This Fleeting World

Acceleration: The Agrarian Era 51
more powerful states during the next period of the agrarian era. In the
Andes, too, cities and states began to appear; the first may have been the
Moche state of northern Peru, which flourished for almost eight hundred
years during the first millennium ce. Like Teotihuacan, the Moche kingdom
influenced a large area, although we cannot be certain how much direct political
power it had over other cities and states. During the later half of the
first millennium statelike powers also emerged farther south in the lands
near Lake Titicaca on the border between modern Peru and Bolivia.
Expansion in Other Areas
Populations also grew beyond the zone of agrarian civilization, generating
new forms of hierarchy. In the thinly populated steppe zones of Eurasia,
pastoral nomads began to form large, mobile confederations that raided
and taxed neighboring agricultural
zones. In Mongolia in central Asia the Topics for Further Study
Xiongnu people created a spectacular Andean States
empire during the second century bce,
Assyrian Empire
as did the founders of the first Turkic
Byzantine Empire
empire during the sixth century ce. At
China
its height the first Turkic empire reached
Greece, Ancient
from Mongolia to the Black Sea. In the
Mesoamerica
Pacific zone migrants from the islands
Mississippian Culture
near Fiji began to settle the islands of
Polynesia, scattered through the central
Persian Empire
and eastern Pacific. Hawaii and remote Roman Empire
Easter Island may have been settled by Steppe Confederations
600 ce, but New Zealand seems to have Turkic Empire
been the last part of Polynesia to be settled,
some time after 1000. Polynesia was settled by farming peoples, and
in some regions, including Tonga and Hawaii, population growth created
the preconditions for significant power hierarchies.
Finally, significant changes occurred even in regions where agriculture
had still made few inroads. In North America the slow northward spread
of maize cultivation led to the establishment of numerous agricultural or
semi-agricultural communities, such as those known as the “Anasazi” or
“Ancient Pueblo People” (on the Colorado Plateau at the intersection of
present-day Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, and Utah). In the eastern