Hi, Professor Charlie Evans
Today I should be talking a little bit about Mesoamerican civilizations.
And the first thing that I'd like to say
is that while I use Mesoamerican civilization
I'm not using it in the narrowly defined
geographical extent
of what is roughly a bit of Central America
and Mexico. I'm using it in a larger
sense of the word
and defining it as all of the western hemisphere
civilizations.
North America
Central America and South America
The civilizations that existed in this geographical area
before the arrival of the Europeans, roughly before 1500, the start of the sixteenth century.
And so you're looking at my
notes that I've written up for
the study of Mesoamerican civilization,
and they're pretty good
But I want to turn to a map.
And this is actually the best map that I could find online
because it was the only map
that showed
the western hemisphere from north to south
and gives us a clear idea of the location
of the different civilizations as they arose
in this area, and going from north to south, Mississippian,
Olmec, Aztec, Maya and Inka.
Now, one of the most apparent things
when we turn our attention to American civilization
is the rather late date for its origins,
for its expansion and development, and its reaching a classical period
I we look at some of the different civilizations that we're talking about here
The Aztec we're really looking at the 14th through 16th century.
The Inka, maybe the same period of time,
roughly the 14th to 16th centuries.
Mississippian,
American Indian civilization, the mound cultures of the Mississippi Valley
are a little earlier, maybe from the 800s (ninth century) to the sixteenth century
And the oldest of these would be the Maya
They predate these other civilizations by quite a bit of time.
The classical period of Mayan civilization
roughly from 250 to 900 CE.
The fact that these civilizations are arrayed from north to south
is one of the factors that Jared Diamond
elaborated upon in his rather controversial book, Guns, Germs and Steel.
in his explaining of the rather late development of civilizations in the western hemisphere.
The fact that developments really
were really very difficult to pass from one civilization to another
because of the difficulty in moving from north to south, or from south to north.
The geography, the different weather patterns, made it very difficult
to pass cultural or technical developments from one society to another.
And then also consider the fact that the isthmus is very narrow, and it made travel back and forth complicated.
The other thing that Jared Diamond points out
in his book is that
the western hemisphere lacked
some of the native grains that were prevalent in the Near East, grains that would
fuel population expansion, rapid population expansion, and the development of societies
and also the fact that the western hemisphere lacked
the animals that could be used for
farming, as compared to the animals that existed in the Near East, that there was no real
shall we say beasts of burden available to societies in the western hemisphere.
And so, I'm just going to sum up really quickly
one of the things that I find striking, and that you will find striking, is the rather late development of societies in the western hemisphere.
Although those societies did (some of them) achieve
unbelievable technological, architectural
and other developments, they're still relatively late in comparison to the developments of comparable societies
in the Near East, North Africa, South Asia, East Asia, and also the Mediterranean basin.
OK, that's it for today.  Thanks.
