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Hello, I attached the instructions document that has the question and I attached the pages required to answer the question. I want you to write three different copies each copy should consist of 5 sentences or more. Please try to answer each question given with clear explanation and detail. Please note i want three different drafts of this and don’t make them similar to avoid plagiarism.
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Write a response to this prompt that is, at least, five sentences long; a
longer response is preferred.
Question:
This section focuses on the high rates of success American indigenous
societies had with food production in order to support and make their
states highly functional and stable. While indigenous societies practiced
various forms of trade, it is not heavily emphasized in this part of the
book. Answer all or some of the following questions (you will need to
consider the ways some other global societies created wealth and
prosperity for themselves): In what way(s) did food production provide
an advantage to indigenous populations in the Americas that it didn’t in
many other parts of the world at this time? Why might it be important to
understand sophisticated agricultural production as a means to success?
How do you believe ag production changed societies in the Americas?
88 Dan Allosso and Tom Williford
As described in the Introduction, the people living in the
Americas had been separated from Eurasia for nearly 12,000
years, since the end of the Ice Age. During this period, Native
Americans experienced their own agricultural revolution
around the same time as Africans and Eurasians, but instead
of domesticating cattle, horses, sheep, goats, pigs, and
chickens–which were not native to the Americas–they
developed certain plants, creating three of the world’s current
top fve staple crops: corn, potatoes, and cassava, as well as
additional plants such as hot peppers, tomatoes, beans, cocoa,
and tobacco.
The pyramid of Kukulcán in Chichén Itzá
Reliable,
storable,
staple
food
supplies
are
a
necessary
precondition for long-term settlement and population growth
– in other words the creation of cities. Like the Europeans,
Africans, and Asians, once they had created a reliable food
supply, American natives built remarkable cities, especially in
Central and South America. From present-day Mexico’s
Yucatan Peninsula south through Guatemala, the Maya
developed a complex society which reached its most intense
gourishing during their “Classic Period” (250 CE-900 CE).
However, by the time the Spanish arrived, the Maya were living
in more separated independent city-states, seemingly having
abandoned some of their more impressive temples and
structures such as Chichén Itzá in Yucatan. This led to an
Modern World History 89
interpretation that the original society sueered a partial collapse
sometime around 900 CE due to feuding among these separate
cities.
However, more extensive surveying using recently developed
laser technology has revealed that the city-states were never that
separate during the Classic Period—there are new structures
and buildings that are revealed through this new research,
showing that the Mayan area was probably more populated than
previously calculated. To support such a population, the Maya
used raised irrigated felds, creating canals—and again, more
recent research has revealed that they bred a certain kind of
fsh to use as fertilizer, in addition to water plants and algae. In
mountainous areas, the Maya terraced the hillsides to provide
gat areas for planting.
Religion and governance intertwined in Maya society, and
stories of gods and goddesses were fundamental in the building
of temples and determining the best times for planting and
harvest. The Maya origin story, Popul Vuh, is surprisingly similar
to that found in the Judeo-Christian Book of Genesis. Corn
and the god related to corn were the principal concern for
Maya religion and society. To record their beliefs and run their
complex society, the Maya developed a written language based
on 800 hieroglyphs that represented dieerent syllables. They
also developed a base-20 number system that included “zero”
centuries before the concept was introduced into Western
Europe. The preciseness of Maya mathematics, along with the
importance of the stars and planets to their religious beliefs,
allowed the Maya to be more advanced than the Europeans in
astronomy and to develop a more exact calendar.
Mayan religious beliefs included scraping down and
redecorating their temples every sixty years. One famous
carved calendar used to calculate the precise time for this
renovation and other key ceremonies ended on December 21,
2012, leading many to believe that the Maya had predicted the
end of the world. In reality, it seems that the astronomers had
simply run out of room on that particular calendar.
Questions for Discussion
90 Dan Allosso and Tom Williford
•
Is it signiQcant that several pre-Columbian cultures were not
at their peaks when the Europeans arrived?
•
How does the existence of a written language alter how we
think of people’s level of civilization?
An 1.8 meter high Olmec Head from San Lorenzo, carved of basalt, 1200–900 BCE.
Farther north in today’s Mexico, the Olmecs were among the
frst to form a complex society–they carved impressive statues
including large stone heads some 3,000 years ago. Another
society built the structures of Teotihuacan between 100 BCE
and 750 CE. The nearby twin Mexica Triple Alliance capitals
of Tenochtitlán and Texcoco, built in the 1320s in the Valley
of Mexico, each had more than 200,000 inhabitants when they
were frst encountered by the Spanish, making them as large
as Paris and Milan, Europe’s most populous cities at the time.
Tenochtitlán was built on an island in Lake Texcoco and was
connected to the lakeshore by a series of causeways.
Modern World History 91
The urban Aztecs had a lot
of people to feed. They
surrounded
their
island
capital of Tenochtitlán with
raised planting-beds called
chinampas
on
goating
platforms in Lake Texcoco.
This technique allowed Aztec
farmers to carefully control
soil fertility and watering.
The
Aztecs
were
so
concerned about the quality
of the water, they created a
dike across the lake that
separated the fresh water
around their city from the
Map of the Valley of Mexico when the
brackish water of the main
Spanish arrived, showing the chinampas
surrounding Tenochtitlán and in
lake to the east; and they
Xochimilco, where some persisted until the
drank water brought into the
present
city via an aqueduct from
springs in the hills overlooking the lake. The Aztecs supported
six people per acre using chinampas in the fteenth century. By
comparison, Chinese intensive rice farming, the most successful
agricultural technique known in Europe and Asia, supported
only about one person per acre at the same time.
Tiwanaku, located near the
shores of Lake Titicaca in
what are now the Bolivian
highlands, was built about
3,500 years ago. Its 30,000
inhabitants
developed
a
farming
technique
called
gooded-raised
feld
agriculture and covered the
hills around the lake with
Ancient terraces surrounding Lake Titicaca
walled terraces. Centuries later, the Incas maintained and
expanded by thousands of square miles these terraced farms
throughout the Andes to achieve a level of agricultural
production similar to the Aztecs. For example, surrounding
92 Dan Allosso and Tom Williford
Lake Titicaca in Bolivia there were terraces rising from the
lakeside elevation of 12,500 feet (nearly 3,700 meters). Dotting
the eastern slopes of the Andes were cities like the Inca capital
at Cusco and its nearby towns and villages, which were also
surrounded by terraced farms, many of which are still in use
today. These terraces were not only built and irrigated by hand
at extremely high altitudes, but guano from coastal islands
hundreds of miles away was carried in via well-built Inca roads
to fertilize the Andean farms. Many of these native cities have
been hidden and their buildings and terraces torn apart by
rainforest trees over the last fve centuries. Machu Picchu, a
smaller settlement located on a mountain peak about sixty
miles from Cusco, was only encountered by Westerners in 1911.
The fact that it had been undiscovered by the Spanish provided
a clearer picture of how the Inca had organized their
settlements, with terraces for agriculture and buildings made
of seamless stonework using large blocks of carved rock—far
superior to most European masonry at the time.
View of the residential section of Machu Picchu
Complex societies in the Americas were not restricted to just
the Aztec, Maya, and Inca. In Colombia there is evidence of
large ceremonial cities built in the northern highlands near
Modern World History 93
the Caribbean Coast before the arrival of the Spanish, while
other indigenous groups built complex irrigation systems in
the lowlands just oe the Caribbean Coast. The Muisca in the
eastern highlands of present-day Colombia, settled at a high
altitude, around 8000 feet (2600 meters) above sea level. They
cultivated corn and quinoa on the extensive gatland valleys
between the mountains, controlled extensive salt deposits, and
traded salt for gold, emeralds, fruits and other lowland products
with neighboring indigenous groups. Their architecture was
impressive, but built with massive tree trunks rather than stone,
so that no examples survived the Spanish conquest.
The Muisca did not develop a writing system like the Maya
and Aztecs, but maintained religious rituals and beliefs focused
on ancestor worship and the sacredness of their kings. Each
year, at a round ceremonial lake outside of present-day Bogotá,
the Muisca king powdered himself in gold dust and dove into
the waters as a purifcation rite for the gods. This practice is the
origin of the myth of El Dorado, the “Golden Man,” sought by
the Spanish in their early explorations. Over time, Spaniards
such as Coronado came to believe they were searching for a city
of gold, which they never found.
Question for Discussion
•
Why are native agricultural systems so impressive?
The natives of North America also settled in complex societies
in various regions, based mainly on the cultivation of corn, wild
rice, squash, and pumpkins and on managing the environment
to promote the success of game animals. The traditional U.S.
and Canadian Thanksgiving dinner celebrates the native foods
of North America, including the turkey. Along the Mississippi
River and its tributaries, indigenous people lived mostly in
villages but occasionally gathered into cities and built mounds
like those found at Cahokia. The Algonquian and Iroquois were
semi-sedentary, living throughout what is now upstate New
York and southern Quebec and Ontario. By the time of contact
94 Dan Allosso and Tom Williford
with Europeans, the Iroquois had formed a confederacy of fve
major tribes. The Ojibwe and Dakota were also semi-sedentary,
living in settlements in the western Great Lakes region and on
the edge of the northern Great Plains. By the time of contact
with the Europeans, the Dakota dominated the Plains, where
they took advantage of the large herds of buealo as a source
of protein, clothing, and housing, while gathering wild rice and
cultivating corn and squash for carbohydrates. Many North
American forest-dwellers also developed the sap of the maple
tree as a key source of sugar.
Of course, all this agriculture and city-building and
civilization was happening in the Americas without anyone in
Europe, Asia, or Africa knowing about it. Although it is NOT
true that everybody believed the world was gat until Columbus
came along, some Europeans were unclear on the actual size of
the Earth, the existence of American continents and the Pacifc
not all Europeans were unaware
there was something valuable across
the Atlantic. It’s important to realize
that European exploration did not
BEGIN with Columbus. Around 1000
CE, fve hundred years before the
Italian explorer set out to discover a
new trade route to Asia for Spain,
Norse explorers from Europe and
Iceland had established a presence on
Greenland. The Greenland colony
lasted four hundred years and was a
base for exploration and settlement
even further west. Leif Erikson, son of
the Greenland colony’s leader Erik the
Red, began a colony in what is now
northern Newfoundland. For a long
time, historians thought Scandinavian
claims about a North American colony
called Vinland were just patriotic
Ocean. But
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