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Mesoamerica would deserve its place in the human pantheon if its inhabitants had only created maize, in terms of harvest weight the world’s most important crop. But the inhabitants of Mexico and northern Central America also developed tomatoes, now basic to Italian cuisine; peppers, essential to Thai and Indian food; all the world’s squashes (except for a few domesticated in the United States); and many of the beans on dinner plates around the world. One writer has estimated that Indians developed three-fifths of the crops now in cultivation, most of them in Mesoamerica. Having secured their food supply, Mesoamerican societies turned to intellectual pursuits. In a millennium or less, a comparatively short time, they invented their own writing, astronomy, and mathematics, including the zero.

A few decades ago, many researchers would have included jump-starting Andean civilization on the honor roll of Mesoamerican accomplishments. The Olmec, it was proposed, visited Peru, and the locals, dutiful students, copied their example. Today we know that technologically sophisticated societies arose in Peru first—the starting date, to archaeologists’ surprise, keeps getting pushed back. Between 3200 and 2500 B.C., large-scale public buildings, the temple at Huaricanga among them, rose up in at least seven settlements on the Peruvian coast—an extraordinary efflorescence for that time and place. When the people of the Norte Chico were building these cities, there was only one other urban complex on earth: Sumer.

In the last chapter, I described how archaeologists have spent the last century pushing back their estimates of when Indians were first present in the Americas. Now I turn to a parallel intellectual journey: the growth in understanding of the antiquity, diversity, complexity, and technological sophistication of Indian societies. Much as historians of early Eurasia focus on the Tigris-Euphrates, Nile, Indus, and Huang He Valleys, historians of the Americas focus on Mesoamerica and the Andes.

Like the Eurasian centers of civilization, Mesoamerica and the Andes were places where complex, long-lasting cultural traditions began. But there was a striking difference between the Eastern and Western Hemispheres: the degree of interaction between their great cultural centers. A constant traffic in goods and ideas among Eurasian societies allowed them to borrow or steal each other’s most interesting innovations: algebra from Islam, paper from China, the spinning wheel (probably) from India, the telescope from Europe. “In my lectures, I put this very baldly,” Alfred Crosby told me. “I say that nobody in Europe or Asia ever invented anything—they got it from somebody else.” He added, “When you think of the dozen most important things ever invented—the wheel, the alphabet, the stirrup, metallurgy—none of them were invented in Europe. But they all got used there.”

By contrast, there was very little exchange of people, goods, or ideas between Mesoamerica and the Andes. Travelers on the Silk Road between China and the Mediterranean had to cross desert and the Hindu Kush, both formidable obstacles. But there was no road whatsoever across the two thousand miles of jagged mountains and thick rainforest between Mesoamerica and the Andes. In fact, there still isn’t any road. The section of the Pan-American Highway that runs between them remains unfinished, because engineers can neither go around nor bulldoze through the swamps and mountains at the narrow Panama-Colombia border. Almost entirely by themselves for thousands of years, these two centers of civilization were so different that researchers today have difficulty finding a conceptual vocabulary that applies to both. Nonetheless, the tale of their mostly separate progress through time deserves prominent placement in any history of the world.

THE COTTON AGE

Peru is the cow-catcher on the train of continental drift. Leading South America’s slow, grinding march toward Australia, its coastline hits the ocean floor