Human Patterns over Time

The conquest of Middle and South America by Europeans set in motion a series of changes that helped create the ways of life found in this region today. The conquest wiped out much of the indigenous civilizations and set up new societies in their place. Many cultural features from the time of European colonialism endure to this day, as do some vestiges of the precolonial era.

The Peopling of Middle and South America

Recent evidence suggests that between 25,000 and 14,000 years ago, groups of hunters and gatherers from northeastern Asia spread throughout North America after crossing the Bering land bridge on foot, or moving along shorelines in small boats, or both. Some of these groups ventured south across the Central American isthmus, reaching the tip of South America by about 13,000 years ago.

By 1492, there were 50 to 100 million indigenous people in Middle and South America. In some places, population densities were high enough to threaten sustainability. People altered the landscape in many ways. They modified drainage to irrigate crops, they terraced hillsides, and they built paved walkways across swamps and mountains. They constructed cities with sewer systems and freshwater aqueducts, raised huge earthen and stone ceremonial structures that rivaled the pyramids of Egypt (Figure 3.11A).

The indigenous people also practiced the system of shifting cultivation that is still common in wet, hot regions in Central America and the Amazon Basin. In this system, small plots are cleared in forestlands, the brush is dried and burned to release nutrients in the soil, and the clearings are planted with multiple crop species. Each plot is used for only 2 or 3 years and then abandoned for several decades—long enough to allow the forest to regrow. If there is sufficient land, this system is highly productive per unit of land and labor, and is sustainable for long periods of time. However, if population pressure increases to the point that a plot must be used before it has fully regrown and its fertility has been restored, yields decrease drastically.

The Aztecs of the high central valley of Mexico had some technologies and social systems that rivaled or surpassed those of Asian and European civilizations of the time. Particularly well developed were urban water supplies, sewage systems, and elaborate marketing systems. Historians have concluded that, on the whole, by 1500 c.e., Aztecs probably lived more comfortably than their contemporaries in Europe.

In 1492, the largest state in the region was that of the Incas, stretching from what is today southern Colombia to northern Chile and Argentina. The main population clusters were in the Andes highlands, where the cooler temperatures at these high altitudes eliminated the diseases of the tropical lowlands, while proximity to the equator guaranteed mild winters and long growing seasons. For several hundred years, the Inca Empire was one of the most efficiently managed empires in the history of the world. Highly organized systems of labor were used to construct paved road systems, elaborate terraces, irrigation systems, and great stone cities in the Andean highlands (see Figure 3.11B and Figure 3.36). Incan agriculture was advanced, particularly in the development of crops, which included numerous varieties of potatoes and grains.

European Conquest

The European conquest of Middle and South America was one of the most significant events in human history (see Figure 3.11C). It rapidly altered landscapes and cultures and, through disease and slavery, ended the lives of millions of indigenous people.

Columbus established the first Spanish colony in 1492 on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola (presently occupied by Haiti and the Dominican Republic). After learning of Columbus’s exploits, other Europeans, mainly from Spain and Portugal on Europe’s Iberian Peninsula, conquered the rest of Middle and South America.

The first part of the mainland to be invaded was Mexico, home to several advanced indigenous civilizations, most notably the Aztecs. The Spanish were unsuccessful in their first attempt to capture the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán, but they succeeded a few months later after a smallpox epidemic decimated the native population. The Spanish demolished the grand Aztec capital in 1521 and built Mexico City on its ruins (Figure 3.11A).

A tiny band of Spaniards, again aided by a smallpox epidemic, conquered the Incas in South America. Out of the ruins of the Inca Empire, the Spanish created the Viceroyalty of Peru, which originally encompassed all of South America except Portuguese Brazil. The newly constructed capital of Lima flourished, in large part as a transshipment point for enormous quantities of silver extracted from mines in the highlands of what is now Bolivia.

Diplomacy by the Roman Catholic Church prevented conflict between Spain and Portugal over the lands of the region. The Treaty of Tordesillas of 1494 divided Middle and South America at approximately 46° W longitude (Figure 3.12). Portugal took all lands to the east and eventually acquired much of what is today Brazil; Spain took all lands to the west.

The superior military technology of the Spanish and Portuguese sped the conquest of Middle and South America. A larger factor, however, was the vulnerability of the indigenous people to diseases carried by the Europeans. In the 150 years following 1492, the total population of Middle and South America was reduced by more than 90 percent to just 5.6 million. To obtain a new supply of labor to replace the dying indigenous people, the Spanish initiated the first shipments of enslaved Africans to the region in the early 1500s.

By the 1530s, a mere 40 years after Columbus’s arrival, all major population centers of Middle and South America had been conquered and transformed by Iberian colonial policies. Figure 3.12 shows how the colonies soon became part of extensive regional and global trade networks, the latter with Europe, Africa, and Asia.

A Global Exchange of Crops and Animals

From the earliest days of the conquest, plants and animals were exchanged between Middle and South America, Europe, Africa, and Asia via the trade routes illustrated in Figure 3.12. Many plants essential to agriculture in Middle and South America today—rice, sugarcane, bananas, citrus, melons, onions, apples, wheat, barley, and oats, for example—were all originally imports from Europe, Africa, or Asia. When disease decimated the native populations of the region, the colonists turned much of the abandoned land into pasture for herd animals imported from Europe, including sheep, goats, oxen, cattle, donkeys, horses, and mules.

Just as consequential were plants first domesticated by indigenous people of Middle and South America. These plants have changed diets everywhere and have become essential components of agricultural economies around the globe. The potato, for example, had so improved the diet of the European poor by 1750 that it fueled a population explosion. Manioc (cassava) played a similar role in West Africa. Corn, peanuts, vanilla, and cacao (the source of chocolate) are globally important crops to this day, as are peppers, pineapples, and tomatoes (Table 3.1).

The Legacy of Underdevelopment

In the early nineteenth century, wars of independence left Spain with only a few colonies in the Caribbean (see Figure 3.11D). Figure 3.13 shows the European colonizing countries and the dates of independence for the various Middle and South American countries. The supporters of the nineteenth-century revolutions were primarily Creoles (people of mostly European descent born in the Americas) and relatively wealthy mestizos (people of mixed European, African, and indigenous descent). The Creoles’ access to the profits of the colonial system had been restricted by mercantilism, and the mestizos were excluded by racist colonial policies. Once these groups gained power, however, they became a new elite that controlled the state and monopolized economic opportunity. Because they did little to expand economic development or access to political power for the majority of their populations (see Figure 3.11E), the revolutions were incomplete.

Today, the economies of Middle and South America are much more complex and technologically sophisticated than they once were. Nevertheless, disparities persist: About 30 percent of their populations (see Figure 3.11E), the revolutions were of the population is poor and lacks access to land, adequate food, shelter, water and sanitation, and basic education. Meanwhile, a small elite class enjoys levels of affluence equivalent to those of the very wealthy in the United States. These conditions are in part the lingering result of colonial economic policies that favored the export of raw materials and fostered undemocratic privileges for elites and outside investors who often spent their profits elsewhere rather than reinvesting them within the region. These policies will be further discussed in the “Economic and Political Issues” section below.