Chaco
Massive multi-room masonry complexes in Chaco Canyon.
What are Great Houses?
The largest earthen platform mound in North America sits at this city’s center.
What is Monks Mound?
Raised-field islands that fed Tenochtitlan.
What are chinampas?
Andean empire with a highly centralized state and large bureaucracy.
What is the Inca Empire?
Ancestral people of these cliff dwellings are ancestors of modern Pueblo communities.
Who are the Anasazi/Ancestral Puebloans?
Ceremonial rooms found in large numbers at Chaco sites.
What are kivas?
Mississippian societies are known for building these large earthworks.
What are platform mounds (and other-shaped mounds)?
Payments demanded from conquered peoples to support the capital.
What is tribute?
Imperial road network that knit the Andes together.
What is the Qhapaq Ñan?
Primary food base that supported population growth before 1200.
What is grain farming (maize agriculture)?
Engineered features linking outlying settlements—including long straight segments and ramps.
What are road alignments (with cut stairways and masonry ramps)?
Region where Mississippian lifeways developed and spread.
What is the Mississippi River Valley (and tributaries like the Tennessee)?
Elite long-distance merchants who connected markets.
Who are the pochteca?
Relay runners who sped messages across mountains.
Who are the chasquis?
Largest cliff dwelling at Mesa Verde with ~220 rooms and 23 kivas
What is Cliff Palace?
Trade evidence found in excavations: name any one exotic item.
What are seashells, copper bells, macaws, or fine turquoise jewelry?
General river-based mode of exchange common in Mississippian networks.
What is riverine trade?
Political structure: a loose, tribute-based alliance centered on Tenochtitlan.
What is a decentralized tripartite confederation?
Labor tax the state demanded instead of money.
What is the mit’a?
By ~1275, this environmental factor pushed people to relocate.
What is severe drought?
Knowledge used to anticipate calendric cycles and align roads/architecture.
What is astronomical knowledge (solar, lunar, and stellar alignments)?
Most Mississippian sites predate the 1539–1540 de Soto expedition; name one group that maintained Mississippian practices into the 1700s.
Who are the Natchez communities?
This ritual need—meant to keep the sun strong—pushed the Mexica to fight and expand.
What is obtaining captives for human sacrifice to sustain Huitzilopochtli/the sun?
State storehouses used for redistribution and famine relief.
What are the qullqa?
A major cliff complex with ~150 rooms and 21 kivas, housing 200+ people.
What is Long House?