From Nomads to City Life

Americas first peoples spread out across North and South America at the end of the Last Ice Age...

And unfortunately we don't know quite as much about these people as we'd like. It's the tricky thing with hunter-gatherers; they certainly leave clues behind: flint tools, arrow or spear heads, fossils, and petroglyphs (rock art), but a nomadic lifestyle does not lend itself to being materialistic, so they don't have quite as much stuff to leave behind. The information from the time of their first arrival to the development of better understood cultures like the Maya, Olmec, Aztec, Anasazi, or Mississippians is patchy.

The oldest known petroglyphs in the United States can be found in the southwest, in Nevada, dating back between 11,000 and 15,000 years ago. Agriculture in the Americas may date back to around 10,000 years ago with earliest domesticated plants coming from the squash family.

The history of agriculture has been typically intertwined with the development of the city, almost like the age old question of the chicken and the egg. One might say that people developed agriculture, then had a steady food source, and this allowed them to settle down and build cities; OR people found a place to successfully hunt, a place worth defending, built the city and then needed to support it with agriculture. Ultimately the truth may lie somewhere between these two theories. There's no reason to believe that people wouldn't have settled near places with plentiful hunting and wild grains. Evidence in Turkey seems to suggest that hunter gathers were capable of banding together to build Gobekli Tepe. The construction of this temple may turn the preconceived notion about the need for agriculture, urbanization, and specialization to build monuments on its head. It isn't an accident that that Americas first peoples settled in places where food crops like wild rice grew naturally. Evidence in the Americas suggests that people eventually settled where food was abundant and likely developed certain agricultural practices before building cities.

One of the oldest known cities in the Americas can be found in Guatemala. The Mayan city of Kaminaljuyu appears to date back to around 800 BCE. To give you some sense of the timeline, this is around the same time as the Phoenician civilization founded the City of Carthage. Like other urban sites, Kaminaljuyu is filled with the assortment of artifacts one would expect at a major dig site: specialized tools, workshops, pottery, agricultural products, and refuse. The development of agriculture and cities is really quite the amazing thing. The city restructures a society in incredibly important ways. It is in cities where you find an increase in job and skill specialization. This allows for focused development on further specializing tools. It encourages the development of social constructs: farm laborers vs artisans vs a priestly caste or ruling elite. Cities give rise to the development of mathematics and writing because working people need to know how much their work is worth and laws are put in place to maintain order.

One of the oldest cities in the Americas which best represents this development of specialization is Teotihuacan in Mexico. This is a well known, often visited UNESCO World Heritage Site adorned with large stone pyramids. The city dates back to the first century CE and at one point was home to an estimated 25,000 citizens. Simply feeding a population of 25,000 would have required a significant labor force of farmers, but in order to create the infrastructure found in the city, the city needed engineers, artisans, and probably some less skilled workers for mining the stone and moving it. And of course the development of the city also means, you have those who live in the city and those who live outside of it which is a different kind of social stratification.

So arguably I've diverged some from a history of the United States. Why focus in on the cultures developing near the Yucatan? Cahokia is why. American History textbooks often dive into the Aztecs and the Incas as a precursor for talking about Spanish exploration. My intention here is simply to use the earliest cities in the Americas as an example of how cities develop. Cahokia formed significantly later than Kaminaljuyu or Teotihuacan; the city was built near St. Louis MO on the Illinois-side of the great Mississippi River around 800 CE. Again for reference, to orient yourself on Earth's timeline, this is around 350 years after the Fall of Rome and around the time of Charlemagne's rule. Cahokia is built around a series of mounds of various heights. These mounds are highly reflective of the pyramids built at Teotihuacan; it's a comparable urban design. It has been speculated and evidence seems to support that the design of these cities is lined up as a greater celestial calendar. And this shouldn't be a surprise. Cahokia is home to wood henges, very much like the more famous Stonehenge. For an agricultural society, knowing when spring was coming, when to plant crops, when to harvest, these are the most important things, and they can be known by understanding the Sun and stars in the sky. Mississippian culture spread out from Cahokia and evidence of it can be found in Aztalan, WI as well as the Natchez in Mississippi. Between 1100 AD and 1200 AD, Cahokia erects palisade walls and eventually the city declines. The creation of fortifications suggests there was someone worth keeping out. That's one of the great challenges faced by many great cities, how do you interact with the folks outside of the city? The current theory about the fall of Cahokia points a collapse in agricultural (corn) production driven by climate change, and as food became more scarce, the social order collapsed, sometimes violently. Before the Spanish fleet ever set sail, Cahokian civilization had collapsed. Today you can visit Cahokia in IL; it's a pretty fantastic site, and if you are otherwise in the Midwest, there are other mound sites for you to visit such as Aztalan in WI.

A post on the development of cities in the Americas would be remiss if it did not touch on the American Southwest. The Anasazi people, the ancestors of today's Pueblo peoples (the Hopi and Zuni) also took to constructing cities. There's a distinctly southwestern feel to the clay brick structures built up along cliffs overlooking the desert. These cities look like formidable fortifications and certainly give the appearance of being defendable. What's somewhat odd is that these people don't appear to have started off living in the cliffs. Anasazi culture appears to have developed around 1500 BC. Chaco Canyon is preserved as a national park today and was home to people for nearly 10,000 years. Between 800 and 1200 CE, massive stone Great Houses were built at Chaco, possibly felling 200,000 trees to complete the construction. The buildings in Chaco like the structures in Cahokia and Teotihaucan are oriented with celestial bodies. A system of roads connected the people of Chaco, and there is evidence that this civilization was trading with other peoples like the Cahokians. Trade amongst cities should not be surprising, as noted earlier, specialization develops within cities, such that if your city is really great at making pottery, the next city over might produce a food product you really want, then these cities become interconnected via trade. Oddly enough at around the same time as the decline of Cahokia, the Anasazi appear to retreat from Chaco Canyon and move up into the fortified cliffs. During the 12th century, Chaco Canyon also experiences forces of climate change becoming drier, and it had been potentially deforested in the efforts to build the Great Houses. There is also evidence of violence being a part of the collapse with fossil remains which appear to have been butchered and boiled. If the land in Chaco Canyon was no longer able to support sustained agriculture and violence erupted, this may explain why people split off into smaller groups, building impressively fortified cities hidden upon the cliffs.

While neither of the high societies of Chaco or Cahokia were in place to meet the European explorers in the 15th of 16th Centuries, their descendants would encounter the Europeans with consequences no less disastrous than the fall of these civilizations. (That's a post for another day) There are also lessons to be learned today in understanding how these cities rose to power and fell. Cities, even today, are dependent on a steady source of food, on agriculture. It must be grown in sufficient quantity to be brought in and sustain the city's population. Food scarcity is a fast track to social disorder. And agricultural production can be threatened by climate change. Perhaps this is the most important lesson for us to learn today, as scientists continue to warn us about climate change and places like California (which supplies much of our produce) have suffered repeated years of drought and wildfire.