Article suitable for older students

A celebration of Mesoamerican achievements and advances

3rd Jan 2020

Artist’s impression of Tenochtitlan city centre

Perhaps we don’t spend enough time reflecting on just how impressive the achievements of Mesoamerican (and South American) peoples prior to the Spanish invasion were. Here’s a nice summary for you! It comes from the book Trans-Pacific Echoes & Resonances; Listening Once Again by Joseph Needham and Lu Gwei-Djen (1985), in their day both eminent scholars at Cambridge University.

‘We would want to be among the first to recognise the great artistic and liturgical [relating to public worship] sensibility of the Meso-american peoples. We salute their great achievements in architecture, especially the planning of ceremonial centres, and to a lesser extent in hydraulic engineering. They were the first masters of platinum metallurgy; and their potters invented many strange and subtle forms such as the stirrup-pots, the whistling jugs and the bifold and trifold double vessels. The hammock was their invention too.

‘We recognise that the whole world is indebted to them for a plethora of botanical discoveries - rubber, cocoa and chocolate, plant-drugs such as quinine and cocaine, tobacco, and food-plants such as maize and the potato. To put it in a nutshell, the Central and South American high cultures of antiquity were entirely worthy of comparison with what the Old World had achieved by the time of the Han, the Gupta, and the Hellenistic age. The fact is that the Amerindian high cultures were a human modality of their own, and those Spaniards who came among them first would have had the sensation, if they had ever heard of such literature, of treading in a world of imaginative science fiction. But it was real, and the Amerindian achievements deserve all our sympathy and praise.’

Of course this is just a sampler: we COULD add -
• terraced farming
• corbelled arches
• featherworking
• jade work
• mosaics
• astronomy
• calendars
• canoes
• dentistry
• water conservation
• writing systems
• base 20 mathematical system
• zero
• medical knowledge and techniques
• steam rooms
• pharmacology (medication with drugs)
• compulsory education
• vulcanization and rubber balls
And many more besides...!

Picture sources:-
• Main: from http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/tenochtitlan.htm
• Dam construction: illustration by Alberto Beltrán
• Maya mural: photo by Ian Mursell/Mexicolore
• Turquoise mosaic: photo courtesy of and copyright The Trustees of The British Museum.