What was pre columbian

Here, civilizations and empires arose which included the Moche fl. Developments towards civilization were by no means limited to these two regions. Large-scale states, complex societies and at least proto-urban settlements developed in the Amazonian region in the first millennium CE.

Similarly, large towns such as Cahokia grew up in the Mississippi valley, the center of a network of trade routes which spanned North America. However, it was Peru and Central America or Mesoamerica , which is the term historians use for this region which produced the clearest examples of Pre-Columbian civilizations in America, and it is to these that we will now turn.

On the Pacific coast of South America, in the region of present-day Peru, are two parallel environments. Firstly, just inland from the coast is the second highest mountain range on the world, the Andes. Secondly, on a narrow strip of land between the mountains and the ocean, is a dry coastal plain. It was in the latter of these two environments where the origins and early movement towards civilization in Pre-Columbian South America lay.

Carving their way through this plain are a series of small rushing rivers, dry for most of the year but bringing plentiful rainfall from the high Andes in the spring. They form short but fertile coastal valleys, with fertile floors created by the rich mud brought down from the mountains. These valleys acted as the cradles of South American agriculture. Farming, based on the cultivation of squashes, gourds and chilis, began to develop along the Pacific coast of Peru around BCE.

To channel and preserve the spring floodwater required for cultivation in this arid landscape, dykes, ponds and canals had to be constructed. Co-ordinating this activity and no doubt organizing the defenses needed to protect the new farming settlements led to the rise of strong rulers, who created the earliest states in South America.

Abundant harvests gave rise to population growth; trade routes grew up with the mountain regions. In the Andes highlands , farming appeared sometime after BCE, specializing in hardy crops like the potato and quinoa, and herding llamas.

Back on the coast, populations have been expanding, boosted by the spread of maize cultivation to the region. Small towns were starting to appear by around BCE. A thousand years later many features of later Peruvian civilization had appeared, most notably the flat-topped pyramid. Pottery and weaving had been invented, and had metalwork using copper. Over the centuries the trading networks created a unified cultural area embracing both coastal and mountain regions.

During the first millennium BCE there seems to have been a shift inland from the coast, perhaps associated with religious and cultural developments which created important ceremonial centers in the highlands. Another factor was the introduction of irrigation into the highland areas, using lakes as water sources.

The systems around Lake Titicaca would continue to thrive and grow into historic times. It was here, in the Andean highland region rather than in the coastal valleys, that the earliest Pre-Columbian civilization in South America emerged. It included large stone temples and its inhabitants produced fine metalwork — including high quality craftsmanship on gold and silver — pottery and textiles. All this testifies to the presence of a religious-political elite able to command the labour of peasants and craftsmen over a wide area.

After c. This lasted from c. Although the Moche Horizon saw the second of the South American Pre-Columbian civilizations flourish, it was the period when the first true cities appeared in the region.

The Moche Horizon was centered on the city of Mochica, on the coastal plain, and embraced other substantial urban settlements as well. The Moche were a warlike culture, and practiced human sacrifice on a large scale; however, they also excelled in the arts of peace: they produced some of the finest sculpture, metalwork and pottery of all the Pre-Columbian civilizations of America.

Moche art is marked by its striking realism, and vivid shapes. Moche civilization vanished in the second half of first millennium, and in the next phase of South American Pre-Columbian civilization, the center of gravity again shifted to the highlands. Because of the uniformity in design and construction of their heavily fortified settlements, many archaeologists consider these to have been large political states — empires in fact — with conquest playing a part in their formation.

Two moments stand out in the sordid history of the American Southeast—removal and the Seminole Wars. Debt, dependency, threats, and force, in that order, was the thinking of the day. Thomas Jefferson saw the remaining southeastern tribes as impediments to the cultivation of the American nation and American character.

By the beginning of the eighteenth century, eastern tribes were all predominantly agricultural anyway: they grew yams, beans, corn, and squash, and more intensively so after the trade in buckskin brought the white-tail deer to near extinction east of the Mississippi. Many of them had had small villages and settlements where they farmed intensively, and effectively. They had seats of government and centers of power. After the colonists arrived they began cultivating cotton and other export crops as well in the 18th century, which they farmed plantation style.

Many Cherokee and other tribal people bought and kept black slaves, as did Jefferson himself. In a series of secret memos to William Henry Harrison written in , Jefferson sketched out a plan by which Indian tribes in the Southeast could be disappeared:. To promote this disposition to exchange lands which they have to spare and we want for necessaries, which we have to spare and they want, we shall push our trading houses, and be glad to see the good and influential individuals among them run in debt, because we observe that when these debts get beyond what the individuals can pay, they become willing to lop them off by a cession of lands.

In this way our settlements will gradually circumscribe and approach the Indians, and they will in time either incorporate with us as citizens of the United States, or remove beyond the Missisipi [ sic ].

The former is certainly the termination of their history most happy for themselves. But in the whole course of this, it is essential to cultivate their love. As to their fear, we presume that our strength and their weakness is now so visible that they must see we have only to shut our hand to crush them, and that all our liberalities to them proceed from motives of pure humanity only. Should any tribe be foolhardy enough to take up the hatchet at any time, the seizing of the whole country of that tribe, and driving them across the Missisipi as the only condition of peace, would be an example to others, and a furtherance of our final consolidation.

These secret memos were written while Jefferson served as president of the United States. By this point, the eastern Cherokee had consolidated power and launched a new governmental structure based on a balance of power and a judiciary. They published a bilingual newspaper and formally declared New Echota near what is today Calhoun, Georgia as the capital of the Cherokee Nation.

But Jackson had spent his military years fighting Indians and the British, as well as speculating in real estate often out of the spoils of war , and he regarded such claims as ridiculous.

Earlier, in , Georgia had agreed to give up claims to land in what would become Alabama and Mississippi if the federal government would remove or reduce the Indians in Georgia.

Basically, Georgia would give up land outside the state in order to secure more land within its borders. After Jackson assumed the presidency, he was happy to oblige. He offered the tribes two choices: move west of the Mississippi or allow themselves to become subjects of the states in which their tribal homelands existed. In a series of rulings known as the Marshall Trilogy, the court affirmed the rights of the Cherokee and ruled the removal of Indians unlawful.

Andrew Jackson did it anyway. Between and more than , Indians of the Southeast were forcibly removed to territory west of the Mississippi, mostly on foot and in wintertime. A cross the Americas, the history of indigenous cultures is so long and so vibrant that by , hundreds of histories could be found inscribed in abandoned cities and half-buried settlements.

Built by the ancestors of the Maya, many sites still held hieroglyphic texts carved in stone or painted inside building walls. In the highlands of Peru, Machu Picchu, seen in the photograph, had been an Inka royal retreat. The city was abandoned probably in the early 16th century; its walls overgrown with orchid and bromeliad, even as vibrant Andean communities made their living nearby.

L iving peoples anchored their own pasts to these ancient places, sustained and reshaped histories through their own oral narratives, animated them through ritual practice. Yet the ruined pyramids had not been forgotten. B efore the arrival of Europeans, then, the indigenous past was both well honored and open to reinterpretation by the descendants of those who came before.

This was a process that depended upon and lent new meanings to visual culture, as peoples actively recast old forms and places, reworking and reinterpreting them. It was also a process that continued after the arrival of Europeans, but was made more difficult by the profound and devastating changes that were unleashed soon after The conquistadors had little interest in indigenous histories: many an Inka witnessed the Spanish conquistadors destroying ancient shrines—places where the dead could speak to the living—in their zealous search for silver and gold.

Often Spaniards viewed local history—embedded in objects and architectural spaces—as an impediment to conquest. Thus, Aztecs saw their glorious capital city reduced to rubble, the life-size portraits of the Aztec kings gouged off the living rock, and, as seen below, sacred objects and manuscripts put to the torch. South America: Andean and Coastal Kingdoms. The earliest art in South America appeared at archeological sites such as the famous Cueva de las Manos Cave of the Hands , which dates back to the era of Mesolithic art , around 7, BCE.

In the Andean region present-day Peru , the first developed culture was the northern Chavin civilization , that flourished BCE. Noted for small-scale ceramics, as well as the magnificent murals, carvings and other artifacts the Tello Obelisk, the Lanzon and the Raimondi Stela excavated from its principal religious site of Chavin de Huantar.

The Chavin were succeeded by the Moche c. Meanwhile, on the southern coast of Peru, the Paracas culture - renowned for its textiles - was followed by the Nasca culture , responsible for a South American Renaissance in multi-coloured ceramic art c. Later cultures in the Andes included the northern Wari or Huari culture, famous for its stone architecture, sculpture and large-scale painted pottery; the Bolivian Tiwanaku culture CE ; the Chimu people, noted for their silversmithery and featherwork.

See also: Tribal Art. Building materials were of either stone or adobe - mud-brick. The former is mainly found in the highlands and the latter on the coast where vast urban and defensive complexes were created solely from this material, such as at Chan Chan, capital of the Chimu coastal empire in north Peru. From BCE, the peoples of Peru were constructing complex temples and ritual structures, as at Chavin de Huantar in the North Highlands where the main temple platform was found to be honeycombed with labyrinths on at least three levels.

The best-known architecture is that of the Inca, who constructed mighty fortresses. Sacsahuaman near Cuzco has three ringed zig-zag defences with the basal stones measuring sometimes over 25 feet high. Mortar was not used, but perfect joints were made by carefully cutting and dressing each stone. Built thus and slightly tapered from base to top, they were strong enough to withstand the severe earthquakes of the region.

As with architecture, fine sculpture occurs from around BCE with the Chavin culture. A great white granite monolith over 12 feet high was found at the centre of the temple mound at Chavin de Huantar, at the crossing of the galleries. This "Great Image" was carved intricately as a snarling fanged man-like being with hair of snake-heads and a girdle composed of serpent-jaguar heads - concepts all central to Chavin and other South American art-styles.

Cornices were carved to represent condors with feline attributes or bas-reliefs of felines with snake-like attributes. About the same time, at Cerro Sechin on the coast of Peru, temple walls are composed of monoliths elaborately carved with relief sculpture of warriors and their dead or dismembered captives, also a popular theme.

Much later around CE at Chan Chan, a very different type of sculpture can be seen with the mud-plaster friezes on the temple walls, where entirely mythical creatures of dragon-like appearance were represented together with sea-birds and fishes, underlining the importance of the coastal economy here.

In highland Bolivia on the shores of Lake Titicaca, Tiahuanaco, centre of another great civilisation, displays competence in the execution of whole sculpture and carved reliefs with principal figures also representing snarling man-jaguar beings and condor-headed deities bearing staffs.

Heavier whole stone statues of squat, slanting-eyed men are found nearby at Pucara. See also: How to Appreciate Sculpture. For more modern works, see: How to Appreciate Modern Sculpture. Pottery manufacture was introduced about BCE and later periods show great competence in this field of applied art. All visual forms were common and, since the potter's wheel was unknown, were produced by hand or from moulds. The stirrup bottle and from this form, the whistling jar, often decorated with life-like figures of humans and animals, were especially popular.

Pottery provided the Pre-Columbian craftsman with one of his main types of art and the consequent variety and vitality of form and decoration exemplify this.

Around CE the Mochica of North Coastal Peru produced vast quantities of finely moulded pots, some in the likeness of local dignitaries, others showing the manifold daily pastimes and occupations of the people from weaving to making love. Painted scenes of battles, the parading of nobles and the punishment of naked prisoners were common. Bowls, bridge and spout jars or figurine-urns were commonly decorated in bright burnished polychrome designs of life-like birds, fishes, animals and people.

The Huari-Tiahuanaco culture similarly depended upon ceramics for the spread of its own bold and distinctive art style. Fanged beings with rayed sun-like head-dresses, snakes and eagles still abound.

The Incas decorated their pottery in mainly intricate geometric motifs. The aryballus - a large globular jar with pointed base and tall widely everted mouth - was a classic Inca form used for the storage and transport of water or the alcoholic beverage chicha. Metalwork appeared in general use around Chavin times, by BCE, although the techniques known were limited to hammering, annealing, soldering and repousse working of sheet gold and silver.

By Mochica times, every technique was used including casting - simple and cire perdue - alloying and gilding.