THe Americas: Shaping/Harvesting THe Land
ABSTRACT
This lecture gives an introduction to some of the important sites in the Americas. These include La Venta (900-300 BCE) of the Olmecs in Mexico, Chavín de Huántar (900 BCE) in Peru, and Pueblo Bonito (920-1100 CE) in the U.S. The lecture discusses the impact of corn and the development of monumental ritual architecture.

KEY PEOPLES AND EMPIRES
•	Poverty Point peoples
•	Cahokia (600 – 1400 CE)
•	Ancient Pueblo (900 to 1150 BCE)
•	The Olmecs (1500-300 BCE)
•	Mayans
Pre-Classic period (c. 2000 BCE to 250 CE)
Classic period (c. 250 to 900 CE),
Post-Classic  (900- 1500 CE)
•	Norte-Chico or Supe-Caral (2600- 2000 BCE)
•	Chavín de Huántar (900 BCE)

KEY CONCEPTS
•	Cenote
•	Kiva
•	Lanzón

KEY PLACES
•	Poverty Point (1800-700 BCE)
•	Cahokia (600 – 1400 CE)
•	Pueblo Bonito (920-1100 CE)
•	San Lorenzo (1500-900 BCE)
•	La Venta (900-300 BCE)
•	Chichén Itzá (600-1200 CE)
•	Caral (2600-2000 BCE)
•	Chavín de Huántar (900 BCE)

NOTES ON SELECT TERMS
Chaco Canyon
Chaco Canyon was not built or used primarily for household occupation.  This evidence, along with the dearth of burials found in the canyon, suggests that, even at the peak of the Chacoan development, there was a low resident population. 

This means:
1. Chaco Canyon was a political and economic center where the Chacoans administered a widespread trade and redistribution system   
2. Chaco Canyon may have served as a center for seasonal ceremonial visitations by great numbers of residents of the outlying communities, i.e. as a type of regional ritual center.
3. Chaco Canyon may have served as a "central archive for esoteric knowledge, such as maintenance of the region's ceremonial calendar.”

The Mayans
The Mayans developed the only true written system native to the Americas. Its purpose was largely scientific: to understand the repetitive cycles of motions of the moon and planets, and thus to be able to predict when these bodies would be in certain places on the sky in the future. To allow such predictions, the Maya also developed a sophisticated number system, of base 20 (compared with our base 10 system). Their observations were used by their priests to indicate to the  meso-American rulers propitious times for various actions. Indeed, their whole calendar played a critical role in identifying important occasions, tied to many-year cycles of the base 20 numbering. 

The Dresden Codex contains:
An eclipse table that predicts times when eclipses may occur.
A Venus table that predicts the times when Venus appears as morning star and the other apparitions of the planet.
A Mars table that records the times when Mars goes into retrograde motion. A second Mars table that tracks the planet's motion along the ecliptic has recently been identified.
	
Classic Era Maya urban design could easily be described as the division of space by great monuments and causeways. Open public plazas were the gathering places for people and the focus of urban design, while interior space was entirely secondary. Only in the Late Post-Classic era did the great Maya cities develop into more fortress-like defensive structures that lacked, for the most part, the large and numerous plazas of the Classic.

At the onset of large-scale construction during the Classic Era, a predetermined axis was typically established in a cardinal direction. Depending on the location of natural resources such as fresh-water wells, or cenotes, the city grew by using sacbeob (causeways) to connect great plazas with the numerous platforms that created the sub-structure for nearly all Maya buildings. As more structures were added and existing structures re-built or remodeled, the great Maya cities seemed to take on an almost random identity that contrasted sharply with other great Mesoamerican cities such as Teotihuacan and its rigid grid-like construction.

At the heart of the Maya city were large plazas surrounded by the most important governmental and religious buildings, such as the royal acropolis, great pyramid temples and occasionally ball-courts. Though city layouts evolved as nature dictated, careful attention was placed on the directional orientation of temples and observatories so that they were constructed in accordance with Maya interpretation of the orbits of the heavenly bodies. Immediately outside of this ritual center were the structures of lesser nobles, smaller temples, and individual shrines; the less sacred and less important structures had a greater degree of privacy. Outside of the constantly evolving urban core were the less permanent and more modest homes of the common people.