Nathaniel Popkin

Charles Mann, 2005
Four lost cities of the Americas

One of the most striking insights to come from this historiography-altering work is that pre-Columbian cities in America were large, sophisticated things—and there were a lot of them. Mann’s point is that the civilizations they represented have been overlooked in our understanding of American history.

In 1491 the Inka ruled the greatest empire on earth. Bigger than Ming Dynasty China, bigger than Ivan the Great’s expanding Russia, bigger than Songhay in the Sahel or powerful Great Zimbabwe in the West Africa tablelands, bigger than the cresting Ottoman Empire, bigger than the Triple Alliance (as the Aztec empire is more precisely known), bigger by far than any European state, the Inka dominion extended over a staggering thirty-two degrees of latitude—as if a single power held sway from St. Petersburg to Cairo. The empire encompassed every imaginable type of terrain, from the rainforest of upper Amazonia to the deserts of the Peruvian coast and the twenty-thousand-foot peaks of the Andes in between. “If imperial potential is judged in terms of environmental adaptability,” wrote the Oxford historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto, “the Inka were the most impressive empire builders of their day.”

Perhaps, just as we in the west need to overcome our ignorance of the hundreds of contemporary giant eastern cities, we ought to also become more familiar with those that once dotted the Americas. The names they were given remind us of Calvino’s invisible cities. There was the mound city of Adena, the Andean Wari, two to three square miles of geometry. There was Tiwanaku, with its gateway to the sun, the highest city in the ancient world. There was the Inka capital of Qosqo (the Peruvian Cusco), with its main plaza of Awkaypata “carpeted almost in its entirety with white sand carried in from the Pacific and raked daily by the city’s army of workers,” the center of the cosmos. There was Calakmul, a Maya city on the Mexican border with Guatemala, until the 1980s covered entirely with vegetation. Calakmul, once the center of a city-state of half a million or so, according to Mann was a city of 6,000 houses, temples, and granaries. There was Cahokia, near present day St. Louis, which bustled between 950 and 1250 A.D. About the same population as London, Cahokia was “a huge collection of farmers packed cheek by jowl.”

“Having never seen a city,” writes Mann, “its citizens had to invent every aspect of urban life for themselves.”

Indeed, Mann says these earliest Americans invented something else, which, in theory at least, has outlived their cities: an American civilization, based most profoundly on twin pillars of equality and personal liberty.

—NRP