The oldest signs of human habitation in Nicaragua appear in the hardened mud along the edge of Lake Managua, which the Indians called Xolotan. Along this shore in the northwestern part of Managua, seventeen men, women, and children left footprints indelibly marked into once soft mud.
Jaguar paw prints and deer hoof-prints crisscross the human tracks, adding a sense of dramatic urgency to the mute artifacts as though the people and animals had all been fleeing something quite frightening. The depth of the adult prints suggests that the men and women struggled under the weight of heavy burdens, which may have been young children, loads of food, or prized possessions, as they ran toward the possible safety of the water. Whatever danger threatened them must have been quite awesome to scare not only these seventeen people but the animals as well.
Perhaps the nearby volcano Masaya erupted at that undetermined moment thousands of years ago, throwing these people and animals into a panic.
The people around Lake Managua have always faced peril at the whim of an unpredictable and often cruel Mother Nature.
Even more recent prints of disaster scar the lake shores today.
Downtown Managua still looks like a battle zone long after its destruction in the Christmas earthquake of 1972.
The Bank of America skyscraper and the Intercontinental Hotel with its 210 luxury rooms survived the catastrophe to stand like sentinels at two ends of a plain of devastation. Office buildings crumbled, but because the quake struck in the middle of the night the white-collar workers escaped injury; cleaning crews, night guards, and homeless people curled in the doorways died.
Fellow anthropologist Gotz von Houwald, who lived in the area for many years, pointed out to me the ruins of a hotel where several people had died in their beds. He told me of the less fortunate group that had just started ascending in the hotel elevator when the quake struck. They survived the destruction of the building, protected inside the metal elevator in the cement-block elevator shaft, but their protection became their tomb. Even though rescuers could hear their muffled screams, they could not reach the shaft before all the victims had died of slow suffocation and trauma.
Houwald also guided me through the cathedral, whose roof had collapsed, littering the center of the city with chunks of broken marble and leaving virgins and saints on the altars staring at the sky and exposed to tropical rains, dusty winds, and the degradations of birds. Near the still-standing Intercontinental Hotel, he took me to a street corner to show me the ruins where a foreign friend of his had lived and told me of going to her home after the quake and seeing people loot it while her body lay kicking and half exposed but trapped alive beneath the rubble.
Managua bears the marks of the earthquake far more vividly than the marks of the political revolution that followed, and in some ways the earthquake probably caused the revolution. The quake virtually destroyed the city. Ten thousand died, and hundreds of thousands lost their homes. An outpouring of world assistance, money, and supplies followed the earthquake, but the greedy family and allies of dictator Anastasio Somoza diverted much of the assistance into private accounts. Rather than using the funds to rebuild the city, they used it to create and speculate on new suburban projects. By the time the revolution reached the streets of Managua, the city center stood open, the buildings already lying in ruins. The rock throwing and shooting in the streets that marked the final days of the general uprising of the lower classes against a widely despised dictatorship added little to the devastation already caused by the earthquake.
Even cursory examination of a relief map of the Americas reveals a peculiar feature. A chain of mountains runs from Alaska in the north to Tierra del Fuego at the tip of South America.
The mountains start well above the Arctic Circle at 70 degrees north and 160 degrees west, run from Alaska down the western side of Canada, fan out to pass through the United States, and then run down through the middle of Mexico and Central America, becoming ever narrower. Jumping over to Colombia, the mountain range hugs the western coast of South America before widening to a dramatic climax in the massive Andes of Bolivia and finally tapering off south of Patagonia at 52 degrees south latitude and 65 degrees west longitude. This ten-thousand-mile-long chain stretches approximately halfway around the world and boasts a disproportionate share of the world’s volcanoes, geysers, hot springs, and salt flats as well as all of the Andes and the Rockies. A large number of fault lines radiate across and out from these mountains like cracks in dried mud.
Through centuries of pushing and pulling at the land along the lines where several continental plates intersect, this stretch of the earth’s surface gave rise to major deposits of mineral wealth.
Potosi dominated the mountains as the most lucrative site of all, but this same long chain also supplied the silver mines of Mexico and was the source of the gold rushes in Alaska, California, and the Canadian Rockies. The mountains have also given up a bounty of base metals, including copper, tin, and zinc.
Earthquakes in this part of the world occur with such frequency that most people outside of the area allocate them little notice.
Managua itself toppled once before in 1931, and long before that the nearby capital of Leon collapsed in an earthquake in 1609 and had to be moved to the site of present-day Leon. The former capital for all of Central America once stood in Antigua, Guatemala, but earthquakes destroyed it so many times that finally in 1775 the government abandoned it and moved the capital to a new site now known as Guatemala City.
A major quake hit Ecuador in 1797, killing an estimated forty thousand people. In April 1906 an exceptionally severe earthquake destroyed the city of San Francisco with a Richter-scale reading of 8.3. Four months later a quake of 8.6 magnitude struck Valparaiso in Chile, killing over twenty thousand. In 1964 a major quake hit Alaska. On May 31, 1970, a quake hit off the coast of northern Peru, destroying the towns of Huaraz and Yungay while burying Callejon de Huaylas under a torrent of icy mud from the surrounding mountains. In February of the following year a major quake shook the area around San Bernardino, California.
In 1976 an earthquake with a Richter-scale reading of 7.5 flattened Guatemala City, killing twenty-two thousand. In the autumn of 1986 a quake rocked San Salvador, capital of El Salvador, killing thousands and leaving tens of thousands homeless and further destabilizing a nation already in a civil war. A few months later in 1987 a similar quake struck eastern Ecuador, destroying the nation’s meager oil industry and plunging the nation into the depths of economic crisis.
Mount St. Helens blew its top in Washington State in 1983, destroying thousands of acres of forest and sending dust and debris into the jet stream, which spread it around the world. The mountain arc along the Pacific coast of the Americas boasts the world’s highest volcanoes, running the length of the mountains from Alaska to Chile. At 9,677 feet, Mount St. Helens ranks in the middle between some of the small Alaskan volcanoes of only a few thousand feet up to the Andean giants that hover just under twenty thousand feet.
Part of the Pacific coast’s Ring of Fire, these volcanoes are traditionally among the most active in the world.
The oddest fact about this mountainous chain of destruction may be cultural rather than geological, for despite this precarious situation, nearly every major Indian civilization was built on or very near this mountain range. The mountain chain abounds with the ruins of Indian cities, temples, and pyramids that seem little affected by the devastation around them. This unstable territory became home for the Aztecs of highland Mexico, the Mayas of Guatemala, the Chibcha of Colombia, the Inca civilization, and the culture of Tiahuanaco on Lake Titicaca. The Indian constructions endure the earthquakes while the more modern cities built by the whites must be frequently rebuilt. Ironically, the Inter-continental Hotel in Managua was built to resemble a Mayan temple pyramid and decorated in Mayan motifs. This had nothing to do with its durability, but it stands tall in the European ruins around it as a defiant symbol of Indian continuity amid the chaos of natural and political turmoil.
Part of the reason the buildings survive seems to be that the Indian architects over the centuries consciously developed their edifices to withstand the shock and frequent movement of these cataclysms. Inca stones fit together snugly, but the masons allowed flexibility in the walls. Thus through all the quakes of the last half millennium these walls have never fallen.
The tapering shape of the temple pyramids of central Mexico and their nearly solid construction also enabled them to withstand tremendous earth movements without collapsing into themselves or shedding their outer layers of stone. In lowland and more stable Indian sites such as Tikal in Guatemala and Uxmal in the Yucatan, the pyramids could be taller and built at a much steeper angle with less volume. Thus, at 228 feet, the pyramids of Tikal are the highest in the Americas. The slope rises so sharply that the ascent more closely resembles climbing a mountain than a set of stairs. Modern governments had to add chains to help modern climbers get up or down the pyramid. Even though such steep pyramids could be built in stable areas, the architects knew enough to build lower ones with more gradual ascents in unstable areas. Probably for this reason the great pyramid of Cholula in the less stable highlands of Mexico rises to only half the height of the tallest Egyptian pyramid but exceeds the Egyptian pyramid in volume by 15 percent[Driver, p.115]. Not until the United States built its space-shuttle facilities at Cape Canaveral, Florida, did America see any structures more massive than the pyramids of Cholula and Teotihuacan.
The tallest structure standing in the nation of Belize even into the twentieth century was still the Maya pyramid of Altun Ha.
The pyramids of Tikal still rank among the tallest structures in Central America, and until the twentieth century the pueblos of Mesa Verde and Chaco Canyon survived as the largest, albeit deserted, apartment buildings in the United States.
The Indians in different parts of the Americas mastered the technology for making concrete and the use of lime mortar, and they developed plaster and stucco. But none of these seemed to have had an impact on the subsequent skyscrapers and apartment buildings built in America. Most of the techniques of monumental construction used by the Indians have been lost.
Even though a building such as the Intercontinental Hotel in Managua, the university in Mexico City, an art museum in Santa Fe, or even an idiosyncratic skyscraper in Los Angeles may take stylistic nuances from the Indian cultures of the past, none of them uses Indian principles of architecture or science. Unlike native American agriculture, medicine, and political ideas; Indian architecture never influenced Europeans, and it failed to survive on a very large scale even in America.
One reason that the Old World settlers coming into America did not adopt the monumental architecture of the Indians was the fanatical European obsession with the arch. Old World architects of churches and public buildings arched the entryways and lined the walls with arched windows. They vaulted the interior of churches by a series of arches, or they capped the building with a dome, an architectural device which is nothing more than a hemisphere of arches. The Europeans used the arch frequently not only in churches, schools, and monasteries, but also in government buildings of all types from courts and palaces to prisons and arenas.
By contrast, the architecture of America, like that of ancient China, Egypt, and Greece, generally ignored the arch, using instead the more sturdy angles, straight lines, and parallels. Of all the American groups, only the Mayas used a type of arch in their monumental architecture. This was the corbeled or false arch that they used to make entries, vaulted passageways, and interiors.
The Mayas derived an array of arch types from this, including a trefoil arch that had a Moorish appearance, but none of these functioned as a true arch, since they used the cantilever principle to direct the stress downward rather than to the sides as in a true arch. Because of this the Mayas could not build structures of several floors without using massive support walls, but the Mayan buildings still stand from the Yucatan to Honduras even after the European buildings with their heavy dependence on the arch have long since crumbled into ruins.
The Gate of the Sun at Tiahuanaco adjacent to Lake Titicaca in Bolivia illustrates the American tradition. This monolith rises approximately ten feet in height and stretches to twelve and a half feet wide. Unknown Indians carved it from a single block of andesite weighing approximately ten tons. The form appears typically American in its perfectly angular shape. By contrast, the carvings decorating it exhibit much more fluidity, and the angles of the form contrast nicely with the roundness of the sun that forms the centerpiece of the gate. This more stable door survived earthquakes even when arched doorways collapsed. The lines and angles of the ruins suggest Athenian temples much more than the architecture brought in by European conquerors.
Perhaps because of the similarities of architectural style among American Indian, Egyptian, and Greek architecture, all of these civilizations have bequeathed to the world impressive ruins, while so many other civilizations have passed away with barely an architectural trace.
Even though the Europeans loved the arch and the vaulted ceilings and domes derived from it, they used it primarily in large public buildings and only sparingly in their homes. By an odd contrast, the native Americans almost never used the arch or any of its derivatives in their public, or monumental, architecture, but frequently used it in their homes and in the less important buildings. Some of the first longhouses encountered by the settlers in North America relied primarily on arched construction.
These buildings consisted of a single long room with an arched ceiling. In form they more closely resembled European churches than homes. Other North American structures such as the wigwam, wickiup, hogan, pit house, kiva, sweat lodge, and, above all, the igloo incorporated some form of the arch or a real dome as the primary feature of its construction.
In South America as well, the natives employed the true arch in simple constructions of homes but not in the monumental constructions of public buildings.
Around the River Plate or Plata in Argentina, the natives built small mud-and-wattle huts with thatched roofs that had arched doorways. Several thousand miles away on the Peruvian coast, the Indians also used arched entrances, but these never diffused up into the earthquake zones of the Andes. Simple constructions of wood and supple materials would survive an earthquake or would do only minimal damage if they collapsed.
Sometimes the great pyramids, temples, and other monumental constructions blind us to simpler but even more important architectural achievements of the Indians. The village of Acoma in New Mexico probably holds as much valuable information for us as do Cuzco, Tikal, and Teotihuacan.
Acoma springs up before the visitor in the middle of the high desert about fifty miles west of Albuquerque and over a mile above sea level. Acoma, which is often called Sky City but means “people of the white rock,” sits atop a large sandstone mesa that rises dramatically from the plain surrounding it. No gentle slopes or rolling hills make the transition from the plain to the mesa top. Instead, the Acoma mesa rises with essentially vertical walls like those of a European castle. Centuries ago the residents carved a narrow path into the living rock to connect the village on top of the mesa with their cornfields on the plain. They carefully concealed the path from the curious glances of passersby and thoroughly protected it from the sight of unwanted visitors.
The buildings of Acoma climb up another two or three stories above the mesa top. Buildings that look like so many brown blocks stacked on top of one another carefully adhere to the traditional pueblo design. The Indians still make their homes from mud bricks and mud topped by roof timbers that also serve as the patio to the next story above.
Wooden ladders connect to other stories that usually house relatives. These Keresan-speaking Indians must transport not only the timbers up to the top of the mesa but also the bricks and the mud plaster. The rocky mesa lacks the simplest materials; the residents must even haul up dirt in order to bury their dead in the cemetery.
Acoma has adopted few modern conveniences even today. The residents banned electricity as well as water pumps. They collect and store rainwater in stone cisterns on the mountain, and they transport it by hand. Women bake bread in oval earth ovens much like the ones used in places as varied as Timbuktu in the Sahara and KahI in the middle of Europe. Firewood is the only fuel allowed for this baking as well as for all other cooking and for heating on cold nights.
Those villagers who prefer a more modern life live a few miles away and out of sight of Acoma in a governmental housing project called Acomita adjacent to the interstate highway. There they have unlimited access to radios, video recorders, refrigerators, stoves, and the other necessities of modern life. Many families maintain residences in both Acomita and in Acoma in order to participate in both styles of life.
Acoma and its approximately three thousand residents preserve much of the past, but its importance derives from more than mere nostalgia. Acoma and the other Indian pueblos of New Mexico are the oldest continuously inhabited communities in the United States. When Captain Hernando do Alvarado first visited Acoma in 1540, the village housed about six thousand people, and according to his description, it looked then much as it does now except for the church.
Indian settlers built the community of Acoma around the year A.D .900, at a time when Europe was suffering through the Middle Ages. About this time Charles III, also known as Charles the Fat, ruled the Frankish kingdom and had to deal with the Vikings, who took over his province of Normandy; the Moors were conquering Spain; the Huns were moving into Hungary; and Alfred the Great was fighting to bring order to the barbarian tribes of England. Tikal had already reached its height of development and no one had yet imagined either the Aztec or the Inca empires that followed much later.
The great pageant of the last millennium of world history left little mark on Acoma. Armies came and went, marching under the flag of the Spanish kingdom, the Holy Roman Empire, the Mexican Republic, and more recently the United States. From time to time these invaders devastated the pueblo, starting in 1599, when Vicente do Zalvidar avenged the death of his brother Juan and other Spaniards by enslaving most of the villagers and chopping off one foot of all males over twenty-five years of age.
Despite violent episodes of conquest, revolt, and subjugation, the people of Acoma found a way to continue their traditional life in the same vitlage without changing the building style.
Long before the Puritans dreamed of building a colony in North America, Spanish settlers moved into this area, and they adopted Indian architecture and construction techniques to make their homes. When the Spanish priests arrived they built their massive church in a European shape but of mud and brick like every other building in the community. They built. Santa Fé, the early capital for the area, in much the same way that the people of the pueblos built their homes. They added Spanish tiles and metal fixtures, increased the number of windows, and built interior walls dividing the buildings into rooms, but the Indian nature of the style endured for several centuries after the initial conquest.
Throughout not only the southwest but all of North America, the colonists borrowed Indian building techniques. The Algonquian-speaking Indians along the Virginia coast surrounded their villages with a row of posts buried firmly in the ground and sharpened at the top. These barriers offered protection against surprise attack. The Europeans immediately adopted the same technique, and this evolved into the stockade and finally the wooden fort that became an emblem of the white expansion and conquest of North America.
Early settlers on the Great Plains of North America built their semi-subterranean sod houses in imitation of Indian pit houses or earth lodges. These well-insulated homes withstood the ravages of the severe continental winters and summers and provided protection from tornadoes that plow across the plains. Later, when the pioneers became more prosperous, they bought lumber shipped in from the woodland zones, and they left the sod homes in favor of more traditional European-style wooden houses built above-ground. Heating and cooling costs for such houses have proved very high, and annually a few hundred of them must be replaced because of the destructive tornadoes.
On the northern Pacific Coast the Europeans had no problem adopting the plank house of the Indians, since it was rectangular, built well above ground with gables, and made with dressed lumber, usually cedar or redwood. It looked much like the dwellings to which the whites were accustomed.
In the twentieth century, native American architecture once again received attention both for its functional form and for its practical building techniques. In an effort to create a new American architecture that blended in organic unity with nature, Frank Lloyd Wright returned to some basic Indian principles. He minimized the number of interior walls in favor of free-flowing space, and he used warm earth tones. Even though he introduced new engineering concepts and integrated new materials into his constructions, his homes maintained low, linear profiles that nestled into the earth like the pueblos of Arizona and New Mexico.
An Indian or Eskimo of a millennium ago could easily recognize his igloo or wigwam in the modern geodesic dome that Buckminster Fuller popularized in his writings and in the United States exhibit he designed for the 1967 World’s Fair in Montreal, Canada. Similarly, the “habitat” style in the same fair introduced modular apartment units stacked together with private entrances and patios resembling closely the pueblo-style construction of the southwest. At the same time in the extremely cold areas of Canada and the northern parts of the United States, modern builders experimented with a variety of semi-subterranean constructions for houses, factories, and schools. These too appear as modern versions of the traditional Indian constructions in the same area.
In the southwest there has been a resurgence of the use of adobe as the ideal insulator in that hot, dry climate.
The valley of Pocona in Bolivia is littered with the remains of the Incas. The site, called Inkallajta, which means “place of the Incas,” contains ruins of the largest room known to have been built by the Incas. It sits on a clearing just above a small waterfall that flows even during the long dry months of December through March. Nearby is the village of Pocona, with ruins that were probably a lookout or guard station on the mountain overlooking it. The present adobe houses of Pocona have the traditional Spanish colonial format of a household of buildings clustering around an open courtyard. Like the homes of Timbuktu, they mostly show blank walls to the outside world while guarding trees, flowers, and whatever beauty they may have for the people on the inside.
Looking closely at the buildings of Pocona, I soon realized that even though they were Spanish in form, many of them were built on stone foundations that were clearly Incan. The large cut stones had been rearranged to form new shapes, and then the adobe walls and tile roofs were built on top.
Early settlers destroyed or altered most of the native American architecture. The great Inca fortress of Sacsahuaman became the quarry from which the conquistadores built a new and more Spanish version of Cuzco on the stone foundations of the Inca city.
Cortes ordered the Aztec capital of Tenochtitla’n pulled down and the debris of the buildings and pyramids used to fill in the extensive canal network. Above this newly leveled ground, he built the new plazas, streets, and churches of Mexico City. Most of the monumental sites of America were razed, and only the abandoned or remote ones such as Machu Picchu in Peru, Tikal in Guatemala, Chichen Itza’ in the Yucatan, and the Anasazi cliff dwellings of the United States survived. These complexes had little impact on the building styles of the new settlers, and they certainly did not influence builders in other parts of the world.
Incan urban planners adhered tenaciously to the grid concept in laying out cities.
While the cities of Europe grew up pellmell around narrow and twisted alleys, the Inca emperor directed a careful plan to all cities, towns, and villages throughout his empire. The towns always centered on a large plaza around which stood the major religious and political buildings of the community.
In turn each block of buildings centered around an open cancho, or courtyard.
Where the topography demanded some changes in this rectangular arrangement, the Incas showed great ingenuity. The planners of Cuzco made the city in the form of a puma with its head centered on the great fortress of Sacsahuaman.
Even though the colonists arriving in America built on top of Indian sites, they did not follow Indian building patterns. To find the model for most colonial cities from San Francisco to Buenos Aires, one need not look at the great Indian cities such as Cuzco or Tenochtitla’n nor at the smaller villages such as Pocona. The model for the American cities came instead from the small Andalusian village of Santa Fé in Spain.
Entering Santa Fé today, one would hardly take it to be the model for anything. It is a small settlement of eleven thousand people. As I walked through the streets of Santa Fé, I could have been in any one of a thousand Mediterranean villages. Along one street, an elderly woman dressed in black awkwardly white-washed the front wall of her house with a paintbrush tied to a long stick. An even older woman, also dressed in black, sat in a chair pulled up close to the same wall so that she could paint the bottom ledges of the windows.
All of the houses of the village had the same whitewash, but the two feet of the house just above the ground had been painted a very dark green.
Santa Fé has no large boulevards or open park areas to make it appear an appropriate model for a city. Young men on motorcycles and workmen in small trucks and vans made the streets of Santa Fé much louder than the rather meager traffic warranted.
On the smaller streets, women on their errands could walk safely down the middle of the street and pause to talk with one another without fearing any greater danger than a stray ball tossed by one of the numerous children playing in the same area.
Santa Fé cannot boast any palaces, castles, ancient fortifications, gardens, or even a church any more grand than the usual parish edifice. By Spanish chronology, it does not even have a particularly ancient pedigree, having been founded on October 2, 1491, almost exactly one year prior to Columbus’s discovery of America. But therein lies an odd coincidence that makes Santa Fé such an important spot for anyone studying American urban design of the last five hundred years.
When Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand laid siege to the Moors in the Alhambra, they assembled an army of sixty thousand camped on the plains outside Granada. To impress the Moors with their determination to sustain the siege until victory and with their strength and resources, Isabella built a camp of brick and stone rather than a flimsy one of tents and woods. This camp on the Genil River she named Santa Fé, “Holy Faith,” in recognition of her faith in victory through the guidance of the Christian God.
The army laid out this town like a Roman camp rather than like the towns then being built in Europe. Santa Fé was made in the form of a rectangle, with two major streets crossing in the middle at a plaza. Each of the four streets terminated in a gate on one side of an otherwise walled rectangle that protected the camp. This rectangular shape contrasted with the more circular shape common to urban areas that centered on a main castle or other edifice and had several main arteries radiating from the center like spokes on a wheel. The best example of this survives in the form of Paris. The new form probably appealed to Isabella and Ferdinand’s medieval superstitions, since the town assumed the shape of the sacred cross.
While the Catholic monarchs stayed at this new village during their Moorish war, Christopher Columbus arrived to petition them to finance his planned trip of exploration to Asia. After great indecision and vacillation, Ferdinand and Isabella granted him the Capitulaciones de Santa Fé on April 17, 1492, giving him both the permission and the financing for his journey.
When Columbus and the subsequent conquistadores arrived in America they used the plan of Santa Fé for virtually every city they founded. Each American enclave became an armed camp in stone crossed by two major arteries and divided into a sequence of blocks centered on the plaza, which housed the church and the chief municipal building or governor’s palace. From Santo Domingo to Lima, all American cities had the same form as the humble village of Santa Fé. Some of the Spanish explorers also carried the name of the village to America and gave it to such places as Santa Fé de Bogota, Colombia, as well as Santa Fé del Rosano, Argentina, and Santa Fé, New Mexico.
In order to make the newly established settlements conform to their urban pattern, the Spanish destroyed many Indian cities such as Tenochtitlan as well as small towns such as Pocona.
When settlers arrived a century later in what would be the United States, they too followed this new grid model of city planning.
Washington, D. C., is one of the few exceptions to this pattern.
Designed by the Frenchman Pierre Charles L’Enfant in 1791, the city used the older Parisian design of spoked avenues radiating from fixed points.
Aside from this notable exception, the North Americans not only embraced the grid for urban planning but extended it to rural organization as well. Grids show on the map where most of inland United States and Canada is divided into nearly precise squares or rectangles such as Colorado, Wyoming, and Manitoba.
The planners further divided these squares into smaller squares which became counties. The obsession with this grid overcame planners, who then built roads and tried to lay out all towns precisely on this one principle. Planners marked off the newly conquered or purchased territories of the United States into squares or townships. The legacy of this looms prominently to any passenger on a transcontinental flight crossing the American heartland, which appears neatly farmed in a checkerboard fashion of squares.
Even though European settlers imposed new architectural styles and new ideas of urban planning on America, they usually built over existing Indian settlements rather than clearing out new areas of settlement. Subsequent generations of Americans usually forgot that their towns and cities had been founded by Indians.
Myths rose about how the colonists literally carved their settlements out of the uninhabited forest. Nowhere does contemporary civic mythology elaborate on this theme more than in the case of Washington, D. C.
According to this story, George Washington himself, the father of his country, surveyed this virgin land astride the Potomac River as a place to build a new capital equidistant between the northern and southern halves of the country. The location on the Potomac also gave the city a potential water link into the Ohio River system. Few American books bother to mention that the city of Washington arose on top of Naconchtanke, the main trading town of the Conoy Indians. At the time of their first contact with the Virginia colonists in 1623, the site served as home and headquarters to Chief Patawomeke and his followers.
The name of the chief evolved in the present name Potomac, and Naconchtanke survives only in its Latinized corruption Anacostia, one of the subdivisions of the city of Washington.
In the 1975 excavation on the White House lawn for the presidential swimming pool, builders found Indian relics that pointed to the commercial prosperity of a former Indian group. Only a few blocks away from the White House, the Indians had operated one of the largest Indian quarries for steatite or soapstone.
Numerous manufacturing sites surrounded it where Indian craftsmen made dishes, pipes, and implements from the soft stone. From here the Indians traded the manufactured goods all along the eastern coast in what may have been the last productive enterprise practiced by humans along this stretch of the Potomac.
In nearly every case the European colonists built a city that eventually stretched to hundreds and even thousands of times the size and population of the original Indian settlement, but nevertheless they built on top of a previous settlement rather than starting a new one. Even the Puritans took over fields already cleared by the Indians but abandoned when European diseases decimated the native population.
Like the city of Washington, most American capitals arose atop Indian communities. Some capitals such as Mexico City and Quito were built on the ruins of cities that were already major administrative, trade, and religious centers. Other cities such as Lima, Ottawa, and Buenos Aires arose from much more modest Indian settlements.
The new settlers of America continued on a much more expansive scale the same settlement patterns already firmly established by the Indians. The Europeans concentrated on building in the same places that the Indians had built before them. In North America the Indians built along the rivers and coast with only minimal settlement of the plains or mountains, but in South America the Indians built primarily in the mountains, secondarily along the coast, and almost not at all in the large inland river areas and the plains.
Precisely the same patterns hold today.
North Americans live along the two coasts and the Mississippi and St. Lawrence river systems while leaving much of the remainder of the country virtually vacant. The Mexicans crowd the highland plateau and mountains, avoiding the lowland areas.
In South America the population also concentrates itself in the Andes and along the two coasts, but despite centuries of government pressure avoids the vast interior drained by the Amazon and Orinoco rivers and the great plains of Argentina, Paraguay, and Uruguay.
The importance of the Indians in shaping contemporary cultural geography in America shows clearly in the names of American rivers, mountains, cities, and states. The first white arrivals in America named most of the eastern lands after places in the Old World; the American lands became New Granada, New York, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and New England. The British colonists also named other new areas after sovereigns whom they wanted to honor or flatter, as in Maryland, Carolina, Georgia, Alberta, and Virginia. The Spanish usually preferred to use the names of saints rather than sovereigns, as in San Francisco, Santo Domingo, San Antonio, and San Diego.
At first it appeared that the Indian names would soon be dropped entirely and the map of America would read like a thoroughly scrambled map of the Old World. To the contrary, however, the Indian names often showed great tenacity. From very early, the name Massachusetts stuck, as did names for smaller places, such as Nantucket, Roanoke, Tallahassee, Poughkeepsie, and Oswego.
As the colonists moved west, they made far less use of foreign names and stuck to American ones, either adopting the existing Indian names, as for Chicago, Minnesota, and Tennessee, or accepting the name of the Indians already in the area, as for Kansas, Dakota, Utah, and Texas. Even after three centuries as a Spanish colony under the name New Spain, Mexico reassumed its older Indian name after winning independence in 1821.
The cultural geography of the modern Americas combines many varied characteristics from both the Old and the New World.
Even though much of the Indian heritage has been lost or buried, some of it still shows through enough to make America very different from Europe, Africa, or Asia.