Ciudades Precolombinas

THIS IS A new, much revised edition of Hardoy's scholarly and pioneering work on the cities of the American continent before the arrival of Columbus and the Spanish conquistadors in the fifteenth century of the Christian era. Hardoy, an eminent scholar and urban thinker and one of the founders of this journal, died in 1993 at the age of 67, when the revision of the book was nearly complete. His widow entrusted the revised manuscript to Ediciones Infinito, the same publishing house that published the first edition in 1962 and which Hardoy had helped found.
This authoritative work still provides perhaps the best available overview of the cities and settlements of pre-Columbian America. It draws on a vast range of archeological, literary and archival sources to provide an engaging history of the continent's settlements in its 50,000 years or so of human occupation. Although much of the evidence cited dates prior to the 1960s, it is unlikely that newer archeological evidence would have significantly altered the story that Hardoy so rigorously documents.
Cities in the Americas are not as old as in the Middle East or the Valley of the Indus. What Hardoy defines as "an urban form of life" appeared shortly before the Christian era in the territories of modern Mexico, Guatemala and Peru some 3,500 years after Mesopotamian cities and some 2,500 years after urban life took root in India. For the purposes of the book, urban settlements are defined according to ten features which include, among others, stability of occupation; population density; street layout; economic, religious and service functions; and links with other settlements.
By the time the Spanish invaders arrived and started conquering the mighty Aztec and Inca empires and the smaller kingdoms scattered around the continent, few (if any) of the European cities had the population size and commercial might that Hernán Cortés and his men encountered in Tenochtitlán, modern-day Mexico City, or the treasures found by Pizarro in the palaces of Cusco, capital of the Inca empire. With a population estimated by scholars at between 150,000 and 300,000, the Aztec capital impressed the provincial conquerors with the size and wealth of its markets, its large ceremonial avenues and monuments, and the dexterity of the irrigation engineers in controlling the waters of the lake
surrounding it. In a matter of decades, the Europeans would impose their rule on most of the continent, leaving few vestiges of a native urban civilization. Destruction and death would spread rapidly, fuelled by a deadly combination of greed, ruthlessness, military superiority and the introduction of diseases for which the natives had no antibodies. In their place, new cities would appear, more akin to Madrid or Seville than anything that was there before.
The book is divided into 14 chapters, plus an introduction written for the revised edition. There are general chapters on the origin of urban life in the continent, the Aztec, Maya, Inca and Chimor societies, as well as entire chapters devoted to the most important cities whose might and past glory is still visible to visitors of their vast archeological sites or even their present-day successors: Teotihuacán, Tenochtitlán, Tiahuanaco, Cusco.