Mexico City 15

Posted on February 6, 2003 in Anthropology Fact-Dropping Photos

European and North American historians mark the fall of Tenochitlan as the moment when superior European technology first overcame primitive Amerindian cultures. They point to three distinct instruments Cortes and his vandals possessed that the Aztecs did not: steel swords, horses, and gunpowder. A few hasten to add the wheel, which the Aztec knew of but only implemented as toys.

Another view suggests that what cost the Aztecs their empire wasn’t their inferior technology. In many ways, the Aztec technology rivaled and surpassed that of the Spanish. They perfected means of building stable structures in the marshlands in the Valley of Mexico. Tenochitlan was the largest city in the world, possessing half a million inhabitants at a time when few European cities approached even a hundred thousand. The Aztecs practiced crop rotation, which enabled them to feed the multitudes. Most important of all, they knew how to channel wastes out of their urban centers and knew the value of personal hygiene.

The Spaniards won because they did not keep themselves as clean as the Aztecs did. Furthermore, their homeland was a crossroads of history whose inhabitants carried genes from Europe and Africa. The Aztec DNA was little different from the rest of the people of the Americas. When the sloppy Spaniards brought the measles, the people of Tenochitlan (including their emperor) caught it and died in droves because none among them possessed natural immunity.

Cortes’s campaign to take Tenochitlan failed the first time. He escaped by the skin of his teeth, losing many of his men to Aztec priests who promptly took them to the top of the Templo Mayor and sacrificed them to the gods of war and rain. A still healthy population easily contained the European threat. Two years later, after Montezuma was slain and his brother died of the measles, the Spanish easily overran the besieged city, whose inhabitants suffered mightily from the strange fever of the red spots.

Had the blood of the Americas intermingled with the peoples of Eurasia and Africa before the European incursion, it is doubtful that Cortes would have triumphed. The Aztecs were an astute people who could have learned the technological secrets of the Europeans and used them to full advantage. Had they succeeded, residents of what I call California might well speak Nahuatl, though there could also be a strong movement for bilingual education in Gabrileno and other local languages.

And George W. Bush might well be a peasant working some lord’s farm in England.

We can know history as it occurred, but with key changes, what might have been is any person’s guess. Only arrogance allows us to presume that the same events would have happened as they did.

Tomorrow marks the return of color and faces made of flesh to the photo section of this weblog. Sometime in the next two weeks, though, look for my photos of the pyramids.

Did any of you get my postcards?