Portrait of a continent - the Meso-America continent

'NAKED as the day they were born .... Handsome men with well-proportioned bodies and fine faces, hair almost as thick as a horse's mane and cut short. ... Neither white nor black." This was how Christopher Columbus described in the log of his first voyage the indigenous people who came to meet him on the island of Guanahani, which he christened San Salvador. Convinced that he was near the Indies, he called them simply "Indians".

The inhabitants of these islands, and of larger neighbouring ones such as Haiti, Cuba, Jamaica and Puerto Rico, were Arawaks, while the Lesser Antilles were peopled with Caribs. These "Indians" and their counterparts in the Paria region of Venezuela and Darien in Panama engaged in hunting, gathering and agriculture, and lived in small villages of mud huts with roofs made of branches. The Spaniards quickly learned that they belonged to "tribes" and obeyed one or several chiefs.

There were other surprises in store for the Europeans in their encounters with the peoples of this extraordinary continent. Columbus himself on his third voyage was told of Mayan merchants who travelled by boat along the Honduran coast. An even more impressive spectacle awaited the shipwrecked sailors who were washed ashore on the Yucatan peninsula in 1511, and the navigator Juan de Grijalva when he landed on the same coast in 1518 and saw "a settlement that seemed at least as big as Seville, with houses of stone, towers and a large square .... "This was the Spaniards' first contact with one of the Mayan cities of MesoAmerica, a region encompassing all of central America and part of Mexico.

CEMANAHUAC: A LAND BETWEEN TWO OCEANS

Meso-America, or Cemanahuac, was the cradle of a civilization which for thousands of years had boasted great cities richly endowed with palaces, temples and monuments, paintings and inscriptions, and schools where books were written on figtree bark or deerskin treated in the manner of parchment. Besides the great cities, several states flourished in this region of more than two million square kilometres. Each one was virtually an empire in itself with its own political, economic and religious centres.

In 1492, the Mexicas or Aztecs, heirs to the Toltecs, governed the region from their capital, Tenochtitlan, which stood on the site of what later became Mexico City and was even then one of the world's greatest cities. Their ruler Ahuitzotl, the predecessor of Montezuma, held sway over a realm stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific and from the Panuco Basin to Guatemala. A network of trade routes linked the high plateaux of central Mexico with the Mayan territories, reaching as far as the most remote northern districts of the empire, in what is now the southwestern United States.

The power and culture of the Aztec empire extended over much of the continent. A variety of languages were spoken within it, including Nahuatl, Otomi, Huastec, Tlapanec, Totonac, Mixtec and Zapotec. The Meso-Americans were remarkable agriculturalists. Their ancestors had domesticated maize almost 7,000 years earlier and had acclimatized it to almost all the region. But maize was by no means their only gift to the world. From Meso-America and the Caribbean also came cocoa, groundnuts, cassava root, tomatoes, red peppers, tobacco, various kinds of squashes, haricot beans and cotton, as well as such fruit varieties as watermelon, papaya, avocado, guava, mammee apple (or Saint Domingo apricot), soursop, chayote and prickly pear, not to mention a large number of medicinal plants. Their domestic animals included a species of hairless dog and they also reared the turkeys which, along with the cuetlax6cbiH, or poinsettia, grace the tables of the year-end festive season in many parts of the world.

To the north of the Aztec lands, many other groups lived in mountainous areas, on the great plains, close to rivers and lakes, or on the coasts of the two oceans. These "Indians" were fewer in number than in the southern part of the continent and had managed to adapt to every kind of climate, from the frozen wastes of what are now Canada and Alaska to the torrid deserts of California and Arizona and the Sonoran desert. Today's Inuit (Eskimos), Athapascans, Iroquois, Algonquins, Sioux, Navajo and Papago are all descended from these peoples, who from the closing years of the fifteenth century had to contend with the inroads made by the Spanish, and subsequently by the English, French and Dutch.

In South America there were many other groups including tribes which lived in small villages in the vast forests of the Orinoco, Amazon and Parana basins. The civilization of the Incas, which rivalled that of the Aztecs and also drew on a tradition dating back thousands of years, had developed in the foothills of the Andes and along the Pacific coast.

TAWANTINSUYO: THE REALM OF THE FOUR PARTS

From 1493 Huayna Capac ruled over the Inca empire, which was known to the Incas themselves as Tawantinsuyo, the Realm of the Four Parts, and stretched from the south of presentday Colombia to northern Argentina and Chile, taking in a large part of Ecuador, Peru and Bolivia. This vast area was studded with towns and villages, temples and palaces, and countless monuments. The seat of Inca power was the splendid city of Cuzco, almost 4,000 metres up in the Andes.

The roads criss-crossing the empire, from the Chibcha lands in present-day Colombia in the north to the territory of the Araucanians in Chile at its southern extremity, were used by the Incas for their intensive trading system. In the Andes region, various animals belonging to the camel family, such as llamas, alpacas and vicunas, had been domesticated to serve as beasts of burden and for their wool. Among the loads they carried were potatoes, the Artdean peoples' great gift to the rest of the world. Other products cultivated in the region that would also later become widely known included quinine, a remedy for fevers, and the coca shrub, whose leaves, when chewed, provide a powerful stimulant and can also be used to make cocaine, a pain-killer, which drug traffickers, unlike the Incas, have since turned into a source of ill-gotten gain.

The Andean cultures boasted remarkable craftsmen who created unique alloys like turnbaga, which combined silver, gold and copper. The works of decorative and sacred art they produced over the centuries commanded the admiration and provoked the greed of Europeans. Their metalworking techniques spread as far as Central America and Mexico. Some of those, like the painter Albrecht Durer, who saw the "golden Sun and silver Moon" sent by Cortes to the Emperor Charles V thought them the most remarkable objects they had ever set eyes on.

THE ENDURING HERITAGE OF THE AMERINDIANS

The Aztecs, Maya, Zapotecs and other Meso-Americans, like the Incas and Aymaras of the Andes, were the heirs of highly developed and ancient civilizations whose cultural influence extended over the greater part of the continent. They all had a number of features in common. They were deeply religious. They shared the same love of the soil, which they saw as symbolizing motherhood, and worshipped the Sun as the source of all life and as a paternal symbol radiating light and warmth. They respected old people, whom they regarded as the repositories of time-honoured wisdom. Their myths, stories, festivals, songs and music show how spirits and the supernatural were part of their daily lives. They strove to live in perfect harmony with nature and all its creatures, whether plants, animals, mountains and rivers, lakes or the sea.

It is not known exactly how many they were when the two worlds came into contact in 1492. A figure of 100 million indigenous inhabitants of the Americas has been advanced, but some people think this is far too high. What is certain is that the culture shock and the spread of previously unknown diseases subsequently decimated the Amerindian population. But they were by no means wiped out, and their descendants are still fighting vigorously to keep their cultures and languages alive. Today, 500 years later, forty million people of Amerindian descent are living evidence of the force of their creativity, their tenacity and their courage.

We, peoples of America....

To mark the Fifth Centenary of the Meeting of Two Worlds, UNESCO has organized a number of meetings for representatives of the indigenous peoples of America. People of Amerindian descent who met in June 1991 at San Cristobal de Las Casas, where Bartolome de Las Casas,. the "Apostle of the Indies", once exercised his ministry, adopted the following declaration:

"Fully conscious Of the fact that we share a common destiny; we know that the future of our peoples depends on our ability to create an America based on solidarity, and that the America of our dreams is Indian and will remain so;for the original peoples of the continent are at the very heart of its identity. "We are the heirs to civililations which flourished on the highland plateaux and in the tropical regions of our continent and have continued to contribute to the enriching of its culture.

"We assert the enduring strength and vitality of Indian identity, as borne out by the increasing extent to which it is taken into account in drawing up national projects .... We invite the leaders of our countries to heed the many voices crying out for dignity, justice and solidarity for al the peoples of the continent".

At their Summit meeting held in Guadalajara, Mexico, on 19 July of the same year, the Presidents and Heads of State of all the Ibero-American countries made the following declaration:

"We recognize the enormous contribution the indigenous peoples have made to the development and pluralism of four societies, and we reiterate our commitment to their economic and social well-being and our obliga. tion to respect their rights and cultural identities".

MIGUEL LEON-PORTILLA is Mexico's ambassador and permanent delegate to UNESCO. Professor emeritus of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, his many works on the preColumbian cultures of Mexico have been translated and published in several languages.

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