Lost Civilizations: 10 Societies that Vanished Without a Trace by Michael Rank

Author:Michael Rank [Rank, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Five Minute Books
Published: 2013-12-03T07:00:00+00:00

Chapter 7

The Ancient Pueblo peoples (1200 B.C.):

The Ancient Rock Climbers of the American Southwest

In 1539, Spanish explorer Francisco Vázquez de Coronado was named governor of the kingdom of Nueva Galica, located in today's American Southwest. The conquistador had grand ambitions in the New World, most importantly to conquer the mythical Seven Cities of Gold. However, acquiring those limitless riches would have to wait as he set out to conquer a more immediate issue – his afternoon lunch. Before he could sit down to eat, Coronado was interrupted by a visit from a Franciscan friar, the same man he had dispatched to explore the areas north of modern-day Texas. The friar told his Excellency that he had been to the mythical golden city of Cibola, a place of vast wealth where buildings occupied cliffs and high hills in an area as large as Mexico City.

Coronado immediately assembled an expedition. His imagination ran wild with dreams of the never-ending supplies of gold that would adorn the city. The young commander had every reasonable expectation to strike it rich, as he had heard tales from his fellow conquistadors about the massive fortunes held by the Indian civilizations. When Hernán Cortés and his troops first visited the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán in 1519, they were immediately gifted with gold from Montezuma II. In the markets, they observed untold numbers of precious stones being bought and sold, and these same soldiers acquired all of this wealth with their conquest of the city in 1521.

He was particularly interested in the story of the ransom of the Incan emperor. In 1532, 160 conquistadors captured Emperor Atahualpa, the last sovereign ruler of the South American empire before the Spanish conquest. To obtain his freedom, he paid his gold-hungry captors a ransom that is widely considered to be the largest in history: he filled a room with gold and then twice over with silver. The room was 22 feet long by 17 feet wide, and filled to a height of 8 feet (or 6.7 meters by 5.17 meters, up to 2.45 meters). It totaled over 13,000 pounds of gold and twice as much silver. The gold was divided up among the captors and each of the 160 men received the equivalent of $500,000 in today's currency. The leader, Francisco Pizzaro, received 14 times as much – or $7 million.

To his infinite disappointment, Coronado found nothing of the sort when he reached his destination. He found only traces of the friar’s mythical boasts. Stepping deep into a narrow canyon, Coronado saw abandoned dwellings carved into the rock face. The facades held rows of mud-and-stone structures that soared 600 feet above the canyon floor. They were echoes of an ancient golden age, buried by time and haunted by the mysterious disappearance of its owners.

He was astonished at the settlements built high in the cliffs. They were spaced apart from each other horizontally and vertically, requiring expert-level mountaineering and sheer rock wall climbing ability to move around the town. What powers did

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