City Libraries, City of Gold Coast

The Aztec, Inca & Maya empires, the illustrated history of the ancient peoples of Mesoamerica & South America, Martin J. Dougherty

eng

Includes bibliographical references and index

mapsillustrations

index present

non fiction

The Aztec, Inca & Maya empires

bibliography

Martin J. Dougherty

the illustrated history of the ancient peoples of Mesoamerica & South America

From government structures to marriage rites, from pyramids to human sacrifice, from agriculture to textiles, astronomy to hieroglyphics to ball games, the book explores the history of what today we call Latin America from its early kingdoms up to the crippling of the societies with the arrival of conquistadores and smallpox. The biggest Mesoamerican cities, such as Teotihuacan, Tenochtitlan and Cholula, were among the largest in the world. Mesoamerican civilisations are credited with many inventions: building pyramid-temples, mathematics, astronomy, medicine, writing, highly accurate calendars, fine arts, intensive agriculture, engineering, an abacus calculator, and complex theology. In South America, the Inca Empire, the largest empire in pre-Columbian America, was, at its height, possibly the largest in the world. And yet it achieved this without wheeled vehicles, animals to ride or draft animals, without using iron or steel, or developing a written script

Aztec, Inca and Maya empires