Buried Beneath Us: Discovering the Ancient Cities of the Americas
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Buried Beneath Us: Discovering the Ancient Cities of the Americas
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Overview
A beautifully illustrated look at the forces that help cities grow—and eventually cause their destruction—told through the stories of the great civilizations of ancient America.
You may think you know all of the American cities. But did you know that long before New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, or Boston ever appeared on the map—thousands of years before Europeans first colonized North America—other cities were here? They grew up, fourished, and eventually disappeared in the same places that modern cities like St. Louis and Mexico City would later appear. In the pages of this book, you'll find the astonishing story of how they grew from small settlements to booming city centers—and then crumbled into ruins.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781596439139 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Roaring Brook Press |
| Publication date: | 11/19/2013 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 96 |
| Lexile: | 1180L (what's this?) |
| File size: | 7 MB |
| Age Range: | 10 - 14 Years |
About the Author
Anthony Aveni is the Russell B. Colgate Professor of Astronomy and Anthropology at Colgate University. He helped develop the field of archeoastronomy and is known particularly for his research in the astronomical history of the Maya Indians of ancient Mexico. He is a lecturer, speaker, and editor/author of over two dozen books on ancient astronomy. He lives in Hamilton, NY.
Katherine Roy is an author, illustrator, and cartoonist. She graduated with an MFA from the Center for Cartoon Studies after earning a BFA in Illustration and English from the Rhode Island School of Design. Her drawings have appeared in Slate, Seven Days, and several educational books for children, in addition to her ongoing series, Caterpillar Tales. She has also illustrated The Expeditioners by S.S. Taylor. She lives in New York City.
Anthony Aveni is the Russell B. Colgate Professor of Astronomy and Anthropology at Colgate University. He helped develop the field of archeoastronomy and is known particularly for his research in the astronomical history of the Maya Indians of ancient Mexico. He is a lecturer, speaker, and editor/author of over two dozen books on ancient astronomy, and author of the children's book Buried Beneath Us: Discovering the Ancient Cities of the Americas. He lives in Hamilton, NY.
Katherine Roy is the award-winning author and illustrator of many science-based books for kids, including her Robert F. Sibert Honor Book Neighborhood Sharks: Hunting with the Great Whites of California’s Farallon Islands, How to Be an Elephant: Growing Up in the African Wild, and Making More: How Life Begins. She is also the illustrator of numerous other books, including Barb Rosenstock's Otis and Will Discover the Deep, Richard Ho's Red Rover, and Kirsten W Larson’s The Fire of Stars. She lives with her husband and sons in western Oregon.
You can visit her online at katherineroy.com.
Read an Excerpt
Buried Beneath Us
Discovering the Ancient Cities of the Americas
By Anthony Aveni, Katherine Roy
Roaring Brook Press
Copyright © 2013 Anthony AveniAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-59643-913-9
CHAPTER 1
WHAT ARE CITIES?
Downtown Mexico City, the largest city in the Americas, February 21, 1978: Electrical workers are at work laying a cable on a busy street corner. Suddenly a loud clank resonates from the tip of a laborer's shovel. Kicking away the surrounding dirt, he realizes the edge of the stone he has struck is round and far too huge to dislodge. He calls over his fellow workers to help out. Further digging reveals a portion of a carved arm, then an upturned face five times bigger than life, with a tasseled headdress adorned with bells.
Archaeologists from the nearby National Institute of Anthropology and History are called in. Jumping into the pit, they quickly abandon the shovels and get to work with their trowels and whisk brooms so as not to damage the delicate carving. They employ dental picks and toothbrushes to chip away caked-on dirt.
The archaeologists had found evidence of an ancient city, Tenochtítlan, that grew, thrived, flourished, and was destroyed on the turf where modern Mexico City stands today.
Over four hundred years earlier, Bernal Diaz del Castillo, a soldier accompanying Hernando Cortés, wrote on seeing Tenochtítlan for the first time: "[A]ll around me there are great towers and buildings rising from the water, all built of masonry. I do not know how to describe it, seeing things that had never before been heard of or seen before nor even dreamed about."
It's difficult to reconcile Bernal Diaz's awe over a vast, teeming city with a place that has been reduced to ruins, almost undetectable under the streets of Mexico City. Yet there are other examples of ancient cities that once existed before European settlers ever reached America's shores. In the Americas, cities have grown up, flourished, and died for three thousand years. Centuries before our modern cities appeared, great cultural centers flourished in what is now the American Midwest, Mexico, and the Andes of South America.
The first American cities rose and fell long before our contemporary urban areas blossomed, but they all created lasting works that impress us to this day — tall buildings, huge monuments, exquisitely decorated architecture, beautiful paintings, and spectacular sculpture. Some ancient cities developed writing, literature, and mathematics. Like Boston, Seattle, Los Angeles, Vancouver, and Lima today, America's ancient cities were style setters, symbols of what it meant to be modern and creative. Each developed a great tradition that was maintained for a long time, a way of living that affected and transformed many of the cultures they came in contact with. Their people embraced ideas and customs that seem very different from our own, but there is much to be learned from the ruins of their courts and temples, streets and fortifications — even the everyday articles of the people, rich and poor, who once lived there.
The many people who have inhabited our planet before us left a lasting impression on the world, and we can benefit from their knowledge. If we look closely enough, we can discover where they succeeded and why they failed. That's the lesson of history.
CAHOKIA
Five hundred years before Christopher Columbus's arrival, Cahokia was the biggest city in North America. One of the many cities of the Mississippian culture, this metropolis was made up of more than three thousand structures. Monk's Mound, the highest of them all, rises up to seventy-five feet (about five stories in a modern building). And yet this lost city lay overgrown and undiscovered until the eighteenth century.
When the American explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark crossed the Mississippi River going west in 1804, they spotted a tiny Indian village just south of where St. Louis is located today. Clark's diary for September 23 reads: "[We] descended to the Mississippi and round to St. Louis, where we arrived at twelve o'clock; and having fired a salute, went on shore and received the heartiest and most hospitable welcome of the whole village."
When they stepped ashore, they noticed that the shoreline was strewn with lots of broken pottery and pieces of flint arrowheads, indicating that people had already inhabited those lands. Because they were preoccupied by this social occasion, they had little time to explore the land farther from the riverbank.
What they missed, hidden deep in the brush, was a massive building covering an area of fourteen acres (that's bigger than twelve soccer fields!). The French explorers Jacques Marquette and Louis Joliet, who made that same crossing more than one hundred years earlier, had missed seeing the lost pyramid, too.
The explorers failed to recognize the great pyramid on the Mississippi because even though it stands out in the landscape, the pyramid is made of earth. It doesn't have any stone facing like Egypt's pyramids and it isn't covered over with stucco and painted in bright colors like the Mexican pyramids, so it was easy to mistake it for a natural hill.
By the time President Thomas Jefferson's good friend, the explorer Henry Brackenridge, arrived in the area in 1811, he knew what he was looking for. Brackenridge had heard that there were many Indian mounds situated on the edge of the Mississippi/Missouri floodplain, or bottomlands. He knew that a spot near the intersection of two of America's great rivers would have been an excellent place to build a city. The location offered great soil for planting and a watery highway for trading goods.
As he hacked his way inward from the shore through the cedar- and willow-covered bluffs, Brackenridge noticed that the mounds got bigger and bigger and they were regularly spaced. He had a strong feeling that he was about to arrive at some very important ancient place. Suddenly, he found himself standing in front of the huge earthen pyramid. He had discovered ancient Cahokia! Awestruck, he would later write to the president: "I was astonished that this stupendous monument of antiquity should have been unnoticed by any traveler." He named it Monk's Mound after a group of French monks who had built a monastery nearby.
Let's turn the Cahokia clock back a thousand years and try to imagine what Monk's Mound looked like in AD 1000. The earthen structure supported a huge pole and thatch temple, likely the residence of an elite class of rulers. The grass roof of the temple was decorated with wood carvings of animals covered with feathers. The great pyramid had a two-hundred-acre plaza in front of it, surrounded by a stockade made out of twenty thousand twelve-foot-long logs. That alone would have taken a crew of one hundred workers twenty years working eight hours a day to build — without a day off!
TENOCHTÍTLAN AND THE AZTECS
More than a thousand miles south of Cahokia, underneath modern Mexico City, lie the ruins of another great native American city, Tenochtítlan, the ancient capital of the Aztecs. We know more about what life was like when that city flourished more than five hundred years ago than we do about any ancient American city. That's because, unlike the people of Cahokia, the Aztecs of Mexico have left us a picture record of their history in addition to magnificent ruined temples made of stone. Before the arrival of the Spaniards, the Aztecs made books, called codices, out of deerskin. These books told stories about the founding of their city, how they worshipped their gods, the history of their wars, and the lives of their rulers. After the conquest of Mexico by Spain in the sixteenth century, priests who came to the New World to convert the Aztec people to Catholicism interviewed Aztec officials and acquired further details about daily life. Scribes and artists continued to create codices during the colonial period.
At the time of Spanish contact, Tenochtítlan was one of the largest cities in the world — more than fifty thousand people made their homes there.
Unlike the first explorers who visited Cahokia, the first outsiders to view Tenochtítlan saw a real live "downtown pyramid" in a bustling city. There were many temples, altars made of stone for worshipping a host of Aztec deities, schools, marketplaces, and ball courts. Seeking gold, the Spanish conqueror Hernando Cortés docked his ship in Veracruz on the Gulf of Mexico in 1519. Accompanied by a few hundred men, a few dozen horses, and warriors from tribes who considered themselves enemies of the Aztecs, Cortés climbed the pass between the snowcapped twin volcanoes called Popocatépetl (the man) and Ixtaccihuatl (the woman). It was there that Cortés first cast his eyes upon the Valley of Mexico below him. He glimpsed Tenochtítlan, the great city situated on an island in Lake Texcoco and connected to the mainland by four causeways. Seeing the gleaming palaces with exquisite gardens and waterways, one of his soldiers wrote in his diary: "[T]here is a building of such height and beauty that it astonishes me ... the equal in cut stone of any I have seen in Seville, and all around there are eleven or twelve more just like it all closely clustered together." For the first time, outsiders were glimpsing an American city that rivaled the great urban centers of Europe.
CUZCO
When Francisco Pizarro and his army landed on the west coast of South America in 1532 and penetrated the high Andes to reach Cuzco, they, too, were awed by what they saw in this equally large city. It had taken them several weeks to reach the city, trekking over mountains that rose to 15,000 feet. South America's west coast presents a hostile environment — steep valleys lie between high, snow-covered peaks that crowd up against the coast. Living there might seem difficult to us, but, as in other rugged environments like the deserts of Egypt, people learn to adapt to the world around them.
And the Inca did more than just survive in this harsh environment; they flourished. They built this fourteenth-century city out of stone blocks carved, without metal tools, so perfectly that you can't fit the blade of a knife between the stone slabs that make up their buildings. They mastered the control of water in a landscape that was very difficult to irrigate, and decorated their most important places of worship in gold.
The Spaniards especially marveled at Cuzco's Coricancha (it means "golden enclosure"), also called the Temple of the Ancestors. It was sheathed with large plates of gold to honor the color of their sun god, Inti. The invaders greedily pried hundreds of these two-foot-square, fifty-pound plates off the stonework. But Pizarro was seeking greater treasure — the king's golden throne and tubs of silver and emeralds, which he had heard about from Indian informants. The king had hidden away most of the gold when he got word that the Spanish were marching on his capital. But Pizarro captured Atahualpa, king of the Inca. He promised to spare the king's life if he delivered the treasure. Pizarro ordered Atahualpa to fill a huge hall in the temple with these precious items (about 500 million dollars worth of goods in today's currency). The ruthless Pizarro painted a red line seven feet from the floor all the way around the room to show how high the pile must rise in order for the king to be spared. (You can still see it today if you visit Cuzco!)
Even though Atahualpa granted Pizarro's wish, the conqueror failed to keep his promise and had Atahualpa killed. The Inca believed all power was concentrated in their ruler. So, cutting the lifeline between the people and their king would make conquest much simpler. But as in Mexico, the conquest of Peru would not have been possible without alliances made by Pizarro with Indians who were the enemies of the Inca. If his allies had only known they were trading their local enemies for a far worse alien force!
COPÁN
The ancient Maya, who lived in the Yucatán Peninsula, have fascinated us ever since early explorers rediscovered their lost cities back in the 1830s. Travel books were popular at a time in American history when the land west of the Appalachian Mountains was being opened up to exploration. Writer John Lloyd Stephens caught the imagination of the public with his vivid descriptions, accompanied by exquisitely detailed drawings by Frederick Catherwood, which proved that remarkable cities once flourished in the mosquito-infested jungles of southern Yucatán. The thick jungle seemed to them a weird place to build cities. Stephens encountered the ruins of the ornate stuccoed buildings at the city of Palenque and the delicate sculpture of Copán. He also visited the stately ruins of Uxmal and Chichén Itzá in the north of Yucatán, marveling at what he saw every step of the way.
Stephens was particularly awed by the carved stelae, or standing stones, arranged around the plazas of the great Maya cities. The stelae looked like gravestones and they showed bigger than life statues of beings garbed in ornate clothing and holding long staffs. Were they gods or people, he wondered? Then he noticed strange hieroglyphs on the stelae:
What do the stelae peeking out of the jungle depict? Here they stand, silent and solemn, strange in design, excellent in sculpture, rich in ornament — their whole history so entirely unknown, their hieroglyphics unintelligible ... [W]ho shall read them?
CHAPTER 2WHERE DO CITIES COME FROM AND HOW DO THEY GROW?
The original peopling of the Americas began about twenty thousand years ago in the far north of Alaska. There, a strip of land known as the Bering land bridge connected North America to Asia. Migrants from Asia tracked game across the land bridge. In several waves of migration lasting thousands of years, they crossed what is now Canada into the United States. As the hunters and their descendants trickled down to Central America, following migrating herds of reindeer, caribou, and buffalo, and supplementing their diet with wild plants, they mixed bloods, genes, DNA, languages, and customs.
Once the land bridge disappeared beneath the ocean waves, the first Americans were here to stay. And what a diverse group of cultures they would become: Aztec, Mississippian, Inca, Maya, and many more. About five thousand years ago, these people began to realize the advantages of staying in one place as opposed to the nomadic life of hunting and gathering. They domesticated plants, like corn, and animals, like dogs, and began to live in small villages, where they could develop specialized skills. Archaeological evidence shows that some became skilled potters, weavers, and toolmakers. A few of the more successful settlements — the ones with the best crops and the most sought-after products — would gradually grow in population and become cities. Not every settlement grew to become a bustling city — a number of factors determined whether these population centers flourished or failed.
One key to a city's success is a good location. Proximity to an abundant supply of good drinking water is important. So is fertile land capable of producing a large supply of fruits and vegetables. Settlements founded near rivers, especially those with tributaries people can navigate, are better situated to develop opportunities to trade for a wider variety of goods over greater distances. Finally, the more defensible your location is — say surrounded by water or on a hilltop — the safer you are from attack.
America's first great cities grew out of small settlements that possessed many of these advantages. Cahokia was built on a bluff overlooking the Mississippi River, just south of where its two main tributaries joined. Cuzco was built in a fertile valley at the junction of two rivers and surrounded by high mountains. And Tenochtítlan was built on an island in the middle of a huge lake.
Modern American cities are no different. Washington, D.C., was located on the site of an old fort on the banks of the Potomac River, at the farthest point upstream that ships of the eighteenth century could safely navigate. That made it easier to trade goods from the Virginia and Maryland colonies. Most of the early colonial cities, like Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Charleston, Savannah, and New Orleans, developed from tiny settlements at the water's edge into deep-water ports. New York would not have become the largest city in America if it weren't for the Erie Canal, which connected to the docks of New York, by way of the Hudson River, to the bountiful fur and grain trade from America's heartland.
Chicago was conveniently founded at the southern end of Lake Michigan. St. Louis was strategically located, too, like its ancient predecessor, Cahokia, just twenty miles downriver from the place where the Mississippi and Missouri rivers joined together. Its founder, Pierre Laclède, wrote in 1764, "I have found a situation where I am going to form a settlement which might become, hereafter, one of the finest cities in America — so many advantages are embraced in its site, by its locality and central position, for forming settlements."
Actually, planning a city wasn't so high on this Frenchman's agenda. He was more interested in selecting the best place to set up a fur trading post. He chose that particular spot because the river moved swiftly there and it did not flood, thanks to the high bluffs that overlook it from both sides. If you want to see how much of the United States is accessible by water that eventually passes by St. Louis, check out any U.S. map.
Food supply also affects a city's survival. Cities can only grow to the extent that they can feed their people. None of the early American cities could have flourished without stable, long-term access to a nutritious food supply. From collecting remains, archaeologists know that corn was the staple crop of all the North and Central American cities, from Aztec Tenochtítlan to Maya Tikal and Copán. Without it, these civilizations could not have survived.
Corn originated in the Americas. Around 7000 BC, hunter-gatherers in the mountains of southern Mexico began to cultivate different kinds of edible grasses. One of them is called teosinte, the ancestor of the corn plant. As they moved with the seasons to get their food supply, the hunter-gatherers gradually began to domesticate corn. They selected the seeds of the biggest and heartiest teosinte. They put them in the ground and left them behind. The next year when they returned, they had food to eat. You'd have a hard time recognizing what ancient corn looked like. Teosinte cobs were about the size of your little finger. But because its seeds mutated over time, corn eventually grew to much larger sizes.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Buried Beneath Us by Anthony Aveni, Katherine Roy. Copyright © 2013 Anthony Aveni. Excerpted by permission of Roaring Brook Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
TITLE PAGE,COPYRIGHT NOTICE,
DEDICATION,
CHAPTER 1 WHAT ARE CITIES?,
CHAPTER 2 WHERE DO CITIES COME FROM AND HOW DO THEY GROW?,
CHAPTER 3 DAILY LIFE IN THE CITY,
CHAPTER 4 HOW RELIGION KEEPS CITIES TOGETHER,
CHAPTER 5 LESSONS FROM THE CRUMBLED RUINS,
PRONUNCIATIONS,
SOURCE NOTES,
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS,
INDEX,
COPYRIGHT,