and other smaller
animals of the pampas for their subsistence, although they supplemented their
diet with fish, tubers, seeds, and berries. The Puelche had a similar diet,
with the exception of fish. The Tehuelche of Patagonia relied on guanaco and
rhea, as well as tuco-tuco (a large rodent), skunks, and a large variety of
wild plants including tubers. After the introduction of the horse in the 16th
century, the Tehuelche pursued guanacos from horseback.
In the harsher, more limited conditions of
Tierra del Fuego Island, the northern and southern Ona (called Pámica and
Hamka, respectively) were limited primarily to the tuco-tuco, in the north,
and the guanaco, in the south. Coastal Ona here also relied on a variety of
marine mammals such as seals and otters, in addition to scavenging beached
whales whose (sometimes rotting) flesh was considered a great delicacy. The
Alacaluf, Chono, and Yahgan of the Chilean and Tierra del Fuego archipelagos
gathered shellfish, especially mussels, as their primary source of food. Women
were the principal gatherers. They picked up the shellfish along the beaches or
went out in canoes with shellfish spears. Where shellfish beds lay in deeper
water, women dived to the bottom and brought up the shellfish in baskets. All
this took place in extremely cold water ranging from 4° to 10°C (40° to 50°F).
Shellfish gatherers supplemented their diet with sea lions, sea birds
(cormorants, ducks, and penguins), fish, sea otters, porpoises, and a few land
animals. They also gathered very limited amounts of plant foods.
|
G5
|
Social and Political Organization
|
Because its land was unsuitable for
agriculture and food was scarce, the Southern South America culture area could
not support large populations. Thus, all of the indigenous people here were organized
as nomadic bands. In the north, band sizes ranged from 100 to 120 individuals
for the Puelche to as many as 500 people for the Tehuelche. In contrast, band
sizes farther to the south and along the east side of the continent were much
smaller. The typical band consisted of a nuclear or extended family with no
more than 10 to 15 people.
|
G6
|
Warfare
|
Nearly all of the indigenous groups of
Southern South America engaged in raiding or warfare, usually over territory
and access to hunting grounds. The Charrúa, for example, conducted surprise
raids against their enemies, and would hide their women and children in a
nearby forested area before launching the attack. Women and children in the
enemy band were spared and sometimes incorporated into their band, but men were
killed, their heads skinned, and the skulls kept as trophies to be used as
ceremonial drinking cups. Both the Puelche and the Tehuelche continually fought
with neighboring bands and, later, with newly arrived European settlers.
Although these two peoples used bows and arrows as well as spear throwers and
slings, their most deadly weapon was the bola, which could be used either to
kill the enemy or to quickly bring down a horse and its European rider.
The Ona were famous for their warfare.
Numbering some 4,000 people throughout Tierra del Fuego Island, they divided
into 38 territorial units, each with its own name, whose boundaries were
defended against any incursions by neighboring groups. Shamans, called xon,
were believed to have the magical power to change themselves into guanacos,
allowing them to gather intelligence on the enemy covertly. The shamans would
advise local men where the enemy was, what its numbers were, and whether a raid
was likely to be successful.
|
G7
|
Settlement and Housing
|
Because people lived in temporary settlements,
dwellings in this culture area were simple pole-frame structures that could be
easily erected and disassembled. The Charrúa constructed square huts consisting
of a wooden pole set in each corner and covered with straw matting. All of the
other groups placed sewn hides on a framework of wooden poles. The Tehuelche
further weatherproofed their dwellings by smearing a mixture of red paint and
grease over the exterior of the guanaco hides that formed the walls and roof.
In the far south, where temperatures were cold all year, people usually kept a
hearth fire going continuously in the center of the hut. Fur hides were placed
around the hearth, and the entire family slept in a circle around it at night
to keep warm.
|
G8
|
Transportation
|
Although the Charrúa frequently used canoes for
fishing, the Puelche, Tehuelche, and Ona did not use canoes at all, and the
material items necessary for daily life were carried on their backs. Once the
horse was introduced to the pampas in the 16th century by European settlers,
both the Puelche and Tehuelche adopted a way of life centered around the horse.
As with peoples of the Great Plains in North America, the horse aided them in
hunting, extending their territories, and in carrying out attacks against both
other indigenous groups and European settlers.
Living along damp, rugged coasts and offshore
islands, the Chono, Alacaluf, and Yahgan were all primarily canoe people.
Although Yahgan men were in charge of building beech bark canoes, the women
owned them. During the hunt for sea mammals, a woman would guide the canoe
while a man stood in the prow with his weapons to kill whatever prey they
found. On colder days, the boaters kept warm by starting a fire in the bottom
of the canoe on a bed of sand and rocks. Although these canoes looked very
fragile to European observers, the Yahgan were such expert seafarers that they
were able to travel 50 km (30 mi) across the open ocean to the Ildefonso
Islands, which lie to the south of Tierra del Fuego.
|
G9
|
Clothing and Ornamentation
|
The primary item of clothing among the people
of Southern South America consisted of cloaks or robes made of animal hides—the
Charrúa using deerskins, the Tehuelche and southern Ona using guanaco skins,
the northern Ona using tuco-tuco skins, and the Yahgan using seal, sea otter,
and fox skins. Some groups wore fur hats and boots. However, in the southern
archipelago, where wintry conditions include snow and fierce winds, the Yahgan
often went about with little or no clothing at all.
|
G10
|
Religious Beliefs and Practices
|
The Ona and Yahgan oriented their religion
principally around shamans who played roles both as bewitchers of enemy individuals
and curers of their own people. To weaken their enemies, the shamans hurled
invisible magic darts (called kwáke by the Ona and yéku by the
Yahgan) intended to cause illness and death. Because enemy shamans engaged in
the same hostile behavior, local shamans sought to cure ill members of their
band by magically sucking the invisible darts out of their bodies and hurling
them into the air away from camp. The Puelche of the pampas believed in two
spiritual beings, one of whom caused illness, death, and storms, and the other
of whom was benign. Little is known about the religion of other peoples in the
culture area.
|
G11
|
Post-Contact History
|
The first European explorer to arrive in Southern
South America was the Spanish navigator Juan Díaz de Solís. In 1516 he sailed
into the Río de la Plata, a large estuary between present-day Uruguay and
Argentina. Solis claimed the region for Spain, but he and his landing party
were killed by the Charrúa. In 1520 Portuguese explorer Ferdinand Magellan,
navigating through what is now the Strait of Magellan, encountered the
Tehuelche of Patagonia. In 1526 Italian navigator Sebastian Cabot visited the
Río de la Plata, traveling up the Paraná River as far as the area of modern
Asunción in Paraguay. But conquest and colonization of the region did not begin
until 1536, when a large expedition led by Spanish soldier Pedro de Mendoza
founded Buenos Aires.
The native peoples of Southern South America suffered
greatly from diseases brought by the Europeans. Indigenous groups in the
central and northern parts of the region, who lived closest to European
colonies in Uruguay and Argentina, quickly died out or were assimilated into
European society. In contrast, the Chono, Alacaluf, Ona, Aush, and Yahgan
survived in significant numbers until the end of the 19th century.
Nevertheless, in the face of the European expansion into the Chilean
archipelago and Tierra del Fuego in the early 20th century, all of these groups
were extinct by the 1950s.
The introduction and the Culture Areas
section of this article were contributed by David J. Wilson.
|
III
|
HISTORY
|
|
A
|
The Historical Record
|
Determining the history of human settlement and cultural
development in the central and southern portion of the Western Hemisphere (or
Middle and South America) is an exercise in reconstructing the past. Scholars
use many types of evidence and methods to reconstruct the histories of the cultures
that existed in the Americas before the late 15th century, when Europeans began
their conquest of what they called the New World. Well before then, indigenous
peoples had developed advanced civilizations. These civilizations were centered
in the most densely settled areas of Middle America (Mexico, Central America,
and the West Indies) and the Andean region of western South America. When
Europeans arrived, the Aztec Empire ruled over central Mexico and the Inca
Empire dominated the Andean region. Most historical research has focused on
these areas.
Archaeology, the examination of surviving physical
remains, has been conducted throughout the Americas. This method uncovers
information that can help to reconstruct the broad structures and textures of
cultures. The layout of communities and architecture of buildings provide a
fundamental understanding of the people who created and lived in these places.
The designs and patterns found on textiles and pottery also provide important
clues to their ways of life. However, archaeology rarely illuminates the
dynamics behind changes through time. Also, the quality and quantity of
existing physical remains differs considerably from one area to another. The
archaeological record remains incomplete for the early indigenous cultures of
the Americas. Most evidence is from the larger civilizations, which constructed
stone edifices. These ruins provide a more durable record than the dwellings
made of wood or other perishable materials that were built by many smaller
societies. In addition, the physical record has been altered by the impact of
human-induced destruction and variations in climate. Technological advances in
radiocarbon dating methods and DNA studies, both of which are used in the
scientific evaluation of archaeological evidence, can help scholars formulate
more accurate conclusions from surviving remains.
Other types of evidence are based on human memory
and record keeping. Native American testimonies survive from many early
encounters with Europeans. Although these records are invaluable, they are
often shaped by the European recorders’ understanding of Native American
languages and by their subjective interpretations. In Middle America and the
Andean region, where the most advanced indigenous civilizations thrived, native
scholars and officials wrote histories of their cultures and communities in the
decades following European conquest. This substantial body of writings is
highly informative and quite reliable, especially when the individual works are
evaluated against each other and against other sources. In Middle America many
native peoples became literate in their own languages using the Roman alphabet
and recorded land-ownership transactions, minutes from meetings, and other
important events. The enormous volume of such documents affords a detailed and
intimate view of native life and culture after European contact, and sometimes
even before the first encounters. Present-day native rituals, dances, and oral
histories also provide important information through the retelling and
reenactment of legends and myths. However, these forms often relate an
idealized and selective reconstruction of events, rather than an exact account
of what may have actually happened.
The Maya of the Yucatán Peninsula and
Guatemala and the various native peoples of central Mexico had developed
writing, as well as highly accurate mathematical systems and calendars,
hundreds of years before Europeans arrived. Writing was a skill restricted to
official scribes, who enjoyed high status. They created thousands of codices,
which were folding books made from tree bark and animal skins. The codices
recorded religious systems, political dynasties, military victories, and other
matters of high importance. However, the Spanish destroyed almost all of the
codices, in the belief they were a hindrance to the smooth conversion of Native
Americans to Christianity. The ability to read classical Mayan was lost for
centuries. Scholars finally learned to read the language during the second half
of the 20th century, giving new significance to the many inscriptions found on
surviving Maya structures, monuments, and ornaments. Other indigenous
societies, especially in the Andean region, used knotted cords called quipus
to keep accurate counts of population, animals, and products. Some of these
have survived, providing another source of information.
|
B
|
Early Migration Patterns
|
It remains unknown precisely when humans first
appeared in the Western Hemisphere. The first inhabitants most likely migrated
from northeastern Asia to what is now Alaska by crossing over a land bridge,
known as Beringia. This land bridge was exposed from about 25,000 years to
10,000 years ago, during the final glacial stage of the Pleistocene Epoch (1.6
million years to 10,000 years before present). At that time ocean levels were
lower because more of Earth’s water was frozen in glaciers. Migratory and herd
animals such as mastodons, horses, mammoths, camelids, bison, elk, and moose
also crossed the land bridge. Some of these large Pleistocene mammals,
including the horse, became extinct in the Americas by 7000 bc. When the Pleistocene Epoch ended,
water completely covered Beringia, effectively closing off this early migration
route. By then humans had migrated throughout the Americas. They reached the
southern cone of South America, as evidenced by the archaeological site of
Monte Verde, at least 12,500 years ago. Some early southward migrations may
have taken place in boats. See also Migration to the Americas.
|
C
|
Early Settlement and Way of Life
|
The early inhabitants of the Americas existed by
hunting, gathering, and fishing. They adjusted their diet to what was
seasonally available in their environment, gathering wild edible plants and
insects as well as hunting and fishing all sorts of wild animals. This early
diet permitted substantial population growth. Population density remained low,
however, and people mostly lived in bands of 50 or fewer members. Populations
also increased because most epidemic diseases common to Europe, such as
smallpox and measles, did not exist in the Americas.
By 7,000 years ago people in Middle and South
America were cultivating edible plants. Permanent agricultural settlements
emerged about 4,000 years ago. Peoples of the temperate highlands, specifically
south central and northeastern Mexico and coastal Peru, began to cultivate
maize around this time. During the next several hundred years, the populations
of these areas became much larger. The local societies organized into distinct
states, with royal families, governmental bureaucracies, and legal and judicial
systems.
|
D
|
Civilizations in Middle America
|
Middle America is made up of a long, tapering
isthmus that forms a bridge between North America and South America. It
includes the present-day countries of Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, El Salvador,
Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama. Large mountain chains of volcanic
origin dominate much of Middle America. In Mexico the mountains divide the vast
temperate highlands of the central plateau into a number of valleys and basins,
each with a distinct environmental setting. The Valley of Mexico, on the
southern edge of this plateau, was the focal point of several prominent
civilizations. Southeast of this valley is the huge northward-projecting
Yucatán Peninsula, the center of the great Maya civilization.
During the 1st millennium bc several cultures in the region began to establish complex
urban and ritual centers. These
elaborately constructed centers were the locus of power, high culture, and
immense wealth. Through trade, conquest, and alliances, several civilizations
extended their spheres of cultural influence and political rule. The
development of civilizations in Middle America culminated in the great Aztec
Empire, which was at its height when the Spanish conquest destroyed it in 1521.
|
D1
|
Olmec Civilization
|
In about 1500 bc the Olmec
people emerged as the first major civilization in Middle America. They built
their settlements and ritual centers in fertile coastal lowlands southeast of
the Valley of Mexico along the Gulf of Mexico. The favorable climate permitted
crops to be harvested twice a year, and the fine stones of the region,
particularly jades, were marketed over a vast area. The Olmec culture thrived
until about 600 bc and influenced
other cultures in central Mexico and the Yucatán Peninsula. The Olmec developed
calendar and counting systems that were the precursors to systems used by later
cultures in Middle America.
|
D2
|
Monte Albán
|
The Zapotec people inhabited the Valley of Oaxaca,
south of the Valley of Mexico, beginning in at least 1500 bc. They established one of the first
city-states in Middle America. In about 500 bc
they built their capital, Monte Albán, on top of a flattened mountain in the
valley. When the city reached its
height of influence, power, and wealth in about ad
500, it had between 25,000 and 30,000 inhabitants. The political domain of
Monte Albán spread beyond the confines of the Valley of Oaxaca, and the Zapotec
established ties with other civilizations in Middle America, including
Teotihuacán. After about 750, however, the city declined for unknown reasons.
The Zapotec developed a more centralized and hierarchical society than the
Olmec. They also developed one of the earliest writing systems in Mesoamerica,
and the edifices they built at Monte Albán have many hieroglyphic stone
inscriptions.
|
D3
|
Teotihuacán
|
In central Mexico, meanwhile, important ritual and
market centers began to appear about 400 bc.
Teotihuacán was the urban center of the first of several far-reaching
civilizations in this region. It was located in the Valley of Mexico about 40
km (25 mi) northeast of present-day Mexico City. In the 1st century ad Teotihuacán began to grow rapidly as
a city and to assert its influence and control more widely. By 600 it was one
of the largest cities in the world. It extended over an area of 21 sq km (8 sq
mi) and included probably 125,000—but possibly as many as 200,000—inhabitants.
Its center consisted of a vast ceremonial complex, including two great
pyramids, along a sunken road that extended more than a mile.
Teotihuacán established its influence throughout much of
central Mexico. The city grew in wealth and power through its extensive trading
zone, which reached into Central America. Cacao, tropical bird feathers, honey,
and herbs were brought to the city from the Yucatán Peninsula and beyond.
Teotihuacán’s many craftspeople, some of whom had their own neighborhoods,
produced cut precious stones and pottery that were marketed widely in Mexico
and Central America. Massive projects of agricultural engineering, including
the construction of raised fields, canals, and terraces, were undertaken
throughout central Mexico to increase agricultural production as the region’s
population continued to grow into the millions. Maize, beans, and specialized
crops were routinely transported over considerable distances to supply the
network of provincial cities that grew ever larger and more elaborate.
Teotihuacán flourished until about ad 650. The reasons for its collapse, although unknown for
certain, were seemingly a combination of population pressure on limited
resources and recurrent attacks by nomadic tribal peoples who lived in the
desert region north of the city.
|
D4
|
Maya States
|
Also during this time, the Yucatán Peninsula and
present-day Guatemala were inhabited by Mayan-speaking peoples. Between 1000
and 600 bc they developed
autonomous agricultural communities with substantial populations. Over the next
several centuries a number of Maya cities, beginning with Tikal, emerged as
marketing and regional centers, developed more complex political structures,
and extended their cultural influence and political control over their
hinterlands. By about ad 250 the
Maya were organized into city-states, each ruled by a hereditary king and a
social elite, or aristocracy. The Maya conducted extensive trade throughout the
region. The city-states were in competition with one another, and warfare was
frequent among them. No great empire developed, but regional ones were common.
The Maya also developed a hieroglyphic writing system, complex mathematics, and
a sophisticated knowledge of astronomy that yielded a highly accurate calendar.
In about 900 the great Maya civilization
collapsed and fragmented. It had depended on the food production from
agricultural engineering projects that required continual upkeep. Some sort of
subsistence crisis seems to have erupted, causing famine and considerable loss
of life. This led to mass rejection of the social and political elites, and
perhaps even of the gods, and brought about an extended period of warfare. The
calendar and writing systems were abandoned, and most forms of state
organization failed, as the reduced population concentrated on local food
production and village affairs.
|
D5
|
Toltec Empire
|
In central Mexico, meanwhile, the Toltec people
established the next major civilization after the fall of Teotihuacán. A
Nahuatl-speaking people, the Toltec migrated from the north and established
their capital of Tula (Tollán) in the central plateau, about 64 km (40 mi)
north of present-day Mexico City. Tula achieved a population of about 60,000
during the peak of the Toltec civilization, from about 900 to 1200. The Toltec
assembled an empire with trading routes that extended north of the present-day
border of Mexico and south into Maya territory. This trade network spread
Toltec influence over a much greater area than that under direct Toltec rule.
The Toltec Empire was not as expansive or culturally pervasive as Teotihuacán,
and it flourished for a relatively brief period. However, it achieved a
sustained period of peaceful rule. Successor states, including the great Aztec
Empire, considered it to be the primary source of high culture and political
legitimacy in the region. Even centuries later, leaders of politically
ambitious ethnic groups sought to intermarry with descendents of the noble
lineage from imperial Tula.
|
D6
|
Aztec Empire
|
For two centuries after the decline of the Toltec
Empire, no single group achieved domination over a substantial area of central
Mexico. A series of competing and warring mini-empires briefly held sway over
small areas. Many nomadic groups migrated from the desert in the north into the
more developed and temperate central plateau, and then acculturated to a more
settled way of life based on agriculture. Most were speakers of Nahuatl, and
this became the dominant language in central Mexico. The Mexica were among the
last of the nomadic groups (known collectively as Chichimec by the sedentary
societies in central Mexico) to migrate to the Valley of Mexico, arriving there
in the 13th century. In about 1325 the Mexica began to construct their capital,
Tenochtitlán, on one of the islands of Lake Texcoco, which was one of five
interconnected lakes in the valley basin. They fought as mercenary warriors for
other cultural groups in the valley for some time after their arrival, and they
were subordinated to a small empire assembled by the Tepaneca. In 1428 the
Mexica joined with the peoples of two other subjected city-states, Texcoco and
Tlacopan, in revolt against the Tepaneca. After a successful insurrection, the
triple alliance went on to establish the Aztec Empire. Tenochtitlán became the
imperial capital.
Aztec armies conquered the entire region of central
Mexico in less than a century of expansion, and the Aztec Empire became larger
than any of the preceding empires in Middle America. The empire demanded labor
service and tribute payments from its subjects. The subjugated peoples remained
culturally distinct within the empire, however. They continued to be governed
by their own royal families and worshiped their distinctive gods. Their
frequent rebellions were violently suppressed by the Aztec armies. These
internal wars provided Tenochtitlán with captives to offer as sacrifices to the
Aztec gods. The Aztec Empire practiced far more human sacrifice than any other
society in the Americas, making it central to religious ritual. In the other
aspects of its culture the Aztec Empire largely resembled the preceding
civilizations of Middle America. Little technological progress had occurred
since Teotihuacán. None of the peoples of the Americas, for example, had
developed industrial metallurgy, although they refined gold, silver, and some
copper. Their tools and weapons still depended on sharpening and shaping
obsidian (volcanic glass) and basalt (volcanic rock). Their extensive
agricultural engineering, however impressive, largely replicated models and
techniques that were centuries old. These factors placed restraints on the
empire’s productivity and development.
|
E
|
Civilizations in South America
|
In South America the indigenous peoples of the
Andean region also had a long history of advanced civilizations. The immense
Andean mountain chain rises in western Venezuela and extends down the west
coast through present-day Colombia, Bolivia, Peru, and Chile to the southern
tip of the continent. The mountains rise near the coast and extend inland
hundreds of miles in many places, forming a distinctive high plateau region, or
Altiplano, in western Bolivia and southwestern Peru. The peoples of the Andean
region established communities at many different elevations, from the coastal
lowlands and inland river valleys well into the higher reaches of the
mountains. The Andes became the most densely populated mountain chain in the
world. The overall population was smaller than that of Middle America, however,
and the rugged terrain led to a more dispersed pattern of settlement.
The Andean cultures had a greater variety of crops
and animals than did the peoples of Middle America. They cultivated root
vegetables in the colder climate of the highlands and raised camelids—llamas,
alpacas, and vicuñas—to provide wool, meat, and pack animals. They engineered
innovative systems for agriculture, such as underground irrigation canals and
mountainside terraces, in response to the challenges posed by extreme variations
in climate and terrain. They also developed superior food storage and
distribution techniques. They warehoused processed foods, such as freeze-dried
potatoes, and other products to guard against future shortages and to supply
military campaigns. Although they never created calendric, writing, or
mathematical systems that rivaled those of Middle America, they did invent
weaving and metallurgy earlier and developed them to a more advanced stage.
The Andean cultures did not construct urban
complexes, temples, and pyramids on such a massive scale as those that
characterized the civilizations in Middle America. Their urban centers were
fewer and smaller. Their ritual centers also were generally smaller and less
elaborate. They developed extensive trading networks like those found in Middle
America, but they had fewer marketing centers.
|
E1
|
Regional Andean Empires
|
In about ad 400 two important
city-states emerged in the Andean highlands. The Tiwanaku (Tiahuanaco) culture
was centered at Lake Titicaca, straddling the present-day border between Peru
and Bolivia. The Huari (Wari) culture was centered at Ayacucho, in south
central Peru. Lake Titicaca, situated at an elevation of about 3,810 m (12,500
ft) in the Altiplano, was the site of many early cultures. In the 5th century
Tiwanaku began to expand its influence, promoting increased agricultural
production and trade throughout the Altiplano. Meanwhile, the influence of the
Huari culture expanded from Ayacucho throughout much of the highlands and
westward to the coast. Both cultures eventually assembled regional empires.
They developed their regions considerably through colonization of
underpopulated areas, agricultural engineering, and the construction of roads,
bridges, and storehouses. This became a characteristic pattern of development
in the Andean zone, and one that the Incas later used to their advantage in
establishing their vast empire.
The Chimú civilization was the largest to develop in the
coastal lowlands. The capital city of Chan Chan was located in the Moche River
Valley, the site of the earlier Moche (Mochica) culture, in present-day Peru.
The Chimú constructed an extensive irrigation system in Chan Chan, and
thousands of artisans worked in the city. Chan Chan encompassed an area of 20
sq km (7.7 sq mi) and had at least 25,000 inhabitants. Extending their
influence from Chan Chan, the Chimú began to assemble an empire in the 12th
century and eventually dominated other river-valley societies over a 1,000-km
(625-mi) expanse of coastland. This empire was intact when it was conquered by
the Incas in the 15th century.
|
E2
|
Inca Empire
|
The Incas were a highland people with Cuzco,
in present-day south central Peru, as their capital. In 1438 they were attacked
by a neighboring group, the Chanca. After a successful defense, they undertook
their own offensive and quickly dominated nearby provinces. During the next 90
years they subjugated virtually all of the peoples in the Andean region from
southern Colombia into northern Chile. The population of Cuzco increased to
about 100,000. The Inca Empire controlled the entire sedentary agricultural
zone. Further expansion of the empire would have been difficult and would have
yielded little of value.
The Inca Empire, called Tawantinsuyu (Land of the
Four Quarters) by the Incas, was the first Andean civilization to extend over
virtually the entire region, encompassing both the coastal lowlands and the
mountain highlands. The Incas demanded only labor service, not tribute, from
the peoples they conquered. The Incas generally did not replace the traditional
ethnic rulers of the provinces that surrendered. The peace they imposed
promoted agricultural development, greater productivity, and economic
integration. They even founded entire new cities as administrative centers and
as warehouse complexes to supply adjacent areas in times of shortage. Few
revolts were attempted against Inca rule, unlike the many insurrections within
the Aztec Empire.
|
E3
|
Other Societies of South America
|
Beyond the central Andean civilizations, many
indigenous societies thrived in other areas of South America. The Chibcha
(Muisca), a semisedentary people who occupied the high plain of central
Colombia, were located close enough to the Andean zone of high civilization to
be influenced by some of the major accomplishments, including the construction
of temple complexes and the manufacture of fine jewelry. They produced a
substantial amount of gold ornaments and ceremonial objects. They lived in
fortified communities and established some limited, unstable empires. They
maintained extensive trading relations throughout a broad region that included
the more developed Andean societies.
The northern coast of South America was inhabited
by the Arawak and the Carib. Over time both of these peoples had migrated from
the mainland to populate the Caribbean islands. The Arawak inhabited the coast
of present-day Venezuela and the major Caribbean islands. They were a
semisedentary people with locally powerful chiefs and communities of
considerable size. The Carib, a warlike hunting-and-gathering people who
practiced some cannibalism, inhabited the smaller islands of the Caribbean and
some areas of the mainland coast.
The peoples of the Amazon River Basin in South
America belonged to a great many different ethnic groups. They were organized
into chiefdoms. They practiced agricultural engineering, including raised
fields, and lived in compounds on earthen mounds they constructed along the
river to protect their communities from regular floods. Although they remained
substantially dependent on a diet of fish drawn from the river, they
increasingly supplemented it with manioc and then maize. They had been
producing ceramics for several millennia before the arrival of Europeans.
Most native communities in highland and coastal Brazil
were inhabited by members of the Tupian language group. Primarily
agriculturalists, these semisedentary peoples lived in communities organized around
a headman, who assembled the residents from his extended family, marriage
alliances, and friends. These were among the most warlike people in the
Americas, gaining prestige and wealth from recurrent conflict against
neighboring communities.
|
F
|
European Conquest and Colonization
|
Spaniards began to colonize the major islands of
the Caribbean just two years after explorer Christopher Columbus discovered
them for the Spanish Empire in 1492. They demanded labor service from the
indigenous peoples to develop the meager gold deposits of the islands. They
also introduced epidemic diseases such as influenza, smallpox, measles, and
typhus. These foreign diseases were catastrophic for the native peoples, who
had no natural resistance to them. Within 50 years the diseases had decimated
the indigenous populations of the large Caribbean islands.
In the early 1500s the Spanish began to
broaden the scope of their conquest and colonization to the mainland. In 1519
Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés led expedition forces into central Mexico.
The Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán fell to Cortés’s forces in August 1521. The
Spanish then built their own capital, Mexico City, on the site of the conquered
and razed Aztec capital. Their colony in Mexico became known as New Spain.
In 1532 Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizarro
commanded a force of fewer than 200 Spaniards against the Inca Empire in the
Andean zone of South America. Pizarro’s forces executed Inca emperor Atahualpa
and conquered the Inca capital of Cuzco after a three-month siege. Pizarro
established a colonial capital at Lima. The Spaniards proceeded to establish
control over all of Inca-held territory except the Inca kingdom at Vilcabamba,
which was protected by difficult terrain. It survived as the last Inca
stronghold until the Spanish conquered it in 1572 and executed its ruler, Tupac
Amarú.
The Aztec and Inca empires were less than a
century old when they were conquered. Both empires extended over vast areas and
encompassed millions of people. The imperial capitals fell to the invaders only
after prolonged campaigns with numerous casualties among the native armies, but
comparatively few among the Spaniards. The same epidemics that had decimated
the native populations of the Caribbean islands also afflicted the Aztecs, but
not the Incas, during their wars against the Spanish. The conquest of the Incas
largely preceded the impact of European diseases, although the peoples of the
Andean region eventually were decimated by epidemics as well.
The very size and sophistication of the Aztec
and Inca empires worked against them during the European conquests. Their
strict social and political hierarchies and their dedication to a certain way
of war made them easier targets. The ancient military tradition of their
armies, which numbered in the tens of thousands, emphasized one-on-one
engagements on the front lines in open, level areas. The bulk of each army
remained out of action, acting instead as support forces for the actual
fighters as they waited for their turn at the battlefront. The armies made
little use of battlefield tactics or ambushes. Further, the primary goal of the
combatants was to disable their opponents and take them captive, rather than to
slay them. Also, the armies operated under the strict authority of their
commanders. They did not use graduated levels of command. If the commander was
killed or captured, his army considered itself defeated and withdrew from the
battle.
The Europeans enjoyed several major advantages in
military conflicts against the Aztec and Inca forces. They had metal weapons
and armor, while the indigenous peoples of the Americas had not yet developed
large-scale industrial metallurgy. The weapons used by indigenous forces—arrows
and spears with chipped-stone tips and wooden clubs—were not effective in
inflicting fatal wounds on the armored invaders. At the same time, Aztec and
Inca warriors were largely defenseless against the Spanish weapons—sword blades
and metal bolts fired from crossbows. At that time firearms were still
inaccurate and slow-firing, and the Spanish forces found them ineffective in
the type of warfare they used against the Aztec and Inca armies. Meanwhile,
many native peoples who had been subjugated by the Aztec and Inca empires sided
with the Europeans. They provided invaluable logistical support, but the
Spanish used them only infrequently in actual combat.
The Spanish had much less success against the
tribal peoples who occupied most other areas of Middle and South America. These
peoples did not hesitate to attack from ambush and to flee into the hinterland
when battles turned against them. They depended on bows and arrows in combat
and sought to avoid numerous casualties. The Maya of the Yucatán Peninsula used
such tactics to frustrate repeated Spanish expeditions. In 1542 the Spanish
founded the city of Mérida in the northwestern corner of the peninsula, but
they effectively controlled only the surrounding region and a couple of other
small areas. Independent Maya communities occupied the greater part of the
peninsula for many decades, despite repeated efforts to subjugate them or to
convert them to Christianity.
The Spanish encountered particularly fierce resistance
by the Araucanian tribes. With the conquest of the Inca Empire complete, a
Spanish force moved southward to found the city of Santiago in 1541 and to gain
control over the fertile central region of present-day Chile. In the southern
part of their colony were the Araucanians, who resisted foreign control well
into the 19th century. The Spanish built a string of forts to defend their
settlements against Araucanian attacks and raids, which were nevertheless
frequent and often successful. The Araucanians adapted to the European style of
warfare. They learned to ride horses, which Europeans had introduced to the
Americas, and to shoot arrows while on horseback. They devised spears to stymie
Spanish cavalry charges. In the 18th century the Araucanians raided across the
Andes into southern Argentina, defeating the indigenous inhabitants of that
region and rustling cattle from the Spanish colonists. They drove these cattle
to Chile, where they traded them with Spanish middlemen for armaments and
manufactured goods. The Araucanians prospered through this system until the end
of the 1870s, when they were defeated in battle by the Argentine and Chilean
militaries and forced onto government-designated reservations.
Despite encountering areas of resistance, however, the
Spanish rapidly expanded their empire in Middle America, the Caribbean, and the
Andean region. Meanwhile, Portugal was much less successful in colonizing its
new territory in South America. In 1500 Portugal claimed the eastern coast of
the continent. Portugal’s holdings in Africa and Asia were far more lucrative
than its new colony until well into the 17th century, and relatively few people
from Portugal migrated to the Americas. Those who did depended on alliances
with certain tribes to protect their settlements and to provide indigenous
labor. Initially Portugal exploited just one product from its colony in South
America, the native-growing brazilwood, which yielded a highly prized red dye.
(The Portuguese eventually named their South American colony Brazil.) Coastal
tribes harvested brazilwood trees and stored them near the shoreline until
Portuguese ships arrived with European goods to bargain a trade.
Later in the 16th century, the Portuguese
began to develop sugar plantations in Brazil. The clearing of land for
intensive cultivation intruded on indigenous lands, and many native peoples
fled to the hinterland of the interior. At the same time, the demand for native
labor increased. Among the indigenous peoples of this region, women
traditionally did the agricultural work; however, the Portuguese preferred male
labor for their plantations. Plantation owners tried to coerce indigenous
peoples to work in the sugar fields and mills. They also forced many into
slavery. Beginning in the 1560s, however, the Portuguese were faced with a
diminishing labor force as European-introduced diseases swept through the
indigenous villages and decimated their populations. The Portuguese began to
import slaves from Africa to work the plantations. The introduction of large
numbers of slaves via the Atlantic slave trade continued into the mid-1800s, transforming
areas of Brazil into multiracial societies with Native American, European, and
African populations.
|
G
|
Forced Change, 17th and 18th Centuries
|
The Spaniards never saw it in their interest to
destroy the structure of native society. Rather, they sought to use established
patterns and hierarchies to govern effectively, to mobilize indigenous labor,
to funnel resources from the countryside into the colonial cities and the
market economy, and to Christianize the population.
Until about 1650 the collapse of indigenous
populations was caused primarily by the impact of waves of epidemic diseases
that arrived with the colonists. Native Americans living in temperate and
tropical climates suffered the most. In central Mexico the native population
declined by about 95 percent, or to fewer than 1.5 million, about a century
after European contact. The native-colonist population ratios shifted so
dramatically that surviving Native Americans acculturated much more fully to
the European way of life and could be more closely administered by Spanish
officials and priests. In addition, vast expanses of previously populated land
became available for use by the colonists.
An unintended consequence of the Spanish conquest was
the fragmentation of the great civilization zones that had long prevailed in
Mexico and the Andes. The dense connections of belief systems, artistic
representation, local economic specializations, skilled craftsmanship, and
political networks fell apart after the military defeats through neglect rather
than from Spanish policy. Although indigenous villages participated in local
markets and the Spanish colonial economy, they became far more culturally
isolated and more focused on maize cultivation for their subsistence than ever
before.
Native Americans quickly began using metal tools and
milled fabrics, and raising animals such as chickens and pigs, that were
introduced from Europe. These things improved their productivity and diversified
their diet. Native communities made only limited use of draft animals, however,
because of their cost. While wheat was introduced and preferred by the
Europeans, maize remained the staple of the indigenous diet.
The indigenous peoples quickly adopted Christianity, as
they found it compatible with important traditional beliefs. Few priests worked
among the native populations, so indigenous communities were able to adapt
Christian beliefs and rituals to their local practices. Religious worship and
ritual became closely associated with community identity and service. Native
Americans incorporated important aspects of Roman Catholicism, such as ritual
godparenthood, religious brotherhoods, and devotion to saints, into their own
cultures. Individual towns adopted patron saints and shrines that they promoted
through festivals and generally developed forms of Catholicism that could be
practiced without a priest’s continued presence. A priest appeared usually once
or twice a year, especially during the community’s major festivals. Only then
were confessions heard, masses conducted, and marriages and baptisms carried
out.
The Spanish colonial government required Native
Americans to make tribute payments in cash. To make these payments, indigenous
peoples had to work on colonial enterprises or raise a crop they could sell. At
first, individual Spanish settlers were granted privileged access to the labor
of specific native communities through the encomienda system. Another
system of forced labor, known as the repartimiento (division), emerged
in the mid-1500s. It required Native American communities to supply a quota of
workers available for hire by the Spanish colonists.
Spanish and Portuguese colonists clustered in the cities
they founded, such as Lima and Santiago, or that they took over from native
peoples, such as Mexico City (built on the site of Tenochtitlán), and in nearby
farms. They established gold and silver mines wherever they could, but most of
these were distant from major zones of native settlement. Few of these ventures
greatly disrupted indigenous culture or made heavy demands on the native labor
forces. The major exception was the enormous silver-mining complex of Potosí in
southern Bolivia. To work these rich deposits, colonial officials required indigenous
males to work the mines, usually for six months at a time. Many were
accompanied to the mining sites by their wives and children. When their turns
were finished, most returned to their home communities.
In the early decades of the colonies, the settlers
had depended on drafts of temporary unskilled native laborers. As the colonial
economies became more elaborate, however, this form of labor became less useful
and survived only in the less developed areas of Middle and South America.
Instead, businessmen recruited skilled native workers by offering them better
terms of employment. These terms were made more attractive because of the
deteriorating circumstances in indigenous communities brought about by
population decline and Spanish demands for labor service and tribute payments.
Many Native Americans departed from their communities to live in Spanish
colonial cities or on Spanish-owned agricultural estates (haciendas).
Over the long term, substantial numbers of Native Americans came to reside
permanently in Spanish colonial society. Their children were born to this way
of life, rather than to the traditional village culture that their parents had
witnessed. Indigenous intermarriage with Spaniards and people of African
descent in the cities and estates created a growing interracial population.
People of mixed Native American and Spanish descent, known as mestizos,
were more urbanized and more readily assimilated into colonial society. They
adopted many traits and customs of the dominant Spanish culture and had little
interaction with indigenous peoples who remained in the villages.
By the beginning of the 18th century the
Native American population had begun to recover in some areas. While it never
came close to the size attained before the Spanish conquest, the increase
placed tremendous pressure on the limited resources and productive capacity of
indigenous villages. Although colonial authorities had guaranteed these
communities a certain measure of land held in common, the colonists had
occupied most of the remaining agricultural land to grow crops for local and
international markets. In this situation, many villages faced subsistence
crises, in which they could not produce enough to maintain their populations.
In response to this enduring affliction, Native
Americans began to work in the colonial economy far more extensively than
before. Many more migrated from their communities to the cities and haciendas,
where they became permanent workers. However, they were generally unskilled and
poorly paid. Even those who remained in their villages labored periodically on
the haciendas to earn additional money before returning home. These temporary
workers often hired themselves out as labor gangs.
Native American communities also began to organize
responses to their circumstances. They brought complaints and entered into
judicial disputes over land ownership, boundaries, and access to water. Also,
after many decades in which indigenous societies had rarely risen up against
the colonial authorities, they began to take action, sometimes violently, to
prevent colonists and officials from imposing themselves. These protests
typically involved only one village at a time and a complaint against a single
issue. Individual revolts lasted for only a limited time and did not expand to
embrace larger regions. They also did not challenge the fundamental position of
Native Americans in the colonial system.
|
H
|
Wars for Independence, 19th Century
|
All of the Spanish colonies and Brazil won
their independence from the colonial powers by 1824 (see Latin American
Independence). But the independence movements that erupted throughout the
colonies in the early years of the century did not address issues crucial to
indigenous peoples. The fight for independence was primarily an effort by the
white elite of the colonies to achieve self-government for their class. For the
most part Native Americans did not actively participate in the wars for
independence. Mestizos, however, were among the most involved in the wars,
fighting in both the patriot and royalist armies.
Before the wars for independence ended
colonial rule, Native Americans were officially wards of the Spanish crown and
could request that their grievances be heard by special courts. However, under
the colonial caste system, which was based on racial categories, Native
Americans were placed below whites and mestizos in social status. Therefore
they were among the most disadvantaged in the society, along with free blacks
and black slaves, and colonial practices such as the repartimiento system
allowed them to be greatly exploited and abused.
In 1780, decades before the wars for independence
erupted, highland Peru witnessed a massive uprising by Native Americans. An
indigenous community leader, José Gabriel Condorcanqui, claimed that he was
Tupac Amarú II, a direct descendent of the last independent Inca ruler. He
demanded that the Spaniards abandon the highlands and return them to native
rule. Tens of thousands flocked to his cause, including many mestizos.
Thousands died in the ensuing warfare against colonial forces before Tupac
Amarú II and his associates were captured and executed in 1781. The mountainous
regions of Peru and Bolivia were marked by similar uprisings until the 1820s.
At that time the colonial regime was overthrown, but not to the advantage of
the indigenous peoples. Instead, their concerns were largely ignored and
neglected by the newly independent nations.
The first uprising of Mexico’s independence
movement was led in 1810 by Father Miguel Hidalgo y Costilla, a priest of
Spanish descent in the parish of Dolores. He led his parishioners, who were
mostly mestizos, in a poorly planned revolt against Spanish colonial rule.
Hidalgo called for the abolition of the tribute payments required of Native
Americans. His parish members were soon joined by tens of thousands of others,
mostly Native Americans and mestizos, who rankled at the constraints placed on
them by the colonial system. They executed many of the people of Spanish descent
they took as captives. After suffering a defeat against a small Spanish force,
Hidalgo’s movement fell apart and its participants fled back to their
communities. He and his associates were soon captured and executed. Four years
later a disciple of Hidalgo, José María Morelos, directed a similar, but
smaller and more coordinated, rebellion that also ended in failure. The
successful independence movement in Mexico in 1821 neither included Native
Americans among its participants nor addressed their plight in its program.
The leaders of the new nations believed Native
Americans should lose any special “privileges,” such as the grievance courts,
afforded them during the colonial period. Liberal leaders called for placing
all citizens, including Native Americans, under equal laws and ending the caste
system. The new national governments initially aspired to remove the tribute
payments and required labor services that had been imposed under the colonial
regime. But the reality of nearly continuous national bankruptcy led some of
them to reimpose tribute payments, though under new names. Some also reimposed
mandatory labor service by Native Americans on local construction projects or
agricultural estates, arguing that this taught them proper habits and helped the
nation.
The new nations also sought to eliminate
communal land ownership in Native American communities, a tradition that was so
central to their self-reliance. The governments designated the holdings as
private lands. Many indigenous communities eventually lost their property to
nearby estate owners who sought to expand their profit-oriented enterprises.
The land was often sold without the consent of the native peoples, and
sometimes it was seized outright. The native communities no longer had special
courts to hear their grievances, and the few courts that did exist were
unsympathetic. By the late 19th century a great number of the indigenous
villages had disappeared, and their former members lived in destitution as
temporary agricultural laborers.
The period between about 1870 and 1920 was perhaps
the worst era for Native Americans since the initial conquest period. An
atmosphere of disdain toward native peoples proliferated. Business interests,
prospering during a period of economic growth, dispossessed Native Americans of
their resources. Many indigenous groups responded by organizing regional
revolts against these actions. The weak national governments had tremendous
difficulty suppressing these uprisings, which continued for years before being
extinguished.
One of the largest and longest revolts was the
Caste War of the Yucatán, in which Maya rebels, many of them farm laborers, won
control over almost all of the Yucatán Peninsula by May 1848. By the following
spring the people of Spanish descent in the area, most of whom were town
dwellers or farm owners and supervisors, had recaptured the western and central
areas of the peninsula. However, the eastern area around Chan Santa Cruz
remained an independent Maya stronghold until Mexico’s federal troops invaded
the city in 1901.
|
I
|
Striving for Indigenous Rights, 20th Century
|
The Mexican Revolution (1910-1920) was a major turning
point for Native Americans in Middle America. Under the leadership of Emiliano
Zapata, a revolutionary of indigenous descent, large numbers of native peoples
in southern Mexico fought to regain the traditional community lands they had
lost during the preceding decades. In the two decades following the success of
the revolution, most native communities had their lands restored by the
national government. The Mexican Revolution marked the first substantial
reversal of the neglect of Native Americans that had prevailed since the
colonial period. After the revolution, the Mexican government promoted indigenismo
as a glorious heritage and established agencies to promote native rights and
cultures. Since that time Native American children often have been taught their
traditional language as well as Spanish, and indigenous artisans have had
success marketing their crafts.
The indigenous peoples of Bolivia lost most of their
lands when the government eliminated communal land ownership early in the 20th
century. Most of them were retained as laborers on the large and often
unproductive estates that incorporated their lands. Despite uprisings and other
forms of resistance, they had little success in remedying their condition until
a larger revolution erupted in the country in 1952. Native Americans took up
arms to help overthrow the old regime and bring to power the Nationalist
Revolutionary Movement (Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario, or MNR), a
leftist-oriented political party, which pledged to make them full-fledged
citizens. The new MNR government immediately extended the right to vote to
Native Americans, and in 1953 it instituted a land reform law that allowed
Native Americans to reclaim their traditional lands. Since that time, the
indigenous peoples of Bolivia have been able to grow crops for urban markets to
support their communities, retain authority over their internal affairs, and
obtain education and public health services for their communities. They have
also been active in local and national politics.
In some countries, however, Native American
populations continued to suffer miserably. In El Salvador in the early 1930s,
indigenous communities inspired by radical politicians from the cities
protested to have lands restored and labor conditions improved. In 1932 the
army seized the government and violently repressed the movement, killing
between 10,000 and 30,000 rural Salvadorans in what came to be known as La
Matanza (The Massacre). Native Americans were especially targeted during
the massacre, and those who survived lived under a repressive military regime.
The Maya of Guatemala, meanwhile, had lost much of
their land by the beginning of the 20th century and were required by the
government to provide labor to the large estates or face arrest. A reform
government that gained power in 1944 began to reverse this situation, but a
counterrevolution led by the military in 1954 imposed a series of repressive
regimes. In response, radical armed rebels established themselves in the
countryside to mobilize support against the government. Both sides competed
over the Maya population that composed most of the rural population. Violence
was endemic, and the national military committed some horrible massacres of
Maya communities, especially in the 1970s and 1980s. Finally, in the early
1990s the two sides entered into a national accord, and most of the organized
armed violence ended. Some communities regained their lands, and in some
schools the Maya began to be educated about the magnificent history of their
ancestors, occasionally in their own language.
The History section of this article was
contributed by John E. Kicza.
|
IV
|
NATIVE AMERICANS TODAY
|
Indigenous peoples in Middle and South America today
make up a large majority of all Native Americans throughout the world. At least
400 different groups count themselves as culturally distinct peoples. Some
strive to reinforce cultural traditions, while others have shifted toward urban
and international ways of life. Some live on land that the government set aside
for them, but many more live as peasants in the countryside, or migrate to
cities.
Diverse as they are, these peoples share a
common experience: All of them live in countries that until very recently
excluded them from power. Indeed the word indio (Indian) still carries a
racial stigma. Many who bear it seek to free their cultures from misperceptions
through political and social activism.
This section describes indigenous peoples in Latin
America today—their demands for increased self-government, their increasingly
close alliance with each other, their evolving struggles to defend land and
resources, and their efforts to combine sacred cultural heritages with
practical adaptations to the modern world.
|
A
|
Population
|
Recent estimates of Latin America’s total
indigenous population vary from 40 million to 49 million people. Native groups
are spread unevenly throughout the area. The majority of indigenous people live
along the mountainous spine of Middle and South America, in densely settled
villages in the Mesoamerican highlands and the Andes Mountains. Many of these
villages have the status of “recognized peasant community,” although the term
varies among countries. This status means that the government recognizes the
village as collective owner of its lands. In the lowlands, indigenous groups
often live in government-demarcated reservations, tribal areas, or autonomous
zones. Throughout Middle and South America, many indigenous people also live in
cities.
The size of indigenous populations varies widely from
country to country in Latin America. In some countries, indigenous people make
up almost half or more of the population. These countries include Bolivia (60
percent of the population), Peru (45 percent), Guatemala (44 to 53 percent),
Ecuador (43 percent), and Mexico (8 to 30 percent). Bolivia is the only country
that officially describes itself as having a Native American majority.
The countries with large indigenous
populations—notably Mexico, Ecuador, and Peru—also have very large numbers of
people, even majorities, who are mestizo. The term mestizo refers to
people of mixed indigenous and European or African ancestry who generally do
not practice indigenous lifeways. Mestizos make up between 70 and 92 percent of
Mexico’s population, 40 percent of Ecuador’s population, and 37 percent of
Peru’s population.
In Latin American countries at the other end of the
spectrum, indigenous groups form small minorities both absolutely and relatively.
Only about 3 percent of Argentineans are neither white nor mestizo. About 1
percent of citizens in El Salvador and Costa Rica are counted in the census as
indigenous. Less than 1 percent of Brazil’s population is officially
indigenous.
Some of these smaller numbers were undercounts
because they come from countries where both the government and individuals have
tried to minimize the heavily stigmatized “Indian” identity. As more people
began to value and embrace indigenous culture, however, more have begun to
publicly identify themselves as indigenous. In any case, population numbers
fail to capture the importance of small indigenous groups. Some small
minorities, especially in Brazil, have become human rights test cases with
powerful implications for how the majority population should treat minorities.
Many indigenous peoples have been completely wiped out
by varying combinations of epidemic, massacre, cultural assimilation,
servitude, flight, and intermarriage. For example, the three sea-hunting and
guanaco-stalking peoples who lived around Tierra del Fuego, South America’s
southern tip, were all but exterminated. Of the Ona, not a single descendent
survives. In the 20th century, activities such as land grabbing, misuse of
natural resources, and frontier violence took their toll on just about all of
Latin America’s native peoples. Occasional reports of so-called isolated or
newly contacted tribes usually turn out to be reappearances of groups that had
sought refuge by making themselves mobile and elusive.
Indigenous ways of life today in Latin America defy
the tourist-brochure stereotypes of timeless traditionalism. The huge majority
of indigenous Latin Americans take part, willingly or not, in many aspects of
industrial-based life such as the market economy and government institutions.
But they are integrated into national institutions to different degrees. Most
highlanders in the former Inca domains of South America (Ecuador, Peru, and
Bolivia) and in the Mesoamerican highlands (Mexico and Guatemala) retain ties
to peasant villages of pre-Hispanic origin. In lowlands, indigenous populations
who live near major rivers and airfields—with their webs of trade, military
outposts, and missionary networks—are more assimilated than inland populations,
who tend to conserve older lifeways such as the Amazonian circular village.
Increasingly, indigenous Latin Americans are people in
motion. By the 1990s the largest single body of people who knew Quechua, the
language of the Inca, lived in the congested boroughs of Lima, Peru. But many
urban dwellers are also anchored to the villages of their origin. Many return
for traditional events such as festivals where sacred mountains are venerated.
This link to their past provides them with social networks for a lifetime.
Some indigenous people have lost the bonds of homeland
because they fled as refugees amid political violence. From 1978 to 1983 about
a quarter of a million Maya fled to Chiapas, Mexico, to escape Guatemala’s
guerrilla warfare. Thousands gradually returned home, but more stayed in Mexico
or headed for the United States. Substantial numbers of Maya have lived in the
Los Angeles area since that era. Many more indigenous migrants have left for
economic reasons. Texas, New Jersey, and California have notable colonies of
Andean people. Also present in California are Mixtec and Zapotec migrants from
Oaxaca, Mexico. Gradually indigenous populations have built distinctive
institutions in these new places, such as societies to benefit schooling and
health back in their homelands.
Some migrants and refugees return home,
periodically or permanently. But the circuit of migration and return does not
mean that the old order is restored because those who return often come back
with a will to modify old lifeways and customary law. Me Llamo Rigoberta
Menchú Y Así Me Nació La Concienca (1983; translated as I, Rigoberta
Menchú, 1984), the semiautobiographical testimony of Guatemalan activist
Rigoberta Menchú Túm, a Quiché Maya woman, gave voice to this resistance
against oppressive aspects of tradition. She urged a struggle against the
subordination of the Maya, even at the price of armed conflict.
|
B
|
Political Issues
|
Indigenous societies have local ways of governing
themselves that are deeply rooted in their histories. They range from the
intricate hierarchy of Andean village camachicos (“those who set things
in order”) to the moral authority of the Amazonian headman who leads by setting
a self-sacrificing example as first among equals. But the nonindigenous groups
who founded independent Latin American republics did not recognize these forms
of government.
During most of the 20th century Latin American
governments usually claimed responsibility for protecting indigenous peoples,
while excluding them from full citizenship until they could be absorbed into
urban-dominated nonindigenous society through assimilation and intermarriage.
In Brazil beginning in 1910 the government’s Serviço de Proteção aos Indios (SPI,
Indian Protective Service), tried innovative nonviolent methods to shelter
small indigenous groups from conflicts they could not win. The SPI meant to
protect Indians until supposedly inevitable assimilation would merge them with
the majority. That same era saw the rise of indigenismo among
nonindigenous artistic and political elites. This philosophy exalted indigenous
heritage as a past root of the nation while denying it any future other than
assimilation.
Latin American governments also tried to protect
indigenous peoples by providing land for them or safeguarding their existing
lands. From the beginning of the 20th century until the 1930s, some governments
set aside reservation land for lowland indigenous peoples. This period also
produced new leyes de comuna (laws of the commons), which enabled
ancient local communities to obtain collective titles to their lands and
waters. Legal title gave them the right to decide how to use their territory.
It also made it more difficult for outsiders to grab land through coercion or
fraud.
By the beginning of the 21st century the old
expectation that indigenous Latin Americans would assimilate into broadly
European-American culture gave way to growing recognition that nations were
made up of many ethnic groups. Nine countries, including once war-torn
Guatemala, embodied this recognition in constitutional reforms. The most
decisive case was Colombia’s 1991 constitution, which awarded many indigenous
groups self-government rights and the right to elect a small number of
congressional representatives. In 1988 Brazil finally erased the assimilation
of indigenous peoples from its statutory goals.
|
B1
|
Neo-Indianism
|
In the last quarter of the 20th century
many Native Americans in Latin America became involved in a family of movements
known as neo-Indianism. These movements are characterized by mobilizations
within indigenous society, rather than by outside sympathizers, to seek
autonomy rather than assimilation. Neo-Indianism’s growth began where it was
least expected—among Amazonian peoples who are far smaller in numbers and more
remote from power centers than highland groups. But they were also less tangled
in bureaucracies.
In 1964 a number of Shuar groups in
eastern Ecuador loosely banded together to create the Federation of Shuar
Centers. The Shuar effectively resisted ranchers who intruded on their lands by
using amateur radio to warn of intrusions and to rally households. They also
used an alphabetized version of the Shuar language to write documents that
helped crystallize the reasons for their struggle. Soon after Amuesha (Yanesha)
Peruvians and Cauca Valley Colombians achieved similar advances. They formed
autonomous self-defense federations using modern legal and media techniques
rather than waiting for help from government agents.
The Shuar pointed an important new direction
by staying out of traditional vehicles for change such as political parties,
guerrilla armies, and labor unions. Beginning in the 1970s, the most successful
indigenous mobilizations followed the Shuar model, with loose confederations
linking grassroots committees. Ecuador’s Confederación de Nacionalidades
Indígenas del Ecuador (CONAIE, Confederation of Ecuadorian Indigenous
Nationalities), a nationwide alliance expanding on the Shuar pattern, shook the
republic in 1990. Indigenous peoples throughout the country simultaneously
mobilized, demanding foremost the settlement of a long list of disputes about
lands allegedly stolen from indigenous peasants. It was the first truly
pan-indigenous uprising since the 18th century. In the capital city of Quito,
urbanites were stunned by the sight of massed marchers in all kinds of
indigenous garb from feathers to ponchos. At first they called them “Martians.”
In less then a decade, however, Ecuadorian indigenous power was recognized when
the government appointed indigenous leaders to some governmental agencies. By
1992 the organization representing the Quechua inhabitants of the Pastaza
region in southeastern Ecuador secured at least nominal autonomous control of a
tract of land as big as the U.S. state of Connecticut.
In the early 1990s political parties turned
toward indigenous activists in order to appeal to voters. In 2000 Mariano
Conejo was elected the first indigenous mayor of the tourism-rich city of
Otavalo, Ecuador. In Bolivia, a pro-indigenous political movement called
Katarismo began winning important political victories in the 1990s when many
voters began to redefine indigenousness as a cultural right rather than a
demeaning racial definition. In 1993 Victor Hugo Cárdenas was elected vice
president of Bolivia, the first Native American to hold such high office in the
country. He took the helm with his wife beside him in Aymara traditional dress.
However, the course of neo-Indian movements has
been very uneven. In Chile, the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990)
suppressed the autonomy of the country’s indigenous peoples. It broke up
reservations of the Mapuche and sold the land. However, the Mapuche made
impressive strides after democracy was restored in 1989. In 1990 the government
put a stop to the dismantling of reservation territory. It also created a
national commission for indigenous development with Mapuche representation.
A neo-Indian movement in Chiapas, Mexico, hit the
headlines in 1994 under the leadership of the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación
Nacional (EZLN, Zapatista National Liberation Army). The Zapatistas claimed to
represent the indigenous Tzol, Tzeltal, Tzotzil, Chol, Tojalabal, and Zoque
Maya groups, many of whom had already mobilized under other banners influenced
by the fiery liberation theology of Roman Catholic bishop Samuel Ruíz García.
The EZLN occupied four municipalities in Chiapas, Mexico’s poorest state. An
indigenous army of 800 took over official buildings in the state capital,
proclaiming war against the “looting of our natural resources” and demanding
regional political autonomy. In 2001 the Zapatistas and many of their followers
marched to Mexico City and confronted President Vicente Fox to demand that the
national government address indigenous issues. Although the Zapatistas never
won a consensus of Maya support or any major reforms, they powerfully renewed
Mexican and international interest in indigenous issues.
Indigenous movements are no longer constrained by
national boundaries. Instead, indigenous groups have begun to come together
across country borders. Many groups dwell on both sides of formerly closed
boundaries, divided by customs and immigration police or even by hostile
armies. New transnational organizations are reuniting the Aymara of Chile and
Bolivia; the Shuar of Peru and Ecuador; the Garifuna and Miskito of Belize,
Honduras, Nicaragua, and Panama; the Mapuche of Chile and Argentina; the Guaymí
of Costa Rica and Panama (where they are also known as Ngobe-Buglé); and
peoples who inhabit both sides of the U.S-Mexican border (the Yaqui, Kickapoo,
and Tohono O’Odham or Papago).
Reconnecting the Quechua-speaking peoples of the former
Inca lands, now situated mostly in Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia, and the equally
fractured Maya population, has proven a hard job. They have been separated into
regional groups with dissimilar dialects and incomplete knowledge of one
another. Likewise, uniting indigenous peoples of the lowlands with those of the
highlands has proved difficult, but it is underway; in Bolivia, in 1990, 12
eastern lowland groups marched 700 km (400 mi) to La Paz, where thousands of Aymara
highlanders feasted with them in Andean style.
On a larger scale, indigenous movements have
created transnational confederations. These organizations align big and small
ethnic groups and build alliances beyond Latin America. A pioneering example is
the Coordinadora de las Organizaciones Indígenas de la Cuenca Amazónica (COICA,
Coordinating Body for Indigenous Organizations of the Amazon Basin), which by
1995 represented more than 100 ethnic groups. COICA and similar confederations
succeeded in building ties with powerful allies abroad, including the World
Council of Churches and major foundations in wealthy countries. By 1995 COICA
had secured representation within the World Bank, the European Union, and
Consejo de Cooperación Amazónica (Council for Amazonian Cooperation), a treaty
organization formed by the countries with Amazonian territories.
|
B2
|
Land Rights
|
From 1952 through the 1970s a wave of nationalist
revolutionary movements, notably in Bolivia, Peru, and Ecuador, led governments
and political parties to redefine indigenous citizens by class rather than
ethnicity. They viewed class and nationality as the only important categories,
and they wanted to avoid any indications that the nation was not culturally
unified. They thought that raising issues about cultural diversity would dilute
their efforts. Therefore, indigenous people in rural areas came to be called campesinos
(peasants) in public life. Agencies such as Ecuador’s Instituto Nacional de
Reforma Agraria y Colonización (Agrarian Reform and Colonization Institute) or
Venezuela’s Comisión Especial para el Desarrollo de la Región Sur (Special
Southern Development Corporation) at first grouped indigenous peoples with
nonindigenous farmers despite their differences.
The ensuing agrarian reforms provided a firmer
footing for some of the rural poor, but they marginalized indigenous lifeways.
By pressing peasants to grow more of certain crops to sell at market, they
eroded indigenous knowledge of crop varieties and techniques. Amazonian groups
were affected by land reforms in a special way. The reforms failed to recognize
the indigenous, swidden-based use of the forest, which involved cutting and
burning patches of forest to create temporary fields, and later letting the forest
regenerate. Governments thought swidden lands were unused. By opening them to
ranchers, planters, and loggers, all of whom permanently clear-cut the land,
reformers unintentionally wrecked ecologically sound practices.
Many governments of the 1970s—in Bolivia, Brazil,
Mexico, Peru, and Venezuela, for example—promoted massive schemes to develop
forested areas in the lowlands. They wanted to relieve agrarian conflicts in
overexploited highlands and to raise national productivity. When Brazil’s
president in 1968 proposed to send “people without land to the land without
people,” he was in fact sending them as unwitting invaders into the homeland of
hundreds of indigenous peoples whose traditional swidden use of the land was
not protected by law.
New roads and easy land grants in rain forests
all the way from Mexico to Bolivia brought influxes of settlers, many of whom
were themselves indigenous families from thickly populated peasant zones. The
development of these areas affected most indigenous peoples who live in the
rain forests, including the Lacandón Maya of Mexico and the Yek’uana of
Venezuela.
In addition, in Brazil and Colombia, gold rushes
brought tens of thousands of garimpeiros (gold panners) into rain
forests in the mid-1970s. They used airstrips built by the military to leapfrog
into the lands of native peoples, especially the Yanomami of the
Brazilian-Venezuelan border. Miners often murdered indigenous locals who
interfered with the gold mining. In addition, the miners brought with them
deadly epidemics of diseases such as measles. Measles killed about 2,500
Yanomami, or about a quarter of the population. Under international pressure,
Brazilian troops repeatedly blew up airstrips and expelled miners, but the
airstrips were quietly rebuilt and the miners continued to ravage the land.
Starting in 1991, the World Bank put its financial
power behind a policy requiring consideration of native peoples’ interests.
Increasingly, the World Bank and many aid agencies have funded ethnodevelopment,
development projects built around indigenous institutions and interests that
are intended to strengthen them. There were important successes. Yet disorderly
and invasive development in the interior of Middle and South America also
continued apace in the 21st century. As countries developed roads across the
inland, such as the transoceanic highway from the Peruvian Pacific to the
Brazilian Atlantic, indigenous leaders prepared themselves for a struggle to
protect their lands from newcomers.
|
B3
|
Efforts to Control Natural Resources
|
Indigenous peoples also struggle with governments and
rival users over the control and use of natural resources. Mineral development
is a frequent issue, particularly in countries where the law reserves all
rights to minerals below Earth’s surface for the state. A prolonged struggle in
the early 1990s over oil rights pitted petroleum giants and the Ecuadorian
government against the tiny Huaorani ethnic group and its international allies,
who fought the issue to a draw. The Mexican Huave also took on their government
concerning oil pollution. In 1989 Brazilian Kayapó protested against a huge dam
and besieged Congress in their feather crowns. They became instant media icons.
These successful actions show how small indigenous groups have sometimes become
powerful actors in the struggle over natural resources.
Another frequent issue is how to balance a country’s
environmental agenda—for example, managing national parks located in rain
forests—with the ownership rights of people who originate there. Environmental
movements have been influenced by a Brazilian rubber tapper named Chico Mendes,
who defended the rain forests against development and deforestation because the
tappers needed them for their livelihood. When Mendez was assassinated in 1988,
the event awakened the media to the possibility that some humans might guard,
not menace, biologically diverse habitats. More recent projects emphasize
working with local indigenous peoples as stakeholders in enterprises that
depend on biodiversity and conservation. The Purépecha of Michoacán, Mexico,
have mounted a notably successful system of community forestry. In Amazonian
Ecuador, rain forest residents are developing self-managed ecotourism.
Knowledge is a contested resource, too. As the
pharmaceutical industry combed rain forests for curative biochemicals,
transnational alliances campaigned to get indigenous knowledge of these
curative biochemicals recognized so they could be paid royalties for their
intellectual property.
|
B4
|
Crossfire
|
In many cases indigenous peoples’ deadliest
problems include crossfire between national governments and nonindigenous
guerrilla insurgencies that choose indigenous terrain as battlefronts. Around
1980 many Maya highlanders in Guatemala took part in the Committee of Peasant
Unity, which was a nonindigenous union allied with one of the four leftist
armies fighting against the government. They usually did so in defense of
local, nonideological interests. But scorched-earth warfare left about 50,000
Maya among the more than 150,000 dead, and it destroyed more than 400 Maya
communities. A 1996 peace pact improved Maya prospects for peaceful
self-defense by making it possible for them to defend land and other rights
through litigation or public campaigning without being accused of trying to
subvert the government.
In Peru a revolutionary Communist movement, called
the Shining Path, at first gained support among Quechua peasants who were
embittered by the government’s failure to meet their particular needs in
agrarian reforms from 1969 to 1974. However, the Shining Path soon alienated
them by assassinating indigenous leaders and choking off commerce. By 1990
Quechua village rondas (militias) played a major role in fighting the
Shining Path. Ronda veterans emerged in the 1990s as a new type of rural
leadership.
In Colombia, Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de
Colombia (FARC, Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia), a group of left-wing
rebels, and its enemies, the paramilitary forces, also proved ready to shed
indigenous blood. By 1986 FARC had killed more than 100 indigenous leaders in
the Cauca Valley, and in 1999 they murdered a group of foreign observers
backing the U’wa. Although why indigenous leaders were being killed in Peru and
Colombia is not entirely clear, some observers speculate that the Shining Path,
FARC, and other insurgent groups wanted to crush rival leadership.
In Nicaragua, where Sandinista revolutionaries
successfully overthrew the Somoza dictatorship in 1979, many Miskito of the
Atlantic coast rejected a land reform that denied their traditional tenures.
They, too, were swept up in political warfare from 1981 to 1988 as their
leaders joined the U.S.-sponsored opposition guerrilla force known as the contras
(short for “counterrevolutionaries” in Spanish). Later, a post-Sandinista
government granted the Miskito an autonomous zone.
Another crossfire threat to indigenous peoples is
quasi-military intervention by government forces allied with the U.S. Drug
Enforcement Agency (DEA) to stop the production of drugs. Groups on the eastern
flank of the Andes Mountains have grown coca leaf as a legal traditional crop
since pre-Columbian times. But the cocaine industry hugely inflated demand for
coca beginning in the 1970s, and some indigenous peoples, motivated by the
possibility for economic advancement, became involved in the cocaine industry
as illegal suppliers or laborers. Their position is dangerous because they are
cornered between government repression—arrest and defoliation and burning of
the coca plants—and the carnage inflicted by gangster cartels or guerrilla
armies trying to control production.
|
C
|
Employment and Economics
|
Poverty is pervasive among Latin America’s
indigenous population, and living conditions are generally poor compared to
that of the nonindigenous population. In many places, indigenous families put
up with dirt floors, meager diets, contaminated water, and constant worries
about expenses such as medicine, schoolbooks, or bus fare. In 1989 Mexico’s
census agency reported that in municipalities with an indigenous population of
40 percent or more, 42 percent of the residents were extremely poor. It also
reported that in municipalities with indigenous populations under 10 percent,
less than 10 percent of the residents were extremely poor.
Indigenous poverty is not the poverty of unemployment.
In fact, in countries with large indigenous populations, indigenous
unemployment is lower than the national averages. Rather, indigenous poverty
reflects the fact that native populations are concentrated in badly paid
sectors of work, like rural wage labor or farming on eroded land. Indigenous workers
are more likely than others to have a second job, and they work
disproportionately more hours.
In rural areas, farming, herding, and working on
plantations are the most common jobs. Much rural poverty is due to the
fragmentation of land into parcels so tiny that they cannot support a family.
Governments place a high priority on improving agricultural productivity, but
many have taken approaches that favored large, modern farms over small parcels
or community development. These facts have tended to drive indigenous workers
off the land.
The result is that millions of indigenous
migrants have poured into the huge shantytowns of major cities such as Mexico
City or Lima, Peru. Migrants often have to settle for informal work like street
vending or off-the-books jobs such as sewing in sweatshops. Even legitimate
employment often means fleeting work with firms in search of low-cost temporary
labor. Because no job can be counted on, workers in assembly plants, hotels,
and so forth often maintain economic ties to ancestral communities. Each
household pieces together a living combining meager urban wages with food from
the field. Back in the villages, the elders, and sometimes women and children,
work the family’s inherited fields.
Families like these usually do not merge into the
urban working class. Their “safety nets” are associations of fellow villagers.
Old village connections give them financial credit and emotional support. Such
families strive to maintain these connections in cities by tending to live in
the same areas. At the same time they try to build their urban connections by
trying to lose the low-prestige indigenous accent and dress of country people.
(Urbanites usually reject the public identity of indigenousness because it
carries a stigma.) But they do not renounce their rural homes. Indeed, today,
it is mostly their donations that make possible traditional Andean or
Mesoamerican dances and rituals.
Indigenous migrants also head for richer countries as
legal or illegal immigrants to seek a better living. Many highland villages
today have diaspora colonies in North America or Europe. The most obvious
front-runners of migration from the Andean area are the Ecuadorian indigenous
textile traders and musicians who play in cities from Washington, D.C., to Rome,
Italy, to Sydney, Australia. But these visible Ecuadorians are just the edge of
a much bigger population working inconspicuously in hotels, homes, factories,
and shops. In industrial areas in the Northeast and Midwest of the United
States, indigenous immigrants are proving adept at helping to reclaim decayed
industrial towns.
Indigenous peoples also use tourism, the crafts
industry, and ecotourism as ways to escape poverty. In Otavalo, Ecuador,
indigenous peasants have parlayed their weaving arts and their famous market
square into a major export center of woolen goods. Quechua-speaking
entrepreneurs form an upper middle class that piques the envy of local
mestizos.
With ecotourism, one key to success is indigenous
control of tour packaging. A standout example is Peru’s Taquile Island where
the local indigenous people formed a cooperative that controls tourist lodging
and sells crafts and textiles. More commonly, however, indigenous communities
find it hard to capture income from the hundreds of thousands of visitors who
visit fleetingly in search of quick cultural enrichment.
|
D
|
Social and Cultural Issues
|
|
D1
|
Gender Roles
|
As the economic activities of indigenous
communities have changed, gender roles have changed as well. Particularly among
migrants and refugees, traditional male-dominated institutions within the
indigenous community proved unable to guarantee order and welfare, while state
support failed to make up the difference. Women took it upon themselves to try
to help with the burden of soup kitchens and communal organizations. In doing
so they also won public leadership positions. María Elena Moyano, the
Afro-Peruvian deputy mayor of a largely indigenous-migrant borough of Lima, set
a widely admired standard of female leadership. She was assassinated by the
Shining Path in 1992. Along with changing gender roles, indigenous women also
began to use birth control in larger numbers to gain more control over their
lives. Family planning quietly increases female self-assertion and challenges
traditional male privileges. Challenging these privileges in association with
heavy ritual drinking can often lead to domestic violence.
|
D2
|
Languages
|
Latin America has about 400 living indigenous
languages. In some countries, more than 200 different languages are spoken. The
giant among Native American languages is Quechua, the former official language
of the Inca Empire. If considered as a single speech community,
Quechua-speakers number near 10 million. But some linguists think it more
realistic to speak of a Quechua family of languages because some Quechua
dialects are barely mutually intelligible. Quechua is spoken in large parts of
Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia, as well as smaller parts of Colombia and Argentina.
The Maya family of languages has even greater
diversity, with more than 30 tongues in Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and
Honduras. About 4.5 million Paraguayans (most of whom do not consider
themselves indigenous) know the indigenous language Guaraní, one of the
country’s official languages. Aymara, with speakers estimated from 1 million to
2.5 million, spreads from the Bolivian high plains into southern Peru. The rest
of the Latin American languages consist of far smaller speech communities,
sometimes tiny ones consisting of a single village. These are the ones most
vulnerable to extinction. Most of the small ones are endangered with many close
to disappearing.
|
D3
|
Education
|
The future of indigenous languages is linked to
education. Most Latin American countries have highly centralized,
urban-oriented, school systems with instruction only in Spanish. Longstanding
neglect of education in indigenous rural areas prior to the 1970s caused large
literacy gaps between nonindigenous and indigenous populations, especially
among women. But rural schooling began to improve greatly after 1970. However,
the differences in literacy between nonindigenous and indigenous populations
are still dramatic: In Colombia, 16 percent of all Colombians were illiterate
in the 1980s versus 45 percent of indigenous Colombians. In Guatemala 40
percent of all citizens were illiterate versus 79 percent of indigenous ones;
in Panama the rate was 14 percent versus 62 percent; and in Paraguay 13 percent
versus 70 percent.
Most of the indigenous confederations have pressed
for bilingual-intercultural education, with instruction in both the indigenous
language and the country’s primary language. The objective is for students to
keep lasting competence in both languages and cultures. Human resources are not
lacking; in some Peruvian highlands almost 40 percent of teachers already know
the indigenous languages of Quechua or Aymara.
Yet bilingual education still faces great obstacles.
Parents fear that teaching their children indigenous languages will stigmatize
them. Teachers aspiring to jobs in urban areas do not commit to improving rural
schools. Ministries are slow to publish teaching materials in indigenous
languages. However, there have been some places of progress. Ecuador,
Guatemala, and Peru established bilingual-intercultural education programs in
their ministries of education in the 1990s. Indigenous-language radio stations
such as Bolivia’s Radio San Gabriel in Aymara have also made inroads into the
media industry.
As recently as 1970, it was unheard of for
indigenous people to attend college. But by 2000 indigenous students from
countries with large Native American populations had made their way into higher
education. In Guatemala, a nongovernmental Academy of Mayan Languages, in which
indigenous college graduates were often active, achieved remarkable successes
by a grassroots method. Instead of leaving indigenous language issues to
outside specialists, local committees of linguistically trained native speakers
built up norms for writing each local dialect, while also coordinating with
peers to maximize common ground among dialects. A new generation of Native
American intellectuals is appearing everywhere. Guatemalan Maya proponents of
ethnic revitalization such as Demetrio Cojtí Cuxil and Víctor Montejo have been
especially effective in promoting scholarship among indigenous peoples.
|
D4
|
Health Care
|
Where health care is concerned, virtually all
reporting countries show important gaps between indigenous health care and
overall levels. Panama in 1992 reported infant mortality for indigenous peoples
at 3.5 times the national average. Honduras found in 1993 that life expectancy
for indigenous men was only 36 years (compared to 65 for all men) and 43 for
indigenous women (compared to 70 for all women). A Guatemalan report showed the
percent of indigenous women who died in childbirth was 83 percent higher than
the national rate in 1994. Indigenous populations overall show high incidences
of viral disease, malaria, and tuberculosis.
A particularly troubling problem is the continued spread
of devastating infectious diseases among Amazonian peoples with weak
immunological defenses. Measles was often a recurrent disaster. Areas with
growing nonindigenous populations, such as gold rush zones and adjacent
forests, have an increasing number of infections from sexually transmitted
infections as well. However, rural health posts in the densely populated
highlands have made important progress in reducing perinatal deaths and
tuberculosis. This progress has been made in part by training local, often
indigenous, peasants to be health promoters in the public health system.
Because they are respected members of the community, they help greatly in
explaining how and why to practice medicine that uses antibiotics.
One issue with health care is that indigenous
patients tend to fear medical personnel and avoid them until illnesses become
extreme. They feel doctors who are unaware of indigenous ideas about the body,
or scorn them, bring danger and shame onto them. Indigenous confederations have
strongly urged including shamans, midwives, and herbal curers within the public
health service. Some model clinics, such as an Oxfam International-sponsored
project among the Shipibo people in Amazonian Peru, have proven this feasible.
|
D5
|
Religion
|
Since European contact, indigenous peoples have often
combined their religions with nonindigenous religions. Indigenous religions
coexist, and sometimes blend, with Catholicism. Most, if not all, indigenous
people have at least some knowledge of Christianity, but most also conserve
indigenous worship practices of pre-Hispanic origin. Literate Maya increasingly
see a sacred testament in the Popol Vuh, an ancient Maya account of the
creation and history of the world. Most Andean highlanders receive the main
Catholic sacraments, such as Communion, but also make sacrifices to the deified
mountains whom they feel own their land and water. After the Vatican II reforms
(1962-1965), many Catholic clergy took a more positive attitude toward such
combinations, in conjunction with Church support for the social justice claims
of oppressed peoples. Peru’s spectacular Qoyllur Rit’i (starry snow)
pilgrimage includes both a ritual climb in which costumed dancers bring sacred
ice from the heights, and a mass in a chapel under a peak.
Protestantism is booming in many indigenous communities
in Middle and South America. It is not new. As early as 1900 Adventist missions
attracted many Aymara peasants on Lake Titicaca’s shores, and in the 1950s
Guaraní-speaking indigenous people from Paraguay’s arid Chaco region began
gathering around non-missionary Mennonites. But since the 1970s Protestant
missionary religions, especially Evangelical churches, Pentecostal churches,
and Adventists, have grown explosively among indigenous groups as well as among
mestizos living in cities. Some Protestant converts are intolerant of
indigenous practices. Lynchings of “idolatrous” shamans have been reported in
Bolivia. At the same time, certain Evangelical groups strongly affirm the worth
of indigenous identity. They propose improving the indigenous way of life by
eliminating the use of alcohol and promoting indigenous-language literacy.
|
E
|
Outlook
|
Is the resurgence of what Bolivians call the
“original peoples” just a passing phase, or is it the new dynamic? Many
unknowns remain: how to implement ethnic rights without bureaucratizing
culture; how to save endangered languages; how to stop political and
drug-related violence from drowning reform; and how governments with deep
problems of debt and corruption can serve long-neglected indigenous citizens.
Indigenous groups fear, too, that they are defenseless in global free markets.
Some Maya who consider growing corn a sacred duty, protest they cannot sell it
amid a flood of cheaper imports. But one achievement is secure: Latin America’s
native peoples have shown impressively how oppressed peoples can achieve
resurgence without engaging in mass violence against their neighbors.
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Native Americans
