The Builders Ancient Mexico
by Mildred Boyd

      Because human beings are poorly designed creatures, without fur or feathers, claws or fangs, they have always required protection from the elements, from wild animals and, unfortunately, from others of their own kind. Once the demand of increasing population exceeded the available supply of natural refuges like caves, they were forced to become architects and engineers.
      Those first efforts were necessarily primitive; temporary dugouts or lean-tos or leafy arbors. Nomadic hunter/gatherers used any handy branches, grasses or reeds but soon devised clever animal-hide shelters that could be easily carried wherever they traveled.
      Not until increased skills in group hunting, agriculture and animal husbandry insured a relatively steady food supply did permanent homes became feasible. Family settlements became clan villages that developed into urban centers and, finally, into cities requiring public buildings, markets, palaces and temples. Lacking either draft animals or wheeled vehicles to transport stone and ignorant of the art of brick making, they built mainly of perishable local materials that have long since returned to the earth from which they came. Our earliest evidence of such settlements comes from the grave offerings of Early Pre Classic sites. At Tlatilco, on the Altiplano, over 300 burials have yielded fine pottery figurines from as early as 1200 DC which, despite the distance involved, show definite Olmec influence.

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