american-holocaust

BEFORE COLUMBUS 37the most extraordinary civilizations the world has ever known, a civilizationthat governed fifty or more independent states and that lasted in excessof 1000 years.The Maya empire stretched out over a vast land area of more than100,000 square miles, beginning in the Yucatan region of southern Mexico,across and down through present-day Belize and Guatemala towardthe borders of Honduras and El Salvador. No one knows how large theMaya population was at its zenith, but scholarly estimates have ranged ashigh as eight to ten to thirteen million for just the Yucatan portion of theempire, an area covering only one-third of Maya territory. 56 Scores of majorcities, all of them filled with monumental works of art and architecture,blanketed the lands of the Maya. Cities such as Kaminaljuyu, the key centerfor the growth of early Maya culture; Yaxchilan, a vibrant arts community;Palenque, with its extraordinary palatial architecture; Copan, withits Acropolis and its elegant and serene statuary, totally absent of any martialimagery; Uxmal, with its majestic Quadrangle and mysterious Pyramidof the Magician; and the great Toltec-Maya cities like Tula and the grandlyopulent Chichen Itza-to name just some of the more magnificent of suchurban complexes.Maya cities were geographically larger and less densely populated thanwere other Mesoamerican urban centers, particularly those of centralMexico. Thus, for instance, the wondrous city of Tikal, in the middle ofthe luxuriant Peten rain forest, seems to have contained more than threetimes the land area of Teotihuacan (more than six times by one recentestimate), and also had a huge population, but a population less concentratedthan Teotihuacan's because most of its buildings and residentialcompounds were separated by carefully laid out gardens and wooded groves.Current research also is demonstrating that Tikal's population-now estimatedat between 90,000 and 100,000 people-was sustained by an elaboratesystem of immense catchment reservoirs that may have been constructedin other lowland urban areas as well. Combined with advancedagricultural techniques that allowed Tikal's farmers to coax enormous cropyields out of raised wetland gardens, the reservoir systems probably enabledpopulation densities in rural Maya communities to exceed 500 peopleper square mile-that is, as high as the most intensively farmed partsof rural China (and the metropolitan areas of modern-day Albany, Atlanta,Dallas, and San Diego )-while urban core areas attained densitiesas high as 5000 persons per square mile, more than half the density of thehigh-rise city of Detroit todayYIt was with the support of this sort of extraordinary agricultural foundationthat Maya populations fanned out well beyond the outer boundariesof their cities, filling thousands of square miles with non-urban peoples,in some cases virtually from the portals of one major city to the gatesof the next. To use Tikal as an example once again, a detailed recent..