Who were they and when did they live

Who were they and when did they live?

Quick task: When do you think these civilisations lived? • Have a look at this sheet (labelled as task 1) where would you put them as living?

The Aztecs, farmers and warriors, left their original home in North America and made the journey south. We believe this was because of crop failure due to prolonged drought. They were looking for a sign. They had dreamt that the land they were destined to settle on would be shown to them when an eagle landed on a cactus. Finally, after more than one hundred years of searching Mesoamerica, they spotted the eagle on a prickly pear cactus in a swamp surrounded by volcanoes. The people who already lived in Mesoamerica did not welcome the Aztecs. There were many battles between the Aztec and other tribes and the Aztecs were often defeated.

The Aztecs were thrilled to have found their ‘promised land’ after so long but it was not easy to settle there. The land was an island in the middle of a slat-water swamp so they were faced with many challenges. Eventually, through hard-work and their advanced technology, they had built up a city called Tenochtitlan (say Tay-nok-teetlan) which became the centre of a huge empire and one of the biggest cities in the world at the time. The Aztecs became very powerful and ruled over many of the neighbouring tribes.

Europeans first discovered the Americas in 1492 when Christopher Columbus first sailed from Europe to America. He returned with tales of a rich and vast land filled with gold and other precious materials. After that, many other Europeans sailed to America in search of gold and glory. They met lots of native people. The Europeans thought they were savage and battled to take over their lands.

In 1519, a group of Spanish explorers, led by a man called Hernan Cortès, sailed to Mexico. There they met the people known as Aztecs. The Spanish explorers (who came to be known as conquistadors) fought to take over the Aztec lands and after two/three years they succeeded. The Aztecs were defeated and Mexico became a Spanish colony. Once the conquistadors had conquered the Aztecs, they went on to explore the rest of Mesoamerica.

They travelled through land that was mountainous and rugged. Some was dense and humid rainforest. On their way, they came across many native people that they had to defeat before moving on. The Spanish believed they had more right to the land than the natives who had lived there for thousands of years. Then one day, deep in the wild rainforest, the conquistadors came across something that amazed them…

The conquistadors found whole abandoned cities with strange pyramids and other buildings in the middle of the rainforest.

It wasn’t until about 150 years later that more Europeans and North Americans explored these ruins further. They found many more sites and started to understand more about the people who had lived there.

We know that the Spanish conquistadors defeated the Aztecs in 1522. The Mayan empire had collapsed just a few years earlier in 1519. Golden Era of Mayans 250 -900 The Aztecs 1100 -1522 The Aztec Civilisation began in 1100 and were defeated by Hernan Cortès in 1521. The earliest Mayan settlements were built around 1800 BC and the civilisation lasted for over 2000 years. The golden age of the Maya was between 250 and 900 AD.

Task 2 Your task is to write a diary as if you were one of the conquistadors travelling through Mesoamerica. What do you think you would have seen? How would you have felt when you discovered the abandoned Mayan buildings? Or you could also do some research on Hernan Cortès, find out a little more about him.