The Pre-Columbian era refers to the time period in the Americas before the arrival of Christopher Columbus in 1492. This era is characterized by the diverse peoples and civilizations that thrived across the continents. From the advanced societies of the Maya, Aztec, and Inca, to the indigenous tribes that inhabited the vast landscapes, the Americas were home to a rich tapestry of cultures, traditions, and achievements.
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The Archaic Cultures
By about 9000 B.C., small bands of hunters were widely dispersed over the American continents. Changes in climate with the end of the last Ice Age may lie behind changes in diet and ways of life.
The disappearance of large game animals, whatever the cause, was probably met with the less-specialized hunting of smaller game, fishing, and an increased dependence on gathering wild fruits and other plant foods. The culture of these early populations is usually called the Archaic period.
It represented an adaptation to the changing environment and possibilities of subsistence. People made baskets and used stone grinding tools to prepare the roots and plants they collected for food. They used a wide range of animals and plants. As the seacoast stabilized between 5000 and 4000 B.C., populations concentrated around lagoons and river mouths to exploit fish and shellfish.
Enormous debris mounds or shell middens found in Chile and Tierra del Fuego indicate long-standing human dependence on these maritime resources. In Brazil, the middens indicate intensive use of these resources and permanent occupation sites.
Agriculture In The Americas
The move toward agriculture was a natural extension of a process in which A wide range of animal and plant resources were used with less dependence on the hunting of big game. Agriculture may thus have been brought about first by women, since in many simple hunting societies, women are responsible for gathering plant foods.
There is early evidence from the Guitarrero caves in highland Peru of cultivation as early as 7000 B.C., and by 5000 B.C.
Domestication had taken place in a number of regions in the Americas.
The introduction of agriculture, the American version of the Neolithic revolution, was not as complete and drastic a change as we once thought, and Many people continued to practice hunting and gathering, along with some cultivation.
In many places, agriculturalists and hunter-gatherers eventually lived in close contact with each other as a result of different adaptations to environments, opportunities, and social choices.
The movement from Hunting for agriculture did not always happen. In a particularly rich environment on the seacoast or where game was plentiful, people might avoid agriculture and the regimentation of life it could represent.
Eventually, however, agriculture was practiced all over the Americas. the woodlands of eastern North America to the tropical forests of the Amazon basin. American Indians eventually cultivated over 100 different crops from peppers, squash, and tomatoes to amaranth and quinoa.
Some crops, particularly Maize, potatoes, and manioc became essential sources of food for dense populations. As in Asia earlier, agriculture imposed restrictions on human behavior and the patterns of human action, as American societies depended increasingly in agriculture, a series of processes were sometimes set in motion that resulted in complex social, economic, and political systems.
Maize, Manioc, And Potatoes
By about 4000 B.C., the domestication of maize had taken place in central Mexico, and along with it came the cultivation of peppers, squash, and beans.
These expanded and more dependable food resources resulted in population growth (although some scholars argue that the growth of populations may have stimulated the search for new food sources and the domestication of plants). The cultivation of maize spread far and wide.
By 2000 B.C., it was grown in Peru, along with the potato and other crops native to that region. Maize spread northward to the present southern United States, and by about A.D. 1000, it was grown by groups such as the Iroquois in Canada. In the tropical forests of the Orinoco and Amazon basins, people had developed an agriculture based on varieties of manioc or cassava, a root that could be made into flour.
The introduction of maize in areas that had depended only on manioc probably resulted in population growth and, with it, the rise of more complex societies. While varieties of potatoes were the staple in highland South America and manioc was the principal crop of the peoples of the lowlands of South America and the islands of the Caribbean, maize cultivation spread in all directions and was often practiced in those areas in conjunction with other staples.
In Mesoamerica, the area from north central Mexico to Nicaragua, maize dominated the diet of agricultural peoples. It seems clear that, in most cases, agriculture is a major feature in determining the ability of societies to achieve the surplus production and complexity needed for those elements usually associated with civilization. With the adoption of agriculture and a sedentary way of life, the process of civilization was set in motion in the Americas.
Cultural Hearths And Social Systems
Traditionally, archeologists have seen two major cultural hearths in the Americas: Mesoamerica and the Peruvian orbit, including the coastal areas of Ecuador and Peru and the Andean highlands.
In these two areas, processes of development, based on intensive agriculture and including most of the features usually associated with Old World civilizations, could be seen. In both areas, a number of cycles of cultural advancement and, sometimes, empire-building took place long before the rise of the Incas and Aztecs, who were in power when the Europeans arrived.
Over thousands of years, artistic styles flourished and declined, and states rose and fell. Some scholars have suggested that the area between these cultural hearths, including present-day Panama and Colombia, also contained a number of advanced societies with considerable cultural achievements (especially in metallurgy and goldworking) that differed only in that they did not build large stone buildings.
Thus, the whole region from central Mexico southward to Chile formed a continuous nucleus of American civilizations. On the peripheries of this nucleus, due to influence and imitation, other Indian peoples adopted features characteristic of these civilizations.
Types Of American Indian Societies
The idea of a relatively contiguous area of cultural development makes more sense than the previous concept of independent centers. That earlier concept produced an image of the Americas in which isolated civilizations and cultural traditions developed along parallel lines with little contact or interchange.
The emphasis on artistic variation and regional diversity contributed to this view, but scholars are increasingly beginning to examine the broad similarities among ancient American cultures. While many differences and variations existed, there were also uniformities of organization, subsistence, technology, and belief that made them more alike than any one of them was to the civilizations of the Old World.
To some extent, we can make distinctions among ancient American societies on the basis of their economic and political organization. Sedentary agriculture, and with it, population density, was key.
Hunters and gatherers, living much as the early migrants to the Americas did, continued to occupy large portions of the continents, dividing into small bands and moving seasonally to take advantage of the resources.
These peoples sometimes were organized into larger tribes and might recognize a chief, but generally, their societies were organized around family groups or clans, and there was little hierarchy or specialization of skills. With some exceptions, the material culture of these people tended to be relatively simple.
People who had made a partial transition to agriculture lived in larger and more complex societies. Here, a village of 100 or 200 rather than a band of 25 was more common. Men often continued to hunt or make war, but women tilled the fields. Agricultural techniques tended to be simple and often necessitated periodic migration when soils played out.
The villages of these semisedentary farmers and hunters have been found on the Brazilian coast and in the woodlands of eastern North America. It was among peoples who had made a full transition to sedentary agriculture that complex societies emerged most clearly, for it was here that surplus production was most firmly established.
These populations could reach the millions. Men shifted into agriculture, forming a peasant base for a hierarchical society that might have included classes of nobles, merchants, and priests. Strong states and even empires could result, and the extraction of tribute from subject peoples and redistribution by central authority formed the basis of rule.
Chiefdoms And States
Sedentary peoples and hunters often lived near each other and shared mutual hostility and disregard, but, in fact, the categories of sedentary, semisedentary, and hunter-gatherers were never clear-cut, and many aspects of life were shared by them all.
To some extent, the large imperial states with highly developed religious and political systems and monumental architecture (which we call civilizations such as Teotihuacan in Mexico or Chimor in Peru) were variants of a widely diffused pattern, the chiefdom.
From the Amazon to the Mississippi Valley, populations—sometimes in the tens of thousands—were governed by hereditary chieftains who ruled from central towns over a large territory, including smaller towns or villages that paid tribute to the ruler.
The predominant town often had a ceremonial function, with large temples and a priest class. Beautiful pottery and other goods indicate specialization. The existence of a social hierarchy with a class of nobles and commoners was also a characteristic of many of the chiefdoms.
It is sometimes argued that in state-building societies, ceremonial centers became true cities, and clan or family relations were replaced by social classes. The scale of society was greater, but the differences are not always so obvious. Both the Aztecs and the Incas, with their complex social hierarchies, maintained aspects of earlier clan organization.
In fact, in terms of social organization, warfare, and ceremonialism, there seems to be little that differentiates the Maya city-states from some of the chiefdoms in South America or southeastern North America. Cahokia, near St. Louis, an important town of the Mississippian culture (c. A.D. 1050–1200), with its great earthen mounds covering an area of five square miles, probably supported a population of over 30,000, as large as the great cities of the Maya civilization.
A distinction between sedentary agriculturists and nomadic hunters may be more useful than the distinctions between “civilized” and “uncivilized.” Building and carving in stone, and thus the ability of archaeologists to reconstruct a culture, seem to have become a major feature in determining the difference between a state or chiefdom—and by extension, between “civilizations—and societies that do not seem to merit the title.
At the same time, we should recognize that the settled peoples and the hunters recognized the difference between their ways of life, and when they were in contact, they often shared a mutual jealousy and a hostility toward each other. The Incas looked down on the peoples of the Amazonian rain forest and referred to them as chunchos, or barbarians, but they could never conquer these peoples. They traded with them from time to time and sometimes used them as mercenaries.
The Aztecs called the nomads who lived to the north chichimecs, which came to mean “uncivilized,” but the Aztecs themselves may have originated as one of these groups, which were constantly pushing in on the wealthier and better-fed settled areas. To some extent, the pattern of tension between the nomads and the “civilized” Old World was reproduced in the Americas.
Mesoamerica
Geographically, the region of Mesoamerica is a complex patchwork of zones that is also divided vertically into cooler highlands, tropical lowlands and coasts, and an intermediate temperate zone. These variations created a number of environments with different possibilities for human exploitation.
They also created a basis for trade as people sought to acquire goods not available locally. Much trade flowed from the tropical lowlands to the cooler central plateau. The long and slow process of change by which the hunters and gatherers of Mexico began to settle into small villages and domesticate certain plants is poorly known.
Human beings were probably in Mesoamerica by 20,000 B.C. with men hunting the large game animals and, most likely, women involved in the gathering activities. Beginning around 5000 B.C. Gathering and an increasing use of plant foods eventually led to the domestication of certain plants. Beans, peppers, avocados, squash, and eventually maize served as the basis of agriculture in the region.
Later innovations, such as the introduction or development of pottery, took place around 2000 B.C., but there was little to differentiate one small village from the next. As the Shang dynasty ruled in China, permanent sedentary villages based to some extent on agriculture were first beginning to appear in Mesoamerica.
These were small and modest settlements. The lack of elaborate burials indicates that these were societies without much hierarchy or social differentiation, and the uniform and simple nature of pottery and other material goods indicates a lack of craft specialization. But the number of these Archaic period villages proliferated, and population densities rose.
The Olmec Mystery
Quite suddenly, a new phenomenon appeared. On the southeastern coast of Mesoamerica (Veracruz and Tabasco), without much evidence of gradual development in the archeological record, a cultural tradition emerged that included irrigated agriculture, monumental sculpture, urbanism, an elaborate religion, and the beginnings of calendrical and writing systems.
The origin of the Olmecs remains unknown, but their impressive sites at La Venta and Tres Zapotes attest to a high degree of social organization and artistic skill. The major Olmec sites at San Lorenzo (1200–900 B.C.) and La Venta (900–500 B.C.) are in the wet tropical forests of the Gulf coast of eastern Mexico, but Olmec objects and art styles spread to the drier highlands of central Mexico and toward the Pacific coast to the south.
The Olmecs have been called the “mother civilization” of Mesoamerica. Maize cultivation, especially along the rivers, provided the basis for a state ruled by a hereditary elite and in which the ceremonialism of a complex religion dominated much of life. At about the time that Tutankhamen ruled in Egypt, the Olmec civilization flourished in Mesoamerica. The Olmecs remain a mystery.
Some of their monumental sculptures seem to bear Negroid features; others appear to be representations of humans with feline attributes. They were great carvers of jade and traded or conquered it to obtain it. They developed a vigesimal numerical system based on 20 and a calendar that combined a 365-day year with a 260-day ritual cycle.
This became the basis of all Mesoamerican calendar systems. What language they spoke and what became of their civilization remain unknown, but some scholars believe that they were the ancestors of the great Maya civilization that followed. Olmec objects and, probably, Olmec influence and religious ideas spread into many areas of the highlands and lowlands, creating the first generalized culture in the region. By 900 B.C. Olmec style and symbols were widely diffused in Mesoamerica.
During this preclassic period (c. 2000–300 B.C.), other civilizations were developing elsewhere in middle America. At Monte Alban in the valley of Oaxaca, the Zapotec people created a large hilltop center based on terraced and irrigated agriculture in the surrounding valley. A writing system and calendar are also apparent here, perhaps borrowed from the Olmecs, as is considerable evidence of warfare and conquest.
By about A.D. Monte Alban had become a chief ceremonial center, covering over 15 square miles and including some 30,000 people. Further to the south, some early Maya centers began to appear. In the central valley of Mexico, Olmec artistic influence could be seen in expanding communities.
Much of what we know about these cultures must be interpreted from their architecture, art, and the symbols they contain. Art, and especially public art, was both decorative and functional. It defined the place of the individual in society and in the universe. It had political and religious functions; in the Americas, as in many civilizations, these aspects were usually united.
Interpreting artistic styles and symbols presents a variety of problems in the absence of written sources. The diffusion of Olmec symbols is a good example of the problem. Did the use of these symbols among other peoples in distant places indicate trade networks, missionary activity, colonies, conquest, or aesthetic appreciation? We do not know, but clearly Olmec influence was widely felt throughout the region.
The Classic Era
After the Olmec initiative, the period from about A.D. 150–900 was a great age of cultural achievement in Mesoamerica. Archeologists refer to it as the classic period, and during it, great civilizations flourished in a number of places. The two main centers of civilization were the high central valley of Mexico and the more humid tropical lands of southern Mexico, Yucatan, and Guatemala.
The Valley Of Mexico: Teotihuacan
In central Mexico, the city of Teotihuacan, near modern Mexico City, emerged as an enormous urban center with important religious functions. It was supported by intensive agriculture in the surrounding region and probably by crops planted around the great lake in the central valley of Mexico.
Teotihuacan’s enormous temple pyramids rival those of ancient Egypt and suggest a considerable state apparatus with the power to mobilize large numbers of workers. Population estimates for this city, which covers nine square miles, are as high as 200,000.
This would make it greater than the cities of ancient Egypt or Mesopotamia and probably second only to ancient Rome among the cities of classical antiquity. There were residential districts for certain trades and ethnic groups, and there is considerable evidence of wide social distinctions between the priests, nobles, and the common folk.
The many gods of Mesoamerica, still worshiped when the Europeans arrived in the 16th century, were already honored at Teotihuacan. The god of rain, the feathered serpent, the goddess of corn, and the goddess of waters are all apparent in the murals and decorations that adorned the palaces and temples. In fact, almost all Teotihuacan art seems to be religious in nature.
The influence of Teotihuacan extended as far south as Guatemala, and tribute was probably exacted from many regions. Teotihuacan objects, such as pottery and finely worked obsidian, and Teotihuacan artistic style, are found in many other areas. Teotihuacan influence was strong at Monte Alban in Oaxaca.
Warriors dressed in the style of Teotihuacan can be found far to the south in the Maya region. Teotihuacan represented either a political empire or a dominant cultural and ideological style that spread over much of central Mexico.
The lack of battle scenes on the walls of Teotihuacan has led some scholars to believe that the dominance of Teotihuacan led to a long period of peace maintained by the authority and power of the great city. Internally, the fact that the later buildings tend to be secular palaces rather than temple pyramids perhaps indicates a shift in power and orientation from religious to civil authority.
The Classic Maya
Between about A.D. Between 300 and 900, roughly at the same time that Teotihuacan dominated the central plateau, the Maya peoples were developing Mesoamerican civilization to its highest point in southern Mexico and Central America.
While the Tang dynasty ruled China, Charlemagne created his domain in Europe, and Islam spread its influence from Spain to India, after the classical period had ended in the Old World, a great civilization flourished in the American tropics.
The American classical period, launched as the Old World classical civilizations were coming to an end, lasted well into the next period of world history. Because of the richness of the archeological records and because the Maya peoples still retained many aspects of the classic period when the Spanish arrived and observed them, it is possible to reconstruct the world of the classic Maya in some detail.
We can use the Maya as an example of the classic period in Mesoamerican development, for while their civilization was distinctive, it was based on some principles common to the area. The Maya culture extended over a broad region that now includes parts of five different countries (Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, and El Salvador).
It included a number of related languages, and it had considerable regional variation, as can be seen in its art styles. The whole region shared a common culture that included monumental architecture, a written language, a calendrical and mathematical system, a highly developed religion, and concepts of statecraft and social organization.
With an essentially Neolithic technology in an area of dense forests plagued by insects and often poor soils, as many as 50 city-states flourished. How did the large classic Maya urban-religious centers, such as Tikal, Copan, Quirigua, and Palenque, with populations between 30,000 and 80,000, support themselves? Slash-and-burn agriculture as practiced today in the region was not enough.
The classic Maya used a number of agricultural systems. Evidence of irrigation, swamp drainage, and a system of artificially constructed “ridged fields” at river mouths (where intensive agriculture was practiced) has now appeared and seems to explain the Maya’s ability to support large urban centers and a total population of perhaps five million.
While some authorities still believe that the Maya centers were essentially ceremonial and were occupied primarily by rulers, artisans, and an elite, it seems clear that populations concentrated in and around these centers to create a densely populated landscape.
The Maya cities vary in size and layout, but almost all include large pyramids surmounted by temples, complexes of masonry buildings that served administrative or religious purposes, elite residences, a ritual ball court, and often a series of altars and memorial pillars.
These memorial monuments, or stelae, were erected to commemorate triumphs and events in the lives of the Maya rulers or to mark ceremonial occasions. The stelae were usually dated and inscribed with hieroglyphic script. A complex calendar and a sophisticated writing system were two of the greatest Maya achievements.
Religion, Writing, And Society
The calendar system and sophisticated astronomical observations were made possible by a vigesimal system of mathematics. The Maya knew the concept of zero and used it in conjunction with the concept of place value, or position.
With elegant simplicity and only signs for one, five, and zero, they could make complex calculations. As among all the Mesoamerican peoples, the Maya calendar was based on the concept of recurring cycles of different lengths.
They had a sacred cycle of 260 days divided into 20-day months, within which there was a cycle of 13 numbers. This ritual calendar meshed with a solar calendar of 365 days, or 18 months of 20 days, with a remainder of 5 “dead” or inauspicious days at the end of the year.
The two calendars operated simultaneously, so any day would have two names, but the particular combination of those two days would recur only once every 52 years. Thus, among the Maya and most Mesoamericans, cycles of 52 years were sacred.
The classic Maya, however, differed from their neighbors in that they also kept a “long count,” or a system of dating from a fixed date in the past. This date, 3114 B.C. By our calendar, it probably marked the beginning of a great cycle of 5200 years since the world was created. Like other Mesoamericans (and the ancient Peruvians), the Maya believed in great cycles of creation and destruction in the universe.
The long count enabled the Maya to date events with precision. The earliest recorded Maya date that survives is A.D. 292; the last is A.D. 928. A second great Maya accomplishment was the creation of a writing system. The Maya “wrote” on stone monuments, murals, and ceramics, as well as in books of folded bark paper and deerskin, only four of which survive.
Scribes were honored and held an important place in society. Although we still cannot read many inscriptions, recent advances now permit the reading of many texts. The Maya written language was, like Chinese and Sumerian, a logographic system that combined phonetic and semantic elements.
With this system and about 287 symbols, they were able to record and transmit complex concepts and ideas. The few remaining books are religious and astronomical texts, and many inscriptions on ceramics deal with the cult of the dead and the complex Maya cosmology.
The Maya view of the universe was a flat earth whose cardinal points and center were each dominated by a god who supported the sky. Above the sky extended 13 levels of heaven and below nine underworlds, each dominated by a god.
Through these levels, the sun and the moon, also conceived as deities, passed each day. A basic concept of Mesoamerican dualism—male and female, good and bad, day and night—emphasized the unity of all things, similar to that found in some Asian religions. Thus, each god often had a parallel female consort, or feminine form, and often an underworld equivalent as well. In addition, there were patron deities of various occupations and classes.
Thus, the number of deities in the inscriptions seems overwhelming, but these should be understood as manifestations of a more limited set of supernatural forces, much like the avatars, or incarnations, of the Hindu gods. While the few surviving books are religious in character, the majority of inscriptions on monuments are historical records of the ruling families of the Maya cities.
The major Maya centers were the cores of city-states that controlled outlying territories. There was constant warfare, and rulers, such as Pacal of Palenque (who died in A.D. 683), expanded their territories by conquest. Pacal’s victories were recorded on his funerary monuments and in his lavish tomb, discovered inside a pyramid at Palenque.
The rulers exercised considerable civil and probably religious power, and their rule was aided by an elite that exercised administrative functions. A class of scribes, or perhaps priests, tended to the cult of the state and specialized in the complex calendrical observations and calculations.
The ruler and the scribes organized and participated in rituals of self-mutilation and human sacrifice that, among the Maya, as in much of Mesoamerica, formed an important aspect of religion. Also, as a form of both worship and sport, the Maya, like other Mesoamerican peoples, wagered on and played a ritual ball game on specially constructed courts in which players moved a ball with their hips or elbows. Losers might forfeit their possessions or their lives.
Builders, potters, scribes, sculptors, and painters worked in the cities for the glory of the gods and the rulers. Most people, however, were peasant farmers whose labor supported the elaborate rituals and political lives of the elite. Captives were enslaved. Patrilineal families probably formed the basis of social life, as they did among the Maya of later days.
The elite, however, traced their families through both their fathers and mothers. Elite women are often represented in dynastic monuments in positions of importance. State marriages were important, and elite women retained considerable rights.
Among the common folk, women took over the preparation of food and domestic duties, including the production of fine cloth using the backstrap loom. If present-day Maya practices are any guide, the division of tasks by gender was probably supported by religious belief and custom.
Classic Collapse
Between about A.D. Between 700 and 900, the Mesoamerican world was shaken by the cataclysmic decline of the great cultural centers. The reasons for this collapse are not fully understood, but the phenomenon was general.
On the central plateau, Teotihuacan was destroyed around A.D. 650 by outside invaders, probably nomadic hunters from the north, perhaps with the collaboration of some of the groups under the dominance of Teotihuacan.
The city may have already been in decline due to increasing problems with agriculture. Whereas the fall of Teotihuacan seems to have been sudden, Monte Alban, the Zapotec center, went into a phase of slow decline and eventual abandonment.
The most mysterious aspect of the collapse was the abandonment of the Maya cities. During the 8th century A.D. Maya rulers stopped erecting commemorative stelae and large buildings; population sizes dwindled. By A.D. 900, most of the major Maya centers were deserted. Scholars do not agree on whether this process was the result of ecological problems and climatic change, agricultural exhaustion, internal revolt, or foreign pressure.
The collapse took place at different times in different places and seems to be the result of a number of processes, of which increasing warfare was either a cause or a symptom. The warfare may be related to the decline of Teotihuacan and the attempts of Maya city-states to position themselves to control old trade routes. Chief among the explanations for the Maya collapse has been agricultural exhaustion.
The Maya’s ability to create a civilization in the dense rain forest of the Peten in Guatemala and in the Chiapas lowlands was based on a highly productive agricultural system. By the 8th century, the limits of that system, given the size and density of the population, may have been reached.
Tikal had an estimated density of over 300 people per square mile. Maintaining the great population centers was an increasing burden. Epidemic disease has also been suggested as a cause of the collapse, perhaps indicating some unrecorded contact with the Old World.
Others believe that the peasantry simply refused to bear the burdens of serving and feeding the political and religious elite and that internal rebellion led to the end of ruling dynasties and their cities. The reasons for the collapse of the classic civilization remain unclear, but the period was clearly ending, and while a few centers continued to be occupied by squatters and some traditions persisted, the cultural achievements of the classic period were not attained again.
Long-count dating ended, the stelae cult ceased, and ceramic quality and architectural accomplishments declined. But as the great Maya centers of the southern lowlands and highlands were abandoned or declined, Maya cities in the Yucatan and in the Guatemalan highlands expanded and carried on some of the traditions, along with considerable cultural influences from central Mexico.
Mexicanized ruling families established themselves at Chichen Itza and other towns in Yucatan, and Mexicanized Maya groups from the Gulf Coast penetrated into the southern Maya areas. The northern Maya area was able to accommodate these influences and create a new synthesis of Maya and central Mexican culture.
In the great southern Maya cities, such as Tikal, Palenque, and Quirigua, no such adjustment was made, and the rain forest soon overran the temples and palaces. After A.D. 1, one of the new groups that occupied the central plateau after the fall of Teotihuacan, the Nahuatl-speaking Toltecs, established political control over a large territory and eventually extended their influence into Maya territory.
Their genius seems to have been military, and much of their culture derives from classic traditions. From their capital at Tula in central Mexico, Toltec influence and trade may have spread as far as the American Southwest, where the cliff-dwelling Anasazi people, the ancestors of the Pueblo Indians, produced beautiful ceramics and cultivated maize in the desert valleys.
In Yucatan, ruling families claimed descent from Toltec invaders. Even when the Toltec empire fell around A.D. 1200, the cultural traditions of Mesoamerica did not die, for imperial states and civilization do not necessarily go together. Eventually, however, a new power, the Aztecs, rose on the central plateau of Mexico. The Aztecs initiated yet another cycle of expansion based on the deep-rooted ways of life and thought of Mesoamerica.
