The canals range up to a mile or so in length, a hundred feet in width and about ten feet in depth. Mathenay’s suggestion is that they were used for drinking water, for hand-watering adjacent gardens, and as a source of mud for renewing the fertility of fallow fields. I would add the implication that they enabled some regions to grow two crops a year, one based on draining low-lying areas during the rainy season and the second planted on wet mud during the dry season. While Edzná lies outside the central Peten area, the fact that its water control system remained undetected for so long means that all judgments concerning the absence of intensive systems within the Peten itself must be held in abeyance.
And this brings us to the most spectacular aspect of the Peten Maya. After A.D. 800, in center after center, construction ceased, no more commemorative inscriptions were made, temples became littered with household rubbish, and all governmental and ecclesiastical activity in the Peten came to a more or less abrupt end. Authorities differ concerning how fast the population declined. But by the time of the arrival of the Spanish, the Peten area had long since returned to population densities at or below those characteristic of pre-state times and to this day the area remains virtually depopulated. Many other Mesoamerican pre-Columbian state systems, including Teotihuacan, suffered equally abrupt collapses at one time or another. What is unique about the Petén Maya is that not only did the states permanently disappear but so did their entire populations. In the central plateau highlands political collapse was usually followed by the rise of new and larger states and empires embracing the territory and population of their predecessors. The implication of the Maya collapse, therefore, is that the Peten state developed on an unusually vulnerable ecological base which could not be regenerated once it broke down.
Exactly how the Maya destroyed their ecological base cannot be known until we have a better understanding of how the various components in their agricultural system fitted together. The best one can do for the moment is to say that each component had a limit to which it could be pushed, after which it would push back with devastating consequences. Short-fallow slash-and-burn can turn jungles into permanent grasslands. At the very middle of the Peten area is a huge, grassy savanna that was probably created by excessive burning. Deforestation leads in turn to erosion on hillsides. In the Peten the upland soil cover is extremely shallow and readily lost when not protected by plant cover. Erosion can also damage lowland water control systems since it leads to the build-up of excessive silt in canals and reservoirs. Finally, tampering with forest cover over an area as large as that of the Peten can easily change the regional pattern of annual precipitation, lengthening the dry season and increasing the frequency and severity of droughts.
The actual demise of each Peten center may have involved a slightly different scenario—crop failure and famine in some, rebellion in others, military defeat in still others, or various combinations depending on local events. But the underlying process undoubtedly involved the depletion of fragile soil and forest resources to a point so low that centuries of disuse were required for their regeneration.
Whatever the precise cause of the Maya collapse, the reason for the preeminence of the highlands in Mesoamerica seems clear. The capacity of the semiarid valleys of the central plateau to undergo successive agricultural intensifications exceeded that of the Maya’s quasi-tropical forest. Let me show how this process of intensification operated in the history of the Teotihuacán empire.
The Teotihuacán Valley is a branch of the Valley of Mexico lying some twenty-five miles northeast of downtown Mexico City. Like the Tehuacán Valley, where the earliest domesticated plants were found by Richard MacNeish, the Teotihuacán Valley had no permanent villages until the first millennium B.C. Between 900 B.C. and 600 B.C. villages were confined to the forested upper slopes of the valley, below the early frost line but high enough up to take advantage of the extra precipitation which falls on the hillsides. The kind of agriculture practiced by these first villagers was undoubtedly some form of long-fallow slash-and-burn. By 600–300 B.C. several larger villages had formed at lower altitudes at the edge of the valley floor, presumably to take advantage of the alluvial soils and to practice a rudimentary form of irrigation. During the next period, 300–100 B.C., settlements grew up squarely on the valley floor, and one of them—the nucleus of what was to become the city of Teotihuacán—already contained thousands of people. The movement from the slopes to the valley floor strongly suggests increasing reproductive pressures resulting from the intensification and depletion of the slash-and-burn system, especially from deforestation and erosion. As the labor efficiency of slash-and-burn farming declined, it became worthwhile to expend start-up and construction labor on irrigation facilities. Numerous large springs fed by water percolating through the porous volcanic hillside to the valley floor formed the basis for the Teotihuacán irrigation system and are still in use today. As the population of the central settlement increased, the network of river-sized spring-fed canals was eventually used to water about 14,000 acres of highly productive double-crop farmlands.
The city of Teotihuacán grew rapidly after A.D. 100, reaching a peak population of perhaps 125,000 people in the eighth century A.D. Careful mapping by René Millon of the University of Rochester shows that the city was divided into planned quarters and districts, each with its craft specialities, ethnic enclaves, temples, markets, palatial stone and plaster dwellings for the rich and powerful, and dark multi-family apartment houses for the populace—some 2,200 apartment houses in all. Millón has counted more than 400 workshops specializing in the manufacture of obsidian tools and more than 100 ceramic workshops. The largest and most ornamented buildings lined the huge stepped avenue which ran the length of the city almost two miles from north to south. The central monument—the so-called Pyramid of the Sun, built of stone-faced rubble—measures 700 feet to a side and rises to a height of 200 feet.
Around A.D. 700 Teotihuacán suffered a cataclysmic collapse, possibly due to burning and sacking, associated with the rise of a new imperial power—the Toltec, whose capital was located a scant twenty miles away in the Tula Valley. The evidence is incomplete, but I propose that environmental depletion was primarily responsible. The volume of water issuing from the springs fluctuates in relation to rainfall. A slight permanent drop in the volume of spring-fed water and in the water table underlying the valley floor would have compelled many people to move out of the city. We know that there was deforestation over an ever-widening perimeter as the city grew and consumed increasing quantities of wood for house beams and rafters, cooking fuel, and the manufacture of lime plaster. This deforestation was carried out on a sufficiently large scale to have altered the pattern of precipitation and runoff on the upper slopes of the valley.
There was one technical solution to the water problem which the people of Teotihuacán did not try except on a very limited basis. This consisted of using the shallow lake and swamplands that bordered the Teotihuacán Valley on the southwest and that in those days were probably linked to Lake Texcoco, a large, partly brackish body of water that filled most of the adjacent Valley of Mexico. To utilize the margins of the lake, it was necessary to dig drainage ditches and to pile up the excavated soil on ridges—a procedure which was much more costly than other forms of irrigation. Beginning about A.D. 1100 the high start-up costs of this form of agriculture could no longer be avoided by the people living in the Valley of Mexico. A network of drainage canals and highly productive ridges, whose fertility was constantly augmented by new dredgings, spread along the margin of the lake and provided the subsistence base for a half-dozen warring polities. One of these was the Aztec state, which would become the last American Indian imperial power in North America. Since the Aztec capital, Tenochtitlán, was located on an island connected to the shore by a causeway, the Aztecs enjoyed a military advantage over their neighbors and were soon in control of the entire lake region. As the population grew to unprecedented densities, the ridged mounds were extended out
into the lake itself by dumping mud on top of brush, corn stalks, and tree branches, resulting in fabulously productive chinampas, or “floating gardens” (which, of course, did not float).
At first, only the freshwater arms of the lake were used in this manner. But as the areas occupied by the chinampas increased, Aztec engineers tried to reduce the salinity of the brackish portions by diking them off and flushing them with fresh water channeled through a complicated system of aqueducts and sluice gates.
Looking back, then, on the developmental sequence in the Teotihuacán Valley and the Valley of Mexico during the millennium from A.D. 200 to A.D. 1200, we can discern three broad phases of agricultural intensifications followed by three shifts in the mode of production: first, the intensification of hillside slash-and-burn farming; second, spring-fed canal irrigation; and third, chinampa construction. Each of these involved progressively greater start-up and construction outlays, but each ultimately sustained greater population densities and larger and more powerful states. In those thousand years the population of the Valley of Mexico rose from a few tens of thousands to 2 million, while the scope of political control grew from one to two valleys to a whole subcontinent. By the old onwards-and-upwards theory of progress, the steady augmentation of agricultural production should have meant that the Aztecs and their neighbors increasingly enjoyed the benefits of “high civilization”—a phrase anthropologists have not hesitated to apply to them. But the phrase is wildly inappropriate.
9
The Cannibal Kingdom
As well-trained, methodical butchers of the battlefield and as citizens of the land of the Inquisition, Cortés and his men, who arrived in Mexico in 1519, were inured to displays of cruelty and bloodshed. It must have come as no great surprise to them that the Aztecs methodically sacrificed human beings, inasmuch as the Spaniards and other Europeans methodically broke people’s bones on the rack, pulled people’s arms and legs off in tugs-of-war between horses, and disposed of women accused of witchcraft by burning them at the stake. Still, they were not quite prepared for what they found in Mexico.
Nowhere else in the world had there developed a state-sponsored religion whose art, architecture, and ritual were so thoroughly dominated by violence, decay, death, and disease. Nowhere else were walls and plazas of great temples and palaces reserved for such a concentrated display of jaws, fangs, claws, talons, bones, and gaping death heads. The eyewitness accounts of Cortés and his fellow conquistador, Bernai Díaz, leave no doubt concerning the ecclesiastical meaning of the dreadful visages portrayed in stone. The Aztec gods ate people. They ate human hearts and they drank human blood. And the declared function of the Aztec priesthood was to provide fresh human hearts and human blood in order to prevent the remorseless deities from becoming angry and crippling, sickening, withering, and burning the whole world.
The Spaniards first glimpsed the inside of a major Aztec temple as the invited guests of Moctezuma, the last of the Aztec kings. Moctezuma had not yet made up his mind concerning Cortes’ intentions—an error which was shortly to prove fatal for him—when he invited the Spaniards up 114 steps to the twin temples of Uitzilopochtli and Tlaloc, which stood at the top of Tenochtitlán’s tallest pyramid in the center of what is today Mexico City. As they mounted the steps, wrote Bernai Díaz, other temples and shrines “all gleaming white” came into view. In the open space at the top of the pyramid “the great stones stood on which they placed the poor Indians for sacrifice.” Here also was “a bulky image like a dragon, and other evil figures and much blood shed that very day.” Then Moctezuma let them see the image of Uitzilopochtli, with its “very broad face and monstrous and terrible eyes,” before which “they were burning the hearts of three Indians whom they had sacrificed that day.” The walls and floor of the temple “were so splashed and encrusted with blood that they were black” and the “whole place stank vilely.” In Tlaloc’s temple, too, everything was covered with blood, “both walls and altar, and the stench was such that we could hardly wait for the moment to get out of it.”
The main source of food for the Aztec gods was prisoners of war, who were marched up the steps of the pyramids to the temples, seized by four priests, spread-eagled backward over the stone altar, and slit open from one side of the chest to the other with an obsidian knife wielded by a fifth priest. The victim’s heart—usually described as still beating—was then wrenched out and burned as an offering. The body was rolled down the pyramid steps, which were built deliberately steep to accommodate this function.
Occasionally some sacrificial victims—distinguished warriors, perhaps—were given the privilege of defending themselves for a while before they were killed. Bernardino De Sahagún, the greatest historian and ethnographer of the Aztecs, described these mock battles as follows:
… they slew other captives, battling with them—these being tied, by the waist, with a rope which passed through the socket of a round stone, as of a mill; and [the rope] was long enough so that [the captive] might walk about the complete circumference of the stone. And they gave him arms with which he might do battle; and four warriors came against him with swords and shields, and one by one they exchanged sword blows with him until they vanquished him.
Apparently in the Aztec state of two or three centuries earlier the king himself was not beyond the task of dispatching a few victims with his own hands. Here is an account by Diego Duran of the legendary slaughter of prisoners captured among the Mixtees:
The five priests entered and claimed the prisoner who stood first in the line.… Each prisoner they took to the place where the king stood and, when they had forced him to stand upon the stone which was the figure and likeness of the sun, they threw him upon his back. One took him by the right arm, another by the left, one by his left foot, another by his right, while the fifth priest tied his neck with a cord and held him down so that he could not move.
The king lifted the knife on high and made a gash in his breast. Having opened it he extracted the heart and raised it high with his hand as an offering to the sun. When the heart had cooled he tossed it into the circular depression, taking some of the blood in his hand and sprinkling it in the direction of the sun.
Not all the victims were prisoners of war. Substantial numbers of slaves were also sacrificed. In addition, certain youths and maidens were chosen to impersonate specific gods and goddesses. These were treated with great care and tenderness throughout the year preceding their execution. In the Florentine Codex, a sixteenth-century book written in Nahuatl, the language of the Aztecs, there is this account of the death of a woman who played the role of the goddess Uixtociuatl:
And after they had slain the captives, only [then] Uixtociuatl[’s impersonator] followed; she came only at the last. They came to the end and finished only with her.
And when this was done, thereupon they laid her down upon the offering stone. They stretched her out upon her back. They laid hold of her; they pulled and stretched out her arms and legs, bending [up] her breast greatly, bending [down] her back, and stretching down her head taut, toward the earth. And they bore down upon her neck with the tightly pressed snout of a sword fish, barbed, spiny; spined on either side.
And the slayer stood there; he stood up. Thereupon he cut open her breast.
And when he opened her breast, the blood gushed up high; it welled up far as it poured forth, as it boiled up.
And when this was done, then he raised her heart as an offering [to the god] and placed it in the green jar, which was called the green stone jar.
And as this, was done, loudly were the trumpets blown. And when it was over, then they lowered the body and the heart of [the likeness of] Uixtociuatl, covered by a precious mantle.
But such displays of reverence were few and far between. The great majority of victims did not walk joyfully up the steps of the pyramid, soothed by the prospect that they were about to make some god happy. Many of them had to be dragged by the hair:
When the masters of the captives took thei
r slaves to the temple where they were to slay them, they took them by the hair. And when they took them up the steps of the pyramid, some of the captives swooned, and their masters pulled them up and dragged them by the hair to the sacrificial stone where they were to die.
The Aztecs were not the first Mesoamericans to sacrifice human beings. We know that the Toltec and the Maya engaged in the practice, and it is a reasonable inference that all steep-sided, flat-topped Mesoamerican pyramids were intended to serve as a stage for the spectacle in which human victims were fed to the gods. Nor was human sacrifice an invention of state-level religions. To judge from the evidence of band and village societies throughout the Americas and in many other parts of the world, human sacrifice long antedated the rise of state religions.
Cannibals and Kings Page 12