Religion and early cities in Mesoamerica

When you hear "religion" and "early cities" in the title of a work, watch out! Chances are, you are about to read a speculative account about the mystical symbolism of ancient cities. This is a popular topic in some circles. The basic argument is that all ancient cities were highly sacred places, and that this religious symbolism was the reason people moved into cities. Religion shaped peoples' lives, perhaps even more than everyday activities. At its most extreme, this reasoning slips into the silly notion that ancient people worried about death and the afterlife more than they thought about their daily life. Egypt is the most common target of this silliness, although the Classic Maya and other ancient societies have also been implicated. Give me a break! Ancient peoples were no more obsessed with death and the afterlife than you or I.

Now, there is a more respectable line of thought on ancient religious symbolism and cities, but it too is often slips into speculation and even nonsense. Associated with the historian of religion Mircea Eliade, it goes like this. Ancient peoples believed that life on earth was a direct parallel of the cosmos. When cities were built, especially political capitals, they were more successful if they were planned and laid out as models of the cosmos. Since the cosmos are laid out in a four-directional plan (north-east-south-west, with a center point), then cities should follow an orthogonal layout, with a center point where the north-south and east-west axes met. This model does fit some early urban traditions--most notably in China, India, and
Southeast Asia. For early cities in these regions, we have written texts and images that clearly illustrate how cities and buildings were laid out to mimic the organization of the cosmos. Such cities and buildings are often called "cosmograms."

The idealized Chinese city above was a kind of cosmogram, but the Aztec city next to it (actually the sacred precinct of Tenochtitlan) was NOT a cosmogram. How do we know? Because we have written and pictorial records that describe the symbolism of the Chinese city, how it was laid out in imitation of the cosmos, and how emperors picked the sacred place to build their new capital city (see below).

For some reason I have yet to figure out, this idea of cosmograms has been so attractive to some scholars that they go out of their way to find cosmograms all over the place. For China or India, this is fine. But when they start talking about cosmograms in ancient Mesoamerica, they are arguing more from personal bias than from evidence. There are NO WRITTEN RECORDS claiming that Aztec or Maya cities, for example, were cosmograms. But that hasn't stopped these scholars from claiming to have found cosmograms. If you haven't guessed, this kind of speculation dolled up as scholarship drives me up the wall. Ten yeas ago I published two critiques of this kind of reasoning (Smith 2003, 2005), but it still persists in some quarters.

So perhaps I can be excused if I got worried at the title of a new book from David Carballo of Boston University: Urbanization and Religion in Ancient Central Mexico. Would this be the same old kind of speculative account, claiming that ancient people went around pondering the mystical symbolism of their cities? Thankfully, the answer is NO. Carballo finds ways to address the relationship between cities and religion that is based on evidence, and uses contemporary social concepts such as collective action theory rather than the worn-out universal claims of Eliade and his followers.

Rather than worrying too much over the content of religious symbolism, Carballo looks at rituals: actions that people carried out in specific places, that left material traces:

I am less interested in attempting to define religion in an overarching sense and more interested in examining what religion did and the spatiality and temporality of its performance, within the context of urbanization.   (p. 19)

Hear, hear, this is the kind of approach we need more of in Mesoamerican archaeology. For Carballo, ceremonies in formal plazas generated social cohesion in urban populations, contributing to the success of urban life in the centuries leading up to the great Classic-period urban center of Teotihuacan. Carballo does not ignore the content of ancient religious ideas, and his discussion is reasoned and evidence-based:

Issues of greatest collective concern -- such as creation, existential dualisms, and fertility cycles -- fostered cohesion and, in continuing to feature prominently in indigenous religion, have proved the most resilient. In contrast, group divisions along the lines of lineage, status, and community were fostered through other means and saw much greater turnover through time.  (p. 201)

This is an excellent book, and I recommend it for anyone interested in the Mesoamerican past and anyone interested in new ways to look at how religion and urbanization were intertwined in the early states.

Carballo, David M.
2015    Urbanization and Religion in Ancient Central Mexico. Oxford University Press, New York.

Smith, Michael E.
2003    Can We Read Cosmology in Ancient Maya City Plans? Comment on Ashmore and Sabloff. Latin American Antiquity 14: 221-228.

2005    Did the Maya Build Architectural Cosmograms? Latin American Antiquity 16: 217-224.

Cosmograms, Sociograms, and Cities Built as Images

Idealized Chinese Cosmogram Capital

Ten years ago a group of archaeologists published a collection of papers titled "Were Cities Built as Images?" (Carl et al. 2000). They discussed the notion that ancient urban planners laid out cities as pictorial diagrams. In some urban traditions, such as Imperial China and ancient Khmer Angkor, cities were designed explicitly as models of the cosmos ("cosmograms"). For many ancient urban traditions, however, there is little or no evidence for urban cosmograms, but this has not stopped many writers from asserting a cosmological source for urban design principles. A concept used much less frequently is the "microcosm" or "sociogram," referring to an urban design that encodes not cosmology, but features of social organization. I think this latter category may have been more common than is typically appreciated.

Imperial China: Capital Cities were Cosmograms

Feng shui masters pick new capital site

The best examples of ancient cities laid out in imitation of the cosmos are the imperial capitals of ancient Chinia (see figure above). Written sources describe a belief that the emperor had to act in harmony with heaven or else his luck would run out and the kingdom would suffer. One aspect of this belief was the idea that the emperor should build a new capital in a propitious place and that it should be built as a model of the cosmos: a symmetrical rectangle with nine gates, crossing avenues, and a royal compound in the center. The figure at left shows the imperial feng shui masters selecting the site for a new capital. For these Chinese cities, see Wheatley (1971) and Steinhardt (1990).


Ancient Mesoamerica: Cities were Not Cosmograms

There is a common "cartoon view" of ancient societies which holds that ancient peoples were obsessed with religion, death, and the afterlife, thinking about these things more than they thought about daily life. Everyone has heard this about ancient Egypt, but the belief is much more common. "Those people were not logical people like us," the cartoon view holds, "They were irrational prisoners of their religion." This view is nonsense. Ancient people were very much like you and I. Although they lived under very different cultural and social conditions, ancient people were logical and rational. Religion was important to them, but they were generally not fanatical or obsessive about it.

One expression of this cartoon view is the idea that all ancient cities were like the Chinese capitals in being cosmograms. The extent to which some writers are willing to speculate in the absence of evidence in order to uphold the cosmogram view is impressive (and depressing). I have debunked this view for the Classic Maya cities in Smith (2005). To put it simply, there is no evidence that the Maya, or the Aztecs or any other ancient Mesoamerican peoples, viewed their cities as cosmograms. Spanish writers recorded thousands of pages about the religious beliefs of the Aztecs and Mayas, providing great detail about the gods, rituals, and myths, but there is not a word about cosmograms.

The central district of Moundville

Microcosms and Sociograms

The absence of cosmograms does not mean that for form and design of ancient cities were arbitrary or devoid of social meaning. Vernon Knight (1998) used the concept of "sociogram" to describe a model in which aspects of social organization were expressed in the arrangement of public platforms at Mississippian chiefdom capital Moundville (see figure). A series of temple mounds and residential mounds were arranged around a plaza in a form similar to the way that clan buildings were arranged around plazas in Chickasaw villages as described by European observers. Kate Spielmann (2008) adds several archaeological examples of such sociograms, mostly for the village and town layouts of small-scale societies.

Monte Alban, main plaza

Although Knight limited his definition of sociogram to ranked clans in pre-state societies, it can be generalized to urban state societies. For example, three decades ago Richard Blanton (1978) made a similar interpretation of the structures that line the plaza at the Classic-period capital Monte Alban in Oaxaca, Mexico (see map at left). Blanton argued that Monte Alban was created by a series of formerly competing chiefdoms in the Valley of Oaxaca who came together to built the impressive mountaintop city. If correct, then the main plaza at Monte Alban was a sociogram in which each of the structures lining the east and west sides of the plaza represented one of the original chiefdoms. In 1988, Olivier de Montmollin provided a parallel interpretation of the highland Maya city of Tenam Rosario, arguing that rural social groups were represented in the arrangements of plazas and structures in the capital city.

Cosmograms Today?

Burley's plan of Canberra

Urban cosmograms like the ancient Chinese capitals no longer exist in the modern world. Although some specialized religious compounds may be designed as cosmograms, whole cities are not. In the account of Amos Rapoport (1993), modern capital (and other) cities have lost the high-level symbolism and meaning of many ancient cities.Cities are more secular in layout today. But this has not stopped conspiracy enthusiasts from claiming that esoteric knowledge has been used to create secret cosmograms of some modern cities and buildings. Peter Proudfoot (1994), for example, claims that planner Walter Burley Griffin used esoteric symbols from the field of Theosophy to design the layout of Canberra in the early twentieth century. Burley's wife was a follower of Theosophy, and according to Proudfoot this led Burley to design Canberra as a secret Theosophical cosmogram. It is a fascinating book that reveals far more about the author than about the city of Canberra.

The basic message of this discussion is that not all ancient cities in the wide urban world were alike. Chinese and Khmer capitals were built as cosmograms, but Aztec and Maya capitals were not. Smaller Chinese cities were probably not cosmograms either. But the idea of encoding social meaning in city layout may have been broader and more widespread than the cosmogram concept. Are modern cities, or perhaps parts of them, laid out as sociograms? I'll have to think more about that; if you have examples or suggestions, please pass them on.


References:

Blanton, Richard E.
1978    Monte Alban: Settlement Patterns at the Ancient Zapotec Capitol. Academic Press, New York.

Carl, Peter, Barry Kemp, Ray Laurance, Robin Coningham, Charles Highan, and George L. Cowgill
2000    Viewpoint: Were Cities Built as Images? Cambridge Archaeological Journal 10:327-365.

de Montmollin, Olivier
1988    Tenam Rosario: A Political Microcosm. American Antiquity 53:351-370.

Knight, Vernon J., Jr.
1998    Moundville as a Diagrammatic Ceremonial Center. In Archaeology of the Moundville Chiefdom, edited by Vernon J. Knight, Jr. and Vincas P. Steponaitis, pp. 44-62. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, DC.

Proudfoot, Peter R.
1994    The Secret Plan of Canberra. University of New South Wales Press, Kensington, NSW, Australia.

Rapoport, Amos
1993    On the Nature of Capitals and Their Physical Expression. In Capital Cities, Les Capitales: Perspectives Internationales, International Perspectives, edited by John Taylor, Jean G. Lengellé, and Caroline Andrew, pp. 31-67. Carleton University Press, Ottawa.
 

Smith, Michael E.
2005    Did the Maya Build Architectural Cosmograms? Latin American Antiquity 16:217-224.

Spielmann, Katherine A.
2008    Crafting the Sacred: Ritual Places and Paraphernalia in Small-Scale Societies. In Dimensions of Ritual Economy, edited by E. Christian Wells and Patricia A. McAnany, pp. 37-72. Research in Economic Anthropology, vol. 27. Greenwich, CT, JAI Press.

 
Steinhardt, Nancy S.
1990    Chinese Imperial City Planning. University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu.

Wheatley, Paul
1971    The Pivot of the Four Quarters: A Preliminary Enquiry into the Origins and the Character of the Ancient Chinese City. Aldine, Chicago.