hi everyone this is the chapter recap for mesoamerica and south america so just to get started first a little timeline of the mesoamerican cultures just to reiterate the fact that there was a lot of overlap and of course as you might expect interaction and influence between cultures as well and this is true for just about all the cultures that we've been discussing remember that they don't just stop and start but they come and go again overlapping one another in time and in place and so there's definitely influences between them i want to start with some images of the Popol Vuh document these are pictures that professor Novara took when she was in Chicago it's kind of cool to see the text and you can go and visit it if you can get to the Newbery in Chicago it's very cool you can also look at scans of it online okay let's get started with the response questions starting with the Aztecs these are some images of Quetzalcoatl and you can see here this one is stone and here is a drawing I asked you page 451 number one why is it significant that gods sacrifice themselves during this act of creation and do you agree that one sacrifice is more worthy than the other explain-- so for this question most students point out that the humble god's sacrifice seems to be more worthy simply because he wasn't as boastful or proud additionally the selfish god tries to rob the humble god of his sacrifice the significance of gods sacrificing themselves for humanity is found in the myths of many cultures you've seen that all semester long it's happened in several stories this represents how much the gods care for humans and in this case they bring essential light to the earth giving people a reason to honor and worship them if you didn't agree that one sacrifice was more worthy you still needed to offer your explanation of why it's worth noting of course that sacrifice was an essential part of Aztec religious life because it was part of their creation story because the gods sacrificed themselves during the act of creation the people in turn used sacrifice in their spiritual practice remember that the intro material mentions that the people believed they needed to quench the hunger of the earth goddess to avoid destruction some stories say that this would ensure the sun kept moving through the sky so there are multiple different reasons why sacrifice would be part of their religious ceremonies other things that I hope you noticed in the story of the flowing waters that was the Aztec creation of the earth the creation of the fifth sun they tear apart a monster it's a dismemberment and they use that to make the earth so again note the motif of alloforms and yet another association of the rabbit with the moon so i hope you're paying attention to those that keeps coming up again I wanted to mention another motif and this one also involves Quetzalcoatl remember the story the broken bones where he goes to the underworld so there's an underworld journey motif there he goes there to gather bones and he to use them to create life that's an interesting you know different sort of twist on the underworld journey in this case he's going there again to get the materials used to create life so it's very cool and there's of course an underworld journey in the story of the hero twins from from the Maya civilization we'll get to that in a second but while we're on the subject of the Aztecs the next question was also about Quetzalcoatl page 467 number two-- we know the Mesoamerican cultures practiced ritual human sacrifice yet this myth appears to reject it how can we account for this apparent apparently contradictory statement and then i asked you about the conflicting accounts of what happens to Quetzalcoatl at the end what are the differences and why is it important to have this ambiguity-- okay so first of all um about the sacrifice the fact that these stories were gathered by the Spanish conquerors should have been your first big clue there they may have intentionally removed the portion about human sacrifice from the story so that's again very important to remember the people recording the stories are not the people in the culture themselves in many cases the other thing that adds to the confusion and this was also in the notes there that a ruler took Quetzalcoatl's name so again if you're reading you know and or translating transcribing and you see that name or hear Quetzalcoatl you might be confused is this the deity we're talking about or the person the ruler who took his name so that causes confusion as well um the ambiguous ending is significant because it leaves Quetzalcoatl's fate open he endures as lord of the dawn but could also return giving people room for hope so that ambiguity is significant for that reason i also wanted to point out um in the story i believe it was a Mazatec yes the Mazatec story the possum's tale since we're talking about motifs--How Fire Came into the World I hope that you recognize that again as another fire theft story and the possum is marked for what happened by having his tail be bald which is an etiological story this is very similar to the one from Australia and it's very cool that they have fire originating in the stars kind of makes sense right so very cool stuff okay the hero twins from from the Maya culture the hero twins as as a motif is pretty common we see it in other cultures too not just this one and in addition to being heroes sometimes they do things that are considered trickster-like and they also sometimes play a role in creation note there was a virgin birth motif in this story as well and it follows the hero's journey pretty well at the end of the story the twins actually become the sun and moon this translation says they are quote "given" the sun and moon but it's meant to imply they either dwell there or become those celestial objects note the final sentence "heaven and earth were now lighted by the hero twins as they dwelt in the heavens" so that kind of tells us there how significant that is but we're going to talk more about this particular story in the next video where we compare it in detail with the hero twins stories from North America so we're going to sort of push that off until later but we are going to talk about it before we close I just have some images that i wanted to show you from the British Museum some things that I saw that I thought were particularly beautiful this is a turquoise mosaic of the double-headed snake a very famous piece of art actually an Aztec piece and it's really impressive and very hard to photograph because it's behind glass so there's always a glare but it's incredible and i just wanted to point this out um because this double-headed serpent is a really important object and a theme in the mythology and the religion and the word "coatl" right here you notice from Quetzalcoatl and also appears in other names like Coatlicue it means serpent or twin so it's really important and you can come back and read more about these later or pause the video to read because i'm going to show you quite a few pictures here and here's another image of that one so just a really stunning piece the next one I'm going to show you is a book they call them they call it a codex it's painted screen fold book and it's a really cool piece because as you see here these books books like this one were produced as late as 1550 a.d or ce without any hint of Spanish influence that's really important they would have been read from right to left and they're very beautifully drawn with as the text states here by first outlining the designs in red paint and black charcoal and then of course they're they're using mineral pigmented paints so here are a couple images of that okay and i want to show you this beautiful ceremonial shield again it was ceremonial it would not have been used in battle and the iconography on it is really stunning I'll just read you this little bit right here the shield portrays the principal divisions of the Aztec universe viewed horizontally the circular shape corresponds to the surface of the earth with a navel like solar disk at its center from this extent four rays outlined in red shell dividing the world into four quarters in each of which stands a sky bearer but if you look at it vertically you have a great serpent emerging from toothed jaws to coil upwards around a tall tree which forms a world axis so here's what that looks like there would have been feathers all around it and so it's very very hard to make out the shape that's why they provide this drawing here again I'm sorry about the glare sometimes with these highly reflective surfaces it's hard to get a good picture but you can see you can look at it in a couple of different ways and here's that image but right there so very beautiful okay and before we close It's Maya art I'll close with that I've got several slides here for you again I'll move through them quickly you can pause longer on each one if you like or come back to them later Maya art very sophisticated and very highly admired one of the coolest things about it is as we see here on the text they recorded things like birth dates, marriage alliances, coronations, wars, and so many other things, successions of rulers, and because they kept such accurate time and recorded when things happened with their calendar we have a really good idea well very precise in fact knowledge of when things happened so that's pretty cool so here are some of these they call them lintels they're big stone slabs and they're quite striking these next few lintels there are five or six of them create -- i'm sorry depict bloodletting and rituals so um it's a little gruesome to think about but you see here the text sort of explains it the serpent coils up through a beaded blood scroll and from its mouth emerges the ancestor whom the lady has contacted in the right so this is a bloodletting ritual contacting the spirits and you can see here the spirits coiling up out and there are more of these again these bloodletting rituals this one is um a little cringe-worthy because this figure in in this image is uh about to let blood by piercing his penis with this object that he's holding yeah again cringe-worthy and here are some more this one the woman is pulling a thorn-lined rope through her tongue right here so again the idea that bloodletting is a sacred and performed for rituals and ceremonies okay i'm going to close with an image here of Viracocha I wish we had more time to talk about all of these stories but i just wanted to mention this one quickly even though I didn't ask you about it note the motifs that we've seen elsewhere in in this myth there are repeated attempts at creation of people making them out of natural substances, there's a flood , departure of the creator with a promise to return, again common motifs and yet we also know that there was an opportunity for again as I mentioned with the story of Quetzalcoatl and the sacrifice the one about where they eliminated the human sacrifice that Christianity may have influenced the translation so we can't be positive if the motifs are there just because they're common motifs just in general or if it was the influence of an outside culture seeping in so but still again I wish we had more time just to explore the region but we have to move on to the next section so with that i will close and see you next time.