Precolonial Cities

Precolonial cities greatly impressed the conquistadors in both its architecture and infrastructure. The city of Tenochtitlan used intricate fords and waterways, laying out some of the earliest paths in what today is Mexico City. In Cusco, the Incan Empire's crown jewel was the city of Cusco. Shaped like a puma, it linked urban centers with security fortresses and spiritual temples. At the head of the city of Cusco is the fortified fortress of Sacsayhuaman, which overlooks the city and was used to detect potential invaders.

While the Spanish were enamored by these cities, they greatly altered, and often destroyed, the precolonial infrastructure. In the case of Cusco, Spanish settlers set to deconstruct most Incan dwellings, sometimes building on top of them, or knocking them down and rebuilding in a Spanish colonial style. Teotihuacán, which was a huge Aztec urban center, was left comparatively untouched and has become a major tourist destination. The same goes for Machu Picchu, which was not rediscovered by Europeans until 1911. Between these examples of Aztec and Incan urban centers we see that indigenous peoples were not only capable of establishing empires and building cities envious of the old world, but that they invented their own ways of being, which included innovative building and irrigation techniques. These ancient ruins defy the conventional, essentialist narrative that indigenous people are only rural dwelling hunter-gatherers waiting for modernity. Instead, it suggests that indigenous groups had many thriving, cosmopolitan societies at the time of contact with Europeans, which would have continued to expand had disease not wiped out a majority of the indigenous population.

At Machu Picchu, 2012