The Creation of Inequality: How Our Prehistoric Ancestors Set the Stage for Monarchy, Slavery, and Empire (80 page)

  5. At least two of the supernatural beings represented in art at Teotihuacan were the forerunners of Aztec deities. These were the Feathered Serpent (called Quetzalcoatl by the Aztec) and a goggle-eyed personification of Lightning or Rain (called Tlaloc by the Aztec).

  6. Beneath a temple pyramid with depictions of these supernatural beings, the officials of Teotihuacan sacrificed and buried people who appear to have been military captives.

Several centuries after reaching its peak population, Teotihuacan began to decline. By
A.D.
800 it had lost many of its craftspeople. By 1000 it was barely a city at all.

THE SECOND GENERATION OF STATES

It appears that during the height of its power Teotihuacan was able to inhibit the growth of nearby urban centers, much as Uruk did for a time in early Mesopotamia. Once Teotihuacan began to decline, however, its hinterland broke up into a series of kingdoms or political confederacies. It is likely that many of these small kingdoms had once been part of an inner ring of subject provinces, extending out 75 to 100 miles from urban Teotihuacan.

Some of the second-generation kingdoms that took advantage of Teotihuacan’s decline were Cantona to the east (in the state of Puebla), Cacaxtla to the southeast (in the state of Tlaxcala), and Xochicalco to the south (in the state of Morelos). The capitals of these kingdoms achieved their greatest growth between
A.D.
600 and 900.

Many second-generation kingdoms were preoccupied with defense from hostile neighbors. Xochicalco, for example, was set on a rugged mountaintop. The city was defended by a series of dry moats and walls and could only be entered by three narrow causeways. Its summit had a plaza with several temples, a royal acropolis with storage rooms, residential areas for lesser nobles, facilities for sweat baths, and several courts for playing ritual ball games.

One temple platform was decorated both with feathered serpents, like those of Teotihuacan, and hieroglyphs referring to a series of subject territories. Some of the hieroglyphs depict open jaws holding an ancient symbol for tribute: a circular cake of cacao or chocolate, divided by incisions into four quadrants.

Archaeologists suspect that Xochicalco’s eventual collapse was brought on by factional or ethnic rivalry. In its last days, Xochicalco’s royal lineage turned the acropolis into a mini-fortress by dismantling its access stairways. During a final conflagration, women and children were trapped under falling roof beams along the escape route.

In the pine-forested highlands east of the Basin of Mexico lies another city whose concern with defense was obvious. Cantona occupied the summit of a lava hill so rugged and abrasive as to shred the sandals of anyone attempting to scale it. The builders of Cantona added a dry moat and restricted traffic to a series of narrow causeways monitored by guard rooms.

Archaeologists believe that Cantona was built by a confederacy of petty kingdoms that, by pooling their manpower, created a virtually impregnable city. One reflection of this confederacy can be seen in the 24 ball courts scattered throughout Cantona. These courts varied significantly in size, architectural style, and astronomical orientation, as if each participating group had its own version of the ball game.

Still another second-generation city was Cacaxtla, which occupied a defensible hill in Tlaxcala. Cacaxtla lacked the impressive moats and walls of Xochicalco, but its murals depicted battles, captive taking, and the names of subjugated towns. One prominent mural, more than 60 feet long, shows a battle scene in which nobles wearing bird helmets are menaced by warriors wearing jaguar pelts and carrying spears.

One stairway at Cacaxtla, called the Captive Stair, was given several coats of stucco. On the tread, Cacaxtla’s artists painted images of prisoners whose skin-and-bone corpses leave little doubt that they had been deliberately starved (
Figure 68
). On the riser of the same step they painted the hieroglyphic names of subjugated towns, presumably those from which the captives had come.

Another community founded during this period was Tula in the state of Hidalgo. There can be little doubt that the region of Tula had once been subject to Teotihuacan: the earlier administrative center for the region, an archaeological site called Chingú, featured an unmistakable Teotihuacan architectural style. Chingú’s abandonment coincided with Tula’s growth. By
A.D.
900 Tula had become a city covering more than a square mile.

FIGURE 68.
   The Captive Stair at Cacaxtla, a hilltop citadel in Tlaxcala, Mexico, was painted with polychrome images. On the tread were the corpses of prisoners who had been starved until they were literally skin and bone. On the riser were hieroglyphs referring to places subjugated by Cacaxtla. Such militarism was typical of second-generation states in central Mexico.

Many of central Mexico’s second-generation states declined after 900, often because the confederacies that built them had dissolved. Tula was an exception; its greatest days still lay ahead.

THE THIRD GENERATION OF STATES

In 1577 King Philip II of Spain asked every colonial administrator in Mexico to fill out a questionnaire on the province under his command. The result was a series of documents called
Relaciones Geográficas,
kept in an archive in Seville. These documents are a gold mine of information on the Indian societies of Mexico, but they are only the tip of the iceberg. In addition to the authors of the
Relaciones,
highly motivated Spanish missionaries, soldiers, and officials interviewed Indian leaders about their history, customs, religious beliefs, kings, and conquests.

It is from such documents, augmented by archaeological data, that we learn much of what we know about the Aztec. But the legendary histories go back farther than that. They speak of a pre-Aztec people called the Toltec, who ruled central Mexico between
A.D.
900 and 1200. The Toltec spoke Nahuatl like the later Aztec.

Thanks to historian Wigberto Jiménez Moreno, we know that the archaeological site of Tula, roughly 35 miles north of Teotihuacan, was the Toltec capital. We also know that the Toltec created not merely a third-generation state but a multiethnic empire.

Tula was already occupied in 700, but its influence at that time did not extend far outside its immediate region. The city lay along both banks of the Río Tula, the main source of irrigation water for a dry basin 7,000 feet above sea level. According to Jiménez Moreno, Tula’s later growth reflected an influx of at least two major immigrant groups. From the arid north and west came the Toltec proper. From the south and east came the Nonoalca, a collection of ethnic groups whose emigration was prompted by the decline of earlier central Mexican cities.

Now take a large grain of salt and listen to one of the romanticized native accounts of the Toltec rise to power.

The story begins with a leader named Mixcoatl (“Cloud Serpent”). He led a great horde of people from the north into the Basin of Mexico, where he battled with an ethnic group called the Otomí. In the process, Mixcoatl was assassinated. His son, Ce Acatl (“One Reed”), avenged his father’s death and then led his people north to the less bitterly contested region of Tula. The date given for his arrival at Tula corresponds to
A.D.
968 in our calendar.

One Reed then assumed two honorific titles: Topiltzin (the equivalent of “lord” or “sir”) and Quetzalcoatl (“Feathered Serpent”). The latter title suggests an attempt to legitimize his rulership by associating himself with an important deity.

Tula eventually grew to cover five square miles. While it lacked the large traffic arteries of Teotihuacan, its layout suggests that much of its growth was planned. Tula’s artisans did not live in large compounds like those of Teotihuacan, but their crafts were just as well developed. Two huge workshops turned volcanic glass into thousands of lancets, blades, and knives. The enormous numbers of spindle whorls, or flywheels for spinning fiber, suggest large-scale production of cotton textiles. Since cotton cannot be grown at 7,000 feet, it must have been imported from the lowlands on a grand scale.

In fact the evidence for long-distance trade is so great as to suggest that Toltec society included forerunners of the Aztec
pochteca,
a guild of special entrepreneurs that led trade missions to far-off regions. One residence at Tula had storerooms with Plumbate pottery imported from the Pacific coast of Guatemala and Papagayo Polychrome pottery from Costa Rica or Nicaragua.

The temple precinct at Tula was separated from the secular parts of the city by a wall, analogous to the walls that surrounded the sacred precincts of some Sumerian cities. In Tula this structure was a
coatepantli,
or “serpent wall,” decorated with undulating rattlesnakes. The later Aztec would borrow the concept of the serpent wall from the Toltec.

Another Toltec creation adopted by the Aztec was the
chac mool.
This was a sculpture depicting a reclining man holding a receptacle on his abdomen (
Figure 69
). According to oral histories, the receptacle’s purpose was for the placement of offerings, including the hearts of sacrificial victims. The final resting place for the heads of many victims was a
tzompantli,
or skull rack, many layers high.

The peak of Toltec influence occurred in the twelfth century
A.D.
The extent of their trade network was impressive indeed. To the south they had access to the products of Nicaragua and Costa Rica. To the north they had access to turquoise, mined either in the U.S. Southwest or in northwest Mexico.

Archaeologist Patricia Crown and chemist W. Jeffrey Hurst have found residue from chocolate inside a series of painted beakers at Pueblo Bonito in New Mexico. The vessels were locally made, but the chocolate must have come from Mexico. The beakers date to the period when the Toltec were importing a lot of turquoise from regions to the north, perhaps offering chocolate beans in return.

After centuries of expansion, the Toltec succumbed to internal conflict. Once again their oral histories romanticize the story, attributing it to competition between two deities. According to legend, conflict arose between Quetzalcoatl (a deity associated with creativity, arts, and crafts) and Tezcatlipoca (“Smoking Mirror,” a deity associated with militarism and human sacrifice). Tezcatlipoca is alleged to have tricked Quetzalcoatl into public drunkenness, an act so scandalous that the latter was forced to leave Tula.

FIGURE 69.
   This Toltec sculpture, called a
chac mool,
occupied a place of honor at Tula in the state of Hidalgo, Mexico. The sculpture is a bit over two feet tall and depicts a priestly attendant, with a sacrificial knife tucked into his armband, holding the basin in which a victim’s heart would be placed. The carving of such figures was one of the Toltec practices borrowed by the later Aztec.

This legend is probably the romantic version of a conflict between two royal families or political factions, each with a different patron deity. Tula eventually went into a downward spiral from which it never recovered. Huemac, the last Toltec ruler, is said to have left the city in
A.D.
1156 or 1168, moving to the Basin of Mexico. There the old Toltec elite took up residence on the lake system, occupying places with Nahuatl names like Azcapotzalco, Texcoco, Tlacopan, and Colhuacan.

As it shrank in population, Tula became vulnerable to attack. A series of ethnic groups from the north and west, known to the Toltec by the derisive term
Chichimec
, or “Dog People,” entered and burned parts of Tula. One of these Chichimec groups claimed to have come from an island within a lagoon, a place called Aztlan (“Place of the Heron”). People from such a place would be referred to as “Azteca,” which is the origin of the word Aztec. During their migrations, however, these people changed their name to “Mexica,” from which we get the word Mexico.

THE FOURTH GENERATION OF STATES

Between
A.D.
1200 and 1300, a fourth generation of states arose in central Mexico. None reached the status of empire. Most were petty kingdoms, forced to form alliances with their neighbors in order to avoid being taken over by ambitious rivals.