Both the dramatic location and the superior building techniques of Machu Picchu render it a landmark of Native American culture.

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The pueblo tribes of the American Southwest produced some of the most elegant ceramic wares in the history of North Page 255 American art.  

Lacking the potter’s wheel, Anasazi women handbuilt vessels for domestic and ceremonial uses.  

They embellished jars and bowls with elaborate designs that vary from a stark, geometric abstraction (Figure 9.12) to stylized human, animal, and plant forms.

Native American religious rituals blended poetry, music, and dance.  In many regions, the sun dance was a principal part of the annual ceremony celebrating seasonal renewal.  

In the Navajo tribal 

community of the American Southwest, shamans still conduct the healing ceremony known as the Night Chant.  

Beginning at sunset and ending some nine days later at sunrise, the Night Chant calls for a series of meticulously executed sand paintings and the recitation of song cycles designed to remove evil and restore good.  

Characterized by monophonic melody and hypnotic repetition, the chant (a section of which follows) is performed to the accompaniment of whistles and percussive instruments such as gourd rattles, drums, and rasps:

House made of dawn.  House made of evening light.  House made of the dark cloud.  House made of male rain.  

House made of dark mist.  House made of female rain.  

House made of pollen.  House made of grasshoppers.  

Dark cloud is at the door.  

The trail out of it is dark cloud.  

The zigzag lightning stands high upon it.  Male deity!  

Your offering I make.  I have prepared a smoke for you.  

Restore my feet for me.  Restore my legs for me.  

Restore my body for me.Restore my mind for me.

  This very day take out your spell for me.  Your spell remove for me. 

 You have taken it away for me.  Far off it has gone.  Happily I recover.  

Happily my interior becomes cool.  Happily I go forth.

Native American myths and folk tales were transmitted orally for generations but have been recorded only since the seventeenth century. 

 Usually told by tribal elders and passed down to younger generations, such and legends traveled vast distances and often appeared in many variant versions.  

As with African folklore, Native American tales feature hero-tricksters who, in the course of their adventures, may transform themselves into ravens, spiders, coyotes, wolves, or rabbits. 

 Trickster strategies usually involve deceit and cunning, but the tale itself generally bears a moral that is meant to teach as well as to entertain.  

Native American myths of origins and the large corpus of tales that describe the workings of nature are among the most inventive in the folk literature of the world’s civilizations.

The Arts of Meso- and South America 

The largest and most advanced Native American societies were those of Meso- and South America.  

During the 4000-year history of these regions, gold was the favored medium for extraordinary artworks ranging from small pieces of jewelry to ritual weapons (L Figure 9.13) and masks.  

Gold seems to have been associated both with the sun, whose radiance gave life to the crops, and with the gods, whose blood (in the form of rain) was considered procreative and essential to survival of the community.  

In the sacrificial rites and royal ceremonies of pre-Columbian communities, human blood was shed to repay the gods and save the world from destruction.  

Gold, like blood, was the medium of choice for the glorification of gods;  it was especially important in the fashioning of objects associated with rituals at which warriors and rulers nourished the gods with their blood.  

Throughout Meso- and South America, the techniques of metalwork attained a remarkable level of proficiency that was passed from generation to generation.

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Maya Civilization 

The Maya civilization brought to a cultural climax the sacred and artistic traditions of the many Meso-American cultures that preceded it.  

It reached its classic phase between 250 and 900 C.E.  and survived with considerable political and economic vigor until roughly 1600. 

In 2018, archeologists, using state-of the art laser technology, detected beneath the dense canopy of the Guatemalan rainforest more than sixty thousand ancient Maya structures.  

These finds, which include a network of ancient roads and temples, suggest that this densely populated civilization may have been comparable in size to that of ancient Greece.  

At excavated sites in southern Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala, and the Yucatán peninsula, the Maya constructed fortified cities and elaborate religious complexes (Figure 9.14) that look back to those of the Olmec (see Figure 1.34), as well as to the extraordinary central Mexican city of Teotihuacán (ca. 100-650 CE).  Reminiscent of both the Mesopotamian ziggurat (see Figure 1.18) and of Teotihuacán’s ancient sanctuaries, such as the Pyramid of the Sun (see Figure 1.19), the Maya temple took the form of a terraced pyramid with staircase ascending to a platform capped by a multiroomed superstructure (Figure 9.15).

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A shrine and sanctuary that also served as a burial place for priests or rulers, the Maya temple was the physical link between earth and the heavens. 

 On the limestone façades of temples and palaces, the Maya carved and painted scenes of religious ceremonies and war, as well as images of their gods: 

Tlaloc, the long-snouted rain deity, and Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent and legendary hero-god of Meso-America. 

 A landmark at almost all Meso-American sacred precincts was the ballpark.  It was used for the performance of ceremonial games played by two teams of nine to eleven men each.  

The object of the game was to propel a 5-pound rubber ball through the stone rings at either side of a high-walled court. 

 Members of the losing team lost more than glory: 

They were sacrificed to the sun god, their hearts torn from their bodies on ritual altars adjacent to the court.  

Blood sacrifice and bloodletting were also practiced by Maya nobility.  

This ritual served not only to honor the gods but also to confirm the political legitimacy of the rulers.  

Depictions of royal bloodletting appear in Maya frescoes and in carved stone sculptures adorning temples, palaces, and ballcourts.  In one example (4 Figure 9.16), the richly dressed King Shield Jaguar, whose feathered headdress features the shrunken head of a sacrificial victim, holds a staff above his queen de ella, Lady Xoc, who pulls a thorn-lined rope through her bleeding tongue of her.  Such ceremonies were performed upon the accession of a new ruler, prior to waging war, and at rituals celebrating victory in battle.

The Maya were the only known Native American culture to produce a written language.

  This ancient script, comprised of hieroglyphs, was decoded during the second half of the twentieth century. 

 Only since 1995 have the glyphs been recognized as a system of phonetic signs that operate like spoken syllables-a discovery made, in part, by studying the living language of modern-day descendants of the Maya who inhabit the Guatemalan highlands and the Yucatán. 

 Despite the survival of some codices and many stone inscriptions, nearly all of the literary evidence of this people was destroyed during the sixteenth century by Spanish missionaries and colonial settlers.  

Perhaps the most important source of Meso-American mythology, however, survives in the form of an oral narrative believed to date from the Maya classic period, transcribed into the Quiche language in the sixteenth century.  

This narrative, known as the Popol Vuh (The Sacred Book; ca. 1550), recounts the creation of the world.

  According to the Maya, the gods fashioned human beings out of maize-the principal Native American crop-but chose deliberately to deprive them of perfect understanding.

As if to challenge the gods, the Maya became accomplished mathematicians and astronomers.

  Carefully observing the earth’s movements around the sun, they devised a calendar that was more accurate than any used in medieval Europe before the twelfth century.

  Having developed a mathematical system that recognized “zero,” they computed planetary and celestial cycles with some tracked the paths of Venus, Jupiter, and Saturn, and successfully predicted eclipses of the sun and moon. 

 They recorded their findings in stone, on the bark pages of codices, and on the façades of temples, some of which may have functioned as planetary observatories.  

At the principal pyramid at Chichén Itzá, a landmark urban site in the Yucatán (see Figure 9.15), the ninety-one steps on each of four sides, plus the platform on which the temple stands, correspond to the 365 days in the solar calendar . 

 According to the Maya, the planets (and segments of time itself) were ruled by the gods, usually represented in Maya and women carrying burdens on their shoulders.

  The Maya and the various Meso-American peoples who followed them believed in the cyclical creation and destruction of the world, and they prudently entrusted the sacred mission of timekeeping to their priests.  accuracy,

Inca Civilization In 1000 c.E., the Inca were only one of many small warring peoples who had settled in the mountainous regions along the west coast of South America.

  Once established in the Andes mountains of Peru, the Inca absorbed the traditions of earlier Peruvian cultures (see page 25) noted for their fine pottery, richly woven textiles, and sophisticated metalwork (see Figure 9.13).  

But by the late fifteenth century, they had become the mightiest power in South America, having imposed their political authority, their gods, and their customs over lands that extended almost 3000 miles from present-day Ecuador to Chile (see L Map 9.3).  

At its height in the 1500s, Inca civilization consisted of an astounding sixteen million people. 

 Like the ancient Romans, the Inca built thousands of miles of roads and bridges to expedite trade and communication within Paee 258 their empire.

  Lacking writing, they kept records by way of a system of knotted and colored cords known as quipu.  

The cult of the sun dominated religious festivals at which sacrifices-children, llamas, and guinea pigs-were offered to the gods.  

Ceremonial and decorative objects were hammered from sheets of gold and silver-metals reserved for royal and religious use. 

 With only bronze tools and without mortar, the Inca created temples and fortresses that are astonishing in their size and sophisticated in their masonry.  

At Machu Picchu the Inca left an elaborately constructed 3-square-mile city that straddles two high peaks some 9000 feet above sea level L Figure 9.17).  

With little more than heavy stone hammers, they raised two-story stone buildings and terraces surrounding large ceremonial plazas reminiscent of those recently uncovered at Caral (see pages 24- 25).  

Both the dramatic location and the superior building techniques of Machu Picchu render it a landmark of Native American culture.