Geography 2020A/B Lecture Notes - Aztec Calendar, Quetzalcoatl, Pedro De Alvarado
31 Jan 2013
School
Department
Course
Professor
Document Summary
Conquest and the devastation of indigenous populations after 1492. There were the wars of re-conquest and they triumphed over the moors from 711-1492. By 1400 most of spain had been retaken and it was not until 1492 that they were fully free and the crown unified. Spain but they were financially broke from the long wars and this led to their inspiration for financing exploration. They were militaristic and indebted and they needed to finance debts to other countries they borrowed from so they needed to find new sources of wealth. The landscape and the types of people the conquerors encountered determined the nature of the conquest. The cultures of the new world went from large-scale empires with agricultural surpluses, capital cities, and trade links to mobile, egalitarian, low-density populations (hunter-gather, swidden agriculture) In the caribbean the taino or arawak had a population of around 1 m and they practiced fishing and agriculture in small coastal villages -inter-island trading networks.
