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When Columbus landed on the Bahamian island of Guanahaní on October 12, 1492, there were among the estimated 3,000-plus native tribal groups in the Americas twelve polities of various sizes and kinds similar to what we think of as countries, nations, or conglomerates of city-states actively pursuing their courses in the New World. Though the term nation-state is a Western European concept, and one that did not come to fruition even there until the 1500s, it is not far from correct to say that these twelve American polities were characterized by the same essence that characterizes European states today. They were conscious aggregates of individuals speaking the same or closely related languages and with essentially the same cultural norms and practices. They were striving to express this unity through political and economic independence , and they were either urban entities or something close approaching that settlement type. Of the twelve, six had largely succeeded in the venture and would compare readily to the largest and most sophisticated of European, Asiatic, or African states of the 1400s. Of this Big Six, as I shall call them, two, the Pueblo Towns and the Mississippian Cities, were in North America; two, the Aztec Empire and the Maya Kingdoms, were in Middle America; one, the Taíno Kingdoms, was in the Caribbean; and one, Tawantinsuyu, the Inca Empire, was in South America. All of the Big Six were urban—¤ve of them brilliantly so—with large groupings of people concentrated in highly strati¤ed urban settlements. As in the Old World, some were literate—the Maya and the Aztec—and some were not, though all had large literatures verbally transmitted from one generation to the next. All possessed carefully de¤ned political and economic structures. All had an erudite class and an organized system of schools. All were as con2 America 1492 cerned with things religious as was Western Europe, though usually in ways less universalist, less xenophobic, and more tolerant of differences than the European Christianity of the times. All of the attributes we associate with nationhood were abundantly present in all of the Big Six as well as in nascent form in the remaining six. One, Tawantinsuyu, Land of the Four Quarters, was the largest political entity the Southern Hemisphere has ever seen. As in the Old World, these states were not static things but were constantly changing, vibrant social organisms, spreading and shrinking through space and time, struggling with their own internal problems and vying with each other for regional political and economic power. The ¤ve mainland powers—the Pueblo Towns, the Mississippian Cities, the Aztec Empire, the Maya Kingdoms, and Tawantinsuyu—were the outgrowth of earlier, sometimes more spectacular, urban cultures. The Chaco Canyon pueblos of New Mexico gave rise to the historically known modern pueblos. The earlier Poverty Point settlements led ultimately to the cities of the Mississippi River Valley in the period from 1000 to the middle 1400s. Teotihuacán and Toltec Tula in central Mexico were forerunners of the Méxica State founded by the Aztecs in the 1200s. The Maya cities of Guatemala , Honduras, and Belize and the Maya-Toltec cities of Yucatán gave rise to the Maya States of the 1400s, and Tiahuanaco in Bolivia, an Aymará city, was the clear forerunner of Inca Tawantinsuyu. All of those earlier societies were in many ways greater than their ¤fteenth-century descendants. Their offspring, however, consciously retained and pro¤ted from much of the grandeur and sophistication of the earlier cultures, framed in what were more pragmatic national settings. These forerunners were like Greece and Imperial Rome to Europeans. The list of the 12 polities follows, with the Big Six italicized. North America 1. The Pueblo Towns of Arizona and New Mexico 2. The Mississippian Cities and Towns of the Mississippi River Valley 3. The Northwest Coast Towns of British Columbia Middle America and the Caribbean 4. The Empire of the Méxica (Aztecs) in Mexico 5. The Tarascan State in Mexico 6. The Mixtec Kingdom of Mexico 7. The Maya Kingdoms of Mexico, Belize, and Guatemala 8. The Taíno Kingdoms of Hispaniola and Puerto Rico 34 part i. in the beginning South America 9. Tawantinsuyu (the Inca Empire) of Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, Argentina, and Chile 10. The Chibchan Tairona Towns of Colombia 11. The Chibchan Muisca Towns of Colombia 12. The Guaraní Towns of Paraguay Figure 7. Major Native American Societies, 1492 america 1492 35 Columbus himself saw only the Ta...

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