Blog #3:Monte Alban

Monte Alban

Monte Alban is one thing the Conquistadores never saw; it  built around 500 BC, declined from prominence around 800 AD, was completely abandoned, and only rediscovered in the early-20^th century.  The Armageddon-like conquest of the New World basically skipped this place.  Having been abandoned by the time of the Conquest, Monte Alban must have largely fallen out of the living memory of the indigenous.  I wonder I they were aware of the herculean astronomical tasks that were necessary to construct the Meso-American calendar [which enlightened farmers about when to plant; Monte Alban contained a relevant observatory], or did the Meso-Americans at the time of the conquest just take the 365-day calendar on the faith of convention?, relying on the observation that the system worked well-enough.  Realizing the solar year is no mean feat of natural science – its importance is immortalized in Persian holidays that are based on notions [not always correct ones] of the solstices and equinoxes; the Western World has had to make revisions to our calendars multiple times throughout history; the Arabs and the Chinese, in lieu of a solar calendar, used a lunar one [easier to observe, but inaccurate in the long term, regarding the seasons] until rather recently.  In terms of their scientific prowess relative to their historical period, the Zapotecs of Monte Alban [and the broader field of great Meso-American societies] seem to hold their own relative to the Old World – Tenochitlan, at the time of the encounter with the Spanish, was the largest city presently extant in the world.  In a good number of ways, the Old-Worlders were, if not inferior, at least not-greatly-superior to their New-World counterparts.

     That fact never ceases to amaze me, considering how militarily-lopsided the two worlds were.  Cortez and Pizarro conquered Great Powers with just a few ships worth of soldiers.  Whereas the New-Worlders cultivated exquisite precious-metal-working skills, the Old-Worlders developed steel – not a pretty metal, but one that, in military applications, laughs at copper, silver, and gold.  Whereas governance in the New World contained a serious element of attending to cosmic order, and war was a societal ritual, where one of the goals was to capture [alive] supplies for human sacrifice, war to the Conquistadores was a game stripped of such theatrics – the white-men aimed their steel muskets to kill.  In many ways, the New World sounds like it was a soft civilization.  As their architecture attests, they were not primitive at all – to build Monte Alban, the Zapotecs leveled the top of a mountain - achieving this at a time when China was a balkanized, militant mess, Cyrus the Great was an infant, and the West was not even on the horizon.  Meso-America ran some cultural circles around the Old World …just those achievements weren't very militarily-significant. 

     But even if Meso-America was a little out of shape militarily – at least relative to an Iberia that had spent the last seven centuries resisting the advances of Islamic civilization, which was then in its golden age – it still is incredible that the New World would fall to the Old SO easily.  Were I living centuries ago, at this point [being a little stumped], even an agnostic would be temped to write off the conquest of the Americas as "the will of God."  Luckily, I live in an age of information, so I can reduce [however modestly] my reliance on dues ex machinae.  Looking to Guns, Germs, and Steel, I can list my cause, not as esoteric God, but as relatively-mundane Geography.  The New World had fewer large land animals, none of which were domesticated, which reduced the opportunities for pathogenic microbes to jump species, and infect humans.  This reality [bad for New World protein intake / good for sanitation], kept the New World out of the immunological school of hard knocks – the New Worlders were immunologically-soft compared to the Old-Worlders; the New-Worlders were very vulnerable to Montezuma's Revenge.  Exacerbating this immunological shelteredness, was the longitudinal orientation of the Americas – as opposed to the relatively latitudinal orientation of the Old World.  Having faster variation in latitude (per unit land area) [and therefore a less-uniform climate], life-forms [and their pathogenic microbes] were more travel-restricted than their Old-World counterparts, further keeping the New-Worlders out of the immunological school of hard knocks.  So, when the Old World landed on the beaches of Mexico, it was the rudest of awakenings.  Minor Old-World military superiorities rode a wave of immunological superiority – biological warfare at its most-stunning. 

     The Meso-Americans could master geography in the sense that they could level mountains, but at a larger, continental scale, the epidemeologically-salubrious layout of the New World [and its lack of domesticated fauna], sabotaged the New World in a huge way, when the Old World crossed the Atlantic.  I guess the answer to how the Civilizations of the New World – impressive, for their day, by any standards – fell so easily to the Conquistadores, lies either with the whim of God, or in Guns, Germs, and Steel.  Monte Alban and Mark have greatly advanced it up my reading-list.

Justin