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Encarta Historical Essays reflect the knowledge and insight of leading historians. This collection of essays is assembled to support the National Standards for World History. In this essay, David A. Freidel of Southern Methodist University examines the importance of agriculture to the people of Mesoamerica from 300 bc to ad 150. In examining the extent to which agriculture figures into their political and religious institutions, it attempts to show how rulers and people negotiated accepted authority.
By David A. Freidel
In early civilizations around the globe, the innovation of agriculture brought about the chief energy source used to sustain people and to create property and power. In fact, nearly half of the current world population today continues to live by directly producing food. But given the power that agriculture provided people, why did farmers relinquish authority over their lives to leaders who demanded labor, taxes, and military conscription among other things?
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The relationship between political leaders and elites on one side and the great majority of ordinary people on the other side is a continual negotiation in civilization. Leaders must constantly justify their authority by providing practical benefits or by convincing people to trust emotionally and intellectually in their rule. Typically, they accomplish the latter by establishing and sustaining shared beliefs and values. In the Bible, the prophet Samuel warned the people of Israel that a king would burden them with taxes, send their sons to die in battle, and take their daughters as servants. They wanted one anyway, primarily to consolidate the tribes militarily and lead them to victory over their enemies in Canaan. In contrast, the ancient Egyptian Pharaoh was considered divine. The Pharaoh was principally responsible for agricultural prosperity, which he maintained by magically causing the Nile River to rise and flood to irrigate and fertilize the fields. The Pharaohs also carried out practical irrigation projects to extend the area in which crops could be grown. When the river failed to rise and flood and drought covered northern Africa late in the third millennium bc, the Pharaonic government was overthrown by hungry mobs.
Rulers, then, provide an important service to those they rule. While people may give up certain individual powers, they gain from the collective power they invest in their rulers. As long as that collective power is sustained, the people continue to follow their leaders. The ancient civilizations of Mesoamerica (a region encompassing present-day Mexico and most of Central America) provide a further example of how and why people turn to their rulers to maintain their way of life.
By 300 bc farming villages and towns dotted the cool, dry highland valleys and the hot, moist tropical forests of ancient Mesoamerica. Rulers had presided for centuries over ceremonial centers in the mountains and in the plains. From the first great civilization of the region, the Olmec—which lasted from approximately 1500 to 600 bc—to its successor civilizations in present-day Mexico and Guatemala, agriculture organized the social labor, determined property, and generated wealth. The Mesoamerican world was truly agrarian. Its people not only relied on agriculture for food but also depended on agricultural products for their trade, commerce, and political institutions.
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The early Mesoamerican kings claimed a divine mandate, but they also justified the existence of their governments in more practical ways. They established extensive networks of trade and exchange with many allies. When drought or plant disease threatened famine, the people of Mesoamerica may have relied on their kings to import food to tide them over. And they managed agricultural prosperity through public works that created better and more intensive forms of production. Government, in these ways, was a means to reduce the inevitable risks that confront farmers and their crops.
To understand the full significance of the agricultural civilizations that dominated Mesoamerica, we must first understand what kind of farmers they were, including what their important crops were. But how can we know what these people grew in ancient times? Although the plants have long since perished, archaeologists can detect evidence of them through a variety of methods. By excavating areas where people lived and gardened, archaeologists find carbonized fragmentary remains of the actual plants. Further, microscopic analysis of soil samples taken from such excavations can detect pollen generated by particular plant species. In addition, some plants produce tiny mineral objects called phytoliths while they grow. These minerals remain in the soil where they can be detected later. From these clues, a common 'menu' of major foods emerges throughout the region.
The Mesoamericans were remarkable farmers. The plants they farmed included not only familiar staples like maize (corn), beans, and squashes but also a wide range of other popular vegetables and fruits, including tomatoes, avocados, and pineapples. They raised a number of less familiar food plants, such as amaranth, a favorite staple of the Aztecs, and mamey, a tropical tree fruit. They also harvested chili peppers, which are still one of the most widely used condiments in the world today and a valuable source of vitamins.
Just as there was a common menu of favored foods, there was a common Mesoamerican market for commercial agricultural products. Cotton was an important commercial crop and was exchanged throughout the region as woven and embroidered cloth. Cacao beans, used to make chocolate, were domesticated in the lowland forests and riverbanks of the Yucatan peninsula. Chocolate was in such demand throughout this period that the cacao bean was a form of money. Other specialized crops, such as the Maguey cactus used to make a type of beer, were frequently traded as well. In addition, Mesoamericans traded crops for nonagricultural items such as the volcanic glass obsidian and green precious minerals used in ornamentation, jewelry, and currency beads.
The enormous variety and value of the plants the Mesoamericans domesticated laid the foundation for 3,000 years of sovereign civilizations. Plants not only fed the growing populations and fueled their economy, they also influenced how Mesoamericans thought about political power and the social order of civilization. We know this because plant imagery, rain symbols, and other themes related to agriculture abound in the public art commissioned by kings and other elites.
Artists and craftspeople of the Olmec and the successor civilizations developed an awesome array of images and symbols that not only illustrated religious beliefs but also reinforced these beliefs intellectually and emotionally in the general population. The Olmec, peoples of Oaxaca region, and Maya highland people carved large sculptures and stelae—standing stones—depicting their kings, gods, and scenes from mythology. In the Maya lowlands they modeled and painted images of gods and kings in plaster stucco on the sides of pyramids and temples. In all areas of Mesoamerica, artists carved many small images in precious greenstone, shell, and other materials. In addition, potters modeled, carved, and painted images on ceramic vessels.
To understand what these images mean, archaeologists search for clues in these images just as they look for clues in the soil to determine what the Mesoamericans grew. Decoding the meaning of images and symbols requires linking them demonstrably to ideas. Sometimes the images are straightforward representations of natural phenomena, such as raindrops coming out of clouds or depictions of maize. But archaeologists often must trace an image or symbol from an earlier time to a similar symbol in use centuries later whose meaning is known from written declarations or from oral explanations recorded by the Spanish.
The picture that emerges from these images is one of a rich and complicated society dominated by agriculture. The ancient civilizations of Mesoamerica were, like ancient civilizations elsewhere, large societies incorporating thousands of subjects that were administered by governments made up of political, religious, and military specialists. In the case of the Olmec, and the later lowland Maya, who emerged after 500 bc after a lengthy developmental stage, we have evidence that these governments were ruled by exemplary individuals called K'ul Ahaw (Holy Lords). These rulers legitimized their authority not only by performing obvious and apparent services to the populace—such as military security and public works—but also by appealing to common religious beliefs and values that portrayed their authority as divinely sanctioned.
The kings of ancient Mesoamerica were considered magical people, or shamans, capable of transforming themselves into supernatural jaguars, birds, and other beings. In that condition, they fought their enemies, gave sacrifices to the gods, and talked to their ancestors. Not surprisingly, however, given the importance of agriculture to these people, the most important religious duty of the kings was to ensure that the rains fell on schedule and that the crops prospered.
Agriculture figures prominently in the core mythology of the Maya. The Maya believed that the world had undergone several catastrophic destructions and renewals. The latest renewal, after a great flood, was accomplished by the old gods under the leadership of a god named Hun-Ye-Nah, (One Maize [Revealed]), who was also named Six Sky Lord. This god allowed himself to be sacrificed by evil death gods so that he could be reborn as a maize plant. Lady White Heron, the mother goddess, modeled the flesh of the first human beings from the dough made from One Maize's seeds. Thus the origin of their world was tied directly to one of their most important crops and food sources. Throughout the civilization’s history, Maya kings portrayed themselves as this god and as his companion, Chak, the jaguar god of rain and war. By tapping into this shared belief system, Maya kings further legitimized their authority. Thus the Maya not only practiced agriculture but also used the everyday experiences of planting, harvesting, and preparing food as their most sacred metaphors for religious and political power.
Even the Maya’s great pyramids, decorated in elaborate religious imagery, are tied directly to agriculture. In one episode of the Maya creation story, the god One Maize is reborn by sprouting on a sacred mountain. The highland Maya had real mountains, some of which were majestic volcanoes. For the lowland Maya, on the other hand, these mountains were distant and accessible only after lengthy journeys through dense forests. So the lowland Maya built artificial mountains nearby in the form of sacred pyramids, which are literally called mountains in Maya glyphs. There were mountains of sustenance, referred to as 'green true maize mountain.” There were mountains from which souls were brought from the world of the gods and ancestors to be born into this world. Above all, however, the Maya used their pyramids and the temples on top as places to crown their kings and as places where kings entered trances to commune with the gods, sacrificed their enemies, and danced along with queens, courtiers, and vassal lords in great public festivals.
The lowland Maya farmers built plastered platforms as places of worship by at least 700 bc, during the heyday of the Olmec civilization. Within two centuries they were building large pyramids, 18 m (59 ft) high, at ceremonial centers in the northern interior forests of Petén, Guatemala at places now called Nakbe, Guiro, and Tintal. But the greatest center of them all in that region was El Mirador, probably established by 500 bc, but with massive pyramids certainly built between 200 bc and ad 200. El Mirador was the largest and probably the most powerful political and religious capital in all of Mesoamerica between 200 bc and ad 100. The largest building group at El Mirador is El Dante, 300 by 250 m (980 by 820 ft) at its base and rising in a series of massive platforms and pyramids to an ultimate height of more than 60 m (200 ft). El Dante faces west towards another great pyramid, El Tigre, about 2 km (1 mi) away. Measuring 126 by 135 m (413 by 443 ft) at the base and 55 m (180 ft) high, El Tigre is about six times as massive as the largest pyramid at the great Maya capital Tikal, which flourished much later. Around these grand El Mirador pyramids are still more pyramids as well as scores of palaces and temples.
The Maya sometimes called their pyramids magic houses, which refers to a god who played a central role in their creation story. The source of One Maize's magic was the god named Itzamna, (Magic House), who helped One Maize be reborn through sacrificial death. This old god sometimes took the form of a great scarlet macaw known as Itzam-Yeh (Magic-Giver). (Notably, the word for magic, Itz, was also a word for rain as well as the sweet nectar of flowers, images of souls for the Maya. Thus, Itzam-Yeh brought the power of rain and opened the way for souls to be reborn.) During the later period at the height of Maya civilization, this same macaw decorated the temples and shrines that were used by kings for their coronations and other important state occasions. These later temples and shrines were named Itzamna (magic house) and also Kunil (conjuring house). They were places where kings practiced their supernatural powers. It is likely, then, that the temples of the earlier era were used by kings in the same manner as the later ones.
The early Maya temples were also decorated with giant masks representing war and rain jaguars. That wars may be instigated by a lack of rainfall may seem strange to us, but to the Mesoamericans it was not. In fact, the relationship between war and rain-making goes back to the Olmec, who carved sculptures depicting kings as magical jaguars dismembering their enemies, in one case while the rains pour from the sky. Human sacrifice, then, formed the connection. The Mesoamericans practiced human sacrifice to bring rain and for other sacred purposes from at least the time of the Olmec. The most important sacrificial victims, however, were noble enemies captured in battle. Local political leaders acting as shamans brought nourishing rain; enemy leaders also acting as shamans were often accused of bringing drought and disease. Sacrifice was thus not only an offering of precious life to the gods, but a way to neutralize the evil magic of the enemy. War, then, could be sparked by naturally occurring phenomena and the need to control them for the benefits of agriculture.
If Maya kings were the spiritual embodiment of life-giving plants and rain, they also sustained their peoples in more practical ways, such as by commissioning the construction of public works. At the site of Cerros in Belize, a ceremonial center and town, the inhabitants dug canals and drainage ditches to manage the rainwater supply that was stored in reservoirs. These reservoirs allowed people to remain in the area during the dry season when drinkable water was scarce. In the vicinity of Cerros, people created raised fields in the otherwise swampy land and watered the crops from adjacent ditches and canals. In other parts of the lowlands, such as at the center of Edzna in Campeche, the Maya created very large canals that extended for hundreds of meters. These likely provided water for drinking and for irrigation. In the center of the Yucatan peninsula, at El Mirador, nearby swamps were quarried for a rich peaty earth that farmers used to create productive fields and gardens on the higher ground throughout the city and immediate area. At the city of Tikal the people dammed natural drainages in the hills at the center of the city to create a series of reservoirs. And in cities built on hills, such as Caracol in Belize, dozens of square kilometers of terraces were carved around the homes of the people and used for gardens.
The early lowland Maya established an enormously successful civilization. They built centers and towns everywhere from the far northern plains of Yucatan to the deep forests of southern Petén and up into the hills and mountains of Guatemala and Chiapas. During the end of this early era, the Maya built larger pyramids than they ever would in subsequent times. The most dramatic advance of Maya society, however, was the spread of public writing on monuments and buildings and the creation of great art at about ad 200. And with writing came some new and innovative institutions, particularly royal dynasties. These developments marked the end of one era and the beginning of another.
The earlier kings were clearly powerful, and likely often managed to have their sons succeed them. But the formal rules of dynastic succession appear in conjunction with the first public texts. Royal dynasties, passing power through male offspring for generations, created opportunities for enduring alliances between royal families and kingdoms. They also generated opportunities for enduring enmity. In the course of this later period, the lowland Maya were increasingly embroiled in wars, largely between members of two grand alliances with conflicting imperial ambitions. Study of this period has left scholars with difficult questions. Did warfare disrupt the agriculture that provided food and commerce to the kingdoms? Or did periods of drought and hunger fuel wars as kingdoms sought food stocks or food tribute? Whatever the deadly combination of circumstances, the civilization collapsed over large parts of the lowlands in the ninth century ad. And with the collapse of the civilization came the fall of sustained agricultural production.
About the author: David A. Freidel is a professor of anthropology at Southern Methodist University. He is the co-author of Maya Cosmos, Three Thousand Years on the Shaman’s Path and numerous other publications.
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Mesoamerica; Mexico; Central America; Native Americans of Middle and South America; Guatemala; Agriculture; Olmec; Maya Civilization
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