Mesoamerican vs South American Roads

There is a growing argument among Mesoamerican critics that the ancient roads existing in Mesoamerica are as fine and as many and as long as any in pre-Columbian America. Most comments found today of the Mayan roads is quoted from Joy M. Osborn, who in turn quotes from T.A. Willard, which is based on work of Edward Herbert Thompson, an avowed believer that the ancient Maya ruins of Mesoamerica “were the remains of the civilization that sprang from the lost continent of Atlantis.”
    His excavations in the ancient city of Chi-Chen-Itzamin in the Yucatán on the culture and development of the Mayan civilization as revealed by their art and architecture was used as the basis for the work of the others. Thompson, in 1894 was the United States Consul to Yucatán, and purchased the Hacienda Chichén, which included the ruins of Chichen Itza. For 30 years, Thompson explored the ancient city and his discoveries included the earliest dated carving upon a lintel in the Temple of the Initial Series and the excavation of several graves in the Osario pyramid (Temple of the High Priest).

The Osario pyramid at the Chicchen-Itza in the Yucatán

This pyramid is dated from 600 to 1200 AD, and exhibits a multitude of architectural styles, reminiscent of those seen in central Mexico and of the Puuc (hill) and Chênes (oak tree) styles of the Northern Maya lowlands. The presence of central Mexican styles was once thought to have been representative of direct migration or even conquest from central Mexico, but most contemporary interpretations view the presence of these non-Maya styles more as the result of cultural diffusion.
    Thompson is most famous for dredging the Cenote Sagrado (Sacred Well) from 1904 to 1910, where he recovered artifacts of gold, copper and carved jade, as well as the first-ever examples of what were believed to be pre-Columbian Maya cloth and wooden weapons. Thompson shipped the bulk of the artifacts to the Peabody Museum at Harvard University.
    Today, Chichen Itza contains many fine stone buildings in various states of preservation, and many have been restored. The buildings were connected by a dense network of paved causeways, called sacbeob, meaning “white ways” (singular sacbe, sakbej), which are raised and paved pathways or roads built by the Maya civilization of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica—most connect temples, plazas, and groups of structures within ceremonial centers or cities. The practical and symbolic aspects of roadways are also discussed, with the aim of beginning to explain why sacbeob are present at some sites while absent at others.
    Though Osborn quotes from Victor Wolfgang von Hagan regarding Mayan roads, he actually traveled and wrote extensively about the “Inca” roads of Andean South America.
    The concept of sacbeob, referred to as “intrasite” (intertsite) meaning within the site and extending to “core-outlier intrasite” which means within a short distance of the site or within a larger, extended site, and to “intersite,” meaning from one site to another. In Mesoamerican roads, there is no classification for long-range or great distance roads. It should also be noted that these “white ways” are present at some sites, but absent from others (Justine M. Shaw, Maya Sacbeob, Ancient Mesoamerica, Cambridge University Press, 2002, UK, 2001, pp261-272).
    In fact, sacbeob applied to roads, walkways, causeways, property lines, and dikes. The word sacbe has additional meanings to the Mya, as mythological routes, pilgrimage pathways, and concrete markers of political or symbolic connections between city centers. Some sacbeob are mythological, subterranean routes and some trace celestial pathways; evidence for these roadways are reported in Maya myths and colonial records.

Sacbe 9 or Sacbeob, ancient white stone road winding through the jungle among trees Coba, Quintana Roo, Yucatan

According to José Osorio León archaeologists have identified over 80 sacbeob criss-crossing the site of Chichen Itza, which date to 600 to 800 AD, and extend in all directions from the city (J.P Laporte, et al., eds, “The Presence of the Late Classic in Chichen Itza,” XIX Research Symposium Archaeology in Guatemala, Museum National of Archaeology and Ethnology, Guatelama, 2005, pp. 455-462).
    In fact, León states as an intro to his work that: “results of studies made over the last few years in Chichen Itza have confirmed the presence of settlements in this cultural period. Although little is known about the site, it signals the beginnings of the development of this great city that dominated a vast territory, covering North Yucatan and significant parts of the Gulf and Caribbean coasts.
    Chichen Itza as a major economic power in the northern Maya lowlands during its apogee reached an extension of about nine square miles in the eastern region of the Yucatan distributed in different groups near water sources, and united each other through more than 80 roads or pathways (sacbeob). That is not to say that these roads extended beyond the city complex except for a single path or road leading to another city complex.
    On the other hand, Mormon describes the road system as having “many highways cast up, and many roads made, which led from city to city, and from land to land, and from place to place” (3 Nephi 6:8). In the Book of Mormon, the land descriptions are based on city, land, and places, with roads and highways connecting all these areas of the land into one inter-connected road network.
    The ancient pre-Columbian Andean road system was at least 25,000 miles long, which its construction of the roads required a large expenditure of time and effort. The network was composed of formal roads carefully planned, engineered, built, marked and maintained; paved where necessary, with stairways to gain elevation, bridges and accessory constructions such as retaining walls, and water drainage systems.
    It covered ancient Peru, Ecuador, northern Chile, western Bolivia, and northern Argentina, and had to main north-south highways—one along the coast and the second and most important inland and up the mountains both with numerous branches. The road reached from Quito, Ecuador, in the north, passed through Cajamarca and Cusco and ended near Tucuman, Argentina. The Andean Royal road was over 3,500 miles long, longer than the longest Roman road (Maria Rostworowski de Diez Canseco, History of the Inca Realm, Cambridge University Press, England, 1999, p60).
    This work was the result of ethnohistorical research which has been both influential and provocative in the field of Andean prehistory. Rostworowski uses a great variety of published and unpublished documents and secondary works by Latin American, North American, and European scholars in fields including history, ethnology, archaeology, and ecology, to examine topics such as mythical origins, expansion, the organization of Andean society, including political roles, the vast trading networks of the coastal merchants, and the causes of the disintegration of the society.

One of the many Andean roads still intact and still used after about 2000 years

The Andean road system can be directly compared with the road network built during the Roman Empire, and allowed for the transfer of information, goods, soldiers and persons. This network covered about 770,000 square miles and was inhabited by about 12 million people. They were the basis for the Nephite expansion as “they multiplied and spread, and did go forth from the land southward to the land northward, and did spread insomuch that they began to cover the face of the whole earth, from the sea south to the sea north, from the sea west to the sea east” (Helaman 3:8). Without the marvelous network of highways from place to place and the roads within cities and various lands, such growth would not have been possible.
    The most important settlements were located on the main roads,or highways, following a provision prefigured by the existence earlier settlements of roads. The Inkas had a predilection for the use of the Altiplano, or puna areas, for displacement, seeking to avoid contact with the populations settled in the mountains and valleys, and project, at the same time, a straight route of rapid communication.
    Other researchers pointed out additional factors that conditioned the location of settlements and roads, such as the establishment of control zones in an intermediate location with respect to the populations and productive lands of the valleys, the requirement of specific goods, and storage needs, which were favored in the high plains of the Altiplano, characterized by low temperatures and dry climates. As an example, the administrative center of Huanuco Pampa includes 497 collcas (long-term storage buildings, primarily for the storage of grains and maize, which had an extremely long expiration date and made them ideal for long term storage for the army in the event of conflicts), which totaled as much as 1,310,000 cubic feet, and could support a population of between twelve and fifteen thousand people.
    While the Andean roads are the longest and most advanced in the Americas, those of Mesoamerica fall far short of the fantastic descriptions described by Spanish conquistadors about those they saw in Peru (Joy M. Osborn, The Book of Mormon The stick of Joseph: Evidences That Prove the Book of Mormon to be a True Record of a remnant of Joseph, Ensign Publishing Co, London, UK, 2001, pp149-151).
    Though Osborn quotes from Victor Wolfgang von Hagan regarding Mayan roads, Osborn actually traveled and wrote extensively about the “Inca” roads of Andean South America.

One of the rope bridges or suspension bridges the early Peruvians built to cross a river gorge. Many are so old that little of them remains other than their rock stanchions for the rope connections

As an American explorer, archaeological historian, anthropologist and travel writer who travelled with his wife to South America, and between 1940 and 1965, wrote widely acclaimed books about the ancient Inca, Maya and Aztecs, including the Highway of the Sun (1955, about an expediton of discovery of the ancient roads of the Inca), and The Royal Road of the Inca (1976), “went on a two year exploration in the early 1950s of Peru’s ancient roads and found the only surviving suspension bridge of his trail.” His daughter Adriana von Hagen is the co-director of a museum in Leymebamba, Peru.
    While H. H. Bancrfot (1882) speaking of Mesoamerican Maya roads recorded, ”the remains of ancient paved roads, or calzadas, have been found in several parts of the state,” and also quotes from a Spanish traveler named Cogolludo, saying, “In his time, were to be seen vestiges [traces that no longer exist] of calzadas which cross the whole kingdom”), he acknowledges that what was once a road system is now almost invisible.
    In fact, one of the many problems with the Mesoamerican roads, is that they were very difficult to location. In fact, for some time they were believed to be mythical subterranean routes, even showing up in Mayan myths, but recently with techniques such as radar imaging, remote sensing and GPS became widely available, have many of these roads been located.
    On the other hand, in South America, the roads built by the pre-Columbian and pre-Inca Peruvian indigenous people are very spectacular, not only in their design and construction, surpassing anything yet found in Mesoamerica (not just written about), but also in their length and volume. In previous blogs, and easily accessible on the internet under “Inca Roads” is the amount of highways, where they ran, their distances, etc. But overall, we are talking about 24,000 miles of roads or so and there is nothing to compare with that in Central or MesoAmerica at all—not even close! Nor the quality of the construction. The Conquistadors saw both, and raved about those in Andean Peru far more.