Aztec, Maya and Inca History: every ruler, city and turning point, from Caral to today

Maize and the potato are domesticated (maize domesticated c. 10,000 to 7,000 radiocarbon years ago, on Mexico's Gulf Coast by c. 5300 BC; potato tubers in use by about 7,000 years ago)

Every civilization in this timeline rested on crops bred by nameless early farmers. Maize descends from teosinte, a wild grass native to the tropical Balsas River Valley of Michoacan and Guerrero, and was probably domesticated in southwestern Mexico between about 10,000 and 7,000 radiocarbon years ago. Plant microfossils from San Andres in Tabasco show it had reached the Gulf Coast by about 7,300 calendar years ago. In the Andes, a 2005 genetic study led by David Spooner traced all native cultivated potatoes to a single origin; its abstract places this in the northern part of a wild species group in Peru, and its discussion calls that the broad area of southern Peru. Maya lands were growing maize and beans in the Archaic period, between about 7000 and 2000 BC.

• The San Andres team, led by Mary Pohl with Dolores Piperno, argued from the shape of plant silica bodies called phytoliths that they had found maize and not its wild ancestor, and answered critics of the early dates in the same paper; molecular data they cite put domestication at about 9,100 calendar years ago.
• Spooner's team genotyped 261 wild and 98 native cultivated potato samples, and their single-origin result challenged older ideas of several separate domestications, though the authors admit that critics question whether such markers can settle the point.
• Sources describe the potato's homeland in slightly different terms: Spooner's paper says southern Peru, while a Dutch genebank summary says the region around Lake Titicaca and cites J. G. Hawkes (1990) for tubers in use about 7,000 years ago.

Sources: Pohl, Piperno, Pope and Jones: Microfossil evidence for pre-Columbian maize dispersals in the neotropics from San Andres, Tabasco, Mexico (PNAS, 2007); Spooner, McLean, Ramsay, Waugh and Bryan: A single domestication for potato (PNAS, 2005); Potato Genetic Resources Portal: Origin and taxonomy of potato; World History Encyclopedia: Maya Civilization; University of Wisconsin-Madison: A single origin for the cultivated potato (2005)

Caral, a pyramid city without pottery (city c. 2600 to 2000 BC; the wider Caral-Supe culture is dated from c. 3500 or 3000 to 1800 BC)

Caral lies in the Supe Valley on Peru's central coast, and carbon dating of plant fibre, including reed bags used to haul its building stone, gave a date of 2627 BC. Its upper half has six monumental complexes, each built around a pyramid, and its lower half has small pyramids and a Temple of the Amphitheater. Estimates give the city about 3,000 residents, with perhaps 20,000 in the valley's 19 other temple complexes. Max Uhle saw the site in 1905 without recognising the hills as pyramids, and Paul Kosok studied it in 1948, but its age was doubted until Ruth Shady's excavations and the radiocarbon dates she published with Jonathan Haas and Winifred Creamer in Science in 2001. Shady describes a society built on trade, and Wikipedia's account reports no battlements or weapons found there.

• Caral belongs to a wider culture of as many as 30 centres in the Fortaleza, Pativilca and Supe valleys, which had no ceramics at all; a 2004 Nature study by Haas, Creamer and Alvaro Ruiz placed large-scale development from about 3200 BC.
• Irrigated cotton for fishing nets and textiles was a key crop, and seafood mattered, but a 2022 study found plant foods made up over 70 percent of the diet at Caral, which weakens the older idea of a purely maritime foundation.
• Excavators found bone flutes radiocarbon dated to 2170 BC, give or take 90 years, and a knotted textile identified as a quipu; that quipu remains a single undeciphered find that has not been formally published.

Sources: Wikipedia: Caral; Wikipedia: Caral-Supe civilization; Field Museum release via ScienceDaily (2001): Field Museum Anthropologists Establish Date And Importance Of The Americas' Oldest City; Mesoweb Reports: Caral, Earliest City in the New World

San Lorenzo and the Olmec colossal heads (San Lorenzo c. 1400 to 900 BC, at its height c. 1200 to 900 BC (another survey says 1200 to 850 BC); most heads c. 1500 to 1000 BC)

San Lorenzo in Veracruz was the largest city in Mesoamerica from about 1200 to 900 BC, with buried stone drains and a palace floored in red-stained sand and roofed on 4-metre basalt columns. Seventeen confirmed colossal heads are known: ten from San Lorenzo, four from La Venta, two from Tres Zapotes and one from La Cobata. Their stated heights start at 1.17 or 1.47 metres, depending on the passage in Wikipedia's survey, and reach 3.4 metres; the largest, at La Cobata, is estimated at 40 tons. Each face is distinctive, many wear helmet-like headdresses, and they are generally read as portraits of powerful rulers. The people's own name for themselves is unknown; Olmec is an Aztec word meaning rubber people.

• The basalt came from the Tuxtla Mountains, without wheels or pack animals; World History Encyclopedia says some stone travelled 80 km or more, probably on rafts, while another survey gives more than 150 km.
• Jose Maria Melgar y Serrano found the first head at Tres Zapotes in 1862, but it drew little attention until Matthew Stirling excavated it in 1938 and began the first archaeological study of Olmec culture.
• Michael Coe and Richard Diehl first took San Lorenzo's battered monuments as signs of revolt or conquest, but Diehl later argued that much of the damage was recarving and reuse; the city's decline around 900 BC remains unexplained, and rivers changing course may have played a part.

Sources: World History Encyclopedia: Olmec Civilization; Wikipedia: Olmec colossal heads; Wikipedia: San Lorenzo Tenochtitlan; Encyclopedia.com: San Lorenzo; Encyclopedia.com: Olmecs

Chavin de Huantar (c. 1200 to 500 or 200 BC; World History Encyclopedia dates the culture 900 to 200 BC, while a radiocarbon review led by John Rick says the temple stopped functioning by about 500 BC)

Chavin de Huantar stands where the Mosna and Huanchecsa rivers meet in the Peruvian highlands, and its influence spread without any evidence of a Chavin army or conquests. Dates vary between sources: one has building begun before 1200 BC and most of it finished by 750 BC, while another puts the Old Temple around 750 BC and the New Temple around 500 BC. At the heart of the Old Temple's maze stands the Lanzon, a 4.5-metre stone shaped like an Andean foot plough and carved as a fanged, clawed being. Stone channels run through the complex, and the art shows animals of the distant lowland jungle. World History Encyclopedia puts its decline around the third century BC, possibly from drought and earthquakes, but a radiocarbon review by John Rick's team says it had stopped working as a temple by about 500 BC.

• More than 100 stone tenon heads survive from the New Temple's outer walls, and as a series they change step by step from human to jaguar; World History Encyclopedia says shamans at Chavin used hallucinogenic plants.
• Julio Tello, the Peruvian archaeologist, called the site the birthplace of South American culture in the early 20th century, believing Chavin to be the oldest highland culture.
• John Rick has argued that temple priests used the architecture deliberately to win followers; a 2019 camera survey reached a system of 35 linked tunnels believed older than the known galleries, named for a stone bowl carved with a condor's head.

Sources: World History Encyclopedia: Chavin Civilization; HeritageDaily (M. Milligan): Hidden tunnels discovered beneath Chavin de Huantar temple complex; Wikipedia: Chavin de Huantar; Rick, Mesia, Contreras, Kembel, Rick, Sayre and Wolf: La cronologia de Chavin de Huantar y sus implicancias para el Periodo Formativo (Boletin de Arqueologia PUCP, 2009); Encyclopedia.com: Chavin

The Cascajal Block (c. 900 BC by the pottery found with it, though it was not recovered in place; found in the late 1990s, published 2006)

Road builders uncovered this serpentinite slab, about 36 by 21 by 13 cm and weighing 11.5 kg, in a debris pile at a Veracruz gravel quarry in the late 1990s; one report says 1999. Mexican archaeologists Carmen Rodriguez and Ponciano Ortiz registered it, and the find appeared in Science on 15 September 2006. Its face carries 62 signs, 28 of them distinct by one count, and they run in horizontal rows, unlike later writing in the region. Pottery shards and figurines found with it point to the San Lorenzo phase, which ended about 900 BC. Nobody can read it, and scholars still disagree over whether it is writing at all.

• Supporters including Stephen Houston and Karl Taube saw it as a real early script, while Karen Bruhns and Nancy Kelker raised doubts in a 2007 Science letter, noting that it came from bulldozer debris and is unique among Olmec objects.
• Critics stress the lost context, and David Grove said its horizontal rows made it look like a fake; a 2019 archaeometric study by Englehardt and colleagues linked the stone to Tehuitzingo in Puebla and reported a weathered surface and microscopic manufacturing traces.
• Freidel and Reilly argued in 2010 that the signs show sacred objects used in ritual and not a script, reading the block as an arrangement of such objects.

Sources: Science News Explores: Oldest Writing in the New World; Wikipedia: Cascajal Block; Science News (2006): Scripted Stone, Ancient block may bear Americas' oldest writing; Scientific American (2006): Stone Etchings Represent Earliest New World Writing

La Venta and the buried offerings (main occupation c. 900 to 400 BC)

After San Lorenzo declined, La Venta became the leading Olmec centre, built on an island in a coastal swamp above a former river. Its Great Pyramid is about 30 to 34 metres high by different surveys, contains an estimated 100,000 cubic metres of earth and has never been excavated. Complex A held more than 50 caches, including five Massive Offerings of serpentine blocks; the third is estimated at about 50 tons of finished stone under 4,000 tons of clay. Its heads faced outward along a symmetrical plan on a north-south axis, and one estimate has at least 18,000 people supporting the site at its height. La Venta was nearly abandoned by the start of the fourth century BC, and many of its monuments were deliberately destroyed around then.

• Altar 4, about 2 metres high, is now read as a throne: its central figure sits in a creature's mouth holding a rope tied to figures on its sides, whom some see as ancestors and others as captives.
• A burned layer on the Great Pyramid gave a radiocarbon date of 394 BC, give or take 30 years, close to the end of the site's main occupation.
• Monuments were moved to museums without markers showing where they had stood, and in 2009 vandals damaged nearly 30 pieces at the Parque-Museo La Venta in Villahermosa, including all four La Venta heads.

Sources: World History Encyclopedia: Olmec Civilization; Wikipedia: La Venta; Wikipedia: Olmec colossal heads; Encyclopedia.com: Olmecs

Paracas and the mummy bundles of Wari Kayan (c. 800 to 100 BC; burials at the Wari Kayan necropolis continued to c. AD 250)

The Paracas culture flourished on Peru's south coast before the Nazca, who inherited much of its tradition. In 1927 Julio Tello and Toribio Mejia Xesspe located the Wari Kayan necropolis on Cerro Colorado and recovered 429 mummy bundles, each a seated, cord-bound body wrapped in layers of textiles. About half have been opened; they held elite men and women, often with deliberately shaped skulls, along with feathered costumes, gold, food and pottery. Some burial cloths cover more than 1,000 square feet and might have taken one weaver an estimated 30,000 hours, though studies suggest such work was often collaborative. They are among the finest textiles ever made in the ancient Andes.

• Tello resigned as museum director for political reasons in September 1930, and looters then worked the cemeteries from 1931 to 1933; most Paracas textiles in foreign collections are thought to have left Peru in those years.
• A Swedish consul sent 100 Paracas textiles to Goteborg in that period, and after Peru asked for them in 2009 the first four were due home on 18 June 2014, with the rest to follow as conservation allowed; Bard Graduate Center confirms a return in 2014.
• Sources count the bundles slightly differently, 429 in the excavation accounts and about 420 in another summary, and Bard dates Tello's find to 1929 where Trafficking Culture says 1927, and Paracas skulls also show some of the earliest known surgical openings in the Americas.

Sources: Trafficking Culture: Paracas Textiles; Bard Graduate Center: Paracas Mummy Bundles; Wikipedia: Paracas culture

Monument 3 and the early Zapotec script (before c. 630 to 560 BC according to its excavators; other scholars argue for a much later date)

In 1975 Kent Flannery uncovered a carved relief at San Jose Mogote, the main centre of the Valley of Oaxaca before Monte Alban, showing a captive with a glyph and a numeral. Flannery and Joyce Marcus dated it by hearths lying above it, at about 630 to 560 BC, and treated it as an early use of hieroglyphic writing to record a captive's name. Robert Cahn and Marcus Winter reject this, arguing that the stone was not in its original position and belongs to the later Monte Alban II period. They also doubt how much it tells us about the origins of Mesoamerican writing and calendars. The argument matters for the history of writing in the Americas, since the stone has been widely cited on the origins of script and calendar.

• Flannery and Marcus use uncalibrated radiocarbon dates to chart early conflict in Oaxaca: a palisade at San Jose Mogote about 1310 BC, a burned temple there about 600 BC and a burned plaza at Tilcajete about 330 BC.
• They also report a skull rack with 61 skulls at La Coyotera in the Cuicatlan region, dated about 10 BC, and a fortress at Quiotepec about AD 40, as evidence of Zapotec campaigns beyond the valley.
• Carvings on Building J at Monte Alban may record conquests of neighbouring places, showing named hills written in the Zapotec script; Mesoweb presents this as a possibility, not a certainty.

Sources: Flannery and Marcus: The origin of war: New 14C dates from ancient Mexico (PNAS, 2003); Cahn and Winter: The San Jose Mogote Danzante (Indiana); Mesoweb: Monte Alban

Monte Alban, the Zapotec capital (founded c. 500 BC; largely abandoned by c. AD 900 to 1000)

Around 500 BC people moved up to an apparently empty hilltop 400 metres above the Valley of Oaxaca, as the population of San Jose Mogote dropped sharply; Joyce Marcus and Kent Flannery call this a synoikism, a gathering of communities into a new capital. Flannery and Marcus put the founders at 2,000 or more, and the city had an estimated 5,200 people by about 300 BC and 17,200 by the period around 100 BC to AD 200, when it was among the largest in Mesoamerica. Most of the architecture visible today dates from the Classic period, built over earlier monuments. It lost its political dominance in the Late Classic and was largely abandoned by about AD 900 to 1000. The city's end was not the end of its people, and Zapotec communities still live in Oaxaca today.

• More than 300 carved stones called Danzantes, or dancers, have been recorded; the 19th-century reading is largely discredited, and they are now interpreted as sacrificed captives, perhaps leaders of rival centres.
• Alfonso Caso excavated Tomb 7 in the early 1930s, a Classic Zapotec tomb reused for Mixtec elite burials in Postclassic times; many of its objects are in the regional museum in Oaxaca.
• Monte Alban's elite had contacts at the highest level with Teotihuacan, which had a neighbourhood of Zapotec people, and the ball court's central stone may have been used to start a game, as Ignacio Bernal noted Zapotec players start another ball game today.

Sources: Flannery and Marcus: The origin of war: New 14C dates from ancient Mexico (PNAS, 2003); Mesoweb: Monte Alban; Wikipedia: Monte Alban

The Nazca Lines (c. 500 BC to AD 500)

The lines were made by removing the dark stones of the desert surface to expose paler ground beneath, over several centuries between about 500 BC and AD 500. Together they run more than 1,300 km, and some straight lines reach about 20 km. Over 70 are animal or plant designs, including a hummingbird 93 metres long and a condor of 134 metres, and hundreds more are lines and geometric shapes. Paul Kosok noticed a bird shape in 1940 or 1941, and he and the mathematician Maria Reiche proposed that the lines were astronomical markers. The purpose is still debated; a widely held view is that people walked them in religious rites and processions.

• Hawkins and Aveni concluded in 1990 that the evidence for an astronomical purpose was insufficient, while Johan Reinhard tied the lines to the worship of water deities; the claim that aliens made them is pseudoscience, and the investigator Nickell reproduced the figures with ancient tools.
• In 2024 Yamagata University and IBM reported 303 new figures found with AI, bringing the known total on the pampa to 733; they average about 9 metres, and the small relief figures tend to lie near winding paths.
• UNESCO listed the site in 1994; in 2014 Greenpeace activists damaged the site by setting up a banner inside one geoglyph, and the group apologised.

Sources: Agencia Andina: Peru's Nazca Lines: 303 new geoglyphs discovered with help of AI; World History Encyclopedia: Nazca Civilization; Wikipedia: Nazca Lines

The Nazca: pilgrims, water tunnels and painted pots (c. 100 BC to AD 750; another account gives c. 200 BC to AD 600)

The Nazca grew out of the Paracas tradition in the dry valleys of Peru's south coast. Their great centre was Cahuachi, founded around 100 BC, a site of about 40 adobe mounds with no sign of ordinary housing, used for ceremony and pilgrimage. In the Middle Nazca period they built puquios, underground aqueducts that tapped groundwater, with access holes for maintenance; several dozen still work today. Their pottery was painted before firing with at least 12 colours of slip, showing gods, shamans and animals. Around AD 650 power in the region moved to the highland Wari, and the Nazca tradition faded.

• Cahuachi was abandoned at the end of Nazca 3 or early Nazca 4, which is associated with a drought across the Andes; World History Encyclopedia places the drought in the 5th century AD.
• One theory holds that clearing Prosopis trees for maize and cotton fields left the land open to erosion, so that an El Nino flood around AD 750 could wreck the irrigation systems; this remains a reconstruction and not a record.
• Trophy heads, with a hole in the forehead for a cord, are found in caches with burials and in Nazca art, and over 100 mummified examples are known; accounts disagree on whether their numbers peaked in the Middle or Late period.

Sources: World History Encyclopedia: Nazca Civilization; Wikipedia: Nazca culture; Wikipedia: Nazca Lines

Teotihuacan, the great city (founded c. 100 BC; dominant c. AD 300 to 550)

Teotihuacan grew from a settlement of about 600 BC into a planned city of about 20 to 21 square kilometres, its Avenue of the Dead running some 3.2 km through the centre. Population estimates start at 25,000; George Cowgill uses about 100,000, one survey says at least 125,000, and World History Encyclopedia gives as many as 200,000. Its people lived in compounds on a grid, and migrants settled here: a neighbourhood called Tlailotlacan was largely Oaxacan, with Zapotec-style goods, and a Merchants' Barrio held Gulf Coast pottery. Obsidian was a major source of its wealth. In AD 378 a warlord from this world appears in Maya inscriptions at Tikal, about 1,000 km away, so its reach went far beyond central Mexico.

• Teotihuacan is the Aztecs' Nahuatl name, often glossed as birthplace of the gods; Thelma Sullivan renders it as place of those who have the road of the gods.
• Its murals are true frescoes showing processions, water and warriors with spear-throwers and rectangular shields; a group of more than 30 signs at La Ventilla suggests a writing system, and a partial decipherment was proposed in October 2025.
• UNESCO lists the site, and modern development is a recurring threat: a Wal-Mart was built in its outer archaeological zone in 2004, and in 2021 federal forces seized land used for illegal construction.

Sources: World History Encyclopedia: Teotihuacan; David Stuart (Mesoweb): The Arrival of Strangers; Wikipedia: Teotihuacan; George Cowgill (FAMSI, 2002): Ritual Sacrifice and the Feathered Serpent Pyramid at Teotihuacan; Encyclopedia.com: Teotihuacan

Stela C and the first Long Count dates (36 BC or AD 182 (Chiapa de Corzo Stela 2, reading uncertain) and 32 BC (Tres Zapotes Stela C))

In 1939 Matthew Stirling found the lower half of Stela C at Tres Zapotes, with a Long Count date missing its first digit. Marion Stirling argued the digit was a 7, giving a date in 32 BC, and when the top half turned up in 1969 it supported her reading. The only clearly older date proposed is on Stela 2 at Chiapa de Corzo, from 36 BC, though it can also be read as AD 182; a damaged date at Takalik Abaj may be older still. The Long Count counts days from a starting point in August 3114 BC, in units that rise from 1 day and 20 days to 360 days and then by twenties. These early dates come from outside the Maya homeland, so the system was shared across several Mesoamerican peoples.

• The back of Stela C holds one of the few surviving examples of the Epi-Olmec script, and the stone's two halves are now split between the Tres Zapotes village museum and Mexico City.
• The Olmec were once proposed as the inventors of the zero that the Long Count implies, but their civilization ended by the 4th century BC, centuries before these dates, so one survey rejects the idea.
• The first monument that is unequivocally Maya with a Long Count date is Tikal Stela 29, from AD 292, more than three centuries after Stela C.

Sources: Wikipedia: Tres Zapotes; Wikipedia: Mesoamerican Long Count calendar; Wikipedia: Maya numerals; World History Encyclopedia: Maya Civilization

The Pyramid of the Sun (built c. AD 100 to 200 (sources differ))

The Pyramid of the Sun is the largest building at Teotihuacan, about 215 to 230 metres along each side at the base. Published heights range from about 60 metres (World History Encyclopedia) to 75 metres (Wikipedia, which also gives 65.5 and 71.17). World History Encyclopedia dates it to about AD 100 and another account to about AD 200, in two phases, with the first bringing it nearly to its present size. Its alignment points north to the mountain Cerro Gordo and, at right angles, to sunrises and sunsets on particular dates.

• In 1971 Ernesto Taboada found an entrance to a pit at the foot of the main staircase, leading to a cave beneath the pyramid; it was first taken for a natural lava tube, but more recent work suggests it is man-made and may have been a royal tomb.
• Children's burials found at the pyramid's corners are believed to belong to a dedication ritual.
• The Aztecs treated the ruined city as the place where the gods created the present age, and World History Encyclopedia reports that the Aztec ruler Moctezuma made pilgrimages there.

Sources: World History Encyclopedia: Teotihuacan; Wikipedia: Pyramid of the Sun; Wikipedia: Teotihuacan

The Moche of Peru's north coast (c. AD 100 to 800 (one account begins c. AD 1, another c. 200 to 100 BC with collapse between AD 600 and 750))

The Moche lived along about 250 miles of desert coast, using canals to bring river water to their fields; many of those canal lines still work. At their southern centre, the Huaca del Sol used over 140 million adobe bricks, each stamped with a maker's mark, and the nearby Huaca de la Luna about 50 million. Their potters moulded portrait vessels thought to show real people, and their metalworkers plated copper with gold and silver. Many scholars now think the Moche were not a single empire but a group of independent polities sharing a culture, and others debate whether they were a state at all. Extreme weather around AD 563 to 594, possibly a major El Nino, may have disrupted them, and later settlements show fortifications.

• Moche iconography and skeletons show that ritual killing was central to their religion, and scholars disagree whether the victims were rival elites or captured warriors; a link between some sacrifices and El Nino has been proposed but is not proven.
• World History Encyclopedia says one man with a cut lip appears on over 40 portrait vessels, among the clearest signs that these were images of individuals.
• The Huaca de la Luna holds about 10,000 square metres of painted murals, with a new platform built over the old about every 100 years for six centuries; the Huaca del Sol was badly damaged in colonial times, the 16th or 17th century by different accounts, when Spanish looters diverted the Moche River to get at its tombs.

Sources: World History Encyclopedia: Moche Civilization; Wikipedia: Moche culture; Wikipedia: Huaca de la Luna; Encyclopedia.com: Moche

The sacrifices at the Feathered Serpent Pyramid (c. AD 200, the early third century)

The Feathered Serpent Pyramid stands inside the Ciudadela, a huge enclosed plaza at Teotihuacan. Excavations by Saburo Sugiyama, Ruben Cabrera and George Cowgill in 1988 and 1989 documented the remains of some 137 individuals, buried at ground level or in pits. Adding INAH finds from 1993 and 1994 and allowing for unexcavated areas, Cowgill estimated about 200 in all, killed when the pyramid was built, probably in the early third century AD. The groups include men with spear points and military dress, young women, and men with rich offerings suggesting high status. Large pits were also looted in early times, so we cannot tell if a ruler or high priest lay here.

• Cowgill, citing isotope studies by White and colleagues, argued that many victims had spent much of their lives outside Teotihuacan, and that they may have been foreigners serving a ruler, perhaps as guards, not captives taken in battle.
• In 2003 Sergio Gomez Chavez discovered a tunnel under the pyramid after a sinkhole opened; researchers believe it was sealed about AD 200, and by 2015 some 75,000 artefact fragments had been catalogued.
• These counts come from excavation and not from later written accounts, which makes them firmer than most Mesoamerican sacrifice figures, though the true total is still an estimate.

Sources: George Cowgill (FAMSI, 2002): Ritual Sacrifice and the Feathered Serpent Pyramid at Teotihuacan; World History Encyclopedia: Teotihuacan; Wikipedia: Teotihuacan

The Lord of Sipan (buried c. AD 300; tomb excavated from 1987)

In 1987 looters found gold at the Huaca Rajada near Sipan, and a dispute among them brought a police raid and a call to the archaeologist Walter Alva. Alva's team went on to find an intact tomb, the first untouched Moche royal burial. The man inside was about 1.63 metres tall and between 35 and 45 years old, adorned in gold and silver, including a face mask and pectoral. Six other people were buried with him, three young women, two men thought to be warriors and a child, with another man in a niche above, along with 451 ceremonial objects. His name is unknown; Lord of Sipan is a modern title.

• A second tomb found in 1988 held a likely priest, a third belonged to the Old Lord of Sipan, linked to him through the maternal line, and by 2007 fourteen tombs had been identified at Huaca Rajada.
• The Royal Tombs of Sipan Museum opened in Lambayeque in 2002 with Alva as its director.
• In 2005 a mummified Moche woman, the Lady of Cao, was found at Huaca Cao Viejo in an elaborately decorated tomb, so the elite burials of the Moche were not all of men.

Sources: World History Encyclopedia: Moche Civilization; Wikipedia: Lord of Sipan; Wikipedia: Moche culture

The burning of Teotihuacan (c. AD 550 to 600)

Around AD 550 to 600 the major monuments of Teotihuacan were sacked and systematically burned, and artworks and religious sculptures were smashed. No written account tells us who did it. Scholars once favoured foreign invaders but now lean toward internal unrest, partly because the burning seems limited to palaces, temples and other buildings tied to the ruling class. Suggested stresses include drought, the extreme weather of 535 and 536, resource scarcity, deforestation and soil erosion. The wider city stayed inhabited for about two more centuries, but it never recovered its power over the region.

• The city's end as a power did not end its name: Maya kings at Calakmul were still displaying Teotihuacan-style war insignia and modelling themselves on its legendary figures long after its influence had gone.
• Roughly a thousand years after its height, the Aztecs visited the ruins and treated them as the origin of civilization, which is why we know the place by a Nahuatl name.
• World History Encyclopedia dates the burning to about AD 600 and Wikipedia's account to about AD 550, while George Cowgill ends the city's flourishing about AD 650 and one survey keeps it a power until about 750, so the chronology of the end is still imprecise.

Sources: Estrada-Belli, Balanzario and Velasquez: The rise of the Kaanul kingdom and the city of Dzibanche (Ancient Mesoamerica, 2024); World History Encyclopedia: Teotihuacan; Wikipedia: Teotihuacan; George Cowgill (FAMSI, 2002): Ritual Sacrifice and the Feathered Serpent Pyramid at Teotihuacan; Encyclopedia.com: Teotihuacan

San Bartolo: the earliest Maya writing and murals (writing c. 300 to 200 BC; main murals c. 100 BC)

In March 2001 William Saturno, working for Harvard's Peabody Museum, travelled into the Guatemalan jungle to document hieroglyphic monuments and ducked into a looters' trench to escape the heat. On its wall he saw part of a painted scene of the maize god, at first dated to about AD 100 and later carbon-dated to about 100 BC. The room lies within the pyramid called Las Pinturas, and the later building partly destroyed the paintings. One wall shows the maize god among scenes of creation, and another shows figures read as kings drawing their own blood. Nearby finds include the earliest identifiably Maya inscriptions, from the third century BC.

• Fragments from the site carry the date 7 Deer in the 260-day ritual calendar, dated 300 to 200 BC, the earliest known calendar notation in the Maya region, as David Stuart, Heather Hurst, Boris Beltran and Saturno reported in Science Advances in 2022, with 10 other text fragments in several scribal hands.
• Hurst, an archaeological artist, redrew the murals from scans; Harvard's Peabody Museum showed digital scans at real size in its 2008 exhibition Storied Walls.
• San Bartolo shows that Maya writing, kingship and myth were already established centuries before the Classic period and the great Long Count monuments of Tikal.

Sources: Urquizu and Hurst: The Murals of San Bartolo (PARI Journal); Harvard Gazette (2002): Jungle ordeal leads to surprise treasure; Harvard Gazette (2008): The story behind Storied Walls; Wikipedia: San Bartolo (Maya site); Stuart, Hurst, Beltran and Saturno: An Early Maya Calendar Record from San Bartolo, abstract (Science Advances, 2022, at Maya Decipherment)

El Mirador and the Preclassic giants (peak from the 3rd century BC; abandoned c. AD 150, partly reoccupied c. AD 700)

El Mirador was occupied from about 1000 BC, and it peaked from the third century BC. Its La Danta complex rises about 72 metres from the forest floor and contains about 2.8 million cubic metres of fill, which makes it one of the largest pyramids in the world; the El Tigre complex rises about 55 metres. Raised white roads, 2 to 6 metres high and 20 to 50 metres wide, ran to Nakbe, about 12 km away, and to El Tintal, about 20 km away. Around AD 150 El Mirador and nearly all the main sites of the region were abandoned, after a large wall was added to part of the city. Deforestation and erosion, partly from burning lime for stucco, may have contributed; the cause is not established.

• Richard Hansen, who directs the Mirador Basin Project, believes the more than 45 mapped sites in the basin may have formed the earliest well-defined political state in Mesoamerica; that is his interpretation, not a settled finding.
• Monumental building in the Maya area began even earlier: Aguada Fenix in Tabasco, found by Takeshi Inomata's team with lidar, is an earthen platform over 4,500 feet long dated about 1000 to 800 BC.
• Wikipedia dates Hansen's major investigation and conservation programs at the site from 2003, and scholars including Estrada-Belli's team discuss proposed but debated links between El Mirador and the origins of the Kaanul dynasty.

Sources: Archaeology Magazine (2020): Giant Maya Structure Discovered in Mexico; Estrada-Belli, Balanzario and Velasquez: The rise of the Kaanul kingdom and the city of Dzibanche (Ancient Mesoamerica, 2024); Wikipedia: El Mirador

Maya numbers, zero and the Long Count (first securely Maya Long Count monument AD 292 (Tikal Stela 29); dated monuments continue into the 9th and 10th centuries)

Maya mathematics used three signs, a dot for one, a bar for five and a shell for zero, stacked by position in powers of twenty. Their calendar count bent the rule so that the third place was worth 360 days and not 400, close to the length of the year. The Long Count ran from a starting point in August 3114 BC, and the Maya carved it on stelae to fix the dates of royal lives. Calendars like this were shared across Mesoamerica, and the first Long Count dates come from outside the Maya heartland. The first unequivocally Maya example is Tikal Stela 29, from AD 292, and the count became widespread on Maya monuments.

• The current great cycle ended on 21 December 2012; only two known Maya texts mention it, and specialists call the doomsday reading a modern invention. Early ninth-century tables at Xultun, Guatemala, show scribes calculating in Long Count periods, and their report warns against tying them to 2012.
• No Long Count date that visibly uses a zero appears before the third century AD, though the system implies a placeholder existed earlier.
• The system's units were the k'in (1 day), winal (20 days), tun (360 days), k'atun (20 tun) and b'ak'tun (20 k'atun, or 144,000 days).

Sources: World History Encyclopedia: Maya Civilization; Wikipedia: Mesoamerican Long Count calendar; Wikipedia: Maya numerals; Mesoweb Reports (2012): Unearthing the Heavens, Classic Maya Murals and Astronomical Tables at Xultun

The arrival of strangers at Tikal (January 378 (Long Count 8.17.1.4.12))

Inscriptions record that a lord named Sihyaj K'ahk', Fire is Born, arrived at Tikal in January 378, and Tikal Stela 31 says the Tikal king died on the same day. David Stuart reads the verb as arrived, with no war glyph in the four relevant texts, yet he suggests a military force may have overthrown the dynasty, and he marks that as speculation. Stuart sees Sihyaj K'ahk' as a foreigner probably from Teotihuacan, about 1,000 km away, and he appears in the texts of Uaxactun as well. Within about a year a new boy king ruled Tikal, shown in Teotihuacan dress. Whether this was invasion, alliance or something between is still actively debated.

• Stela 24 at Naachtun names a local ruler as Sihyaj K'ahk's subordinate and gives dates two days before the arrival at Tikal, which Stuart reads as a hint of political arrangements already in place in the Peten, not necessarily an itinerary.
• Stuart notes that his own account gives two modern equivalents for the day, 14 and 16 January 378, and the Long Count date is the firm record.
• Stuart suggested that the warrior may have come by way of El Peru to the west, though he marks that point with a question mark.

Sources: David Stuart (Mesoweb): The Arrival of Strangers; David Stuart, Maya Decipherment (May 2014): Naachtun's Stela 24 and the Entrada of 378; Wikipedia: Siyaj K'ak'; Wikipedia: Teotihuacan

Yax Nuun Ahiin I (acceded 12 September 379; died perhaps 17 June 404 (another account says 420))

Yax Nuun Ahiin I (also read Nun Yax Ayin), nicknamed Curl Nose, Ruler · Tikal

Yax Nuun Ahiin took the throne of Tikal a little over a year after the arrival of Sihyaj K'ahk'. His father is named on the monuments as Spearthrower Owl and not the previous Tikal king, and Stuart proposes that Spearthrower Owl may have been a ruler at Teotihuacan. He may have been a child or youth when he was crowned. Stelae 4 and 18 show him in Mexican rather than Maya dress. Stela 31, set up by his son, depicts him as a Teotihuacan warrior with a plated helmet, spear-thrower and square shield.

How they came to power: He became king in 379, after the death of the previous king on the day of the arrival of Sihyaj K'ahk'. Stela 4 appears to name Sihyaj K'ahk' as his overlord, and Stuart suggests the older man may have acted as regent.

How it ended: The cause is unknown and the date uncertain. Wikipedia's account gives 17 June 404 with a question mark, citing Stela 31 for a burial that year and a possible interregnum before his son's accession in 411; World History Encyclopedia gives AD 420.

• University of Pennsylvania archaeologists found his probable tomb, Burial 10, in the 1950s, deep within a temple at the foot of the North Acropolis; World History Encyclopedia says nine sacrificial victims were buried with him, and Wikipedia says at least nine youths.
• His wife's name is given as Lady K'inich, and her titles suggest she may have been a Maya woman.
• His son Sihyaj Chan K'awiil II succeeded him and raised Stela 31, which sets the family's Teotihuacan connection in stone a generation later.

Sources: David Stuart (Mesoweb): The Arrival of Strangers; World History Encyclopedia: Tikal; Wikipedia: Yax Nuun Ahiin I

K'inich Yax K'uk' Mo' (installed AD 426; died between 435 and 437)

K'inich Yax K'uk' Mo', founder of the Copan dynasty, Founder and ruler · Copan, Honduras

Copan's later kings traced their line to K'inich Yax K'uk' Mo', recorded as a foreigner inaugurated in 426 who reached the city the next year. Altar Q, dedicated in 776 by Yax Pasaj Chan Yopaat, shows the sixteen kings of the line seated on their name glyphs, with the founder dressed as a Teotihuacan warrior with goggle eyes. Strontium and oxygen isotopes from the teeth in the Hunal Tomb, beneath the Acropolis, indicate that the roughly 55-year-old man buried there did not grow up at Copan. So later kings' claims about a foreign founder have some physical support. His line ruled until the early ninth century.

How they came to power: He was probably installed after a coup organised from Tikal, and he may have married into the local royal family. He took the title ochk'in kaloomte, Lord of the West, used a generation earlier by Sihyaj K'ahk', the Teotihuacan-linked warlord of Tikal.

How it ended: He died between about 435 and 437; the cause is unknown. The Hunal Tomb is identified as his.

• T. Douglas Price's team proposed he was born at Caracol and spent young adulthood at Tikal, while Arlen and Diane Chase, who direct work at Caracol, doubt the Tikal stage, and David Stuart noted a Copan inscription calling him a Caracol lord; the point remains open.
• Bone analysis suggests that his presumed widow was a local Copan woman, which fits the idea of a foreign founder marrying into the city.
• Rosalila, a temple phase with a deciphered date of AD 571, built over five earlier ones and found almost intact by Ricardo Agurcia, honours him with its painted stucco and shows how his memory shaped Copan for generations.

Sources: Science News: Ancient Maya king shows his foreign roots; Wikipedia: Copan; Wikipedia: Siyaj K'ak'

The Snake Kingdom and the fall of Tikal in 562 (hegemony c. AD 520 to 751; Tikal defeated AD 562; seat moved to Calakmul in the 630s)

The Kaanul or Snake dynasty ruled a hegemonic state over much of the Classic Maya lowlands from about AD 520 to 751, at its largest perhaps 210,000 square kilometres. Its early court was at Dzibanche in southern Quintana Roo, where 12 potential royal tombs date from about AD 400 to 630. In 562 Tikal was defeated by Kaanul and Caracol, and a long silence fell on its monuments; recent work suggests K'ahk' Ti' Ch'ich' may have led that war, not the king known as Sky Witness. After a crisis the dynasty moved to Calakmul between about 631 and 636. There Yuknoom Ch'een II, called the Great, ruled from 636 to 686 and defeated Tikal again in 657.

• Scholars have identified around 35 women in Maya texts, from various ruling families, who married outside their dynasties, and the Snake lords used the strategy more than most; one, Lady K'abel of Waka', is shown as a warrior queen on stelae now in the Cleveland Museum of Art and the Kimbell Art Museum.
• The dynasty struck Palenque in 599 and 611, and it supported rival kings at Dos Pilas in its long struggle with Tikal.
• After defeat by Tikal in 695 Calakmul declined through the eighth century; its last monument dates from AD 909, and the site lay hidden until chicle gatherers led Cyrus Lundell there in 1931.

Sources: Estrada-Belli, Balanzario and Velasquez: The rise of the Kaanul kingdom and the city of Dzibanche (Ancient Mesoamerica, 2024); Archaeology Magazine (B. Alex, 2023): Jungle Realm of the Snake Queens; National Geographic: The hidden ruins of the great Maya Snake Kingdom; Wikipedia: Kaan kingdom; Wikipedia: Yuknoom Ch'een II

Pakal the Great (born 23 March 603; reigned 26 July 615 to 28 August 683 (Mesoweb; Wikipedia's dates run one day later))

K'inich Janaab Pakal I, Ruler · Palenque

Pakal came to the throne at about twelve, not long after Kaanul invasions had shaken Palenque. Over 68 years he expanded the city's power. He began its great Palace in 654, with buildings raised around the East Court, an unusual royal focus for a Maya city. In 659 he recorded taking six prisoners, whose figures line the base of House C, and the ruler of Santa Elena came to Palenque as a captive. The Temple of the Inscriptions, completed about 682, became his tomb.

How they came to power: He took the throne on 26 July 615, aged twelve, about three years after the death of Ajen Yohl Mat, which followed the Kaan invasion of 611. Mesoweb says both his parents may have held power during and after his minority; Wikipedia stresses his mother Sak K'uk'.

How it ended: He died on 28 August 683, aged about 80, and was deified and buried in the Temple of the Inscriptions.

• Alberto Ruz Lhuillier found a hidden staircase in the temple and spent four field seasons clearing it, reaching the sealed tomb in 1952.
• Ruz read the bones as those of a man in his forties or fifties, but a 2003 team led by Vera Tiesler concluded that he lived to about 80, in agreement with the inscriptions.
• Erich von Daniken used the carved sarcophagus lid in 1968 to argue for extraterrestrial influence, a claim archaeologists widely reject.

Sources: Mesoweb: Advanced Age Confirmed for Pakal of Palenque; Mesoweb: K'inich Janaab Pakal I, Los Gobernantes de Palenque; Institute of Maya Studies: The Story Behind the Story of the Discovery of the Tomb of K'inich Janaab' Pakal; World History Encyclopedia: Palenque; Wikipedia: K'inich Janaab Pakal I

Maize, terraces and the crowded Maya lowlands (Late Classic peak c. AD 650 to 800; lidar survey published 2018)

A lidar survey of 2,144 square kilometres of Guatemala's Maya Biosphere Reserve, published in Science in 2018 by Marcello Canuto and colleagues, mapped 61,480 ancient structures. Tulane University's summary adds 362 square kilometres of terraces and other modified farmland, 952 square kilometres of viable farmland, and long raised causeways. Sizeable defensive earthworks point to the scale of war. From this the team estimated 7 to 11 million people in the wider lowlands at the Late Classic peak, an extrapolation from a sample rather than a count.

• Tikal had no water except rain stored in about ten reservoirs, and its population estimates range from 10,000 to 90,000; sediment cores also show severe mercury contamination from cinnabar pigments.
• The Maya are not a vanished people: World History Encyclopedia counts over six million today, and over 30 Mayan languages are listed, among them Q'eqchi', K'iche' and Yucatec with each more than 800,000 speakers.
• Bone chemistry from a Chichen Itza burial shows diets rich in maize, and modern villagers of Tixcacaltuyub in Yucatan show genetic continuity with those ancient people.

Sources: Barquera et al.: Ancient genomes reveal insights into ritual life at Chichen Itza (Nature, 2024); Wikipedia: Tikal; Wikipedia: List of Mayan languages; Tulane University: Unprecedented study confirms massive scale of lowland Maya civilization (2018); World History Encyclopedia: Maya Civilization

Lady Six Sky (arrived at Naranjo 27 August 682; died c. 10 or 11 February 741)

Wak Chanil Ajaw; possibly read Ix Wak Chan Jalam Ajaw Lem; the reading is still debated, Queen and regent · Naranjo (Sa'aal), from Dos Pilas

Lady Six Sky was a daughter of B'alaj Chan K'awiil of Dos Pilas, sent to Naranjo in 682 when the Snake lords of Calakmul wanted its dynasty refounded in their favour. She kept her Dos Pilas titles and never appears in Naranjo's official list of kings, yet she acted as its ruler for decades. Stelae 24 and 29 commemorate her rituals, and show her standing on a captive, a warrior king's pose unusual for a woman. Her son K'ahk' Tiliw Chan Chaak took the throne in 693, aged about five. Between 693 and 698 Naranjo launched at least eight attacks, and scholars think she directed them.

How they came to power: Her arrival in 682 is recorded on Stela 24, and rituals followed three days later. Some accounts make it a marriage to Naranjo's king, whose fate is unknown; others stress a refounding of the dynasty.

How it ended: She probably died around 10 or 11 February 741, a date recorded at Dos Pilas. Her son died after 728, so she may have outlived him.

• Tatiana Proskouriakoff first recognised her name in the 1960s, and the reading has changed since; Lady Six Sky survives as a label.
• Scholars debate whether her wars were expansion or rivals testing a woman ruler, and whether Naranjo's claims to have burned cities were literal, though sediment from Bahlam Jol (Witzna) supports the burning there.
• Older accounts such as Mesoweb's note that no text then known called her K'ahk' Tiliw's mother; Stela 46, found in 2017, is now reported to state the relationship.

Sources: Mesoweb: Senora Seis Cielo, Los Gobernantes de Naranjo; Archaeology Magazine (B. Alex, 2023): Jungle Realm of the Snake Queens; Wikipedia: Wak Chanil Ajaw; Wikipedia: Naranjo; Wikipedia: Women rulers in Maya society

Jasaw Chan K'awiil I (reigned 3 May 682 to 734)

Jasaw Chan K'awiil I, also called Ruler A or Ah Cacao, Ruler · Tikal

Jasaw Chan K'awiil took the throne of Tikal in 682, when his city had been humiliated repeatedly by Calakmul. In 695 his army defeated Calakmul's king Yuknoom Yich'aak K'ahk', and a wooden lintel at Tikal says Jasaw brought down the enemy king's flint and shield. The balance of power in the Peten shifted strongly toward Tikal. He oversaw a great rebuilding of the city. He is remembered as one of its most celebrated rulers.

How they came to power: He was the son of Nuun Ujol Chaak and Lady Jaguar Seat. His father had lost wars against Calakmul and its Dos Pilas allies, and his accession followed a gap of about 130 years in Tikal's historical record.

How it ended: He died in 734, and the cause is unknown. Temple I is associated with him as Burial 116, and his son Yik'in Chan K'awiil followed him.

• Temple I, about 50 metres high with nine levels, rose over his tomb; sources disagree over whether it was built for that purpose, though World History Encyclopedia dates it to about 727.
• His wife, Lady Lahan Unen Mo', who died around 704, is buried in Temple II.
• The Calakmul king was once thought to have died or been captured in the battle, but inscriptions at La Corona show him alive in 696; a tomb in Calakmul's Structure II, found in 1997, held a jade mask and a plate naming him, and archaeologists propose it as his burial.

Sources: National Geographic: The hidden ruins of the great Maya Snake Kingdom; World History Encyclopedia: Tikal; Wikipedia: Jasaw Chan K'awiil I; Wikipedia: Yuknoom Yich'aak K'ahk'; Gonzalez Austria Noguez: Las vasijas de la tumba de Yuhknoom Yihch'aak K'ahk' de Calakmul (Indiana)

Waxaklajuun Ub'aah K'awiil (18 Rabbit) (reigned 695 to 3 May 738)

Waxaklajuun Ub'aah K'awiil, 13th ruler of Copan, Ruler · Copan, Honduras

Waxaklajuun Ub'aah K'awiil is considered the greatest patron of the arts in Copan's history. Between 711 and 736 he commissioned seven monuments, Stelae C, F, 4, H, A, B and D, each showing him in ritual pose. Stela A ranks Copan with Calakmul, Palenque and Tikal as one of the four great Maya powers. He also built on the Hieroglyphic Stairway, whose finished form has 62 steps and about 2,200 glyphs, the longest known Maya text. He dedicated his last work, a great ball court, in 738, just 113 days before his death.

How they came to power: He became the 13th king of the dynasty founded by K'inich Yax K'uk' Mo' in 695, following the death of Smoke Imix. Accounts disagree on the exact day of his accession.

How it ended: K'ak' Tiliw Chan Yopaat of Quirigua, whom he had installed in 724 or 725, captured him about 27 April 738 and beheaded him on 3 May. Copan's only reference to it is a brief note on the Hieroglyphic Stairway that he died by flint and shield.

• K'ak' Tiliw gave himself the title of divine lord in 734, and a Calakmul lord visited him in 736, so scholars suspect Calakmul backed the revolt to weaken an ally of Tikal.
• After 738 Quirigua seems to have controlled river trade in jade and obsidian along the Motagua, and it rebuilt its main group in the image of Copan.
• Quirigua's Stela E, dedicated in 771, has a shaft 10.6 metres long and weighs about 65 tons, possibly the largest free-standing stone monument in the Americas.

Sources: Encyclopedia.com: Quirigua; Wikipedia: Uaxaclajuun Ub'aah K'awiil; Wikipedia: Quirigua; Wikipedia: Copan

The Classic Maya collapse (c. AD 750 to 1050; dates vary by city)

Across the southern lowlands, royal courts failed one after another in the 9th and 10th centuries. Copan's last known king took the throne in 822, Tikal's last monument is dated 869, and Calakmul's dates from 909. The cause is unsettled, with climate change and overpopulation among the suggested explanations. A 2018 Science study led by Nick Evans, using gypsum from Lake Chichancanab, found that annual rainfall in northern Yucatan fell by 41 to 54 percent in droughts from about 750 to 1050, and by up to 70 percent at their worst. People moved rather than vanishing: cities were already empty before the Spanish arrived, but Maya towns went on in the north and elsewhere.

• Takeshi Inomata, who was not on the study, cautioned that climate change does not automatically bring down a society, and Daniela Triadan warned against treating drought as a single cause, since lakes south of Yucatan show no such signal.
• At Copan, over-population and declining living standards marked the reign of Yax Pasaj in the late 8th century; the city's population had fallen below 5,000 in the 8th and 9th centuries by one estimate.
• Tikal's fate shows the timing: it was abandoned by the end of the 10th century, and the great northern city of Chichen Itza was rising as the southern kingdoms fell.

Sources: Eos: Severe drought may have helped hasten ancient Maya's collapse; National Geographic: The hidden ruins of the great Maya Snake Kingdom; Wikipedia: Tikal; Wikipedia: Copan; University of Cambridge release via ScienceDaily (2018): Severity of drought during the Maya collapse

Chichen Itza (c. AD 750 to 1100 or 1200; hieroglyphic dates 832 to 998)

Chichen Itza took shape from about AD 750 and became a regional capital in the 10th century. The earliest hieroglyphic date there is 832 and the latest 998. The pyramid of Kukulkan, the Castillo, has nine levels and four stairways, with 91 steps on three and 92 on the fourth, 365 in all, and stands 24 metres or about 30 metres high by different accounts. Its Great Ball Court is the largest in Mesoamerica, with reliefs showing a beheading. Central Mexican features such as the Temple of the Warriors were once taken as proof of a Toltec conquest, but most recent interpretations favour cultural exchange or emulation, though Stanley Guenter argued in 2019 for reopening the question of migration.

• At the Sacred Cenote, a sinkhole about 60 metres across, dredging from 1904 to 1910 by the U.S. consul Edward Thompson brought up gold, jade and the remains of more than 200 people; whether all were sacrificed is still debated, and Mexico's Supreme Court ruled in 1944 that he had broken no laws.
• A 2024 Nature study sequenced 64 of at least 106 children from a former cistern about 300 metres from the cenote, in use from the seventh to the twelfth century by radiocarbon; all 64 were boys, and two pairs were identical twins, which the authors say may recall the Hero Twins of Maya myth.
• Colonial Maya sources such as the Book of Chilam Balam of Chumayel credit Hunac Ceel of Mayapan with conquering the city in the 13th century, but the archaeology shows it had declined by about 1100, and Maya pilgrims continued to visit it up to the Spanish conquest.

Sources: Barquera et al.: Ancient genomes reveal insights into ritual life at Chichen Itza (Nature, 2024); World History Encyclopedia: Chichen Itza; Wikipedia: Chichen Itza; Guenter: The Return of the Toltecs (The Mayanist, 2019, via Mesoweb); Las serpientes emplumadas de Chichen Itza, Mexico, y las etapas de construccion de la Gran Nivelacion (Historia, Scielo, 2018)

The Bonampak murals (painted c. AD 790 to 800; seen by outsiders in 1946)

Bonampak was a small satellite of Yaxchilan in the Chiapas forest. Its Structure 1 has three rooms painted around the accession of an heir named Chooj, with about 281 human figures. Room 1 shows a court ceremony and musicians, Room 2 a battle and the torture of captives, and Room 3 a dance and ritual bloodletting. Lacandon Maya guides led the first outside visitors there in 1946, and accounts differ on who saw it first. The site declined with Yaxchilan in the 9th century.

• Mary Miller of Yale, whose Bonampak Documentation Project began in 1996, stresses that the battle scene is formal royal portraiture and not a snapshot of Maya war.
• Infrared imaging revealed glyphs no longer visible to the eye, and a new painted version made in 2004 from this work was shown at Harvard's Peabody Museum in 2008.
• The murals are among the fullest pictures of Maya court life: dress, music and rank are all shown, and the losers of Room 2 appear in bird costumes while the victors wear jaguar elements.

Sources: Urquizu and Hurst: The Murals of San Bartolo (PARI Journal); Harvard Gazette (2008): The story behind Storied Walls; Wikipedia: Bonampak

The Dresden Codex (c. 1200 to 1345 by most estimates; the Dresden library's catalogue gives c. 1300 to 1521)

The Dresden Codex is a Maya book of 78 pages painted on fig-bark paper and folded accordion-style, about 3.6 metres long by the library's measure and 3.7 by another. Its library lists offerings to the rain god, New Year ceremonies, the Great Flood, and tables of Venus and eclipses, and scholars think eight scribes worked on it. Johann Christian Gotze acquired it in 1739, and Ernst Forstemann, a Dresden librarian, published the first full facsimile in 1880 and worked out its calendar numbers. Landa's burning at Mani in 1562 and other losses left only a handful of such books, and it was long thought to be the oldest book surviving in the Americas. The Maya Codex of Mexico, once called the Grolier, has since been shown to be about a century older.

• Water from the February 1945 bombing of Dresden destroyed some glyph details, and some pages were reordered afterward.
• World History Encyclopedia reports that Bishop Diego de Landa burned more than 40 codices at Mani on 12 July 1562; only three are traditionally said to have survived, and Landa's own book of 1566 preserved much of what he attacked.
• Its Venus tables track the planet's cycle, and its eclipse tables have made it a key source for Maya astronomy; the Dresden library catalogues it as Mscr.Dresd.R.310.

Sources: SLUB Dresden: Codex Dresdensis, Mscr.Dresd.R.310; World History Encyclopedia: Maya Civilization; Wikipedia: Dresden Codex; Wikipedia: Maya script

Mayapan, the walled capital (capital c. 1220s to 1440s; collapse 1441 to 1461)

Mayapan became the main power in northern Yucatan from the 1220s, leading an alliance of lords. Its stone wall, about 9.1 km long, enclosed more than 4,000 structures; population estimates run from 15,000 to 20,000. Written accounts say the lords chose the Cocom as leaders, and that Ah Xiu Xupan of the Xiu family led a revolt in 1441 that killed nearly all the Cocom. Diego de Landa's 16th-century version, written long after the events, blames a chieftain's abuses and internal war. A 2022 study in Nature Communications led by Douglas Kennett links strife in the city to drought between about 1400 and 1450, while historical sources place the massacre and abandonment in 1441 to 1461.

• Kennett's team combined isotope, radiocarbon and DNA data from human remains with drought records from cave deposits, one about 12 km from the city, and they argue that drought may have fuelled the conflict that brought the city down.
• They point to reliance on rain-fed maize, little centralised grain storage and competing elite families as weak points.
• Mayapan's fall did not end Maya states: people moved to smaller towns that survived into the early 16th century, which is the world the Spanish met.

Sources: UC Santa Barbara news: Climate and Conflict (on Kennett et al., 2022); Wikipedia: Mayapan; Wikipedia: Chichen Itza; Kennett et al.: Drought-Induced Civil Conflict Among the Ancient Maya (Nature Communications, 2022)

Spanish invasions of the Maya lands (1524 to 1546 (northern Yucatan); the last independent kingdom fell in 1697)

In 1524 Pedro de Alvarado entered Guatemala with Spanish troops and Nahua allies from Tlaxcala and Cholula. He seized and burned the K'iche' rulers Oxib-Keh and Beleheb-Tzy, then burned their city of Utatlan. The Kaqchikel of Iximche first welcomed him, but turned against his tribute demands and fought until they surrendered in 1530. Francisco de Montejo sailed from Spain for Yucatan in 1527, but rebellions and withdrawals followed; his son founded Merida in 1542 on the Maya site of T'ho, and a great eastern rising failed in 1546. The lack of a central power slowed the invaders, who still exploited rivalries, such as the conversion of the Xiu lord of Mani.

• The two sides' own records disagree even on allied numbers: Alvarado wrote that the Kaqchikel sent him 4,000 warriors, while the Kaqchikel recorded 400. One modern estimate has at least 10 native auxiliaries for every Spaniard.
• Modern estimates of native population loss in Yucatan run from 75 to 90 percent, with Tabasco losing an estimated 90 percent, while one survey estimates 33 to 50 percent for highland Guatemala from early epidemics; such figures are reconstructions and vary by region.
• The Itza capital on Lake Peten held out until Martin de Ursua's assault of 13 March 1697, the last independent Maya kingdom to fall, and Maya peoples still live across these regions today, speaking their own languages.

Sources: Encyclopedia.com: Tayasal; Wikipedia: Spanish conquest of Guatemala; Wikipedia: Spanish conquest of Yucatan; Wikipedia: Francisco de Montejo the Younger; Arias Ortiz: El caso del mulato Juan Thomas y la Conquista de El Peten, 1695-1704 (Indiana)

Tula and the Toltecs (c. 900 to c. 1150 (approximate))

Tula, known in Nahuatl tradition as Tollan, 'place of reeds', was the great city of central Mexico between about 900 and 1150. It covered some 14 to 16 square kilometres, and estimates of its population run from 30,000 to 40,000 up to about 60,000. Pyramid B still carries four basalt warrior columns about 4 metres tall. Almost everything told about its rulers comes from Aztec-era and colonial accounts, which name a priest-king, Ce Acatl Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl, driven out by the god Tezcatlipoca; modern scholars treat him as a mythologised figure, and the versions disagree even on his dates. The ceremonial centre was burned in the 12th century, but the cause and the exact date are unknown.

• The Aztecs used the word toltecayotl, 'to have a Toltec heart', for excellence in all things, and they claimed descent from the Toltecs.
• Gamboa Cabezas and Healan (2021) give the city's limits as about 16 square kilometres, an estimate from surface debris rather than from their digs, and report salvage work that recovered what they call the first known gold artefacts from Tula, in a pot with cremated remains and a polished obsidian mirror.
• The solid evidence for Tula's economy includes a major trade in obsidian from nearby Pachuca, while no artefacts survive to confirm the gold-and-jade palaces of Aztec legend.

Sources: Gamboa Cabezas and Healan, Ancient Mesoamerica 32 (2021): Salvage and Rescue Archaeology Inside Ancient Tula; World History Encyclopedia: Toltec Civilization; Wikipedia: Tula (Mesoamerican site); Wikipedia: Ce Acatl Topiltzin

Chinampas: farming the lake (earliest securely dated fields 1150 to 1350; still farmed today)

Chinampas are long, narrow fields raised out of shallow lake water, and the popular name 'floating gardens' is misleading, because they were built up from the lake bed. Builders fenced a rectangle with wattle, layered it with mud, lake sediment and rotting plants until it rose above the water, and planted willow or cypress at the corners to hold it in place. The earliest securely dated examples belong to about 1150 to 1350, before the Mexica empire existed. In Tenochtitlan plots ran about 90 metres long and 5 to 10 metres wide, and conquering southern lake cities such as Xochimilco was among the first moves of the Triple Alliance. Modern writers credit chinampas with up to seven harvests a year, though how far the capital depended on them is still being studied.

• Nahuatl wills from the late 17th century measure plots in a unit called the matl, about 1.67 metres, and one scholar's reading of the Codex Vergara gives a field of roughly 30 by 2.5 metres.
• The UN's Food and Agriculture Organization named Mexico's chinampas a Globally Important Agricultural Heritage System in 2018.
• Chinampas survive in San Gregorio, San Luis, Tlahuac and Mixquic, growing vegetables, herbs, corn and flowers, although many have been overgrown, filled in or turned over to tourism.

Sources: Wikipedia: Chinampa; UN News (Spanish): La FAO reconoce el patrimonio agricola de Espana y Mexico (2018); World History Encyclopedia: Tenochtitlan

The Mexica migration from Aztlan (c. 1200 to c. 1325 (the journey is legend; dates are approximate))

After the Toltecs declined, Nahuatl-speaking peoples moved into the Valley of Mexico from about 1200, and the Mexica are said to have been the last to arrive. Their histories trace them to Aztlan, a northern homeland whose location is unknown and which many treat as mythical, and tell how their god Huitzilopochtli led them. In the valley the Tepanecs of Azcapotzalco drove them from Chapultepec. In 1299, in the same tradition, Cocoxtli of Culhuacan let them settle on barren ground at Tizapan, where marriage into Culhua families gave them a claim to a noble line going back to Tula, before they were expelled again. These accounts were written after the conquest and describe the rise of a people who later ruled an empire, so they are the official memory of the winners.

• The modern use of the name 'Aztec' goes back to Alexander von Humboldt in 1810, who drew on Aztlan, often glossed as 'place of the heron'.
• The chronicles give the first ruler, Acamapichtli, a Culhua mother and a Culhua wife, Ilancueitl, which tied the new dynasty to that prestige.
• A split came soon after settlement: in 1337 a dissident Mexica group left to found Tlatelolco on the north of the island.

Sources: Wikipedia: Aztecs; Wikipedia: Mexica; Wikipedia: Acamapichtli; World History Encyclopedia: Aztec Civilization

The founding of Tenochtitlan (1325 by tradition (World History Encyclopedia gives 1345))

By tradition the Mexica founded Tenochtitlan in 1325 on an island near the western shore of Lake Texcoco, where their god's promised sign appeared: an eagle perched on a prickly pear. The story survives in colonial records such as the Codex Mendoza, made around 1541, whose opening page shows the founding. The exact date is unclear, and 13 March 1325 was only chosen in 1925 to mark the city's 600th anniversary. Under Acamapichtli, whose reign the codices date differently, and his heirs, the Mexica paid tribute to the Tepanecs of Azcapotzalco for about 50 years. By the early 1500s the city covered an estimated 8 to 14 square kilometres, and population estimates run from 200,000 to 400,000, with Michael E. Smith's survey giving 212,500.

• Causeways linked the island to the shore, and their removable bridges let canoes pass and could be pulled away in an attack.
• Two double terracotta aqueducts, each over 4 kilometres long, brought spring water from Chapultepec.
• Cortes, writing in 1520, compared the city's size to Seville or Cordoba, and counted four causeways where a modern summary lists three.

Sources: Fordham Modern History Sourcebook: Hernan Cortes, from Second Letter to Charles V, 1520; Wikipedia: Mexico-Tenochtitlan; World History Encyclopedia: Tenochtitlan; Wikipedia: Codex Mendoza; Wikipedia: Aztecs

The Templo Mayor (begun after 1325; rededicated 19 December 1487)

The Templo Mayor stood at the heart of Tenochtitlan with two shrines on top, to Tlaloc, god of rain, painted blue, and to Huitzilopochtli, god of war, painted red. It grew in seven stages, each laid over the last: the first of earth and wood after 1325, one under Itzcoatl, a major enlargement in 1454 under Moctezuma I, and the sixth opened by Ahuitzotl on 19 December 1487. At its greatest the pyramid and shrines reached about 60 metres, on a base of roughly 100 by 80 metres. Excavators have found more than 7,000 objects, mostly offerings, including an Olmec mask and a Teotihuacan mask. Its systematic excavation dates from after the Coyolxauhqui Stone was found in 1978, a story told in the later eras.

• The north shrine, for Tlaloc, marked the summer solstice, and the south shrine, for Huitzilopochtli, the winter solstice, according to World History Encyclopedia.
• The Coyolxauhqui Stone from the temple's base, over 3.25 metres across, weighs 8.5 metric tons and is usually assigned to the later 15th century.
• A monolith of the earth goddess Tlaltecuhtli weighing about 12 tons also came from the excavations.

Sources: Wikipedia: Templo Mayor; World History Encyclopedia: Templo Mayor; Dodds Pennock, Historical Social Research (2012): Mass Murder or Religious Homicide?

Tlatelolco and the great market (founded 1337; conquered by Tenochtitlan in 1473)

Tlatelolco began in 1337 when dissident Mexica settled the north of the island. In 1473 the Tenochca ruler Axayacatl defeated its king, Moquihuix, and made the city subject to Tenochtitlan, yet its marketplace remained the largest in Mexico. Cortes, writing to Charles V in 1520, put the daily crowd in a great square he does not name, usually taken to be this market, at more than 60,000 buyers and sellers, while Sahagun gave a more cautious 20,000 on ordinary days and 40,000 on feast days. Cortes listed maize, fish, eggs, gold and silver jewels, feathers, pottery, cotton thread, dyed deerskins, medicinal herbs, firewood and building stone among the goods. Cortes was an eyewitness writing to his king, and the Franciscan friar Sahagun wrote decades after the conquest, so these figures are impressions and not counts.

• Long-distance merchants called pochteca were organised in guilds, and Tlatelolco's leading merchant was the effective governor of the city, answering to the ruler of Tenochtitlan.
• Some merchants, the naualoztomeca or 'disguised merchants', sought rare goods and also spied for the state, according to Book 9 of Sahagun's Florentine Codex.
• Only men were travelling merchants, but the historian Caroline Dodds Pennock notes that both men and women traded in markets and served as marketplace overseers.

Sources: Fordham Modern History Sourcebook: Hernan Cortes, from Second Letter to Charles V, 1520; Dodds Pennock, Oxford Handbook of the Aztecs (2017): Gender and Aztec Life Cycles; Wikipedia: Tlatelolco (altepetl); Wikipedia: Pochteca; Wikipedia: Mexico-Tenochtitlan

Tlacaelel (1397 or 1398 to 1487)

Tlacaelel, cihuacoatl of Tenochtitlan, Cihuacoatl (chief adviser) · Tenochtitlan

Tlacaelel was the son of the ruler Huitzilihuitl, nephew of Itzcoatl and brother of Moctezuma I. As cihuacoatl he held the senior post that ran the empire's internal affairs, serving four consecutive rulers until his death. Later accounts credit him with raising Huitzilopochtli to the top of the pantheon, increasing militarism and helping impose laws that barred commoners from wearing lip plugs, gold armbands and cotton cloaks. The main source for his role in sacrifice and the Flower Wars is the 16th-century Dominican friar Diego Duran, so the picture of a single mastermind behind the empire leans heavily on one colonial writer. Susan Schroeder's 2016 book, Tlacaelel Remembered, is a modern study of his life.

How they rose: He became prominent in the war against the Tepanecs in the late 1420s, holding the high military post of tlacochcalcatl under Itzcoatl and then the office of cihuacoatl.

How they died: He died in 1487, the year of the great Templo Mayor rededication, and Tlilpotonqui succeeded him in office. The cause of death is unknown.

• Miguel Leon-Portilla considered him the instigator of the burning of older histories, but he granted there was no specific evidence for this, and the Florentine Codex attributes the order to Itzcoatl.
• A remark that World History Encyclopedia attributes to him likens taking war captives to shopping in a market, saying victims should be as easy to pick up as tortillas.
• His birth year is given as either 1397 or 1398.

Sources: Wikipedia: Tlacaelel; Wikipedia: Itzcoatl; World History Encyclopedia: Aztec Warfare; Wikipedia: Aztec Empire

Women, households and schools (c. 1400 to 1519, as described in colonial sources)

Military public culture has long made Aztec society look like a simple patriarchy, but the historian Caroline Dodds Pennock describes male and female roles as structurally equivalent, not equal. Men dominated politics, war, priesthood and office, yet women worked as healers, midwives, matchmakers, teachers and priestesses, and also as district leaders, merchants and marketplace overseers. Adult women could own property and appeal directly to the courts, and cotton cloth woven at home was itself a form of value. Children's schooling was divided too: nobles' sons usually went to the calmecac, which taught history, calendars, religion and law, while commoner youths trained for war at the telpochcalli. Our knowledge comes mainly from the Florentine Codex and the third part of the Codex Mendoza, both made after the conquest.

• At birth a girl was given a broom and weaving tools, and spindle whorls and weaving battens served women as shields and swords did men.
• A woman who died in childbirth became one of the Cihuateteo ('Woman Gods'), honoured like a warrior killed in battle, and her body had to be guarded from young warriors seeking her power.
• Midwives, called tlamatlquiticitl, attended women of all classes and gave prenatal advice as well as leading rituals after birth.

Sources: Dodds Pennock, Oxford Handbook of the Aztecs (2017): Gender and Aztec Life Cycles; Wikipedia: Women in Aztec civilization; Wikipedia: Calmecac; Wikipedia: Codex Mendoza

Itzcoatl (r. 1427 to 1440)

Itzcoatl ('Obsidian Serpent'), fourth tlatoani of Tenochtitlan, Mexica · Tenochtitlan

Itzcoatl was a natural son of Acamapichtli by a Tepanec woman of Azcapotzalco and took power in a crisis over the Tepanec succession. When he defied the Tepanec king Maxtla, Maxtla blockaded Tenochtitlan and demanded more tribute. Itzcoatl then allied with Nezahualcoyotl of Texcoco and with the dissident Tepanec city of Tlacopan, destroyed Azcapotzalco, and joined his allies in the league that became the Aztec Empire. According to the Florentine Codex, he also ordered the old painted histories burned, because it was not wise that all the people should know them, which modern writers read as clearing the way for an official history.

How they came to power: He was elected after his nephew Chimalpopoca was killed, shortly after Maxtla seized the Tepanec throne; Maxtla is usually held responsible. Camila Townsend's 2019 history places a brief ruler, Xihuitl Temoc, between them.

How it ended: He died in 1440, aged about 60, and was succeeded by his nephew Moctezuma I. The cause of his death is unknown.

• The Templo Mayor's third stage dates to his reign, and one staircase bears the glyph for the year Four Reed, 1431.
• The burning of the codices is often given as one reason so little reliable Toltec history survives.
• The surviving account of the burning was recorded long afterwards, in the Florentine Codex compiled by Bernardino de Sahagun between 1545 and 1576.

Sources: Wikipedia: Itzcoatl; Wikipedia: Aztec Empire; Wikipedia: Templo Mayor; Wikipedia: Tula (Mesoamerican site); Wikipedia: Aztecs

The Triple Alliance (war won 1428; treaty dated 1428 to 1430)

In 1427 and 1428 Tenochtitlan, Texcoco and Tlacopan, with help from Huexotzinco, defeated Azcapotzalco and ended Tepanec dominance of central Mexico. Huexotzinco then withdrew, and by about 1430 the three remaining cities had agreed to divide the Tepanec lands and hold future conquests in common, with most tribute going to Tenochtitlan and Texcoco and a smaller share to Tlacopan. Over time Tenochtitlan became the senior partner. Rule was indirect: local kings usually stayed on as long as they paid tribute and sent troops, and the empire was organised into 38 tributary provinces under stewards. Modern figures for its size vary widely, from 135,000 square kilometres (World History Encyclopedia) to 220,000 (Wikipedia), with about 6 million people.

• The Codex Mendoza, made for Viceroy Antonio de Mendoza around 1541, lists the towns conquered by the alliance and what each paid, drawing on the older Matricula de Tributos.
• Some strategic provinces gave tribute or aid by mutual consent, while tributary ones had no such choice.
• The empire had a split in its top offices: the huey tlatoani handled external affairs and the cihuacoatl governed internally.

Sources: Wikipedia: Aztec Empire; World History Encyclopedia: Aztec Civilization; Wikipedia: Codex Mendoza

Nezahualcoyotl (b. 1402; r. 1431 to 1472)

Nezahualcoyotl Acolmiztli ('Fasting Coyote'), tlatoani of Texcoco, Acolhua · Texcoco

Nezahualcoyotl was born in Texcoco in 1402, and Tepanec warriors killed his father Ixtlilxochitl around 1418. After years in hiding he joined the coalition that destroyed Azcapotzalco and took Texcoco's throne in 1431 with Itzcoatl's backing. He organised his realm into eight tribute districts, settled craftsmen in specialised neighbourhoods and is credited with a golden age in the city, including a legal code. Around 1445 or 1449 Moctezuma I asked him to help protect Tenochtitlan from floods, and he built the dike that divided the waters of Lake Texcoco, finished by about 1453 on another account. Much of his fame comes from his own descendant, the 17th-century historian Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl, who is considered partisan, so many stories about him may be exaggerated.

How they came to power: He fled after his father's death, spent years in hiding and was kept for a time under house arrest in Tenochtitlan. When Maxtla renewed the threats on his life, he allied with Itzcoatl and took his throne once Azcapotzalco fell.

How it ended: He died in Texcoco in 1472, aged about 70, and was succeeded by his son Nezahualpilli.

• Poems on the brevity of life and on 'flower and song' are attributed to him, but their authorship is much debated and some probably reflect later European influence.
• Alva Ixtlilxochitl claims he enacted 80 laws, covering offences such as treason, robbery and adultery, and the Mapa Quinatzin depicts most of the crimes and punishments described.
• Alva Ixtlilxochitl also described him as an open opponent of human sacrifice, a claim best read with that author's family interest in mind.

Sources: Wikipedia: Nezahualcoyotl (tlatoani); Wikipedia: Aztec Empire; Wikipedia: Mexico-Tenochtitlan

Moctezuma I (r. 1440 to 1469)

Moteuczoma Ilhuicamina, also Huehuemoteuczoma, Mexica · Tenochtitlan

Moctezuma I was elected in 1440 and spent much of his long reign turning the alliance into an empire, with control extended over Huastec and Totonac peoples on the Gulf Coast and campaigns into Oaxaca that defeated the Mixtecs at Coixtlahuaca around 1458. At home he imposed sumptuary laws limiting clothing and housing by class, reserved death sentences to himself and required a religious school in every neighbourhood. His reign also suffered a run of disasters: locusts in 1446, flood in 1449, and frost and drought from 1450 that lasted four years, when some people sold themselves or their children into slavery. After the famine he backed a sharp increase in sacrifice, and by some accounts the Flower Wars began. With Nezahualcoyotl he improved Tenochtitlan's water supply.

How they came to power: Nobles elected him at about age 42 after his uncle Itzcoatl's death, and Texcoco's ruler crowned him.

How it ended: He died in 1469, aged about 70; the sources used here do not record the cause. Accounts of the succession differ, with some naming his daughter Atotoztli as ruler or regent for her son Axayacatl.

• The Templo Mayor's largest known expansion is dated to 1454, within his reign.
• In February 2026 the Templo Mayor Project linked three newly excavated offerings to three found earlier as one ceremony of his reign; the six chests held 83 Mezcala-style greenstone figurines, and the new three alone held over 4,000 marine objects.
• Wikipedia reports that before attacking he issued three declarations of war, and that if the last was refused the Aztecs attacked within 20 days.

Sources: Wikipedia: Moctezuma I; Wikipedia: Templo Mayor; World History Encyclopedia: Templo Mayor; HeritageDaily (2026): Colossal Mexica offering linked to Motecuhzoma Ilhuicamina uncovered at Templo Mayor

The Flower Wars (c. 1454 to 1519)

The Flower Wars, or xochiyaoyotl, were arranged battles fought intermittently from about 1454 against Tlaxcala, Huejotzingo and Cholula, city-states east of the Valley of Mexico. According to the Texcocan noble Fernando de Alva Ixtlilxochitl, writing in the 17th century, they began after the famine of 1450 to 1454, when priests said the gods required regular sacrifice. His account is the fullest early one, but Frederic Hicks doubts it, since Ixtlilxochitl is the only known source for these events and never uses the term 'flower war'. Modern explanations vary: Ross Hassig sees the wars as a way to wear enemies down and show Aztec power, while Caroline Dodds Pennock links them to the cult of Huitzilopochtli. In 1519 Tlaxcala, the Aztecs' arch-enemy, allied with Cortes, a turn that belongs to the conquest story.

• Andres de Tapia, a captain with Cortes, reported Moctezuma II's own explanation: that war with Tlaxcala gathered sacrifices and trained soldiers.
• The colonial-era Tlaxcalan historian Munoz Camargo records Aztec sieges and trade cutoffs, which do not fit the picture of a purely ritual contest.
• Death in a flower war was thought especially noble, and warriors who died this way were believed to go to the heaven of Huitzilopochtli.

Sources: Wikipedia: Flower war; World History Encyclopedia: Aztec Warfare; Wikipedia: Aztec Empire

Ahuitzotl (r. 1486 to 1502)

Ahuitzotl, huey tlatoani of Tenochtitlan, Mexica · Tenochtitlan

Ahuitzotl came to power in 1486 and spent his reign more than doubling the lands under Aztec control. He put down rebellions in the Huasteca, the Toluca Valley and the Gulf Coast, took the central valleys of Oaxaca around 1494, and reached the Soconusco region on the Pacific around 1499, with conquests stretching toward the Guatemalan border. In 1487 he rededicated the enlarged Templo Mayor, an occasion whose scale colonial writers report in figures from 20,000 (Codex Telleriano-Remensis, mid-16th century) to 80,400 (Diego Duran and the Annals of Cuauhtitlan, 1570s) victims. He took the title huehuetlatoani, marking the Mexica ruler as senior to his allies. He also began a canal to bring fresh water from Coyoacan, which in Duran's telling flooded the city, and priests blamed the flood on his killing of a Coyoacan ruler.

How they came to power: He succeeded his brother Tizoc (a half-brother in World History Encyclopedia), who died in 1486, reportedly poisoned. Sources differ on his parents: World History Encyclopedia calls him a son of Moctezuma I, while Wikipedia gives Tezozomoc and Atotoztli II, Moctezuma I's daughter. His first campaign, a coronation war, was meant to win tribute and captives.

How it ended: He died in 1502. Accounts differ: one describes a fatal wasting disease, another a blow to the head as he fled the flood, and he was cremated on the Templo Mayor. His nephew Moctezuma II succeeded him.

• The scene of the 1487 ceremony is shown in the Codex Telleriano-Remensis, one of the sources for its figures.
• His son Cuauhtemoc led the later resistance to the Spanish, covered in the conquest era.
• Sources disagree on whether he or Tizoc first used the title huey tlatoani.

Sources: World History Encyclopedia: Ahuitzotl; Wikipedia: Ahuitzotl; Wikipedia: Aztec Empire; Dodds Pennock, Historical Social Research (2012): Mass Murder or Religious Homicide?

Sacrifice: what the numbers show (1487 dedication; peak probably in the later 15th century)

Human sacrifice was a central Mexica rite, but most numbers come from colonial writers with reasons to exaggerate. For the 1487 dedication, Diego Duran and the Annals of Cuauhtitlan, both from the 1570s, give 80,400 victims over four days, Torquemada in 1615 gives both 72,344 and 60,000, and the mid-16th-century Codex Telleriano-Remensis 20,000; Sherburne Cook calculated in 1946, at two minutes per victim, that only about 14,100 were possible. The often-repeated figure of 20,000 a year may go back to a letter from Bishop Zumarraga, known only through Torquemada, who says 20,000 children. The historian Caroline Dodds Pennock finds the Florentine Codex's festival calendar implies about 500 victims a year in the regular cycle, and with local rites and special events she suggests low thousands a year in the capital at the Spanish arrival and perhaps 1,000 to 20,000 a year at the later 15th-century peak. Andres de Tapia, a conquistador describing what he saw in 1519, estimated 136,000 skulls on the Huey Tzompantli rack, which Bernard Ortiz de Montellano reduced to at most 60,000. Excavations near the Metropolitan Cathedral from 2015 had found more than 650 skulls by 2017, a partial but physical check on all of these.

• Wikipedia reports that men made up about 75 percent of the victims in the post-2015 excavations, but skulls of women and children were also found, which the biological anthropologist Rodrigo Bolanos said no historical record had described.
• Using Tapia's figures, Cook calculated about 4,250 sacrifices a year, a number Pennock accepts as compatible with her range while warning that the rack may have been in use for longer than he assumed.
• No judicial, criminal or legal records survive from the period, so all such figures rest on general statements in early colonial texts.

Sources: Dodds Pennock, Historical Social Research (2012): Mass Murder or Religious Homicide?; NPR, via Spokane Public Radio (2017): Aztec Tower Of Skulls Reveals Women, Children Were Sacrificed; Wikipedia: Tzompantli; World History Encyclopedia: Ahuitzotl

Nahuatl, then and now (lingua franca by the late Postclassic; about 1.7 million speakers today)

Nahuatl was the language of the Mexica, and their power made the Tenochtitlan variety a prestige tongue and a common language among merchants and elites across Mesoamerica. Within about twenty years of the Spanish arrival, Nahua writers were using the Latin alphabet, and in the 16th and 17th centuries the language filled chronicles, grammars, poetry and administrative records, including the Florentine Codex. Andres de Olmos wrote the first known Nahuatl grammar in 1547, though it was not printed until 1875. The Nahua are a living people: the 2020 census counted about 1.7 million speakers in Mexico, with smaller communities of immigrants in the United States.

• Mexico's 2003 General Law of Linguistic Rights of the Indigenous Peoples recognises Nahuatl as a national language where it is spoken, with the same status as Spanish in those regions.
• English words from Nahuatl include avocado, chili, chocolate, coyote, axolotl and tomato.
• The Mexica and other Nahuatl speakers together made up the peoples now generally called Aztecs, so the language links many communities and not one vanished state.

Sources: Wikipedia: Nahuatl; World History Encyclopedia: Aztec Civilization; Wikipedia: Aztecs; Wikipedia: Arte para aprender la lengua mexicana

Moctezuma II (b. c. 1466; r. 1502 or 1503 to 1520 (this entry covers his reign up to Spanish contact in 1519))

Moctezuma Xocoyotzin, Mexica · Tenochtitlan

Moctezuma Xocoyotzin was a noble educated in the calmecac who won rank through captures in war and served as head priest of Huitzilopochtli's temple before his election. On coming to power he centralised the empire, placing officials and garrisons in the provinces, and barring commoners and illegitimate noble children from his palace and high office. Many campaigns were aimed at putting down revolts, with Achiotlan taken in 1504 and Zozollan in 1506, and raised tribute in the Valley of Mexico fed later rebellion. His reign's limits showed in the failure to subdue Tlaxcala and Huejotzingo and in a 1515 defeat by the Purepecha. The later story that he took Cortes for a returning god is doubted by modern historians: Camila Townsend traces it to post-conquest writing, first stated by Lopez de Gomara in 1552, and Matthew Restall also rejects the picture of a passive ruler.

How they came to power: He succeeded his uncle Ahuitzotl in 1502 or 1503, chosen on the strength of his military rank and religious standing; a stone inscription points to 15 July 1503.

How it ended: His end belongs to the conquest era, and it is told there. Accounts of it conflict: Bernal Diaz, an eyewitness writing decades later, blames an arrow and stones from his own people, while other sources say the Spanish killed him.

• Book 12 of the Florentine Codex lists eight omens before the Spanish arrival, including a comet and a crying woman, but it was compiled decades after the conquest, and Restall treats the picture of a passive, superstitious ruler as a myth.
• According to JSTOR Daily's summary of Townsend, Cortes's own letters never claim he was taken for a god, and she finds no meaningful evidence of a Quetzalcoatl return story before the conquest.
• James Lockhart sees Moctezuma as a scapegoat for the defeat, and Susan Gillespie argues his image was shaped by a cyclical Nahua view of history.

Sources: JSTOR Daily (Matthew Wills): The Mexica Didn't Believe the Conquistadors Were Gods; Wikipedia: Moctezuma II; World History Encyclopedia: Aztec Civilization; Wikipedia: Aztec Empire; Bernal Diaz del Castillo, trans. Lockhart (1844): Memoirs of the Conquistador, vol. 1

The Sun Stone (probably carved 1502 to 1520; found 17 December 1790)

The Sun Stone is a basalt disc about 3.6 metres across and 98 centimetres thick, weighing about 24,590 kilograms. Moctezuma II's name glyph in the central disc is the usual basis for dating it to his reign, though World History Encyclopedia links its 13 Reed glyph to 1427 and Itzcoatl. Workers repairing Mexico City's main square found it on 17 December 1790, and Antonio de Leon y Gama published a treatise in 1792 and persuaded the church not to rebury it. The four earlier world ages are carved around the centre, naming the suns destroyed before the present fifth one. It has been in the National Museum of Anthropology since 1964, and it is now read as a ritual monument and not a working instrument for telling time.

• The central face is often called Tonatiuh, the sun god, while other scholars argue for the earth deity Tlaltecuhtli or a night sun.
• Archaeologists have suggested it was first meant as a sacrificial altar and was stood upright only after it cracked; the imagery's meaning remains disputed.
• The stone was originally painted in bright colours.

Sources: Wikipedia: Aztec sun stone; World History Encyclopedia: Sun Stone; The History Blog (2014): Aztec Sun Stone

Tiwanaku (founded c. AD 100 and a major centre from c. 600 (Marsh et al. 2023); older accounts say c. 200 to 1000; collapse c. 1010 to 1050)

Tiwanaku rose near the southern shore of Lake Titicaca in today's Bolivia, at about 3,850 metres, one of the highest cities of the ancient world. Its monuments include the Akapana, a terraced platform about 16.5 metres tall, and the Gate of the Sun, cut from one block of andesite with a staff-holding figure often linked to the later creator god Viracocha. Estimates of its peak population range from a conservative 10,000 to 20,000 (Wikipedia, for AD 800) up to 30,000 to 70,000 (World History Encyclopedia). Caravans of llamas spread its pottery widely. Many writers have blamed drought for its end, but a 2023 radiocarbon study by Erik Marsh and colleagues found a rapid collapse around 1010 to 1050, before rainfall fell, and concluded drought was not the main cause.

• The same 2023 study found that monument building had stopped about 720 and tomb burials about 910, long before the last residents left.
• Pedro de Cieza de Leon, a Spanish soldier who saw the ruins around 1549 and published in 1553, wrote that he could not understand what tools had shaped the great stones, and that no one knew who had built them (Markham's 1864 translation).
• Inca tradition placed the origin of the world in Lake Titicaca, and the Incas are said to have brought stonemasons from the Titicaca basin to work in their own cities.

Sources: Marsh et al., PLOS ONE 18 (2023): The center cannot hold: A Bayesian chronology for the collapse of Tiwanaku; Cieza de Leon, trans. Markham (1864): The Travels of Pedro de Cieza de Leon, chapter CV; World History Encyclopedia: Tiwanaku; Wikipedia: Tiwanaku

The Wari state (c. 450 or 500 to c. 1000; capital depopulated by about 1000)

The Wari, centred on a capital near modern Ayacucho in Peru, flourished from about 500 to 1000 and shaped how later Andean states governed. The capital may have held up to 70,000 people, and outposts such as Pikillacta near Cusco, about 745 by 630 metres, were built to a rectangular plan. Wari builders used a road network and terraced farming that the Incas later took over, and the first undisputed knotted-cord khipu records are linked to them. They probably kept no written records, so their history rests on archaeology, and the cause of their decline is uncertain, with drought and overexpansion both proposed. At the Castillo de Huarmey on the coast, a Polish-Peruvian team led by Milosz Giersz uncovered an intact mausoleum with the remains of 58 women.

• The Huarmey tomb held more than 1,300 objects by National Geographic's count, or about 1,200 by another, including gold earrings, silver bowls and gold weaving tools.
• Terraces came to the Carahuarazo Valley around 600 under Wari rule, shifting the staple crops from tubers alone to tubers and maize.
• When the capital was emptied, its doorways were deliberately blocked, which suggests that people expected to return.

Sources: National Geographic: 58 women were buried in this pre-Inca tomb. Who were they?; World History Encyclopedia: Wari Civilization; Wikipedia: Wari culture; Wikipedia: El Castillo de Huarmey

Quipu: the knotted records (undisputed examples from c. 600 to 1000; in Inca use to 1532 and after)

A quipu, or khipu, is a set of knotted cords hanging from a main cord, in cotton or wool, and its colours, knot types and positions all carried meaning. The first undisputed examples are linked to the Wari, centuries before the Incas, and larger Inca quipus could have as many as 1,500 strings. Most of those studied record numbers in a decimal system, with specialists called khipukamayuq keeping them and explaining them from memory. Whether they could also hold narrative is still argued over, and non-numeric information remains undeciphered, despite Sabine Hyland's claim to have read two ayllu names on colonial examples. In 1583 Christian officials at the Third Council of Lima ordered some burned as idolatrous, because they recorded offerings to non-Christian gods.

• Cieza de Leon, who published in 1553, noted that knots called quipu kept the tribute fair, and he thought them a good way of keeping accounts (Markham's 1864 translation).
• A 2021 survey by Manuel Medrano counted just under 1,400 known surviving examples, and the Open Khipu Repository listed 702 with public data by January 2026.
• In 2018 Medrano and Gary Urton published a possible match between six colonial khipus from the Santa Valley and a Spanish document, suggesting that the way cords were attached may encode social divisions.

Sources: Cieza de Leon, trans. Markham (1864): The Travels of Pedro de Cieza de Leon; World History Encyclopedia: Quipu; Wikipedia: Quipu

Chimor and Chan Chan (c. 900 (Wikipedia) or c. 1100 (World History Encyclopedia) to c. 1470)

The Chimu kingdom of Chimor ruled 1,000 kilometres (Wikipedia) to 1,300 kilometres (World History Encyclopedia) of the Peruvian coast from Chan Chan, at the mouth of the Moche River, the largest adobe city in the Americas. The city covered about 20 square kilometres, with population estimates from about 30,000 to 60,000, and ten walled royal compounds served as palaces, stores and tombs. Canals, reservoirs and wells made the desert productive, and the sea, under the god Ni, was central to religion. Around 1470 the Inca prince Topa Yupanqui captured its king, Minchancaman, and took him to Cusco. Its rulers are known mainly from oral history, including the legend of a founder, Taycanamo, who came by sea on a balsa raft.

• At Huanchaquito-Las Llamas, close to Chan Chan, Gabriel Prieto and colleagues excavated the remains of more than 140 children and over 200 camelids, dated to about AD 1450, and suggested a link to heavy rains and flooding.
• Chan Chan's palaces had high walls, up to about 12 metres in one compound, decorated with relief patterns of fish, other animals and geometric shapes.
• UNESCO listed Chan Chan as a World Heritage Site in 1986, and it has stayed on the danger list ever since because rain damages the adobe.

Sources: Prieto et al., PLOS ONE (2019): A mass sacrifice of children and camelids at the Huanchaquito-Las Llamas site, Moche Valley, Peru; World History Encyclopedia: Chimu Civilization; World History Encyclopedia: Chan Chan; Wikipedia: Chimor; Wikipedia: Chan Chan

Manco Capac (c. 1200 to c. 1230 (legendary; his existence is uncertain))

Manco Capac (Manqu Qhapaq), legendary first Inca, Founder in legend · Cusco

Manco Capac is the founder of the Inca royal line in the stories told to Spanish writers, and it is uncertain that he existed. In the version set down by Pedro Sarmiento de Gamboa in 1572, eight sibling Ayar leave a cave at Tampu-tocco and march on the Cusco valley, led by Manco and his sister Mama Huaco, whom Sarmiento calls fierce and cruel. The Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, writing in 1609, tells instead how the Sun set his two children in Lake Titicaca, telling them to settle where a golden staff sank into the ground. Sarmiento's history was commissioned by Viceroy Toledo and written partly to justify Spanish rule, while scholars question how authentic an Inca tradition Garcilaso's version is, so neither is a neutral record. Guaman Poma, writing around 1615, records yet another tradition, about a figure called Mama Waqu.

How they came to power: Legend only: in one version he emerges from the cave of Tampu-tocco with his siblings and leads them to the valley of Cuzco; in another the Sun sends him north from Titicaca.

How it ended: Unknown. The traditional dates are legendary, and his son Sinchi Roca follows him in the king lists.

• Garcilaso says the staff the Sun gave them was a sceptre of gold 'half a yard long' (Markham's translation, 1869).
• Sarmiento has the brothers and sisters seize land from the people already in the valley, such as the Alcabisas, making the founding a conquest, not a civilising mission.
• Sarmiento dedicated his history to Philip II from Cuzco on 4 March 1572.

Sources: Sarmiento de Gamboa, trans. Markham (1907): History of the Incas, chapters XI to XIV; Garcilaso de la Vega, trans. Markham (1869): First Part of the Royal Commentaries of the Yncas; Wikipedia: Manco Capac

Potatoes, maize and terraces (c. 1400 to 1532 (methods far older))

The Inca state rested on highland farming that had been developed over many centuries. Terraces with canals extended the land under maize, a method the Wari had used before them and which the Incas spread as they conquered, while potatoes and other tubers fed the high plateau; Sarmiento, writing in 1572, credits Pachacuti with long masonry-faced terraces near Cusco. Chuno is made above about 3,800 metres in June and July, when night temperatures fall near minus 5 degrees: small bitter potatoes are frozen at night, dried by day, and trampled to press out water. Once dry it can keep for years, sometimes decades, and Inca soldiers carried it on campaign. Llamas and alpacas were the only large domesticated animals in the Americas before the Spanish, and llama caravans moved goods along the roads.

• Farmland and herds in the empire were divided into three shares: for the state religion and gods, for the ruler, and for the farmer's own use.
• Round storehouses held maize and square ones held potatoes and tubers, according to World History Encyclopedia.
• Chuno is still made in Bolivia, Peru, Chile and northwest Argentina, and Bolivian chairo soup requires it.

Sources: Wikipedia: Chuno; World History Encyclopedia: Inca Civilization; Wikipedia: Inca Empire; World History Encyclopedia: Wari Civilization; Sarmiento de Gamboa, trans. Markham (1907): History of the Incas, chapter XXX

Machu Picchu (c. 1420 to c. 1532 (radiocarbon); older accounts say c. 1450)

Machu Picchu stands on a ridge at about 2,430 metres above sea level, above the Urubamba River, with around 200 buildings on terraces around a central square. Most archaeologists regard it as a royal estate built for Pachacuti, and others stress its religious buildings. In 2021 Richard Burger and colleagues published radiocarbon dates from 26 people buried nearby, recovered in Yale's 1912 excavations, showing occupation from about 1420 to 1532. That puts its start about two decades before 1438, the year the Spanish-based chronology gives for Pachacuti's accession, and the authors argue the results should change how Inca chronology is worked out. Its modern fame and Hiram Bingham's 1911 visit belong to a later era.

• Estimates of the people living there run to about 750 or up to 1,000, and most would have been support staff, not nobles.
• The Intihuatana stone at the top of the site, whose name means 'place where the sun is tied', is commonly linked to astronomy, but its exact function is debated.
• Its granite blocks were cut so closely that they stand without mortar.

Sources: Burger et al., Antiquity 95 (2021): New AMS dates for Machu Picchu: results and implications; Yale Department of Anthropology: Dr. Richard Burger's study demonstrates Machu Picchu older than believed; World History Encyclopedia: Machu Picchu; Wikipedia: Machu Picchu

Pachacuti (traditionally r. 1438 to 1471; scholars' dates range from c. 1400 to 1471)

Cusi Yupanqui, called Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui ('Earth Shaker'), Sapa Inca · Cusco

Pachacuti is the ruler the chronicles credit with making the Incas an empire. They say the Chanka attacked Cusco while Viracocha Inca and his heir Urco fled, and that a younger son, Cusi Yupanqui, defended the city and took the throne, helped in one story by rocks that turned into warriors. Since the early 1980s most scholars have treated this war as largely mythical. His conquests, with commanders such as Capac Yupanqui and his son Topa Inca, reached the Colla and Lupaca around Lake Titicaca and spread north toward Cajamarca. The usual dates, 1438 to 1471, come from John Rowe's reading of Cabello de Balboa, while radiocarbon work points to an earlier start in the 15th century.

How they came to power: According to the chronicles, he won the defence of Cusco against the Chanka at Yahuar Pampa, survived a plot by his father, and took power after a short civil war in which Urco died.

How it ended: He died in 1471 on Rowe's dating, reportedly of illness, and named Topa Inca as heir. His mummy was venerated and consulted in crises until a Spanish official, the Licentiate Polo, found it in Cusco in 1559 and sent it to Lima.

• Sarmiento, whose 1572 history was written partly to justify Spanish rule, gives Pachacuti a life of 125 years and a death in 1191, and calls him cruel, which shows how little his chronology can be trusted (Markham's translation, 1907).
• Betanzos, writing in 1551, who drew on Inca traditions through his Inca wife, is suspected of raising her ancestor's role in the story.
• He first named his son Amaru Yupanqui as co-ruler, but replaced him because of perceived military weakness.

Sources: Sarmiento de Gamboa, trans. Markham (1907): History of the Incas, chapters XXVII to XLVII; Wikipedia: Pachacuti; World History Encyclopedia: Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui

Cusco, navel of the empire (rebuilt in the mid-15th century, by tradition under Pachacuti)

Cusco was the centre of Tawantinsuyu, 'the land of four parts', and four main roads ran from it to the empire's quarters. In the mid-15th century, by tradition under Pachacuti, the northern swamp was drained, large plazas laid out and the city's buildings replaced in fitted stone, which Sarmiento, writing in 1572, admired for its precision without iron tools. The Coricancha, the Temple of the Sun, was lined with about 700 gold sheets of about 2 kilograms each, and 41 sacred sight lines, the ceques, radiated from it. Estimates give the city proper about 40,000 people at the Spanish conquest and another 200,000 around it, while some reach up to 150,000 for the peak. A popular idea that the city was laid out in the shape of a puma is disputed, and some scholars read it as a metaphor.

• The city was split into an upper hanan half and a lower hurin half, each with five noble lineages.
• The fortress-temple of Sacsayhuaman, on the northern approach, has blocks weighing over 100 tons and is said to have been built by 20,000 tribute labourers.
• After the conquest the Coricancha's walls were built into a Dominican monastery, and many of Sacsayhuaman's stones were reused elsewhere.

Sources: Sarmiento de Gamboa, trans. Markham (1907): History of the Incas, chapter XXX; World History Encyclopedia: Cuzco; Wikipedia: Inca Empire

Qhapaq Nan, the Inca road (built up mainly c. 1438 to 1532 on older Wari and Tiwanaku routes)

The Inca road system linked the empire with tens of thousands of kilometres of road; estimates range from about 23,000 to 60,000 kilometres, and 40,000 is the figure most often cited. John Hyslop measured the main highland route from Quito to the Mendoza River at about 5,658 kilometres. Most roads were 1 to 4 metres wide, though some stretches reached far wider, and tambos with supplies stood about a day's walk apart. Parts were built by the Wari and Tiwanaku before the Incas upgraded them, and communities maintained them through mit'a labour, while Hyslop argues traffic was mainly official: soldiers, porters, llama caravans and nobles on duty. UNESCO inscribed the road as Qhapaq Nan in 2014, across Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Chile and Argentina.

• Cieza de Leon described a 'royal road made by the force and labour of men' from Quito to Cuzco, and compared it to the Roman road in Spain (1553; Markham's translation, 1864).
• Relay runners called chasquis waited at roadside stations to carry messages and light goods onward.
• A rope bridge over the Apurimac, about 45 metres long, was made of plant fibres and had to be replaced about every two years.

Sources: Cieza de Leon, trans. Markham (1864): The Travels of Pedro de Cieza de Leon; Wikipedia: Inca road system; World History Encyclopedia: Inca Civilization; World History Encyclopedia: Wari Civilization

Mit'a: an empire without money (c. 1438 to 1532 (Spanish version from 1573))

Tawantinsuyu worked largely without money or markets, and households owed their tax mainly in labour. Mit'a means a 'turn' in Quechua, and men from about 15 to 50 served in rotating shifts on highways, bridges, terraces, fortifications and storehouses, while their communities looked after absent workers' families. In return the state offered security, emergency food and public works, and stored goods in qollqa storehouses. The empire held an estimated 6 to 14 million people, though estimates run from 4 to 37 million, with over 30 languages. Under Spanish rule, Viceroy Toledo turned the system to the silver mines of Potosi from 1573, a far harsher institution that belongs to the next era.

• Cieza de Leon, publishing in 1553, reported storehouses and lodgings at intervals of four leagues on the roads, with accounts kept by quipu so that no district paid more than its share (Markham's translation, 1864).
• Craftspeople were exempt from agricultural and war service, and Inca mit'a was mostly agricultural, with mining service rare.
• The state also moved whole communities as mitma colonists, which helped spread Quechua.

Sources: Cieza de Leon, trans. Markham (1864): The Travels of Pedro de Cieza de Leon; Wikipedia: Mit'a; Wikipedia: Inca Empire; World History Encyclopedia: Inca Civilization

The aclla and Inca women (c. 1438 to 1532)

Each year officials collected girls of about 8 to 10 from the provinces as a form of tribute, usually from higher-status families, and trained them for about four years in religion, spinning, weaving, cooking and brewing chicha. They lived in enclosed houses called acllawasi, which could hold up to 200 women. Some became mamakuna, or priestesses, others were given in marriage to prominent men or became secondary wives of the Inca, and a few were sacrificed in capacocha rites. Garcilaso de la Vega, writing in 1609, describes virgins dedicated to the Sun in 'conventual houses', while modern accounts stress their labour and their political role. Archaeologists have identified places linked to aclla, notably at Huanuco Pampa.

• Inca kinship ran in parallel lines, with women descending from women and men from men, and women could sometimes own land and herds.
• A woman could hold the post of kuraka, a noble governing an ayllu, and queens may have held significant powers, although Spanish records are unclear about this.
• Sending aclla to communities raised their families' status and tied regions to Cusco, so they served as tools of statecraft and reciprocity.

Sources: Wikipedia: Aclla; World History Encyclopedia: Inca Civilization; Wikipedia: Inca Empire; Garcilaso de la Vega, trans. Markham (1869): First Part of the Royal Commentaries of the Yncas, book IV

Capacocha: sacrifice on the peaks (Inca period, to 1532; the Llullaillaco burials are about 500 years old)

Capacocha was an Inca state rite, usually involving children, performed at the accession or death of a ruler, in illness, or to stop disaster. The colonial writer Cristobal de Molina gives the fullest description, and archaeology has confirmed the rite but not the scale the chronicles suggest. In 1999 a team including Johan Reinhard and Constanza Ceruti found three children on Llullaillaco in Argentina, at about 6,739 metres. A 2013 study led by Andrew Wilson analysed the hair of a girl of about 13, showing that coca and chicha use increased in the year before her death, in a pattern that may reflect sedation. Her two younger companions, about 4 or 5 years old, took much less, and unlike some other high-altitude burials the three show no signs of head trauma.

• Wilson suspects the older girl was an aclla, chosen about a year before her death, when her diet shifted from mostly potatoes to more maize and animal protein.
• Spanish accounts of heart removal in the rite have no archaeological support.
• Other high burials include those on Ampato in Peru, Aconcagua and Cerro El Plomo.

Sources: National Geographic (2013): Inca mummy maiden study; Scientific American (2013): Incas Intoxicated Sacrificial Children in Preparation for Death; Anchorage Daily News, from ScienceNOW (Lizzie Wade, 2013): Inca children, dead 500 years, may have been drugged before sacrifice; Wikipedia: Capacocha

Topa Inca (r. 1471 to 1493 (traditional))

Topa Inca Yupanqui (Tupac Inca Yupanqui), Sapa Inca · Cusco

Topa Inca Yupanqui led his father's armies as crown prince, campaigning north against Hatun Xauxa, the Bombon plateau and Huaylas, and capturing Minchancaman of Chimor around 1470. As ruler he extended the empire through modern Ecuador and rebuilt Quito with architects from Cusco, subdued the Qulla and pressed into the Antisuyu. Sarmiento, writing in 1572, also calls him a notable builder, and credits him with finishing the fortress of Cusco. The most striking story about him is a voyage west on balsas, with more than 20,000 men, to islands called Avachumbi and Ninachumbi, told by Sarmiento and also by Murua and Cabello de Balboa. Some historians identify the islands with Mangareva and Easter Island, Markham in 1907 with the Galapagos, and others doubt the voyage happened at all.

How they came to power: Pachacuti gave him command of the army while he was young and named him heir, after setting aside his elder son Amaru Yupanqui.

How it ended: He died about 1493 at Chinchero, near Cusco. Sarmiento describes a grave illness and his naming of Titu Cusi Hualpa, later Huayna Capac, while also calling his concubine Chuqui Ocllo a witch who killed him, a charge that later retellings give as poison.

• Sarmiento says the voyage lasted nine months, 'others say a year', and that it brought back gold and black people, details that cannot be checked (Markham's translation, 1907).
• A faction backed his son Ccapac Huari, but his brother Huaman Achachi's men killed many of them; Sarmiento says Ccapac Huari was either killed or banished to Chinchero.
• Sarmiento calls him the greatest tyrant of all the Incas, a verdict that fits the book's purpose of justifying Spanish rule.

Sources: Sarmiento de Gamboa, trans. Markham (1907): History of the Incas, chapters XLVI to LV; Wikipedia: Topa Inca Yupanqui; World History Encyclopedia: Chimu Civilization

Huayna Capac (r. 1493 to c. 1527 (his death is dated between about 1524 and 1530))

Huayna Capac (Wayna Qhapaq), born Titu Cusi Hualpa, Sapa Inca · Cusco and Tumipampa

Huayna Capac ruled Tawantinsuyu at its greatest extent, about 2 million square kilometres, pushing north into Ecuador and southern Colombia and south into what are now Chile and Argentina. He campaigned for years in the north against peoples such as the Pastos and rebuilt Quito as a second capital, while the Shuar turned back his attempts to enter the Amazon lowlands. He also held estates such as Kispiwanka, near Urubamba. His death and that of his heir Ninan Cuyochi came within a short time, around 1527, and left the succession open. By then Spaniards had touched the northern coast, and disease may already have been spreading.

How they came to power: He was named by his dying father, Topa Inca, and took power young; Sarmiento records a rival faction backing Ccapac Huari, and another account tells of a plot by his tutor Wallpaya.

How it ended: He died at Quito or Tumipampa of an illness that many chroniclers call smallpox. Robert McCaa, Aleta Nimlos and Teodoro Hampe Martinez find this doubtful: of 17 chroniclers giving a cause, six name smallpox, three fever and two measles, and others mention a rash or leprosy.

• Sarmiento, writing in 1572, dates his death to 1524 and says he reigned for 60 years and died at 80, while modern reckoning gives about 1527, and McCaa and colleagues say the year remains in dispute.
• Pizarro's men first heard of his death only around October 1531.
• Sarmiento says his body was preserved and kept hidden in Cusco until the Licentiate Polo found it.

Sources: McCaa, Nimlos and Hampe Martinez (2004): Why Blame Smallpox? The Death of the Inca Huayna Capac; Sarmiento de Gamboa, trans. Markham (1907): History of the Incas, chapters LV to LXII; Wikipedia: Huayna Capac; Wikipedia: Inca Empire

Quechua, then and now (spread long before the Incas; roughly 7 to 10 million speakers today)

Quechua spread across the central Andes long before the Incas, who were one of many peoples already speaking a form of it, with a homeland that may have been in central Peru. The Incas made it the empire's official language and gave its speakers a privileged status, while mitma colonists carried it further. Its speakers are a living people, and estimates run from just under 7 million in census data up to 2011, through 7.2 million native speakers, to one 2004 estimate of 8 to 10 million. Peru's 2017 census counted 3.8 million speakers, and it is recognised in Ecuador and Bolivia as well. Peru in 1975 became the first country to make Quechua an official language.

• Speakers call the language runa simi, roughly 'people's language', a name that seems to date from the colonial period.
• The oldest written records are by the missionary Domingo de Santo Tomas, who published a grammar in 1560.
• The Huarochiri Manuscript of 1598, written in Quechua, is a major source for Andean religion and mythology.

Sources: Wikipedia: Quechuan languages; World History Encyclopedia: Inca Civilization; Wikipedia: Inca Empire

Huascar (r. c. 1527 to 1532)

Titu Cusi Hualpa Inti Illapa, called Huascar (Waskar), Sapa Inca · Cusco

After Huayna Capac and Ninan Cuyochi died, a faction in Cusco raised Huascar to the throne, while the northern armies stayed loyal to his half-brother Atahualpa. The sources disagree on whether Huayna Capac ever named him. Juan de Betanzos, writing in 1551 and regarded as biased because his wife, his main informant, had been married to Atahualpa, says he seized the lands of earlier Incas and of the Sun. War between the brothers broke out around 1529 after Huascar refused Atahualpa's tribute and declared him a rebel. His generals lost at Chimborazo and then at Quipaipan in 1532, when Chalcuchimac surrounded his army and captured him, and Quizquiz occupied the capital.

How they came to power: Cusco's nobility and priests backed him and crowned him after his father's death, on the instructions, according to Sarmiento, of the noble Cusi Tupac Yupanqui.

How it ended: He was captured at Quipaipan in 1532 and killed soon after Atahualpa's own capture by Pizarro, on Atahualpa's orders and reportedly by drowning. That is told in the conquest era, and the sources disagree on the exact date.

• Sarmiento says he took the name Huascar because he was born in the town of Huascar-quihuar, four and a half leagues from Cusco (Markham's translation, 1907).
• Another explanation of his name links it to a gold chain made for his birth.
• No reliable count of the war's dead survives; Wikipedia's summary gives estimates from 60,000 to 1.1 million, a spread that shows how thin the evidence is.

Sources: Sarmiento de Gamboa, trans. Markham (1907): History of the Incas, chapters LXIII to LXVII; Wikipedia: Huascar; Wikipedia: Inca Civil War

Atahualpa (b. c. 1502; civil war 1529 to 1532 (this entry stops at Cajamarca, November 1532))

Atawallpa, regnal name Caccha Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui, Sapa Inca · Quito and Cajamarca

Atahualpa spent years in the north with his father Huayna Capac and, after his death, held Quito and the loyalty of generals such as Quizquiz, Chalcuchimac and Rumiñawi. Huascar's forces captured him early in the war, but he escaped and his armies drove south, winning at Chimborazo and at Quipaipan, where they took Huascar prisoner. He took the throne in 1532. His birthplace and mother are disputed: Cieza, Betanzos and Sarmiento favour Cusco, Garcilaso (1609) and Juan de Velasco (18th century) Quito, and he himself is reported to have named Caranqui when questioned on the morning of his death. When Pizarro's roughly 168 men reached Cajamarca on 15 November 1532 he was encamped nearby, with an army that modern summaries, including World History Encyclopedia, put at about 80,000; nobody counted it.

How they came to power: Son of Huayna Capac, he built his power among the northern armies during his father's long campaigns, and rejected Huascar's authority after their father's death.

How it ended: His capture at Cajamarca and his execution in 1533 belong to the conquest era and are told there. The sources disagree on the date, 26 July or 29 August 1533.

• The sources name different mothers for him: Tocto Coca (Sarmiento, 1572), Tuto or Tupac Palla (Cieza), a princess of Quito (Garcilaso, 1609), called Paccha by Velasco in the 18th century, and Ecuadorian and Peruvian historians still disagree over where he was born.
• World History Encyclopedia reports that he destroyed many quipus in order to erase records of his rival Huascar.
• Sarmiento's hostile 1572 portrait calls him a bastard, a charge from an author writing to delegitimise Inca rule.

Sources: Sarmiento de Gamboa, trans. Markham (1907): History of the Incas, chapters LXIII to LXIX; Wikipedia: Atahualpa; World History Encyclopedia: Atahualpa; World History Encyclopedia: Quipu

Hernán Cortés (c. 1485 to 2 December 1547; in Mexico from 1519)

Hernán Cortés, 1st Marquess of the Valley of Oaxaca, Conquistador · Cuba, then New Spain

Born about 1485 at Medellín in Extremadura, Cortés went to the Caribbean as a young man, ran a plantation on Hispaniola, worked as a notary and served as a magistrate in Cuba. In 1519 he took an expedition to the Mexican coast, against the limits set by Governor Diego Velázquez, and within about two years brought down the Mexica state with the armies of its Indigenous enemies. He sent long letters of report to Charles V, and these shaped how Europe understood the events for centuries. They are also self-serving documents: in Matthew Restall's 2018 reassessment Cortés emerges as a lucky survivor of a war among Indigenous powers, not the master strategist of his own account. Royal administrators and lawsuits soon closed in on him, and he left on new expeditions, including the march to Honduras of 1524 to 1526.

How they rose: He had served Governor Velázquez in Cuba and married his sister-in-law Catalina Suárez, though relations between them were strained, and in October 1518 Velázquez named him to lead the third mainland expedition. The governor's instructions of 23 October 1518 gave no authority to found a colony; on the coast in 1519 Cortés founded the town of Villa Rica de la Vera Cruz and, using Castilian law, freed himself from the governor's authority.

How they died: He died of dysentery at Castilleja in Spain on 2 December 1547, while about to sail for America again. His wish to be buried at Coyoacán was ignored at first; he was buried near Seville and later moved to Texcoco, in 1566 according to Wikipedia and in 1556 according to World History Encyclopedia.

• Charles V made him Marquess of the Valley of Oaxaca in 1529, a title and estate that passed in 1547 to his legitimate son, also named Martín.
• He had his ships grounded and broken up early in the campaign so that nobody could turn back; materials from them later went into the fleet of 13 warships built for Lake Texcoco.
• His first wife, Catalina Suárez, died in the night of 1 to 2 November 1522. Accusations that he had killed her caused a scandal and an investigation, whose records were published in the 19th century.

Sources: Hernán Cortés, trans. F. A. MacNutt (1908): Letters of Cortés, vol. 1; Fordham Modern History Sourcebook: Hernán Cortés, from the Second Letter to Charles V, 1520; World History Encyclopedia (M. Cartwright): Hernán Cortés; HistoryNet / MHQ (M. C. Eakin): review of Restall, When Montezuma Met Cortés; Wikipedia: Hernán Cortés

Malintzin (c. 1500 to before February 1529; with the Spanish from 1519)

Malintzin, baptised Marina; also Doña Marina and La Malinche (birth name unknown), Interpreter and negotiator · Gulf Coast and New Spain

Malintzin was born to a noble family on the Gulf Coast, though sources disagree on the town, and as a child she was sold or stolen into slavery and ended up among the Chontal Maya of Potonchan. In 1519, after a battle there, the Maya gave the Spanish twenty enslaved women, and she was one of them. She spoke Nahuatl and Maya, so at first Spanish passed through Gerónimo de Aguilar into Maya and then through her into Nahuatl; she soon learned Spanish as well. She spoke for Cortés with Moctezuma's envoys, the Totonacs and Tlaxcala. No writing of her own survives, so she is known only through others: Bernal Díaz, who praised her decades later, Cortés, who barely mentions her, and Indigenous painted histories, which place her at the centre of events.

How they rose: Baptised and given first to the Spanish officer Alonso Hernández Puertocarrero, she became indispensable once the expedition entered Nahuatl-speaking country. Cortés then took her from him.

How they died: The cause and exact date are unknown. Some scholars place her death before February 1529, less than a decade after the fall of Tenochtitlan, by which time she had married the Spaniard Juan Jaramillo.

• The name 'Malinalli', often given as her birth name, is rejected by many modern historians. 'Malintzin' is Marina as Nahuatl speakers said it, plus a respectful ending, and the Spanish heard that as 'Malinche'.
• Her son by Cortés, Martín, born in 1522, is counted among the first mestizos of New Spain.
• Modern Mexico has seen her as a traitor, a victim and a symbolic mother of the nation, and 'malinchista' still denounces someone who rejects their own heritage. Camilla Townsend's work stresses that she bargained hard for protection for herself and her children.

Sources: Bernal Díaz del Castillo, trans. J. I. Lockhart (1844): The Memoirs of the Conquistador, vol. 1, Project Gutenberg; World History Encyclopedia: La Malinche, a complicated woman in context; Wikipedia: Lienzo de Tlaxcala; Wikipedia: La Malinche

The Tlaxcalan alliance and the Cholula massacre (June to October 1519)

The Spanish did not fight the Mexica alone. Their first partners were the Totonacs of Cempoala under Xicomecoatl, whom Cortés persuaded to rebel and seize Moctezuma's tax collectors. In September 1519 the army entered Tlaxcala, a confederacy of four city-states that the Triple Alliance had fought and embargoed but never conquered; after about eighteen days of war, which cost the Spanish half their cavalry and a fifth of their men, Tlaxcala made peace and became an ally. In October the combined force went to the sacred city of Cholula, where Spaniards and Tlaxcalans killed many people and sacked the town. Whether a Cholulan plot really existed, or was a pretext that served Cortés and the Tlaxcalans, is still disputed.

• The death toll at Cholula is contested. Cortés told Charles V that more than 3,000 died in two hours, the Spanish chronicler Francisco López de Gómara wrote 6,000, and the Spanish witness Vázquez de Tapia claimed as many as 30,000. Accounts gathered by Sahagún say the dead were unarmed civilians.
• Tlaxcala's own sources are partisan too: the painted Lienzo de Tlaxcala, made in the mid-1500s to win privileges from the Crown, leaves out the first battles and shows an alliance from the first meeting.
• The war leader Xicotencatl the Younger, who according to Bernal Díaz had to be talked into the alliance, was condemned by the Tlaxcalan council in April 1521 and hanged by Cortés for desertion.

Sources: Hernán Cortés, trans. F. A. MacNutt (1908): Letters of Cortés, vol. 1; Wikipedia: Tlaxcala (Nahua state); Wikipedia: Cholula massacre; Wikipedia: Lienzo de Tlaxcala; Wikipedia: Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire

Cortés meets Moctezuma, and the 'white god' myth (8 November 1519)

On 8 November 1519 Moctezuma II met Cortés on the causeway into Tenochtitlan, exchanged gifts and lodged the Spaniards and their allies in the city. Cortés told Charles V that Moctezuma had in effect surrendered, and the Florentine Codex, compiled under Sahagún some 50 years later, gives Moctezuma a speech welcoming Cortés back to his throne. The story that the Mexica took the Spaniards for gods goes back at least to 1552, when Cortés's chaplain and secretary, the Spanish chronicler Francisco López de Gómara, who had never been to Mexico, wrote it; Cortés's own letters of the time do not make the claim. A fuller version made Cortés the returning god Quetzalcoatl. Modern historians doubt it. Camilla Townsend argues there is little evidence that Indigenous people seriously believed this and no meaningful evidence of a returning-Quetzalcoatl story before the conquest, and Matthew Restall treats both the divine welcome and the surrender as fiction.

• Restall counts Cortés's surrender story among history's great falsehoods, in a book that draws on sources in a half-dozen European and Native American languages.
• Anthony Pagden has noted that no preconquest tradition gives Quetzalcoatl this role of a returning avenger, and that it may have been worked up by the friars Sahagún and Motolinía from their informants.
• Susan Gillespie argues that Nahua writers, who saw history as cycles, shaped the memory of Moctezuma to fit the pattern of earlier last kings. Townsend's 2003 article 'Burying the White Gods' argues that the Mexica quickly recognised the gap in technology and answered it with intelligence, not talk of gods.

Sources: Fordham Modern History Sourcebook: An Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico; Kirkus Reviews: Matthew Restall, When Montezuma Met Cortés; Wikipedia: Moctezuma II; JSTOR Daily (M. Wills, 2020): The Mexica Didn’t Believe the Conquistadors Were Gods (on C. Townsend, American Historical Review, 2003); HistoryNet / MHQ (M. C. Eakin): review of Restall, When Montezuma Met Cortés

The Toxcatl massacre and the death of Moctezuma (22 May to about 29 June 1520)

In May 1520 Cortés left for the coast to face Pánfilo de Narváez, sent from Cuba to arrest him, and left Pedro de Alvarado in charge. During the festival of Toxcatl, about 22 May, Alvarado's men attacked the dancers in the temple precinct; the accounts agree the celebrants were mostly unarmed and had no warning. The city rose and besieged the Spanish compound, where Moctezuma was still held, and chose his brother Cuitlahuac as the new ruler. Moctezuma died about 29 June. Cortés wrote that one of Moctezuma's own subjects hit him on the head with a stone as he spoke from the top of the fort, and that he died within three days, but Indigenous accounts blame the Spanish.

• Book 12 of the Florentine Codex, written by Sahagún's Nahua collaborators, attributes his death to the Spaniards and says they threw his body and that of Itzquauhtzin out at the water's edge.
• The Dominican Diego Durán recorded both versions: Spanish writers and a former conquistador said Mexica missiles killed him, while his Indigenous text and an informant said Cortés's men stabbed him. Other Indigenous annals say he was found strangled.
• Spanish accounts give different reasons for Alvarado's attack, including fear of a revolt and a plan to recover gold. Mexica accounts say the Spaniards wanted the gold the dancers were wearing.

Sources: Hernán Cortés, trans. F. A. MacNutt (1908): Letters of Cortés, vol. 1; Fordham Modern History Sourcebook: An Aztec Account of the Conquest of Mexico; Wikipedia: Massacre in the Great Temple; Wikipedia: Moctezuma II; Wikipedia: La Noche Triste

La Noche Triste (night of 30 June 1520)

With food and powder running short, Cortés tried to break out of Tenochtitlan by night along a causeway. The Mexica raised the alarm and attacked from canoes and from the road, and many of the fleeing Spaniards and Tlaxcalans were killed or captured. The survivors, guided by their Tlaxcalan allies, moved around the northern lakes and fought off another attack at Otumba in July on the way to safety in Tlaxcala. Tlaxcala's continued support kept the campaign alive. The name 'Sad Night' reflects the Spanish view of the event; in Mexico it is also officially called the Victorious Night.

• Casualty figures disagree. Cortés admitted more than 150 Spaniards, 45 horses and more than 2,000 allies (MacNutt, 1908), the eyewitness Juan Cano said 1,170 Spaniards, and Bernal Díaz, in Lockhart's 1844 translation, gives above 870 men and above 1,200 Tlaxcalans over five days including Otumba.
• Wikipedia's modern summary gives between 800 and 1,200 Spaniards and around 4,000 Tlaxcalans killed or captured, and notes that Cano's figure probably exceeds the number of Spaniards actually present.
• The Lienzo de Tlaxcala, the Tlaxcalans' own painted history, shows the Noche Triste among its scenes, part of its case for what Tlaxcala had done for the Crown.

Sources: Hernán Cortés, trans. F. A. MacNutt (1908): Letters of Cortés, vol. 1; Bernal Díaz del Castillo, trans. J. I. Lockhart (1844): The Memoirs of the Conquistador, vol. 1, Project Gutenberg; Wikipedia: La Noche Triste; Wikipedia: Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire; Wikipedia: Lienzo de Tlaxcala

Smallpox reaches Tenochtitlan (from about September 1520)

Smallpox erupted in central Mexico in 1520, a point on which historians agree. Spanish sources say it came with an enslaved Black man in Narváez's force, Francisco de Eguía. In Tenochtitlan it spread from about September, and Cuitlahuac, who had ruled about 80 days, was among the dead. The Nahua account in Book 12 of the Florentine Codex describes people covered in pustules who could not move, many of whom simply starved. Because adults and children fell ill together there was nobody to bring food or water, and the historian Robert McCaa stresses that many died of hunger and neglect as well as the virus.

• How many died is unknown. A 2002 paper by Acuña-Soto and colleagues gives 5 to 8 million for the 1519 to 1520 epidemic in Mexico, but McCaa warns that all population figures from this period are crude and that claims of continent-wide pandemics rest on thin evidence.
• It struck Spanish allies too. Cortés wrote that many caciques around Cholula had died of it and that he was asked to approve their successors, and that Magiscatcin (Maxixcatzin), the principal lord at Tlaxcala and his ally, died of it as well (MacNutt, 1908).
• Virginia Tech's teaching edition of Book 12 reminds readers that the text was set down by a friar after the conquest and must be used with caution.

Sources: Hernán Cortés, trans. F. A. MacNutt (1908): Letters of Cortés, vol. 2; R. McCaa (University of Minnesota): The Population of Mexico from Origins to Revolution; Acuña-Soto et al., Emerging Infectious Diseases (2002): Megadrought and Megadeath in 16th Century Mexico; Virginia Tech, Digital History Reader: Sahagún, Florentine Codex Book XII on the smallpox; Wikipedia: Fall of Tenochtitlan

Cuauhtemoc (ruled from 1520 or early 1521; captured 13 August 1521; hanged 28 February 1525)

Cuauhtemoc, 'one who has descended like an eagle'; tlatoani of Tenochtitlan, Mexica · Tenochtitlan

Cuauhtemoc, a son of the ruler Ahuitzotl, was ruling Tlatelolco when he was chosen to succeed Cuitlahuac as the city reeled from war and smallpox. He led the defence through the siege, when among the Nahuas only the Tlatelolca stayed with him, and was captured on Lake Texcoco on 13 August 1521 as he tried to escape by canoe with his family. Spanish accounts have him ask Cortés to kill him and Cortés honour his courage, but his captors then burned his feet to make him reveal gold, of which little remained. He stayed a prisoner for three and a half years.

How they came to power: His birth date is unknown. In the traditional way, the senior nobles voted for the most able candidate after Cuitlahuac died, when he was perhaps 25 years old.

How it ended: Cortés took him on the march to Honduras in 1525 and had him hanged at Acalan (Itzamkanac), the Chontal Maya capital, on a charge of plotting. Cortés says he confessed; the 17th-century historian Alva Ixtlilxochitl, a descendant of the Texcocan lord Coanacoch, says Cortés invented the plot.

• Cortés's Fifth Letter admits he held Cuauhtemoc as a prisoner, 'always carrying him' along for fear of revolt (MacNutt, 1908).
• In 1949 the archaeologist Eulalia Guzmán announced she had found his bones at Ixcateopan in Guerrero. INAH scholars later rejected the claim, finding that the bones came from several different people.
• Cortés hanged Tetlepanquetzal, ruler of Tlacopan, with him, removing a second king of the old Triple Alliance.

Sources: Hernán Cortés, trans. F. A. MacNutt (1908): Letters of Cortés, vol. 2; Bernal Díaz del Castillo, trans. J. I. Lockhart (1844): The Memoirs of the Conquistador, vol. 2, Project Gutenberg; Wikipedia: Cuauhtémoc; Wikipedia: Fall of Tenochtitlan

The fall of Tenochtitlan (about 26 May to 13 August 1521)

Tenochtitlan fell to a coalition, not to Spain alone. Tlaxcala under Chichimecatecuhtli supplied the largest force, joined by Texcoco under Ixtlilxochitl II, Chalco, Huejotzingo, Cholula, Otomi and lake towns such as Iztapalapa, many of them former Mexica subjects. Tlaxcalan labourers built 13 brigantines under the shipwright Martín López, launched on Lake Texcoco in April. The attackers occupied the causeways, intercepted food and water, and destroyed the city block by block, while hunger and disease spread inside it. Tenochca survivors held out with the loyal Tlatelolca until Cuauhtemoc was captured on 13 August.

• Numbers vary widely. Ross Hassig gives 900 to 1,300 Spanish infantry and 50,000 to 200,000 Native allies. Bernal Díaz (Lockhart, 1844) lists 84 horsemen, 194 crossbowmen and musketeers and 650 foot, and Cortés himself wrote of 'more than a hundred thousand men, our friends' on one day (MacNutt, 1908).
• Nobody counted the dead. Cortés reports more than 12,000 killed and wounded on one day, more than 40,000 killed or taken on another, and more than 50,000 dead of bad water, hunger and disease; MacNutt's 1908 notes add up his figures as 67,000 fallen in the last assaults plus those 50,000. The Texcocan historian Alva Ixtlilxochitl gives 240,000 dead from all causes. Modern summaries put Spanish dead at 450 to 860 (Hassig, via Wikipedia) and allied dead at about 20,000.
• Allied writers later pressed the Crown for reward: Tlaxcala won privileged status, while the lords of Huexotzinco complained in a Nahuatl letter that their service had been overlooked. Restall argues that Spanish weapons brought survival, not conquest, until Spanish and Indigenous reinforcements arrived.

Sources: Hernán Cortés, trans. F. A. MacNutt (1908): Letters of Cortés, vol. 2; World History Encyclopedia (M. Cartwright): Hernán Cortés; Wikipedia: Fall of Tenochtitlan; Wikipedia: Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire; Bernal Díaz del Castillo, trans. J. I. Lockhart (1844): The Memoirs of the Conquistador, vol. 2, Project Gutenberg

The war for the Maya highlands and Yucatan (1524 to 1530 (Guatemalan highlands); 1527 to 1547 (Yucatan))

Pedro de Alvarado entered Guatemala in early 1524 with Spaniards and allies mostly from Tlaxcala and Cholula, whose language left Nahuatl place names across the country. Disease had already hit the highlands. He defeated the K'iche', accepted soldiers from their Kaqchikel rivals, and then demanded so much tribute that the Kaqchikel rebelled and held out until 1530. In Yucatan Francisco de Montejo sailed from Spain in 1527 with 400 men, and the Spanish withdrew from the peninsula in the mid-1530s. They founded Mérida in January 1542, helped decisively by the Xiu Maya lord of Maní, and in November 1546 a league of eastern provinces rose for four months.

• Both sides wrote. Alvarado's letters to Cortés survive in part, while the Annals of the Kaqchikels, a letter of 1571 from the Tz'utujil nobles of Santiago Atitlán and the painted Lienzo de Quauhquechollan give the views of Maya and Nahua participants.
• Tlaxcalan veterans later wrote to the Spanish king to protest at their poor treatment after the Guatemalan campaign.
• Alvarado's single combat with the K'iche' leader Tecún Umán in 1524 belongs at least partly to legend. The Itza kingdom of Petén stayed independent until 1697.

Sources: World History Encyclopedia (M. Cartwright): Pedro de Alvarado; Wikipedia: Spanish conquest of Guatemala; Wikipedia: Spanish conquest of Yucatán

Francisco Pizarro (c. 1478 to 26 June 1541; expeditions from 1524)

Francisco Pizarro, 1st Marquess of the Conquest, Conquistador · Panama and Peru

Pizarro sailed to Hispaniola in 1502 and later settled in Panama, by then a veteran of the Spanish Caribbean, where he heard rumours of a rich land to the south. Voyages in 1524 to 1525 and from 1526 brought more hardship than gain, though his pilot found a balsa craft loaded with gold and trade goods. He sailed a third time in December 1530 and reached the Inca Empire when it was torn by civil war and disease. Peoples who resented Inca rule, among them the Huanca, Cañari and Chachapoya, fought alongside him. He captured Atahualpa at Cajamarca in 1532, entered Cusco in November 1533 and founded Lima on 18 January 1535.

How they rose: In July 1529 Charles V made him a Knight of Santiago and adelantado, with the right to govern any lands he won. He then raised fewer than 200 fighting men, later reinforced to about 260, with Diego de Almagro as second-in-command.

How they died: Rivalry over Cusco led to war with Almagro, who was executed on Hernando Pizarro's orders in 1538. On 26 June 1541 supporters of Almagro's son stormed Pizarro's house in Lima and killed him.

• Most eyewitness accounts of the conquest come from his own side, including the report of his secretary Francisco de Xeres, apparently printed at Seville in 1534 and translated by Clements Markham in 1872.
• According to World History Encyclopedia, Charles V rebuked him for the execution of Atahualpa.
• The same source says that under the terms granted in 1529 he could keep four-fifths of the wealth acquired, with the rest going to the Crown.

Sources: Francisco de Xeres and others, trans. C. Markham (1872): Reports on the Discovery of Peru; World History Encyclopedia (M. Cartwright): Francisco Pizarro; Wikipedia: Francisco Pizarro; Wikipedia: Spanish conquest of the Inca Empire

The ambush at Cajamarca (16 November 1532)

Atahualpa, fresh from victory over his half-brother Huascar, was camped outside Cajamarca with a huge army when Pizarro's small force, with Cañari chiefs from Tumbes in his retinue, reached the emptied town on 15 November 1532. Next day the Sapa Inca came into the square in a litter, carried by nobles and accompanied by thousands of attendants with little more than small axes. The friar Vicente de Valverde demanded his submission and, in Spanish accounts, Atahualpa threw down the book he was handed. Gunfire and cavalry then burst from the buildings around the square. Many scholars today prefer to call it the Cajamarca massacre.

• Pizarro's secretary Xeres wrote that the fighting lasted about half an hour and that 2,000 were killed in the square and on the plain. World History Encyclopedia gives 7,000 dead and no Spanish losses, while the summary on Wikipedia gives 2,000 to 3,000 killed, 7,000 captured, and one enslaved man dead on the Spanish side.
• Xeres, writing for the victors, puts Atahualpa's army at 30,000 to 40,000 men. The summary on Wikipedia gives nearly 80,000.
• The only Inca account comes decades later from Titu Cusi Yupanqui, Manco Inca's son. He places the book-throwing at an earlier meeting and says the Spanish first poured out an offered cup of chicha.

Sources: Francisco de Xeres and others, trans. C. Markham (1872): Reports on the Discovery of Peru; World History Encyclopedia (M. Cartwright): Atahualpa; Wikipedia: Battle of Cajamarca; Wikipedia: Atahualpa

The ransom and death of Atahualpa (November 1532 to 26 July 1533)

In captivity Atahualpa offered to fill a room about 22 feet long, 17 wide and 8 high once with gold and twice with silver. The treasure came in from across the empire, and from prison he arranged the killing of his rival Huascar. Once it had been melted down, the Spanish, fearing an attack by his general Rumiñawi, tried him for treason, conspiracy and the murder of his brother. He was sentenced to burn, but accepted baptism and was strangled with a garrote instead. Pizarro's puppet Tupac Huallpa could not restore order, and the Inca state lost its head at the moment it most needed one.

• Xeres records that the melting ended on the feast of Santiago (25 July), with the royal fifth alone coming to 262,259 pesos of gold and 10,121 marcs of silver (Markham, 1872).
• Sources differ on what the ransom was for. It is often said to have been for his freedom, but John Hemming says he offered it to save his life, and no early chronicler records a Spanish commitment to free him.
• Most sources date the execution to 26 July 1533, though one summary gives 29 August. Later Andean tradition told of Inkarri, an Inca whose severed head would grow a new body and return to set the world right.

Sources: Francisco de Xeres and others, trans. C. Markham (1872): Reports on the Discovery of Peru; World History Encyclopedia (M. Cartwright): Atahualpa; World History Encyclopedia (M. Cartwright): Francisco Pizarro; Wikipedia: Atahualpa; Wikipedia: Spanish conquest of the Inca Empire

Manco Inca (crowned 1533; c. 1515 to 1544)

Manco Inca Yupanqui (Manqu Inka Yupanki), Manco II, Sapa Inca · Cusco, then Vilcabamba

A son of Huayna Capac, Manco joined the Spanish while fleeing Atahualpa's purge of Huascar's kin, and they crowned him at Cusco in late 1533. Mistreated by the Pizarro brothers, he escaped, raised an army and from 6 May 1536 besieged Cusco while his general Quizo Yupanqui attacked Lima. Fire destroyed much of the city and Spanish relief columns were wiped out, but the defenders, with Cañari, Chachapoya and other Indigenous auxiliaries, retook the fortress of Sacsayhuaman and held on. Manco's farmer conscripts had to go home for the harvest, and Almagro's return from Chile helped end the siege by March 1537. He beat off a Spanish attack at Ollantaytambo, then withdrew to the jungles of Vilcabamba and founded the Neo-Inca State.

How they came to power: Pizarro needed a new ruler after his puppet Tupac Huallpa died, and had the chiefs at Cusco acknowledge Manco as Inca, with real power resting with the Spanish.

How it ended: He was murdered in 1544 by followers of Diego de Almagro who had killed Francisco Pizarro and were hiding under his protection. Manco's soldiers then killed them.

• Numbers vary widely. The Spaniards in Cusco estimated the besiegers at 50,000 to 400,000, and most chroniclers and eyewitnesses settled on 100,000 to 200,000 (WarHistory.org); Wikipedia's articles range from as low as 40,000 to 200,000. The garrison was 190 Spaniards, 80 of them mounted, and their Huanca, Cañari, Chachapoya and other auxiliaries are given as about 2,000 (World History Encyclopedia), several thousand, or 30,000 (Wikipedia).
• His relative and rival Pasac, who sided with the Spanish, is credited with the plan to retake Sacsayhuaman; Juan Pizarro was killed in the fighting.
• His sons Sayri Tupac, Titu Cusi and Tupac Amaru ruled after him in Vilcabamba until 1572.

Sources: P. Sarmiento de Gamboa, trans. and introduced by C. Markham (1907): History of the Incas, Project Gutenberg; World History Encyclopedia (M. Cartwright): Francisco Pizarro; Wikipedia: Manco Inca Yupanqui; Wikipedia: Siege of Cusco; WarHistory.org: The Great Inca Rebellion, the Siege of Cuzco I

Las Casas and the New Laws (New Laws 20 November 1542; Valladolid debate 1550 to 1551; Short Account printed 1552)

Bartolomé de las Casas, who first came to the Indies as a layman and became a Dominican friar in the 1520s, spent decades arguing against the encomienda, the grant of Indigenous labour to Spanish settlers. On 20 November 1542 Charles V issued the New Laws, which forbade future enslavement of Indigenous people and limited the settlers' power. In Peru the encomenderos revolted under Gonzalo Pizarro and killed Viceroy Blasco Núñez Vela in 1546, and the laws were only partly successful. At Valladolid in 1550 to 1551 Las Casas debated Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda, who held that some Native peoples could not govern themselves and should be pacified by force.

• His Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies, presented to the hearings of 1542 and printed in 1552, claims above twelve million deaths in forty years. That is the claim of an advocate, not a count, but it shows that the conquest had fierce Spanish critics at the time.
• Las Casas was named Bishop of Chiapas and took up the post in 1545, but served only a short time, because settlers there resisted the laws.
• The laws did free thousands of Indigenous workers held in semi-slavery, even though many settlers opposed them.

Sources: Bartolomé de las Casas: A Brief Account of the Destruction of the Indies, Project Gutenberg; Wikipedia: New Laws; Wikipedia: Bartolomé de las Casas

Cocoliztli and the population collapse (major epidemics 1545 to 1548 and 1576 to 1578; decline through the 16th century)

In 1545 a disease the Nahua called cocoliztli ('pest') swept the Mexican highlands, and it returned in 1576. Acuña-Soto and colleagues estimate 5 to 15 million dead in the first outbreak and 2 to 2.5 million in the second, and argue that it was a local haemorrhagic fever worsened by drought and by poor living conditions and harsh treatment under the encomienda. In 2018 ancient DNA from Oaxaca pointed instead to a strain of Salmonella, so the cause remains open. Behind it stands the wider question of how many people lived in the Americas at all. Estimates differ so sharply that, as Robert McCaa writes, the data point at best to orders of magnitude.

• For Mexico, McCaa sorts the estimates into three camps. Cook and Borah give 25.2 million for central Mexico in 1519 (range 18 to 30 million); Zambardino gives 5 to 10 million falling to one million; Rosenblat gives only 4.5 million falling to 3.4 million, a drop of about 24 percent.
• For the Andes, Noble David Cook's general estimate is nine million in Peru in 1520, while William Denevan's 1992 survey gives 15.7 million for the whole Andes.
• For the hemisphere, estimates run from Kroeber's 8.4 million in 1939 to Dobyns' figure of possibly over 100 million. Koch and colleagues (2019), as reported on Wikipedia, put it at more than 60 million before contact, falling to about 6 million by 1600.

Sources: Acuña-Soto et al., Emerging Infectious Diseases (2002): Megadrought and Megadeath in 16th Century Mexico; R. McCaa (University of Minnesota): The Population of Mexico from Origins to Revolution; L. A. Newson, Latin American Research Review: Indian Population Patterns in Colonial Spanish America; Wikipedia: Population history of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas; Wikipedia: Cocoliztli epidemics

Landa burns the Maya books at Maní (12 July 1562)

Diego de Landa, born in 1524 and sent to Yucatan in 1549, led the Franciscan mission there. In 1562, after idols and skulls were found in a cave near Maní, he opened an inquisition and had Maya nobles and commoners interrogated by 'hoisting', suspending them by the bound hands, sometimes with weights or lashes. At an auto-da-fé on 12 July he burned, by his own count, 27 books and about 5,000 images. Bishop Francisco de Toral sent him to Spain for trial, where a committee absolved him in 1569, and after Toral's death in 1571 he was made bishop of Yucatan. Only three pre-Columbian Maya books and fragments of a fourth are known to survive.

• His Relación de las cosas de Yucatán, written about 1566 in Spain and known only from an abridgement of about 1660, was brought to light in the 1860s by Brasseur de Bourbourg.
• The numbers are disputed. Landa's own figure is 27 books, while World History Encyclopedia gives over forty codices and over 20,000 images.
• Not everyone accepts that the 'books' burned at Maní were true codices: a Popular Archaeology article argues that many were simple local records on bark paper.

Sources: World History Encyclopedia (J. J. Mark): Maya Civilization; Popular Archaeology: Burning the Maya Books, the 1562 Tragedy at Mani; Wikipedia: Diego de Landa; Wikipedia: Maya script

Túpac Amaru and the fall of Vilcabamba (ruled 1571 to 1572; born 1545; executed 24 September 1572)

Thupa Amaru, last Sapa Inca of Vilcabamba, Sapa Inca · Vilcabamba

Túpac Amaru, a son of Manco Inca, took the title in Vilcabamba in 1571 after the death of his brother Titu Cusi. The Spanish, unaware of the change, sent envoys, and they were killed on the border. Viceroy Francisco de Toledo used this to declare war on 14 April 1572, and on 24 June his troops and their Native allies entered Vilcabamba and found it destroyed and deserted. Forty picked soldiers under Martín García de Loyola tracked Túpac Amaru downriver and caught him with his wife beside a campfire. On 24 September, days after being marched into Cusco, he was beheaded in the main square.

How they came to power: He succeeded Titu Cusi in 1571, the third of Manco Inca's sons to rule the small independent state after Sayri Tupac and Titu Cusi.

How it ended: He was convicted of killing priests in Vilcabamba and sentenced to death. Witnesses reported 10,000 to 15,000 people in the square, and sources of 1598 say clerics begged on their knees that he be sent to Spain instead.

• Clements Markham, in 1907, called the killing a judicial murder that stained Toledo's memory, and says the viceroy went home in disgrace. Markham is a partisan voice, and Toledo himself sponsored Sarmiento's history of the Incas.
• The Spanish brought into Cusco the mummified remains of Titu Cusi and of an Inca named Manco and the gold Punchao image, and destroyed them.
• Captain Baltasar de Ocampo, an eyewitness, wrote his narrative many years later, in part to win favours for the settlers of the province.

Sources: P. Sarmiento de Gamboa, trans. and introduced by C. Markham (1907): History of the Incas, Project Gutenberg; Wikipedia: Túpac Amaru; Wikipedia: Neo-Inca State; Wikipedia: Francisco de Toledo

Toledo's resettlements and the Potosí mita (viceroy 1569 to 1581; Potosí mita from 1573)

Having destroyed Vilcabamba, Viceroy Francisco de Toledo rebuilt Andean society around Spanish needs. After a general census he resettled about 1.4 million people in Peru and Bolivia into planned towns called reducciones, to convert them, tax them and reach their labour. He also took the Inca idea of mit'a, a rotating labour turn, and made it a state draft for the mines. From 1573 communities had to send a share of their men to the Cerro Rico of Potosí, whose silver was found in 1545, traditionally by the Indigenous prospector Diego Huallpa. Potosí's population eventually passed 200,000, and the expression 'worth a Potosí' still means great value in Spanish.

• Laws required one-seventh of adult men, and about 13,000 men a year were conscripted from a region of almost 200,000 square miles. Many fled their towns to escape the draft and the tribute.
• Cerro Rico produced an estimated 60 percent of the world's mined silver in the later 16th century.
• Judgements of Toledo diverge. John Hemming called him one of the world's great colonial administrators and also cold and unfeeling, and his regime functioned for more than two centuries at heavy cost to Andean people.

Sources: Dispossessions in the Americas (University of Pennsylvania): The colonial mita; Dispossessions in the Americas (University of Pennsylvania): The reducciones; Wikipedia: Francisco de Toledo; Wikipedia: Mit'a; Wikipedia: Potosí

Sahagún and the Florentine Codex (c. 1499 to 5 February 1590; manuscript completed about 1577)

Fray Bernardino de Sahagún, with the Nahua scholars of Tlatelolco, Franciscan friar and Nahua authors · Tlatelolco, New Spain

Bernardino de Sahagún reached New Spain in 1529, learned Nahuatl and helped found the college of Santa Cruz at Tlatelolco in 1536. His most famous work, the General History of the Things of New Spain, survives in the Florentine Codex: twelve books in parallel Nahuatl and Spanish, with about 2,500 images painted by Native artists. Its authors were Nahua elders and former students of the college, and it covers gods, society, medicine, plants, markets and the conquest. The Getty calls it widely regarded as the most reliable source on Mexica culture, but it was written for missionaries decades after the fall of Tenochtitlan, by authors from Tlatelolco with their own views. Modern editors therefore treat it as a Nahua book as well as a friar's.

How they rose: In 1558 Francisco de Toral, the new Franciscan provincial, commissioned him to write in Nahuatl on subjects useful to the mission. He worked with his collaborators from then on, and consistently credited them.

How they died: He died in Mexico on 5 February 1590, aged about ninety, having worked on the project until the end of his life.

• Dates vary with the version. One recent account says the authors finished in 1577 at Tlatelolco; another reference gives 1569 for the final text, since the work was edited and copied over decades.
• The manuscript reached the Medici library in Florence and was barely known until Angelo Maria Bandini described it in 1793. Charles Dibble and Arthur Anderson's English version of the Nahuatl took about 30 years.
• The Getty's Digital Florentine Codex includes a searchable bank of its art tagged in English, Spanish, Classical Nahuatl and Eastern Huasteca Nahuatl, a language still spoken.

Sources: Getty Research Institute: Digital Florentine Codex; NYU Latinx Project: Digital Repatriation at the Getty Restores Powerful Nahua Voices; Virginia Tech, Digital History Reader: Sahagún, Florentine Codex Book XII; Wikipedia: Bernardino de Sahagún; Wikipedia: Florentine Codex

Inca Garcilaso de la Vega (12 April 1539 to about 23 April 1616; Royal Commentaries published 1609)

Gómez Suárez de Figueroa, called El Inca Garcilaso de la Vega, Chronicler · Cusco and Córdoba

Born in Cusco in 1539, he was the natural son of the Spanish captain Sebastián Garcilaso de la Vega and the Inca noblewoman Chimpu Ocllo, and spent his childhood among her relatives. At about 21 he sailed to Spain, seeking recognition as his father's son, and never came back. His Royal Commentaries, printed in Lisbon in 1609, describe Inca history and life from what his family told him as a boy and from what remained of the Jesuit Blas Valera's work. A second part covers the conquest and civil wars. He wrote as a son of both worlds, far from Peru and decades after he left it, so his account needs checking against archaeology and other chronicles.

How they rose: He first made his name with La Florida del Inca (Lisbon, 1605), an account of Hernando de Soto's expedition, which some historians regard as more literature than history.

How they died: He died at Córdoba in Spain on 23 April 1616, a date that may be up to two days out because the records are inexact.

• In the 1780s, as the Túpac Amaru II rising gained ground, Charles III banned the Commentaries from being published in Quechua in Lima or distributed there. The book was not reprinted in the Americas until 1918.
• Clements Markham translated the first part for the Hakluyt Society in 1869 to 1871. The society's own guide warns that its stories of the semi-mythical first Incas should not be taken literally.
• He was both proud of his Inca descent and at risk for it: his royal lineage is one reason given for his staying in Spain while the wars of the conquest continued.

Sources: Garcilaso de la Vega, trans. C. Markham (1869): First Part of the Royal Commentaries of the Yncas; Hakluyt Society: Regional Guide, South America; Wikipedia: Inca Garcilaso de la Vega

Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala (c. 1535 to after 1616; chronicle finished about 1615)

Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala (Waman Puma), Andean nobleman and chronicler · Lucanas and Huamanga, Peru

Guaman Poma was a Quechua-speaking nobleman of the non-Inca Yarowilca lineage who probably learned Spanish young and worked as an interpreter for the priest Cristóbal de Albornoz in his campaign against Andean religion. Between about 1600 and 1615 he wrote The First New Chronicle and Good Government for King Philip III, in Spanish with passages in Quechua and about 400 full-page drawings. It covers Andean history and the Inca dynasty, the conquest and civil wars, and the damage done by colonial exploitation, and proposes reforms. It is the longest critique of Spanish rule by an Indigenous author from the colonial period. Its drawings, including a world map, set an Andean view beside the Spanish ones.

How they rose: He held local standing and pursued land and title in the Chupas valley through lawsuits from the late 1590s. He lost, and in 1600 was stripped of his property and exiled.

How they died: Unknown. He was still alive about 1615 to 1616, when the manuscript was probably sent from Lima to Madrid; the Royal Danish Library gives c. 1615, other accounts after 1616.

• How it reached Denmark is unclear. It may have been bought in Spain by the Danish ambassador Cornelius Lerche, and it has been in Copenhagen since at least the 1660s.
• Richard Pietschmann brought it to public attention in 1908, and a facsimile appeared in Paris in 1936.
• The Royal Danish Library digitised the whole manuscript (GKS 2232 quarto), and since 2007 it has been on UNESCO's Memory of the World list.

Sources: Royal Danish Library: Chronicle of Guaman Poma; George Mason University, World History Sources (J. Bristol): review of the Royal Library's Guaman Poma site; Wikipedia: Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala

The fall of Nojpetén, the last Maya kingdom (13 March 1697)

The Itza capital Nojpetén, also called Tayasal, stood on an island in Lake Petén Itzá, now the town of Flores. Cortés crossed Itza country in 1525 and left it alone, and for almost two centuries the kingdom took in refugees from Spanish rule, turned away friars and in 1622 killed a Spanish expedition. In the 1690s roads from Yucatan and Guatemala finally closed in. Martín de Ursúa y Arizmendi, governor of Yucatan, reached the lake on 26 February 1697, built a heavily armed oared boat that carried 114 men, and took the island by assault on 13 March. Maya people did not vanish with the kingdom: the Itza are still counted among the Maya peoples of Guatemala today.

• Bernal Díaz, writing many years later, gave the name Tayasal, apparently a Spanish form of ta itza, 'at the place of the Itza'. The Itza king called it Nojpetén, 'great island', when speaking to Spanish officials in 1698.
• About 60,000 Maya lived around the lake at the fall, including many refugees. An estimated 88 percent died in the first decade of colonial rule, mostly from disease, with war as well.
• Spanish accounts also record that in 1695 the Itza king had sent envoys to Mérida to offer peaceful submission. Diplomacy, resistance and Maya rivalries, including with the Kowoj, all shaped the end.

Sources: Bernal Díaz del Castillo, trans. J. I. Lockhart (1844): The Memoirs of the Conquistador, vol. 2, Project Gutenberg; Wikipedia: Spanish conquest of Petén; Wikipedia: Nojpetén; Wikipedia: Peten Itza kingdom; Wikipedia: Indigenous peoples in Guatemala

Ximénez copies the Popol Vuh (copied 1701 to 1703, from a 16th-century K'iche' text)

The Popol Vuh is the sacred book of the K'iche' Maya, telling of the gods' attempts to make people, the adventures of the Hero Twins Hunahpu and Xbalanque, and the K'iche' lords down to colonial times. In 1701 to 1703 Francisco Ximénez, a Dominican priest at Chichicastenango, copied a 16th-century manuscript in which K'iche' writers had put the text into Latin letters, and set a Spanish translation beside it. That lost original is often dated between 1554 and 1558 from the genealogy at the end, though the dating is debated. Ximénez's copy is all that survives, and it reaches us through a Christian priest's hands, a fact to weigh when reading it.

• Carl Scherzer found Ximénez's writings in the university library of Guatemala City in 1854. Brasseur de Bourbourg's 1861 Paris edition was the first printing in K'iche'.
• The manuscript then disappeared into private collections and reached the Newberry Library in Chicago. Adrián Recinos is usually credited with finding it there in 1941, though Walter Lehmann may have got there in 1928.
• UNC's exhibit says the work was surely once written in hieroglyphs, but no such copy survives. John Woodruff cautions that critics may have taken the text's claims about an older book too much at face value.

Sources: UNC Library exhibit, Ancient and Living Maya: Popol Vuh; John M. Woodruff: Popol Vuh research page; Wikipedia: Popol Vuh

Túpac Amaru II (c. 1742 to 18 May 1781; rising from 4 November 1780)

José Gabriel Condorcanqui Noguera, who took the name Túpac Amaru, Kuraka and rebel leader · Tinta, Peru

José Gabriel Condorcanqui, a kuraka who made his money in muleteering, petitioned for years against the burdens on his communities. On 4 November 1780 he and his supporters seized Antonio de Arriaga, the corregidor of Tinta, and had him executed. The rising, driven by anger at the Bourbon Reforms, the mita and forced sales of goods, drew Quechua, Aymara and mestizo followers, and he won at Sangarará that month. Royalist reinforcements reached Cusco on 1 January 1781, and other Indigenous leaders such as the kuraka Mateo Pumacahua fought for the Crown. He was beaten in April 1781 and handed over by his own officers. After his death the revolt ran on until 1783 under Diego Cristóbal and alongside Túpac Katari's rising in Upper Peru.

How they rose: He inherited the chieftainship of Surimana, Pampamarca and Tungasuca, and claimed direct descent from the Inca Túpac Amaru of 1572. His wife Micaela Bastidas was a full partner, and her letters show her pressing him on strategy.

How they died: On 18 May 1781, in Cusco's main square, the authorities executed him, Micaela Bastidas, their eldest son and others after making them watch. Their remains were displayed in rebel towns.

• The historian Charles Walker writes that up to 100,000 people died, primarily Indigenous people suspected of supporting the rebels.
• He said he was fighting in the name of the Spanish king, and protected priests. Walker notes that his followers had more radical ideas than he did, and historians still debate whether this was an independence movement.
• The colonial authorities banned Quechua from public use and censored talk of the revolt, but he later became a hero to many in Peru. His name has been taken up by movements of very different kinds.

Sources: C. Walker, Berkeley Review of Latin American Studies (2014): Peru, Reflections of Tupac Amaru; Wikipedia: Túpac Amaru II; Wikipedia: Rebellion of Túpac Amaru II; Wikipedia: Micaela Bastidas; Wikipedia: Quechuan languages

The Sun Stone and Coatlicue come back to light (13 August and 17 December 1790)

In 1790, during new drains and paving in the main square of Mexico City, workmen found a statue of Coatlicue on 13 August and the great disc now called the Sun Stone on 17 December. The stone, 3.6 metres across and weighing about 24.6 tonnes, carries the name glyph of Moctezuma II, so it dates to his reign, from 1502 to 1520; its purpose is still debated. According to the friar Diego Durán, Archbishop Montúfar had it buried in the 16th century so that the memory of ancient sacrifice would be lost. This time it was kept: it was set against the cathedral tower and stayed there until 1885, when it went to the museum on Moneda Street. It is now in the National Museum of Anthropology.

• Antonio de León y Gama published a study of both pieces in 1792, an early landmark of Mexican archaeology, with engravings by Francisco de Agüera.
• It is often called the 'Aztec calendar' but no one source explains it; the Library of Congress describes the central face as a sun god, with the four earlier ages around it.
• Moving it in 1885 was unpopular with people who regarded it as a public icon. A larger Mexica monolith of the earth deity Tlaltecuhtli has since been found, so it is no longer thought the largest.

Sources: Library of Congress, Worlds Revealed blog: Excavating Early Archaeology, Preserving the Calendar Stone; Wikipedia: Aztec sun stone; Wikipedia: Coatlicue statue

Stephens and Catherwood in the Maya cities (travels 1839 to 1842; books 1841 and 1843)

In 1839 John Lloyd Stephens, sent by President Van Buren as a special envoy to Central America, travelled with the architect and artist Frederick Catherwood, who had read Juan Galindo's account of Copán. They mapped Copán, reached Palenque on 11 May 1840, went on to Quiriguá and Uxmal and came back to Yucatan in late 1841. Stephens' Incidents of Travel books and Catherwood's exact drawings made these cities known to a wide public. Stephens at first supposed that a long-forgotten people had built them, but Catherwood saw a resemblance to the local Maya. Together they argued convincingly that the Maya themselves were the builders.

• Stephens' book on Yucatan reports visits to a total of 44 Maya sites. Catherwood used a camera lucida, a drawing aid he had perfected on earlier travels in the Middle East.
• Stephens, a founder of the Panama Railroad, caught malaria in Panama and died in New York in 1852. Catherwood drowned in 1854 when the steamship Arctic sank in the Atlantic.
• Local Maya communities were living around these sites all along; the 'discovery' was one made by outsiders. Stephens' own book describes the haciendas and Indian villages around the ruins.

Sources: John L. Stephens: Incidents of Travel in Yucatan, vol. 1 (1843), Project Gutenberg; Wikipedia: John Lloyd Stephens; Wikipedia: Frederick Catherwood

The Caste War of Yucatan (30 July 1847 to 1901 (formally 1915); skirmishes to 1933)

In the 1840s Maya peasants of eastern Yucatan were angry at taxation, the loss of their maize lands and debt labour on sugar plantations. After the Yucatecan authorities executed the leader Manuel Antonio Ay and burned Tepich, Cecilio Chi and Jacinto Pat rose on 30 July 1847. By mid-1848 the rebels held about three-quarters of the peninsula and nearly reached Mérida and Campeche, before their men went home to plant and the government got outside help. The rebels of the southeast then built a state at Chan Santa Cruz, today's Felipe Carrillo Puerto, around the Talking Cross that appeared in 1850. Britain dealt with it through Belize, until a treaty of 1893 recognised Mexican sovereignty.

• Losses were heavy on all sides. The Encyclopedia of Latin American History estimates that the peninsula's population fell by at least 30 to 40 percent.
• Letters show the leaders' aims: Jacinto Pat wrote in 1848 that they wanted freedom from oppression and from the many taxes laid on them.
• Mexican troops occupied Chan Santa Cruz in 1901. Governor Salvador Alvarado ended the war formally in 1915 with reforms from the Mexican Revolution, and small clashes went on until 1933.

Sources: Encyclopedia of Latin American History and Culture, via Encyclopedia.com: Caste War of Yucatán; Wikipedia: Caste War of Yucatán; Wikipedia: Chan Santa Cruz

Hiram Bingham and Machu Picchu (19 November 1875 to 6 June 1956; reached Machu Picchu 24 July 1911)

Hiram Bingham III, Yale historian and explorer · Peru

Hiram Bingham, a Yale lecturer in South American history who was not a trained archaeologist, led the 1911 Yale Peruvian Expedition in search of the last Inca capital. On 24 July 1911 the farmer Melchor Arteaga led him, with a local boy as guide, up to Machu Picchu, where families were living and planting among the terraces. Bingham found the name of Agustín Lizárraga and the date 1902 on a wall and noted it in his journal, and the place was known locally well before him. He brought it to international attention through Yale and the National Geographic Society, and took thousands of objects back to Yale. He wrongly took it for the last Inca capital, while the real one, Vilcabamba at Espíritu Pampa, had been visited by him unrecognised.

How they rose: A preceptor at Princeton under Woodrow Wilson, he joined Yale in 1907. On his way home from a 1908 congress in Chile, a local prefect persuaded him to visit Choquequirao, and that excited him about undiscovered Inca cities.

How they died: He entered politics, serving as governor of Connecticut for a single day in 1925 and then in the US Senate. He died on 6 June 1956.

• Modern research treats Machu Picchu as a royal estate of the Inca emperor Pachacuti, not the religious centre Bingham imagined. A 2021 Yale-led radiocarbon study puts its use at about 1420 to 1530, earlier than the usual start date of about 1450.
• In a 1916 letter Bingham wrote that the objects belonged to the Peruvian government and had been allowed out on condition of return within 18 months. Peru sued Yale in 2008, and the last pieces went back by 2016.
• UNESCO listed the Historic Sanctuary in 1983 as a mixed cultural and natural property.

Sources: C. Heaney, via History News Network: Did Yale plunder Peru?; The World (PRX): Machu Picchu artifacts returned by Yale to Peru; Wikipedia: Hiram Bingham III; Wikipedia: Peru-Yale University dispute; Wikipedia: Machu Picchu

Yuri Knorozov (19 November 1922 to 30 March 1999; key paper 1952)

Yuri Valentinovich Knorozov, Linguist and epigrapher · Soviet Union

Yuri Knorozov, born in Kharkov, was trained in Moscow and turned to the Maya script at the urging of his professor. In a 1952 paper, 'Ancient Writing of Central America', he argued that Maya glyphs, like other early scripts, mixed word signs with sound signs, and that the 'alphabet' Diego de Landa had recorded in the 1560s in fact listed syllables. This ran against the view that glyphs stood for whole ideas. J. Eric S. Thompson, the leading Mayanist of the day, attacked it, and Cold War suspicion of a Soviet scholar slowed its reception for years. By the 1970s younger researchers had built on his method, and it is now the foundation of the modern reading of the script.

How they rose: He wrote his dissertation on the Landa alphabet in 1947, and he published his full study of the script in Moscow in 1955.

How they died: He died on 30 March 1999, at 76. After relations were restored in 1990 he visited Guatemala at its president's invitation, saw Tikal and received the Order of the Quetzal.

• A famous story says he rescued a book of Maya codices from the burning Berlin library in 1945, and some exhibits repeat it. Knorozov himself called this a misunderstanding: the books were boxed up and taken to Moscow, and a student has found no evidence that he went to Berlin.
• Michael Coe says few Maya scholars dared to contradict Thompson in his lifetime, which helps explain why decipherment took so long.
• He had presented his work at the International Congress of Americanists in Copenhagen in 1956, then for years was unable to travel abroad.

Sources: UNC Library exhibit, Ancient and Living Maya: Knorozov, Sistema pis'ma drevnikh maiia; PBS NOVA: Cracking the Maya Code, time line of decipherment; Wikipedia: Yuri Knorozov; Wikipedia: Maya script

The Maya inscriptions begin to speak (1958 to the late 1980s)

In the mid-20th century most specialists held that Maya inscriptions dealt with the calendar, astronomy and gods. In 1958 Heinrich Berlin identified 'emblem glyphs' linked to particular cities or dynasties. Around 1960 Tatiana Proskouriakoff, an architect by training, showed from dates at Piedras Negras that monuments recorded the lives of real rulers. At the first Palenque Round Table in December 1973, Linda Schele, Floyd Lounsbury and Peter Mathews reconstructed most of Palenque's dynastic list in an afternoon. The Maya's own words now stand beside the Spanish accounts and archaeology, and over 90 percent of the texts can be read with reasonable accuracy.

• Proskouriakoff, born in Tomsk in 1909, worked at Piedras Negras in 1936 and 1937 and later for the Carnegie Institution and Harvard's Peabody Museum. She also wrote the preface to the 1967 English translation of Knorozov.
• Some older scholars kept resisting. A turning point came with the 1986 exhibition The Blood of Kings at the Kimbell Art Museum, and objections were still being argued at Dumbarton Oaks in 1989.
• Thompson had taken the figures on the stelae for gods; Proskouriakoff showed they were rulers, which is why dated inscriptions are now key sources for the Classic Maya.

Sources: PBS NOVA: Cracking the Maya Code, time line of decipherment; UNC Library exhibit, Ancient and Living Maya: Knorozov, Sistema pis'ma drevnikh maiia; Wikipedia: Maya script; Wikipedia: Tatiana Proskouriakoff

Quechua, official and alive (official in Peru from 27 May 1975; census 2017)

Quechua had spread across the central Andes long before the Incas, who were among many peoples speaking a form of it. After the conquest the Spanish used it for preaching and administration, until officials banned it from public use after the Túpac Amaru II rising. Its prestige fell further after independence. On 27 May 1975 the military government of Juan Velasco made Peru the first country to give it official status; Ecuador made Kichwa an official language for intercultural ties in its 2008 constitution, and Bolivia gave Quechua official status in 2009. Today it is the most widely spoken Indigenous language family of the Americas, and Peru's Ministry of Culture lists it in seven South American countries.

• Estimates of speakers across South America vary: 8 to 10 million in 2004 and just under 7 million from census data up to 2011. Peru's 2017 census counted 3,735,682 people, 13.9 percent, whose mother tongue is Quechua, up from 3,261,750 in 2007.
• In the same census 5,176,809 people aged 12 and over, 22.3 percent, identify themselves as Quechua, a count that shows identity and speech are not the same.
• The language is used in new settings: Roxana Quispe Collantes defended a thesis in Quechua at San Marcos in Lima in 2019, and Pablo Landeo published a novel in Quechua in 2017 without a Spanish translation.

Sources: Peru Reports: Quechua completes 40 years as official language in Peru; Wikipedia: Quechuan languages; INEI (Peru): Perfil sociodemográfico, Censos Nacionales 2017; Constitution of Ecuador (2008), Article 2, Georgetown Political Database of the Americas; Ministerio de Cultura del Perú, BDPI: Quechua

The Templo Mayor is found (found 21 February 1978; excavated 1978 to 1982; museum opened 12 October 1987)

Before dawn on 21 February 1978, power-company workers digging on Guatemala Street beside Mexico City's cathedral struck a huge carved disc showing the goddess Coyolxauhqui dismembered. It lay at the foot of the stairs of the Templo Mayor, the twin pyramid of Huitzilopochtli and Tlaloc that the Spanish had destroyed. Earlier finds, including Manuel Gamio's in the early 20th century, had not stirred much interest, but this one did. Under Eduardo Matos Moctezuma, the Templo Mayor Project, begun in March 1978, demolished 13 later buildings and by 1982 had exposed the temple's successive enlargements (13 in Leonardo López Luján's count; other summaries speak of seven main stages) and 14 smaller religious buildings around it. The finds let archaeologists test what Spanish and Nahua texts said against physical evidence.

• The dig found more than 7,000 objects, mostly offerings: clay pots in Tlaloc's image, skeletons of turtles and crocodiles, coral, gold, Mixtec figurines and urns from Veracruz.
• The carving's place at the foot of the stairs matches the Mexica myth of Coatepec, in which Huitzilopochtli defeated his sister; Matos Moctezuma was first to point out this link.
• Sources differ on the workers' employer: a Mexican press account says Luz y Fuerza, the Compañía de Luz y Fuerza del Centro, and another says the Federal Electricity Commission. The project continues under Leonardo López Luján.

Sources: L. López Luján, via Mesoweb: El Proyecto Templo Mayor (1991-2017); La Crónica de Hoy (2026): 40 años del Museo del Templo Mayor y 50 del PTM; Wikipedia: Templo Mayor; Wikipedia: Coyolxauhqui Stone

The Huey Tzompantli: testing the numbers (found 2015; further finds reported in 2017 and by January 2021)

In 2015 archaeologists of Mexico's INAH began excavating beside the Metropolitan Cathedral and found part of the Huey Tzompantli, the great skull rack of Tenochtitlan, with a round tower beside the chapel of Huitzilopochtli, about six metres across according to Reuters and 4.7 metres according to Hyperallergic. Skulls were set in lime; the structure dates at least to Ahuitzotl's reign, from 1486 to 1502. It confirmed what early Spanish accounts had described, while checking their numbers. The Spanish soldier Andrés de Tapia is reported as counting 136,000 skulls on the rack (Wikipedia) or tens of thousands (Reuters), and Bernard Ortiz de Montellano calculates at most 60,000. Bernal Díaz's 'more than 100,000' describes a different place, the town of Xocotlan on the road inland. By 2017 Reuters reported more than 650 skulls in the tower, and INAH's count reported in 2021 was 484 plus 119, with the dig still unfinished.

• Scholars had expected young male warriors, but skulls of women and children were present too, and the anthropologist Rodrigo Bolaños said this was unexpected. Later work added 119 skulls of men, women and at least three children.
• Other numbers vary even more. Some post-conquest sources claim 80,400 victims at the 1487 temple dedication, which Ross Hassig calls an exaggeration, offering 10,000 to 80,400; Woodrow Borah's figure of 250,000 a year has been rejected by others, and Robert Martin gives 250 to 300 a year in Tenochtitlan based on Durán.
• The historian Robert Martin says the chroniclers had no accurate way of counting, and conquerors had reason to paint the Mexica in the worst light. The Mexica themselves may have inflated the figures to intimidate their enemies.

Sources: NBC News / Reuters (2017): Tower of Human Skulls in Mexico Casts New Light on Aztec Sacrifices; Hyperallergic: 119 Human Skulls Unearthed in 15th-century Aztec Shrine; Wikipedia: Tzompantli; Wikipedia: Human sacrifice in Aztec culture; Bernal Díaz del Castillo, trans. J. I. Lockhart (1844): The Memoirs of the Conquistador, vol. 1, Project Gutenberg

LiDAR maps the Maya lowlands (survey flown 2016; results announced February and September 2018)

In 2016 the PACUNAM Lidar Initiative flew airborne laser surveys over ten separate regions of northern Guatemala, totalling 2,144 square kilometres of forest around sites such as Tikal, Uaxactun and Holmul. Published in Science in 2018 by a team including Marcello Canuto and Francisco Estrada-Belli, the maps showed more than 60,000 structures, from single houses to palaces and pyramids, with causeways, fortifications, terraces and reservoirs. To the researchers, this meant the Maya had reshaped their whole landscape to farm it and that the region was far more densely settled than once thought.

• Population estimates vary. The Science paper itself gives about 80 to 120 people per square kilometre at the Late Classic peak, or 7 to 11 million across the central Maya Lowlands, while Sci.News quoted a team member giving 10 to 15 million.
• The instrument sent out 33.5 billion laser pulses and collected about 60 billion returns, about 5.2 billion of them from the ground.
• Estrada-Belli said the discoveries came in minutes, where traditional fieldwork would have taken years. Maya people still live in the wider region, and the survey was organised through the Guatemalan foundation PACUNAM.

Sources: Optics & Photonics News (2018): Lidar Reveals More Maya Ruins in the Rainforest (on Science, doi 10.1126/science.aau0137); Tulane University: Tulane researchers central to laser-discovered Maya cities; Sci.News (2018): LiDAR Survey Reveals Numerous Ancient Maya Structures in Guatemalan Jungle; Canuto, Estrada-Belli, Garrison et al., Science (2018): Ancient lowland Maya complexity as revealed by airborne laser scanning of northern Guatemala (NSF public access copy)

Nahuatl and Maya speakers today (Mexican census 2020; Guatemalan census 2018)

The Nahua and Maya are living peoples. Mexico's 2020 census counted 1,651,958 speakers of Nahuatl, the country's most-spoken Indigenous language, and 774,755 speakers of Yucatec Maya. In Guatemala the 2018 census counted about 6.5 million people of Indigenous heritage, about 43.75 percent of the population, belonging to 22 Mayan peoples as well as the Garífuna and Xinca. In all, an estimated seven million Maya were living in the region at the start of this century. For most of the 20th century Mexican schools taught only Spanish; a federal law of March 2003 recognised Nahuatl and other Indigenous languages as national languages.

• Huasteca Nahuatl, with over one million speakers, is the most spoken variety. Varieties differ so much that some speakers cannot understand each other.
• After the conquest Nahuatl became a written language in the Latin alphabet, and in 1570 Philip II decreed it an official language of the colonies of New Spain, to ease communication. A large literature in it survives from the 16th and 17th centuries.
• Rigoberta Menchú Tum of Guatemala won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1992 for her work for social justice and for reconciliation based on respect for Indigenous peoples' rights.

Sources: Nobel Prize: Rigoberta Menchú Tum, facts; Wikipedia: Languages of Mexico; Wikipedia: Nahuatl; Wikipedia: Maya peoples; Wikipedia: Indigenous peoples in Guatemala