Ancient American Civilizations

Ancient American Civilizations

Many impressive civilizations flourished in North and South America. The people of these civilizations built cliff-top palaces, huge earth mounds and pyramid temples, although they had no wheeled vehicles. A few fragments of their civilizations’ achievements still survive today.

The Anasazi people lived in what is now the southwestern United States. They grew corn and built amazing apartment blocks in which as many as 5000 people shared cliff houses called pueblos with hundreds of rooms. Their descendants were known as the Pueblo. Also in the southwest lived the Hohokam people, who dug irrigation canals to water their crops and, like the Anasazi, wove cotton cloth and made decorated clay pottery. Farther east, the Mississippian people built well-planned towns of single-family houses.

Around 700AD the largest city in America was in Central Mexico. Teotihuacan was a city of more than 100000 people containing 600 pyramids, 2000 apartment blocks and thousands of craft shops. People had lived in the Teotihuacan Valley since about 500BC, growing crops and buildings pyramid temples from stone blocks cemented together with clay. Teotihuacan’s time of greatest power was from about 350AD to 750AD. After that is was overshadowed by a new power, the Toltecs who built their own temple-city at Tula.

At 3500 metres, high in the Andes, South America, was the city of Tiahuanaco, which flourished between 500 and 1000 people. Here people used llamas as pack animals and paddled reed boats on Lake Titicaca. Other city-states of the Andes, such as Huari in Peru, were greatly influenced by Tiahuanaco. Most South Americans, like the Mochica of Peru, built houses and temples of mud brick. The Nazca of Peru marked out giant pictures in the desert with furrows and stones – amazing animal designs that are best seen from air.