Having spent time in our last lecture talking about the eastern woodlands culture groups, we want to shift gears now and talk a little bit about the various Native American groups that the Spanish began to encounter as the Spanish arrived in the New World. Remember that initial colonization among Europeans took place by the Spanish, and the Spanish encountered different people in the American Southwest and in Mexico. And we want to spend a little bit of time talking about those pre-contact societies then in this lecture. Now, one of the things that I pointed out when we talked about the Clovis people, and remember, genetic studies today demonstrate that almost all Native Americans today were descendants of those Clovis big game hunters. And the important thing to remember is that they were big game hunters.
And. They hunted using spears. Remember the Clovis point, that spear point, was very instrumental in helping the Clovis people in their pursuit of Big Gay.
Well, over time, a new technology began to emerge, and it took time, obviously, but by roughly the 7th century A.D., We began to see the emergence of a new hunting technology that greatly assisted Native Americans as they pursued game of all kinds. Certainly by the 7th century, mammoths and mastodons were no longer around. Some of the giant bison, you know, all of the giant bison were gone.
Much smaller bison existed, much smaller animals existed. Nevertheless, hunting and gathering remained the primary means of survival in the western regions of North America. And the emergence of the bow and arrow sometime around the 7th century really began to revolutionize hunting among Native Americans more generally.
And if you think about it, hunting was and is a very skillful. pursuit. You have to have knowledge.
You have to be very careful. You have to train to hunt effectively. And when people hunted using spears, they had to be able to get very close to the animals in order to take down big game.
And so, of course, they had to be able to stalk. They had to be very careful about how they approached animals in order to bring them down. the bow and the arrow began to change all that the bow and the arrow began to allow hunters to take down animals from a distance and the net result was hunting became a much more efficient and much more successful pursuit and consequently then food sources became more reliable and so in part as a result of changes in hunting And in part, as a result of changes in agriculture, people began to settle down. In the American West, or what would become the American West, they began to live in one place and they became sedentary societies.
They began to grow maize or corn and beans and other kinds of crops that supplemented their diet and allowed for... a more stable food source, and consequently, populations began to grow. And so by the 7th century, with the advent of farming and more successful hunting techniques, people began to settle down, and as they did, they began to build dwellings, places where they lived, and perhaps the most important, the most recognized of these, is a cliff dwelling that exists in southwestern Colorado called Mesa Verde.
If you've ever been to Mesa Verde or any of the dwellings that exist in the American Southwest, then you're visiting the ruins of a culture that we commonly refer to as the Anasazi culture. And between the 600s and the 1300s, these Anasazi people, thrived in the southwestern United States. And we know that because they built these these cliff dwellings.
Canyon de Chelly in Arizona, Mesa Verde, and there's a variety of cliff dwellings throughout the region, which suggest that the populations were fairly widespread, fairly dispersed, but also that people survived very well, all right? And so the Anasazi people thrived in this region. And just to kind of clarify for you.
Sometimes the Anasazi culture is also called the basket maker of culture. The word Anasazi is actually a Navajo word, and they refer to the ancient ones, the Anasazi. But sometimes archaeologists today will refer to this as also the basket maker culture. Now, what's really intriguing about these Anasazi is that by the time the Spanish came on the scenes, and remember, the Spanish are going to start coming on the scene in the 1500s.
Remember, Columbus is 1492, and Spanish arrival in this region is going to take place in the 1500s. And the really intriguing thing that happens then is the Spanish start finding Mesa Verde. They find Canyon de Chey. They find all of these um cliff dwellings, all of these human habitations, have been completely abandoned. It raised the question then to the Spanish, and it's one that we continue to ponder to this day.
What happened to these people? What happened to the Anasazi? Why did they abandon these dwellings? Why did they abandon all of their habitations by the time the Spanish arrived?
Well, there's a variety of different... possible explanations that people have used to try and understand what happened to the Anasazi people. One of them is that there was drought conditions that began to happen in the 1300s. These drought conditions obviously began to threaten agriculture, and places like Mesa Verde did rely not only on hunting, but on agriculture as well. And so what happened?
What very likely happened is that dwellings like Mesa Verde, Mesa Verde was actually located and is located right above a river, but it's a small river. During a drought, those smaller rivers tended to dry up. What very likely happened then is that as a result of drought, the smaller rivers dried up, and the people who lived on those rivers and depended upon those rivers were quite literally forced to relocate.
And so larger rivers that flow more regularly during dry years became the source of congregation, or the site of congregation, I should say, the place where more and more people began to settle. And so the Rio Grande Valley of New Mexico became a concentrated area of settlement. All right.
The Anasazi people then who settled in New Mexico came to be known as the Pueblo people. That's how the Spanish referred to them. So the Puebloan people or Pueblo people, we will talk about them when we talk about the colonization of New Mexico.
These are the descendants, especially of those Anasazi people. They were more sedentary. They were agricultural.
They built... adobe structures and lived in adobe structure. And ultimately, as we'll see, they are going to clash with the Spanish.
So the Anasazi and Pueblo people of the southwest, very important. Now, in addition to the Anasazi, there were other people that we need to mention briefly because they come into the story of a settlement in this region as well. right the Anasazi people may have been forced out of places like Mesa Verde as well, and they may have been forced to consolidate and congregate in part as a result of invasions that took place. In other words, Anasazi congregation may have been a defense mechanism as well.
Sometime around the 1200s, we began to see the migration into the southwestern United States, of groups of people who came from the far north. Okay, these people spoke languages that belong to a family of language called the Athapaskan. Okay, the Athapaskan is a language family.
And that language family includes languages like modern Navajo and the modern Apache language. All right. And so the origins of Navajos and Apaches is probably up in Canada. Okay. We know that because of linguistic similarities between the Navajos and the Apaches and the people of the first nations of Canada.
We also know it because of material cultural commonalities that existed between the two people. So Navajos and Apaches were nomadic people. That is, they migrated and they moved southward and they were... in many ways, people who survived by raiding. These were raiding people who very likely survived by attacking and raiding Anasazi settlements.
That's why we call this the southwest, or I refer to these as the southwest farmers and raiders. Athapascan people tended to raid as a means of survival, and Anasazi's The farmers were oftentimes the victims of that raiding. That was a process that continued well into the time when the Spanish came on the scene. So having said this, and I need to clarify something very quickly here, because I went to school in Arizona, and I know people who are Navajo. And if you...
Go to Arizona. If you talk to Navajo people, you have to be very careful because the Navajo tradition does not accept this theory of Athapaskan origins. The Navajo believe that they are descendants of the Anasazi, that is the cliff-dwelling people of Mesa Verde, Canyon de Chelly. These ruins, the Navajo claim those as the ruins of their ancestors. Okay.
Archaeologists don't agree with that. Archaeologists see the Anasazi and the Athopascan speaking Navajos as different cultures. All right. So the point is, there is not absolute agreement among Native Americans themselves and scholars on the origins of different groups. And the Navajos are one example of that.
Okay. But the Navajos and Apaches are very important. important contributing peoples in the history of this region. Now, it is important before I go on to remember something, that while we tend to associate the Navajos and the Apaches with horses, okay, and we tend to think of raiding as taking place on horseback.
Remember, the horse did not arrive until the Spanish introduced the horse in the 16th century, right? So these Athopascan people, prior to contact, they traveled about on foot. They didn't have the benefit of horses to get around. And that ultimately meant that raiding was more dangerous.
And in the case of Anasazi and Athopascans, hunting was much more difficult. You didn't have the benefit of being able to run down animals and shoot them. All right. Now. The third group that I want to talk about briefly when we talk about the Southwest is a group that actually came from the South.
They spoke. languages that belong to a family of language called the Uto-Aztecan languages. Uto-Aztecan, as the name suggests, came from Mexico. And very likely, these Uto-Aztecan people especially began to migrate northward out of Mexico and into the present-day United States.
especially as the Spanish arrived and began colonizing in central Mexico. So in the 1500s, as the Spanish began to colonize in Mexico, these Uto-Aztecan people were kind of forced out of southern Mexico and into northern Mexico, and even into the modern-day United States. They initially settled in the areas around Utah and Nevada.
And that's why they're called the Uto-Aztecan. And in fact, that's how Utah got its name. These people settled in the area of the Great Basin.
But by the 1700s, some of these Uto-Aztecan people had kind of migrated to the north and east into Wyoming. And then they actually traveled southward through Colorado and down into the Texas Panhandle area. OK. These people became known as the Comanches.
And in many ways, they were later arrivals, right? When we get to Texas history later on in this class, we will talk extensively about the Comanches and Comanche wars. And when we do, it's important to understand where these people came from, okay?
They came out of a different language tradition. They came out of a different cultural tradition. Thus, Navajos and Apaches and Comanches.
Though they were all raiding people, they were highly nomadic people, they didn't come out of the same cultures, they didn't come out of the same backgrounds, and thus Navajos and Apaches and Comanches also often fought with one another. So warfare was very much part of life in the pre-contact Southwest. So that's a little bit now about the Southwest. These are some of the people that the Spanish will encounter as they begin to colonize into the southwestern United States.
These are some of the people that the United States will start to encounter as they start to expand west of the Mississippi in the 19th century. All right, so the southwest farmers and raiders. The third culture area, and I guess before I get to that.
Let me real quickly just kind of show you the map and just kind of remind you of the movement of Native Americans. Remember, the people of the region east of the Mississippi River, here's the Mississippi. These are the people that collectively we generally refer to these as the eastern woodlands groups.
The southwest, the farmers of the southwest. Those of the basket maker tradition, collectively known as the Anasazi. And again, the Pueblo were part of that Anasazi tradition.
The raiders that came in from the north, from Canada, these are the Athapascan people. Their descendants became the Navajos and the Apaches. They were a raiding people, highly nomadic in the southwestern United States as well.
And then. Out of Mexico, the Uto-Aztecan people moved, especially as the Spanish colonized in Mexico, moved into the desert southwest, initially in Nevada and Utah. And again, groups of Uto-Aztecan kind of moved up and around through Wyoming, down through Colorado, and ultimately back down here into Texas.
These were the Comanches, and the Comanches will figure very prominently in the history of the... of the state of Texas. Okay, finally, we want to spend some time now talking a little bit about the peoples of Mesoamerica.
Okay, these are the people that were part of, or that lived in modern-day Mexico when the Spanish came on the scene. Okay, now before I talk about these people, and their history. I think it's very important that students understand the difference between mythology and history because the fact of the matter is much of the history of Mesoamerica is tied up and steeped in the mythology of the region. And sometimes mythology and history overlap. Sometimes mythology is very difficult to distinguish from history, and history is difficult to distinguish from mythology.
But the important distinction to be made between mythology and history is that history certainly as we study it in this class, is a study. It is a discipline, and it is based on evidence, and it incorporates modern scientific methods, okay? It's based on science and reason and logic, okay?
What we look at is history, and the material that I will be presenting in this class is based on evidence, okay? Evidence is critical. in understanding the past. If you don't have evidence, then ultimately you rely on mythology.
Okay. Mythology is stories about the past, stories about the past that aren't rooted in science, and ultimately are not confirmed by science. Okay.
They're ultimately confirmed in a person's faith. That's why mythology and religion are often... very closely related with one another. In fact, religion and mythology are in many ways the same. Okay, so mythology and religion closely related.
You know, as an example, this is an example I frequently use, okay, the mythology of the United States. Well, one of the most powerful myths in American history is that the founding fathers were all Christians, okay? That is mythology. The founding fathers were not all Christians. Certainly not in a modern Christian sense.
We'll talk about that later in this class. But nevertheless, there is this powerful mythology that endures in the United States today, among many Americans, that the founding fathers were Christians. Some of them were, but many of them weren't. And we'll talk about that later and the impact of Christianity on the founding of this country.
In the same sense, then, we can look at Mesoamerica, and we can see that religion played a very important part in the history of this region. Between the 2nd and 8th centuries AD, the Valley of Mexico, and by the Valley of Mexico, I'm talking about the region around Mexico City. It was dominated by a very powerful city-state. That city was called Teotihuacan.
And if you go to Mexico today, you can see the ruins of Teotihuacan, the Pyramid of the Sun, the Pyramid of the Moon, the Avenida de las Muertes. The picture in the upper right-hand slide here, this is a picture of the ruins of Teotihuacan. It was a city that was built and dominated by very powerful merchants, and they had very... prominent religious beliefs, and their religion is evident throughout the modern-day ruins of Teotihuacan.
Well, one of the most powerful images and prominent images associated with Teotihuacan is the image of the feathered serpent, the feathered serpent of Quetzalcoatl. Quetzalcoatl was widely conceived among the Teotihuacanos, and subsequent culture groups in Mesoamerica as a god of peace. Quetzalcoatl is, in the Teotihuacano pantheon of gods, the god of peace.
And that god of peace survived. Sometime around the 8th century, Teotihuacan was abandoned. Exactly what happened to Teotihuacan has always been debated among scholars. It was probably a result especially of internal division, civil unrest within Teotihuacan, which ultimately brought about the demise of Teotihuacan. But what we do know is that in the aftermath of Teotihuacan, then, we see the emergence of a new city-state.
Okay? That city-state actually was the city of Tula, and it was in the city of Tula that we saw the emergence of a new group of people called the Toltecs. Now, the Toltecs, we know...
very little about, okay? They were a warrior culture, and because they were a warrior culture, they tended to focus more on warfare. They tended to focus more on conquest. They didn't focus as much on architecture, you know, city building.
And the net result is Tula, the city of Tula, was nothing like Teotihuacan, for example, okay? Didn't have the great pyramids, didn't have the great... enduring architecture.
Tula was simply the city, the principal city, of the Toltecs. And the Toltecs survived by conquering their neighbors, taking from their neighbors, and ultimately the net result is that the Toltecs were in an almost constant state of warfare. Now, in the 10th century... the late 10th century, a prince was born, and he was known as Tolpiltzin, okay?
Tolpiltzin was the son of a very powerful Toltec warrior, okay? And Toltec, or Tolpiltzin, excuse me, tended to disagree with his father, okay? His father believed in continued conquest. Tolpiltzin argued that if his father continued to expand his...
belligerent activities, his warfare, and his empire, eventually he would overextend himself, and like Teotihuacan, the Toltec empire would collapse from internal problems, okay? And so Tolpilzin became an advocate for ending the warfare and stabilizing Toltec society. And for that reason, among many Toltecs, Tolpilzin was very popular, and his popularity literally began to transform him into a god, okay?
Tolpiltzin became the god Quetzalcoatl, okay? And so again, this is where mythology now started to become prominent, all right? We know there was a man, a prince named Tolpiltzin, okay?
Whether he actually was god, of course, remains on what, depends on what one believes, okay? And before you start thinking, well, how could this man become God? Okay, men don't become God. If you're among the Christians listening to this video, give a little more thought.
Because remember, Christians believe that Jesus of Nazareth, a man, became or was God. All right? So it's a very similar kind of situation.
Okay? Topiltzin became the God of peace. Topiltzin became Quetzalcoatl.
All right? That was something that was very prominent. And according to the tradition told by Toltec descendants then, Quetzalcoatl basically went to war with his father. It was a showdown that took place. And ultimately, and again, this took place between 968 and 987 A.D.
And ultimately, Tolpiltzin was defeated. Quetzalcoatl was defeated. And the Toltec emperor sent his son packing out of Tula and out of Mesoamerica.
What happened to Toltec? Well, one of the legends is that he was placed on a boat and sent out to sea and that the people of Mesoamerica were constantly on the lookout. and waiting for the return of Quetzalcoatl.
That's one of the stories tied up in mythology. But that is more mythology. There is no real science.
There's no evidence to confirm that that's what happened to Tobel Zin, or Quetzalcoatl. So it's very unclear what happened to Quetzalcoatl. But I will say there is this one strand, this one part of the story, which holds that he had been ejected. And he was somewhere out in the east and he was waiting to come back to Tula or to the Valley of Mexico. OK, as for the Toltecs more generally, what happened to the Toltecs more generally?
Well, history shows that this culture, especially the area around Tula, their capital, began to collapse basically in the 12th century. In 1168 or. by 1168, we see the emergence of a very new and prominent group of people. They were called the Chichimecas.
The Chichimecas challenged the Toltecs for domination in the Valley of Mexico, and ultimately the Chichimecas defeated the Toltecs and drove them out of the Valley of Mexico. The Chichimecas, like the Toltecs, they were warriors and they continued to fight. They continued to try and dominate in the Valley of Mexico.
more generally. So the Toltecs were ultimately defeated, and we saw them replaced by this group of Chichimecas. Now, one of the stories that comes out of the fall of the Toltec Empire is the story of a group of Toltecs who fled during the Chichimeca occupation. This group of Toltecs According to legend, and again, this is part of the mythology of Mesoamerica.
It's not something we can confirm in history. It's stories that were told among the Aztecs themselves. In any case, there was a group of Toltecs who fled Mesoamerica and traveled northward. Where they went?
Nobody knows. Nobody even knows if they existed. But according to legend, they traveled to a land that came to be known as Aslan. And there, for about 85 years, these Toltecs reinvigorated their society. They held on to Toltec traditions, and they now began to think of themselves as going back into the Valley of Mexico and reclaiming the Valley of Mexico.
So what happened? Well, after 85 years or thereabouts, this group of Toltecs began to return to the Valley of Mexico. They no longer called themselves the Toltecs, but because they came from Aslan, they now called themselves the Aztecs.
And according to Aztec tradition now, according to Aztec stories, they were guided by a very powerful god of war. His name was Huitzilopochtli. Huitzilopochtli, the Aztec god of war, led the Aztecs back into the Valley of Mexico. And again, ultimately, the story is told of how these Aztecs... saw or encountered an eagle with a serpent in its talons perched upon a saguaro cactus.
And that was taken as a sign that this is where the Aztecs now should settle and establish their new city, their new capital. And of course, that then the eagle became a very powerful symbol within the history of Mexico, modern day Mexico. All right. Huitzilopochtli was that eagle, the god of war.
And they feared Huitzilopochtli. They believed that they had to appease Huitzilopochtli because in order to bring down the Chichimecas, in order to reestablish themselves in the Valley of Mexico, they needed, they must have their war god. If their war god ever abandoned them, they would be left at the mercy of...
the Chichimecas. They would not be able to defeat the Chichimecas, all right? And so the Aztecs relied very heavily on this god, okay? So Huitzilopochtli, critical to the story of the Aztec return to the Valley of Mexico, okay?
By the 14th century, okay, by the 1300s, the Aztecs had re-established themselves, okay? They had driven the Chichimecas out, and they had now built a new capital city, okay? One that didn't completely rival Teotihuacan, of course, and the ruins of Teotihuacan continue to exist, but one that ultimately demonstrated a very sophisticated culture among the Aztec people. When we think of the Aztecs, oftentimes the first image that comes to mind among students is that these were people who practiced human sacrifice. And because they practiced human sacrifice, there's a tendency to equate the Aztecs with barbarism.
That is, they were so focused on warfare. There were warring people. and therefore didn't take time to develop higher forms of culture, like architecture, mathematics, language, and so forth.
The reality is the Aztecs did develop higher forms of culture, much more sophisticated kind of culture. They weren't simply a warring people. Yes, they did survive through warfare. And Tenochtitlan, the city itself, began to reflect the degree to which the Aztecs did continue to engage in warfare. They were a culture that survived through military conquest.
And so what you're looking at in this slide is actually a Spanish interpretation of the city of Tenochtitlan, the capital city of the Aztecs. By the time the Spanish came on the scene, it was a city that may have... of accommodated or housed up to a quarter of a million people, okay? It could have been, it might have been a huge city, okay? And what makes it especially interesting, intriguing, is that it was located on an island in a lake, okay?
The lake was called Lake Texcoco, okay? And the island was reached by various drawbridges that reached... from the shore out to the city itself, right? And so the point is that if at any time the Aztec capital was under siege, the Aztecs could simply raise up the drawbridge and the lake effectively acted like a moat around the city and made it very difficult to attack, right?
So the city itself was very sophisticated. Engineering was very precise. It was built in many ways as a fortification. Interestingly enough, surrounding the city were rafts.
These rafts basically allowed, well, they filled them with soil, and the soils could be used to grow crops, especially maize. These rafts were actually called chinampas. You don't have to remember that term, but the chinampas are even to this present day, are the floating gardens that you find in Mexico City. Well, the origin of the chinampas was that they were actually agricultural rafts that floated on Lake Texcoco, allowing the residents to grow corn. And that way, if they were under siege for long periods of time, they could provide for their own food needs, even as they were under siege.
So, The Aztecs were a very, developed a very sophisticated culture, okay. This is the, these were the people who occupied Mesoamerica, who dominated Mesoamerica then in the 16th century when the Spanish came on the scene, okay. Their emperor at that time was the very powerful Emperor Moctezuma II, okay.
Moctezuma II had probably done more than any emperor before him to expand the power of the Aztec Empire, to expand the territory of the Aztec Empire, and to ultimately create this and aggrandize this city of Tenochtitlan. He would be the man on the throne when the Spanish arrived. He will come back into the story then when we start talking about Spanish colonization.
All right. So that's going to wrap up quickly my discussion of pre-contact culture groups. The last thing I want to say, just before I run out of time, is I want to say a few things about the population of the Americas, and in fact, the world, in 1492. Okay.
Remember, 1492. Christopher Columbus brings about an enduring contact between Europe and the Americans. And things are going to change dramatically. But one of the important things that's going to happen is populations in the Western world are going to decline dramatically. All right.
So I do want to do just a brief comparison of populations. I can tell you I'm not going to quiz you over these numbers. OK, but I do want you to understand kind of the general trends of these populations that I'm giving. Now, the reality is. historical demography, study of historical populations, is a whole lot of guesswork, okay?
It's difficult to pin down, and the reason is quite simple. There weren't many people taking censuses at this time, and so we have to use evidence in the form of how much land was under cultivation, how much food was being produced. We have estimates of population, okay? We can we can string together bits and pieces of information to try and make estimates of population.
But even in so doing, we're going to get wide ranges of guesses. So if we're looking at Latin America in 1492, it's estimated that there were between 25 and 45 million people living in Latin America. And again, by Latin America, I'm talking about all of the Americas south of the United States. Everything south of the United States is considered Latin America.
That includes Central America, the Caribbean Islands, and South America. Now, Anglo-America would include the region that was colonized by the English. And that includes what would become the United States and Canada. Prior to 1492, it's estimated that there was between 5 and 18 million people living in Anglo-America.
Okay, so the first thing that ought to occur to you now is that there were a whole lot more people living in Latin America than there were in Anglo-America. Okay, there were large civilizations that had existed in Latin America, including the Aztecs, the Mayas, the Incas, and others. Okay, you didn't see those large... civilizations in Anglo-America.
Populations in Anglo-America were much more dispersed. So the encounters that the English, the French, would have with Native Americans were going to be very different than the encounters that the Spanish and the Portuguese had. So if we look at Europe at this time, estimates are between 70 and 80. and 150 million people in Europe at this time.
Europe, in terms of geographic area, much, much smaller than the Americas collectively. And yet, there were many more people. Many more people.
Even if you include Russia as part of Europe, the Americas collectively were a much larger area. You had more people packed into a much smaller area. Europe was becoming crowded. Europe was becoming congested.
It's important to understand that because that's going to serve as one of the influences in convincing people to start leaving Europe. They're going to try and get away from the crowded conditions that existed in Europe. Finally, on a worldwide basis, it's estimated that there were 400 to 500 million people.
around the world. Almost a half billion people lived in the world at the time of Columbus, okay? And that means there were a lot of people living elsewhere in the world, okay? Not just in Europe, not just in the Americas, but there were huge populations growing in Asia, South Asia, and East Asia.
There were also large populations in Africa that were growing, all right? And those populations now were going to be... Trade partners, as the countries of Europe started engaging in commerce, international trade, they're going to start coming into contact with people in Africa. They're going to start coming into contact with people in South Asia.
They're going to start coming into contact with people in East Asia. And the world is going to begin opening up after 1492. The colonization of North America is going to be a considerable part of that. opening up.
That's what we're going to start talking about when we start talking about colonization. So I'll wrap up this lecture, and when we come back next time, we're going to start talking about some of the conditions that existed in pre-contact Europe. Thank you.