Ancient Mesoamerica - Dr. Michael Whalen

our speaker today is Michael Raylan a professor of anthropology at the University of Tulsa and I just learned as I met him coming into the auditorium today he's been at TU since 1978 which means he spent almost his entire academic career at the University of Tulsa he received his master's degree and PhD in anthropology and archeology from the University of Michigan - I dare tell them when you earned the in 1976 the year I graduated from high school dr. waylan's research interests are in cultural evolution and the development of complex societies like that presented in the upcoming West Mexico exhibition his research includes the excavation of individual communities and surveys of regional settlement patterns in northern Mexico Mesoamerica and the United States Southwest his technical interest is ceramic analysis and as you will see in the final program of this series with dr. Pickering ceramics will be the star attraction of the West Mexico ritual and identity exhibition dr. William Indiana's career in Mesoamerica research with his dissertation excavation at a site occupied between approximately 1600 BC and 500 BC since 1989 he has been investigating the Casas Grandes regional system through a program of large scale surveys and excavations in Northwest Chihuahua Mexico his research over the years has been supported by the National silent Science Foundation and the National Geographic Society at last count dr. Whelan has at least 26 publications to his credit dr. waylan's program today is as you can see on the screen ancient Mesoamerica from the Olmecs to the Aztecs let's give a warm Gilcrease welcome to dr. Michael wave well thank you all for coming it's a real pleasure to speak here at Gilcrease my task is Herculean today to manage something like 2,500 years of Mesoamerican prehistory in an hour but we'll see what can be done then let me start out by saying something about Mesoamerica what it is and how its defined as you're probably aware the prefix hit everybody still hear me if I talk down here as you're probably aware the prefix mezzo in Mesoamerica means middle or in-between come from the Greek term meaning middle so as you can see they're Mesoamerica that's the shaded area there is in between North and South America now much of Mesoamerica is included in the modern country of Mexico but not all of it is make you that here we go we can see on here the boundaries of Mesoamerica those are the heavy black lines that are drawn upon the screen here's the northern boundary of Mesoamerica and here the southern so the north part of the Republic of Mexico actually is not included in Mesoamerica and other countries what the Maya El Salvador and the western portion of Honduras are included in Mesoamerica so a number of modern nations make up the country it's a common error to think that Mesoamerica is synonymous with Mexico and in fact it actually isn't as you see here now I also want to make two basic divisions in this big area that we call them in so America one of them is cultural and one of them is topographic yeah here's the topographic division there's no key on this but the area's you see shaded in red on this map are highland areas the areas that are green are lowland areas so that that's fundamental contrast in Mesoamerican topography the Highlands and the lowland you can see that both coasts are lowland areas the distance of the one that Bank right here is also a lowland area and then most of the Maya area over here is lowland tropical jungle as well this distinction between lowland and Highland is more than just a geographical interest as a profound effect on cultural development in Mesoamerica we see a little bit more about that later there's also yes sorry I had these slightly out of order there's also a cultural division right here you can see part of Mesoamerica this slide is shown as dark brown and part of it as grey there is this is a distinction which doesn't really have a formal name like Highland and lowland but I'd like to think of it as the Mexican part of Mesoamerica and the Maya part of Mesoamerica the gray area right here would be the Mexican part the dark brown area there the Maya partner both of these are indisputably Mesoamerican cultures no question about that but they're different in many of their fundamental undertones as a matter of fact if any of you are familiar with modern Mexico today you'll be aware this cultural distinction still persists there's a Maya part and a Mexican part in fact in 1871 the Maya area came within an inch of seceding from Mexico probably didn't do it well let's look at the face of the land in Mesoamerica here's a shot taken in the Central Valley of Mexico right here I'll start off by noting that a lot of the and in mesoamerica is harsh in one way or another Mesoamerica is a land of violent rain storms hurricanes earthquakes constant tremors in 1943 there was a huge volcanic eruption that destroyed a great great deal villages crops all sorts of things in 1972 and in 1981 there were massive earthquakes - that caused a huge amount of damage in the country in fact one prominent scholar of Mesoamerica made that I think very appropriate remark that the people of Mesoamerica live in the mouth of the volcano which and in fact they do Mesoamerica is a beautiful setting as you can see here but it's also a fierce one it's not what I would describe as a team-- natural setting this is very much reflected in the outlook and beliefs of the native peoples of Mesoamerica the old gods they're the old gods are Thunderer's earth shakers mountain movers they can be generous if they're propitiated but they're not gentle benevolent deities and all effect they're harsh fierce once all of them there's also the idea in Mesoamerica recurrent theme that the world has been cataclysmically destroyed a number of times the peoples of Mesoamerica have a fundamentally different concept of time that we conceive of time is linear that which has come comes not a dead Mesoamerican people and many of the people of Asia as well have a cyclic concept of time so that the passage of time is akin to the turning of a great wheel that which has been before will be again when the cycle completes itself the Mesoamericans saw five major cycles of the earth each of which ended in ruin and destruction and the growth of a new world under a new sun sand his idea of Perpetual Cataclysm then well alright let's go on and look at the actual pre three of mesoamerica you can see four major time periods right here and the first one you'll notice the longest with a pre ceramic that's from the very first appearance of humans in the area and I'm not going to try to talk about it today we're just going to talk about the last three periods that you see there the formative the classic and the post classic and you can see the approximate dates that go along with each time period I can't talk about all of them in all the parts of Mesoamerica today so what I'm going to do is talk about each time period in terms of its biggest and most spectacular development that pick one example of each one I'm also not going to try today to talk about the the Maya world I'm only going to focus on the Mexican world and the reason for that is why are fascinating people but the reason for that is that the West Mexican exhibit which is coming here is certainly part of the mexican world so I want to spend the most time on it to put it into its context all right well let's start with the formative period here you can see from that dates on the screen is very long period more than two millennia in fact of Mesoamerican culture history we actually divided into early middle liked parts the dates of which I won't bother you with but let's just say that this long time period is a time of tremendous culture change there's a huge amount of evolution packed into the formative period in fact that's always been my specialty in Mesoamerican archaeology it starts in its early days early dates that you see up there it starts with semi agricultural tribes that are barely sedentary it ends with incipient States by the early centuries of the Christian era so huge amount of human cultural development is packed in there now we haven't time to travel all the way through the formative period I'm going to do is talk about the Olmec here and as the caption implies this is meso America's first big cultural development it's the first example of what we would call a complex society these are societies that are large that integrate thousands of people that are hierarchically differentiated and are therefore capable of doing big things so they'll never the first that we see right there now the Olmec culture is right here it's the area here you can see I don't know if you can see that brown contrast in color but that's that's the Olmec area there it's on the gulf coast of Mexico so it's a lowland phenomenon so the first big cultural development of Mesoamerica comes from the lowland they're not going to hold that lead for long them here they certainly do there's several big Olmecs sites that we could talk about kid can you all read the names of those sites yeah okay they're too far away here's my Fanta right here sign more ENSO those are two of the most famous of them now the area in which the Olmec culture developed is like this this is what the Gulf Coast lowlands of Mexico looked like today incidentally this is the location today of modern Mexico's oil fields that's where all of them are today that's a resource of course that was meaningless to the Olmec and other Mesoamerican people although it's mighty significant today all right let's take a look at Olmec sites and there's something else I couldn't mention I should stay here there's something else a convention to that is that the Olmec at all of their sites display a particular and very highly recognizable art style a way of portraying things the reason I mentioned this is that in early formative middle formative times this art style spreads very widely over Mesoamerica it reaches all the way down into Guatemala up into central Mexico as well you'll see a little bit more about that in a moment first let me introduce you to the Olmec art style here's the big site of San Lorenzo right here this is an aerial view you can see a number of its components there's a big conical pyramid number one everything that you see is a big lump right there is an artificial construction these are just solid constructions or earth and stone we speak of these things as pyramids and people sometimes are inclined to confuse the pyramids of Mesoamerica with the pyramids of Egypt they're quite different things however the pyramids of Egypt whether five thousand years old or to start with but they're also mortuary monuments they're intended to contain the embalmed corpse of the Pharaoh forever Mesoamerican pyramids on the other hand virtually never have interments inside them they're simply artificial mountains on top of which temple structures are built so the - oh they're they're called synonymously they actually function very differently then all right here's to the Olmec art style here this is a drawing of one of the many stone carvings that you see there and characteristic elements of the Olmec style are reflected right here you have you have quasi human figures like these right here they have human bodies but they have Tiger faces there with a thick snarling lip of Tai are sometimes large tiger fangs as well sometimes tiger I'm sorry in creating the wrong one sometimes Tiger ears as you see on this one we call these these creatures we're Jaguars they're like a werewolf these are weird Jaguars then and they're imitating the Jaguar here this is a native animal in this area and all Mesoamerican peoples consider it a vast supernatural power it's also associated with water and rain in as though America but this image set of Tiger faced humans is the dominant theme throughout Olmec art we find creatures that look like this spread all through Mesoamerica something else we find it's also very characteristic of the old Mac some of you may have seen pictures of these things are the colossal heads then there's a people in there to give you an idea of the scale of this gigantic one right here these things are carved out of basalt then they weigh many tons apiece as you can imagine there it's a and they're all broadly the same that is they all have human faces here a couple of other shots of those you can see they all have human faces they all have flattens noses they all have very thick upper lips observe that in a bunch of them they all wear some kind of helmet like device on their heads I won't take the time here to show you all of them there's several dozen that are known but their facial features are distinctive that is they don't all look just the same then now has been suggested that these are African features then this is not a respected view in Mesoamerican archaeology I think the situation is that these are not African features but feline once that is the flattened nose the thick snarling lip are the same ones that you see on the some carvings then so they're feel ionizing these people right here perhaps to imbue them with the power of the Jaguar yeah these very possibly represent ruler and omec society although the omec did not write the writing system so we don't really know what these people put these objects work now I mentioned that the Olmec interacted widely with other people in Mesoamerica and just to give you a single example all of those ornaments that you see in this picture right here this is one of the caches from the site of La Venta then those are all Jade then Jade is the precious stone in Mesoamerica known to the Aztecs as the sweat of the Gods then Jade comes from highlands of Guatemala yeah which is where all this stuff was imported from so we have pan Mesoamerican trade going on at this time not only an Olmec symbols but in fancy luxury things as well well I hate to say it but for all of its fame we really don't know that much about the Olmecs we know a little bit about its antecedents we presume it evolved from local coastal people in this area so we know they were there before we don't know much about the process and we actually don't know much about the working of Olmec society if so there's still a huge amount to be learned there I found in my life that it's a common misconception that we archaeologists know all about the past and actually far from that and that's certainly the case here well as fascinating as the Olmec are and as much as could be said on them let's move on to the next big stage of cultural development in Mesoamerica which is the classic period and I might have put the sub caption on here the first round of state formation the first the first states get started at the end of the formative period as I mentioned a moment ago they reach their first florescence in the classic period effect the classic period could really truthfully be described as the time of great fluorescence of Mesoamerican culture you get writing systems developing you get elaborate art styles developing urbanism develops large powerful states developed in a number of areas as well now the fact that you have these big powerful States developing sysm off a lot of that social organization in Mesoamerica it means that many thousands of people can be brought together and gotten somehow to through organization integration and management to produce colossal works there which simply could not be done by people at simpler levels of development you'll see in a moment some of the biggest of the classic works then as all this takes a huge amount of organization and management which classic period societies very clearly possessed well alright let's turn then to the big site of Teotihuacan I didn't put a slide in with anyone in particular but there it is ody Cana there it's an Aztec word actually it means the place where the gods are then now the Aztec came much later than Celtic wakhan which was in ruins at that time the Aztec though were so impressed with the huge ruins of Teotihuacan that in their mythology the place had been built by giants at the beginning of the world then and it was the scene of the first great convocation of the gods actually the fourth in which they resurrected the Sun and started the new world hence the name where the gods are if people if they're with you what con certainly does not call themselves that though we have no idea of what they call themselves for they did not have an extensive writing system either here's Delta what kind though it's it's actually a verb but it's gigantic urban centre something like sixty thousand people living in it the red I'll show you the close-ups in a minute but the red structures that you see there are temples pyramids and ceremonial structures you can see they form the core of the city and the black rectangles all around it are well what we call partment complexes that's where the bulk of the people in the city lived yeah so we're looking at a real urban situation here with very dense packing of a large population in fact interestingly the city of tilty what cotton seems to have acted like a giant magnet and drawn into it 75 to 85 percent of the population of the valley of Mexico so the place is just empty around it so we know where it got its people it grew them in from the hinterlands here's an aerial photo looking down the main street of TOD what time you can see two of the big pyramids right here when I say big I mean really big this is the Pyramid of the Sun right here it is something like 900 feet on a side then 300 meters on the side what three football fields on a side then and it is a solid construction of earth and stone that is there was no hill or natural rise there when they started to build it they simply laid out on the ground a square three football fields on a side and said to the people fill it up but it's a very effective we did here's a shot of it right here to give you an idea of scale to give you an idea of scale that's that's a person an adult standing right there this structure in fact is as large at the base as the Great Pyramid of Cheops in Egypt which is the biggest of all of the pyramids it's only however about one-third as high as the Pyramid of Cheops then it presumably had an enormous goes up to a little flat back for up there on the top you'll see what I mean you understand now what I mean when I talk about the kinds of massive works that classic period societies were capable of producing an imagined cost and the organizational requirements of building something like this now telling Wakanda itself actually seems to have been built to a standardized plan also it didn't just grow up helter skelter and you can see here you can see the circle right here this is pecked into the plaster floor of one of the houses that has got to across through it like this these are sighting marks then they lay out an angle of sight which is seven and a half degrees north east of North seven and a half degrees east of North the entire city is laid out on that same grid buildings a mile and a half from the center of the city are still very precisely on the same grid so this is I guess a perfect example of what you call organized growth they are tightly controlled growth and in fact the grid of residential buildings extends about a mile and a half out from these ceremonial buildings that we have been looking at here now the building's themselves today are only pale shadows of what they work when you look at these Mesoamerican buildings you have to keep in mind that originally they were covered with gleaming white plaster and painted with fantastic colors as well we see them today just as rough stone constructions that that's analogous that look to looking at the plucked carcass of a brilliantly feathered bird then trying to get an idea what the bird actually looked like this is one of the temples at tilted con you can see the elaborate carving that's on there this is this is one of the very powerful classic Mesoamerican deities at clock reign deity this is itself go back over here the plumed serpent there both of these are just in rough stone like this here's a reconstruction this is inside the National Museum in Mexico City where they repainted so you can see microscopically what colors originally were used there so it would have looked something like that in its heyday now we have fortunately although there's no writing at Teotihuacan we do have some other indications of how the place operated and what sorts of things were important to us obviously there must have been a very powerful and comprehensive organization there to supply the wants of the great population there to keep everything integrated and organized in typical Mesoamerican fashion there were two pillars to the organization of this society one of them was religion and ceremonialism and the other militarism that take them together they make a pretty powerful stew then I'll show you some of the indications here oh I forgot that I put this a let me die you die you rest for one second these are the apartment complexes that are spread so thickly out from the central part of the city this is where in structures like this the bulk of the people would have resided these apartment complexes probably represent descent groups clans lineages something like that here's a shot of some of them being excavated then you can see how close they're about less than a meter under the ground here and there are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of them spread all around most of which have never been opened okay well here we are back to the twin pillars of Tempe what kind of society militarism and religion I'll take the latter first religion then you can see there this this is inside one of the fancier of the apartment complexes in fact that this is a fresco here if any of you are familiar with old-world frescoes these are done by exactly the same technique you make a white line bastard ply it to the wall and wait until it's hard but still slightly damp you then paint on that and the paint is absorbed into the still slightly damp plaster insulate fresco refresh then these a fresco has done just the same way independently invented apparently and these are going around the walls of one of the rooms in one of the apartment complexes the more elaborate of the apartment complexes were heavily decorated like this as were many of the temples now you can see that their figures there here's a close-up of one of these figures it's obviously a human very richly dressed human with elaborate elaborate headdress and the dreams of the Quetzal bird a sacred bird in Mesoamerica then the bundle the purse like bundle that he holds in his hand is what we call power bundle it's simply a symbol that the bearer possesses supernatural power then also at filty wakhan they use these things we call them speech scrolls then I guess you can think of them as analogous to the bubbles above a cartoon figure although they don't have any actual they're symbols inside them but no actual writing there so the figure is presumably chanting or speaking then likewise in one hand he holds his power bundle in the other hand these figures are all two-dimensional in the other hand like the one he holds out like this drops of rain fall so we frequently get this image that richly dressed priests with drops of rain falling from his fingers that something of consummate concern for farmers natural these are also always standardized images the facial features never vary they're just like stick figures and they're all over the place then so the power of priests and priestly figures and tell you what Khan must have been ignored in addition their warriors as well here's a drawing I want to be central Mexican warriors he's dressed in typical style he carries a shield with three darts on the end they kept balls of cotton tied around the razor-sharp obsidian points of their darts so they would break as soon as I hit something they'd come off and penetrate though it is unfazed and he carries an atlatl or spear thrower which was the typical weapon there I he to is chanting or speaking like this and here's another set of figures here this is you can see this is a tiger then but no ordinary tiger he wears a great headdress of plumes and he is a little bit destroyed out of that corner but he's holding up one of his paws like that in which is a blood dripping human heart then he's getting ready to take a bite out of there we see a number of images like this of richly dressed tiger figures with human hearts in later times in Mesoamerica specifically in Aztec times there were two major military fraternities in society one of the main goals and the other you guessed it the Tigers there are their Eagles at Teotihuacan well he has as a matter of fact there are there's one right there this is a stylized heart you know from other aspects of iconography but it's three chambers here in front of its who's going to stay up in the Eagle sits there with a heart in front of him and liquid whether it's blood or rain drips from his beak like this as does another cascade with eyes and we don't know what the purpose of that might be but we do get these motifs the twin motifs at Teotihuacan actually triple motifs warriors Tigers devouring hearts and eagles with hearts sitting in front of them if you really older archeology books from the 40s 50s 60s they have the idea that day with you work on was a peaceful theocracy as a place ruled might be not increased yeah in fact that's what I learned when I had my first Mesoamerican archeology course we now understand that militarism was a powerful force in healthy wakhan society the idea of peaceful theocrats is pretty much gone by the board as a matter of fact is interesting to note that in the last days of Teotihuacan this would be about 500 AD then the number of priestly scenes declines and the number of military scenes increases that certainly looks like the influence of one side of society is waning while the other side is waxing them well so much more could be said about Dorothy or cotton but let's conclude by noting that its influence in Mesoamerica is extremely widespread it's a single place itself but it touches almost every place else in Mesoamerica they get a tremendous amount of craft production at Teotihuacan there is also a mountain of obsidian right beside Teotihuacan is a distinctive green color and the craft products and the obsidian are traded all over Mesoamerica here's here's an example these are telltale const i'll vessels they're they're cylindrical vessel see they've got three feet on them sometimes the feet are slabs sometimes they're conical like that sometimes they have lids like this as well it's a real typical Tempe what kind of style priests painted on that one there you find these things all over Mesoamerica and here's the real thing though this is what's called tail G Wakana Theodoric pottery and we call it that because it's still an orange as you can see it's got some of them have the three feet on them and some of them don't thin orange pottery is all over the place in classic times now the reason I mentioned is that it's very clear that West Mexico which you're going to be focusing on from here on out was closely integrated into the town tehuacán interaction sphere as we find thin orange pottery we find the slab footed cylindrical vessels we find Teotihuacan style architectural elements all of those things show up in West Mexico also so there are people there in the classic period they're not as highly developed this guilty pecan will go there on the way then and clearly are interacting with it all right well let me move here to the Postclassic period the classic period itself comes to an end not only in central mexico with delta con about 8,500 we don't look on this as cataclysmic we talk about the collapse of classic period cultures it happens all over Mesoamerica on the Gulf Coast central Mexico shaaka all over the place and we always refer to it as the classic period collapse although we don't think anything catastrophic happened floods famines aliens invasions anything like that what it appears rather is that the classic period societies fall apart through internal organizational problems that's a much more likely hypothesis not nearly as dramatic I guess it wouldn't make the status of the Chariots of the Gods but it's a more likely explanation in fact in any case by about 500 AD the big clap first big classic states have fallen apart there follows a period of some centuries I guess you might call it a power vacuum in central Mexico places are still developing on their own central Mexico West Mexico Oaxaca are still moving along but nobody is yet powerful enough to dominate the whole area it's only about ad I put the round figure 18,000 up here kind of depends on where you are in Mesoamerica but sometime between 900 and a thousand we get what we refer to as when you see it up there the second round of state formation that is to say local policies in different parts of Mesoamerica begin getting powerful enough that they can eat up their neighbors then expand their territories and form well these were all be conquest states now the most famous of these Postclassic states will come to them in a moment but let's just note before I get there that a number of these late Postclassic states were actually seen in operation by the Spanish they were functioning when Cortes and his henchmen arrived in 1519 on the coast of Veracruz yeah so we have extensive Spanish accounts here particularly of the people called the Aztec and I imagine they're the most famous actually should be infamous they were pretty awful bunch of all of the Mesoamerican people now Aztecs themselves would not have recognized the name Aztec they did not use it they did not so refer to themselves that's a later historical appellation I also didn't write but we know from Spanish accounts that they actually call themselves miss chica you can see from the term there that's where we get the term Mexico also you can see the Spaniards problem they can't speak the language they get there they say what is this place - the Aztecs the Aztecs say Michigan and this all this mashita also so the Spanish is Spanish eyes that to make Ecole and hence the name of the place then so the insects certainly the single most famous Postclassic people they originally came from northern Mesoamerica and they were they were rather barbarians at the time they moved into the valley of Mexico in early Postclassic times they moved in during the power vacuum after the collapse of Teotihuacan and set themselves up as fairly disagreeable people at the time throughout and this was about AD 1250 so this this would be about contemporary with early Middle Ages and your first crusade was going on about this time in fact that the Aztecs were moving into the valley of Mexico they set themselves up and through a series of cunningly contrived alliances betrayals intrigues Wars conquests succeeded in establishing themselves as a major power in central Mexico in fact after they had done so this will be by about 1300 ad there was a series of Aztec kings who were resolute militarists and expanded the Aztec empire to its peak probably in 1400 to 1450 ad this is only seventy years less than seventy years before the arrival of the Spanish so the Aztec had not been functioning at their peak capacity for more than a couple of three generations before the Spanish arrived and I guess you'd have to say cut them off at the needs though so their their culture did not come to a natural end then alright let's look at the Aztecs we know more about them I imagine that any other Mesoamerican people thanks to the efforts of some of the Spanish some of the Spanish were dismal fanatics who regarded everything that was Indian as diabolical and worthy of instant destruction that so awful lot of stuff was destroyed some of the Spaniards however were people of broader sensibilities they taught Indians to read and write Spanish and Latin and encourage them to annotate the picture manuscripts which yes has had they did not have an effective writing system so you'll see one of these in the minute and see the Spanish notations on it with pretty remarkable spelling in fact I guess these guys could write Spanish for the discolored very well so thanks to a few enlightened people like that we we know a lot about the s takes yeah well here's the scene of the development of Aztec power it's the valley of Mexico appear is it right at Central Mesoamerica here's the shot that I showed you before this is the valley of Mexico it's it's a high altitude area this is about 6,500 feet here it's surrounded by snow-capped volcanoes as you can see there the one you see right here in front is East Taxi wacky which in nahuatl means white lady and other back there public at the portal which means the smoking Mountain then each taxi want to begin smoking from a decade ago something I remember reading about it in the papers it's there they're still possibly active there's still an awful lot of seismic activity here you can see this is good farming land up here look cold so you have to take certain steps to management now in Aztec times there was a huge lake in the center of the valley of Mexico if any of you been to Mexico City modern Mexico City today you'll get weather there is no lake in fact it was drained in the 1600s by the Spanish for various irrigation projects and modern-day Mexico City was built on top of the Aztec capital which had been out there in the lake in fact here's the Aztec capital here Tenochtitlan you can see it's on a partly artificial island out here in the center of the lake and it had stone causeways or bridges like this that connected it to the land upon the draining of the lake the span built their things right on top of the Aztec things I'll show you some of them in a minute then on the marshy ground there with the effect that everything begins sinking there's a sixteenth century cathedral in Mexico City for example which is canted about like that because it's just sinking into into the muck in 1850s Mexico considered moving its capital to drier ground but it was just too expensive so they didn't do it anyway here's a Spanish map of Tenochtitlan the Aztec capital with its great ceremonial complex here in the center surrounded the water around it was shallow at 3 or 4 feet deep that with these stone causeways here I can recommend very highly a fascinating book it's called the discovery and conquest of Mexico and he was written by Baron Audi s the book has been continuously in print for the last 500 years in fact they're not the S was one of the soldiers of Cortes when he was a young man so he was actually there and saw this stuff and then when he was an old man maybe basking in the recollections of the glories of his youth he wrote the discovery and conquest of Mexico in which he related all these things I particularly recall one passage said we came we came from the causeway Papa says we went across the causeway we saw the city of the city Aztec city rising up out of the lake in front of us he said we saw the white buildings and the temples gleaming in the Sun said all around me I heard the soldiers asking one another if what we saw was not a dream or an enchantment yeah so it certainly seemed so through them they had expected to see nothing of the sort here's an artist's view of they're not Diaz will come along its causeway right here all right once you get into Mexico City itself there's a giant ceremonial complex or I should call it Tenochtitlan as Mexico City is the Spanish name there's a giant ceremonial complex like this which is right in the center of Mexico City today I mean have you been to Mexico City okay well you remember the big central plaza where the Metropolitan Cathedral is the big alameda the big open spot right there that's right where this was it see there two temples one of them was two o'clock there in God and the other two discounting polka then here's the situation there's one of the big temples that you were just looking at right there mess that's its position these are all colonial buildings from Spanish times around it there's the Metropolitan Cathedral right here this is the older one right here that's so badly tipped then and this is the big central plaza the Automator of Mexico City but you can see how the Mexico City is just sitting on top of the Aztec material in fact you cannot excavate a sewer line in Mexico City without running into Aztec material so they're here in fact is work on the main temple right here this is the base of the main temple right here there they're the streets of Mexico City with cars going through them right up here so they're literally right in the middle of the urban said they have today made a fantastic museum on this spot which I highly recommend it's called a template my York or the main temple museum so if you find yourself in Mexico City don't miss that it's great all right well the Aztecs are infamous for their gory human sacrifices also like this and the the sacrifice is actually what he has take we're up the bloodthirsty people they had both religious and political bases though the Aztec I think truly saw themselves as the soldiers of the Sun because according to their beliefs the Sun and that was the incarnation of the fifth world that they lived in the world it lasted as long as the Sun lasted they knew that the end of the world was certain as soon as the wheel completed its cycle the world would end however they believed that you could hold off the end of the world it could slow the turning of the wheel by nourishing the Sun then the Sun can only be nourished by the blood of sacrifice like this so they considered themselves the soldiers of the Sun whose Duty it was to feed it to keep it going then they sacrificed Apollo numbers of people this is the sole monthly right here it's a reconstruction of it or the skull rack which stood below one of the big temples in Mexico City now it has that times those those are real skulls according to the Spanish count there were a hundred at one hundred and thirty four thousand of them in this particular skull rack right here I think the Aztec also used this as a political device to they could say come join me as thick Empire which I'll tell you something in a minute I'd say we'll treat you well which they didn't but they don't so say and if you do anything we don't like we always need sacrificial victims them but I think it had put political and religious connotations for them in fact this brings us to the whole question of the Aztec empire is they had the biggest empire those ever formed in Mesoamerica now this is central Mexico right here and the two different colors that you can see are differently designated as tributary provinces and strategic provinces we did not go into those details here that shows you pretty much the extent of the Aztec empire you can see it's not a coherent structure it's not consistent they're big areas of the Aztec they're not controlled in between in fact the whole empire was a very loosely administered structure but a big one Testament it's height there was something like 5 million people included under it there the city of Tenochtitlan and its height is estimated to have been 5 times larger than contemporary London also it solved of being set up now we can best describe the Aztec empire yes these are not scholarly terms but I would describe the Aztec empire as a giant extortion racket yeah because it simply was a-bleeding of everybody for everything that they had the Aztec would defeat them in battle they'd say okay here's your tribute there's an Aztec tribute list right there those the right now you can see on this Spanish and a patient that has been added to it they would give they would assign crushingly heavy tribute burdens so the whole population of the area would have to work 90% of their time just to pay the tribute they say if you pay won't bother you if you don't pay you'll soon be very sorry yeah anything we'll just leave that local rulers were responsible for collecting the tribute and sending it to Mexico City in fact is quite rare to see an Aztec in the outer parts of the Empire then if you did it generally meant being trouble coming soon then as you might imagine the people of Mexico bitterly hated the Aztecs there was nothing to hate it so much as an Aztec you may have asked yourself at some point how is it that Cortez and 520 Spaniards that was the size of his force were able to conquer the whole Aztec empire in three years the answer to that question is they couldn't when Cortes arrived in Mexico City and Tenochtitlan when he marched into Tenochtitlan he had his 520 Spaniards with him but marching behind him were nearly 50,000 Indian soldiers Saul Cortes had to do he would use a sharp guys this quick he would come into a place they would say who are you and what he want he would say my name is Cortez I serve a great king across the water and I have come here to liberate you from the tyranny of Montezuma and the people would say man just wait a minute while we get our weapons and I would fall in behind him and so he didn't conquer Mexico with 500 Spaniards they conquered up with something like 50,000 Indian soldiers the instinct in fact were not go to Empire builders they seem to have generated a remarkable amount of hatred in Mesoamerica had structures like that don't generally last very long well the situation then I might also note that the Aztecs are extremely militaristic they would need to be to sustain their empire and their their conquests as this scene shows we're by force there here you can see Eagle and Tiger warriors than two that belong to those two military fraternities that we first saw at Teotihuacan they continued strongly on the Aztec as well well the situation then I'll just go back to the one we had and we'll leave those warriors on the screen the situation then is that in 15 2015 19 Cortes and Spaniards arrived he succeeded in defeating the Aztecs and conquering the place if he had not someone else would have fairly shortly then as Cuba only 90 miles to the west of Yucatan was filled with hungry Spaniards then so I guess you could say in a word that the prophecies came true the wheel turned full circle the cycles completed themselves the world ended in chaos and ruin and it was reborn under a new Sun although now the Sun is Spanish rather than Aztec well at the end I want to say a little bit about West Mexico so to tie that in right here I won't say too much because you're going to hear more at another time I've already noted that West Mexico was firmly tied in to the TLT work on interaction sphere there's people there there's cultural development going on there they have basically the same formative classic post classic time periods they're following similar developmental trajectories though not as rapidly then in the classic period as I say they're interacting with guilty wakhan by post classic times population is increasing in West Mexico power structures are beginning to emerge there by about 1200 ad some considerable power structures have emerged in fact one of them is the Empire of the Taurus codes then these folks during the time period between about 1440 and 1470 were in fact the principal enemies of the aztecs there was a constant series of border wars between the West Mexican tar oskins and the central Mexican Aztecs in 1479 and 1480 a nest egg army of something like 32,000 men according to the Spanish records made a large incursion into tereska territory they were met by a taraskin force of about 50,000 men after days of fighting the Aztec army withdrew defeated that's the only time they ever attempted to expand anywhere and were unsuccessful at it and they didn't come back then it's our ask an empire that continues until its conquest by the Spanish as well well I think I'll stop here to want to weary weary you too much it's a nutshell view of Mesoamerica so thank you for your attention if anyone has any any questions or comments being claimed to hear them yes but actual states of modern-day New Mexico are we talking about so I could look it up on that fort Orosco disappear issue economy and the Aztecs well you know Mexico is is a republic like this one it has States and then it has a federal district in the center like Washington DC mexico df is the federal district and that's where most of the Aztec stuff is what about that first on the Olmec there in the modern state of Veracruz there Nick pretty much exclusively Americans yeah he said the Telos guns were about the we're the only ones that didn't conquer what about the cross color flash colonists are interesting people they are a small group of people in the center of the Aztec empire when Cortes got there the clash Collins told him they told them tales of the orders of the Aztecs and their brutality and all this work that's it well I see that you are still armed you know how how is that if you're if your Aztec slaves they said Aztecs took everything from us but our weapons then the situation was that the Aztec society required warfare who is the only method of social advancement them so they effectively kept the tar askins there as somebody to fight with definitely so that the Warriors could cover themselves with glory in advance social it means there was no other means for doing so in Stech society so the Tarasque ins were they didn't pay tribute but they fought wars with the aztecs there is Austin yes why did the Olmecs take the line seven a half seven and a half we don't have any idea why any of those reference were chosen they could have been there's a number of possibilities it could have been astronomical and this has been several thousand years ago so we're not as far as we're not executives in position there so there's slight differences there we don't know of any major constellations or anything like that that are seven and a half degrees off there's nothing obvious then another alternative and this is a more hopeless one is that it's a mythological reference then which we don't really have any clue so to answer your question in a few words we don't know it's something we can see but we can't explain it on your bath of tribute and the influence of the acids number 27 down here within a lot of all of that coming all through you or what is that that was an area on the coast of Guatemala which the Aztec took special pains to get defend it was so far away because it produced a cow and cacao is the raw material for chocolate then if any of your chocolate addicts you could thank Mesoamerican people for that because their lines and development cacao when the Spanish arrived they found the Aztecs with this bizarre brown bead which they grind up put into hot water and froth by spinning a wooden sort of like whiskey in it like that and then drink it with relish man if you've never seen anything like that and they tried it this item is pretty good and Spanish ship soon were carrying cacao hints to be chocolate back to the old world so that that was a specific strategy of the Aztecs to gain control of cacao growing industry to do that they had to make a complicated series of treaties with the zapotec swish Tex and other people through whose lands they passed doctor weather are there any relationships tre other kinds of influence between these bezel Arabic cultures and people in our area approximately up here not very much some Mesoamerican symbolism seems to have made its way north in both the southwestern and southeastern United States there is some use of serpent symbols sometimes plume serpent symbols like the Quetzalcoatl eco Quetzalcoatl to mind so it seems that some ceremonial concepts made their way north however we don't have any good indication of large-scale transmission of Mesoamerican culture that does not seem to have happened then well you know one thing your question makes me think of something that I should have mentioned about western Mexico though and that is it's the only place in Mesoamerica where they didn't metal working the metal is not used anywhere else and it seems very likely that the West Mexican tradition of metalworking was acquired by sea from Central and South America in South America metalworking is very nature then but not anywhere in between then so there's a who've been seaborne trade at least along that Pacific coast yes just looking at the picture it looks more like a spark well the guy yeah the guy he's got a stored interest up there then he's got no feathers on his body right here I was thinking a steward is like I don't know how they bring the babies and so it seems like it's more well you know birds birds often have ceremonial associations in different cultures we have the stork delivering babies in our culture but these folks would have had an idea at all inside specific to us the more hybrid well I think what you're doing is I think you're attaching your Western concepts of things to these folks and that's one thing we want to be careful not to do they were people like us but they did not see the world like we do then okay oh yes well actually not there they're just oriented on that seven and a half degree axis and as I I was saying before we can see the orientation but we can't explain it now whatever the referent was though it was consistent all through the city yes on a wider note mother delicacies Mexico sir they are baby eels and they're growing little pools of water around article city that part of the original life as tax probably it is the Aztecs made very heavy use of the lake and lake resources in fact the Spanish were amazed when they got to the valley of Mexico to find the thoroughness and intensiveness with which every available if of the valley and the lake was being utilized to produce food because it's so heavily populated there so yeah I imagine that's an old tradition that still continues okay well thank you again for your attention

Channel: Gilcrease Museum

Views: 48,520

Keywords: lecture, Gilcrease Museum, Mexico, mesoamerica, Olmecs, Aztecs, Maya

Id: 9PiWN0nhYqI

Length: 62min 57sec (3777 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 27 2016

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Dr. Michael Whalen presents his lecture Ancient Mesoamerica: From the Olmecs to the Aztecs in the Gilcrease Auditorium at 3:00 tomorrow (Friday, February 26th). Michael Whalen received his Ph.D. in anthropology and archaeology from the University of Michi­gan . He currently is a professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Tulsa. Dr. Whalen’s program will outline the culture and history of some of the most influential people in prehistoric Mesoamerica, including:

(1) The Olmecs and the first complex society

(2) Teotihuacan and early urbanism

(3) The Classic Maya and tropical ceremonial centers

(4) Developments in western Mexico

(5) The Aztecs, the first empire of Mesoamerica.