Compare And Contrast Maya And Aztec Civilization

580 Words3 Pages

The Maya, Inca, and Aztec civilizations are all different in their respective ways. Each and every one of them had to learn to live and work in their environment. From dry plains to mountains and lakes, each and every lifestyle was different based on the environment they lived in. An example of how people learn to adapt to their environment is the Aztec civilization. The Aztec way of life has a lot to do with religion. They were directed by one of their Gods, Huitzilopochtli, to build at the place where there was an eagle sitting on a cactus eating a snake. When they saw this exact thing on an island in the middle of Lake Texcoco, they started building. While their environment may have been different from others, they learned to work with it. An example of this is shown in …show more content…

The Inca lived high in the Andes Mountains, thus making it difficult to grow crops. Mountains are known for having inadequate, undeveloped soil due to the surrounding landscape, but the Inca put their environment to good use. They created the method of terrace farming. This method utilized the landscape that they had to work with while living in the mountains. Terrace farming would turn mountain sides into step-like levels that sustain nutrients by carrying them down after it rains. This differs from other types of farming because the nutrients do not get washed away. They simply just move forward to the other crops. A quote that touches on this is in document C for the checkpoint two document set. The quote says, “The Incas were ambitious farmers, and to maximize agricultural production, they transformed the landscape with terracing, canals, and irrigation networks, whilst wetlands were often drained to make them suitable for farming.” This shows that the Incas took something that was thought of as insufficient and used their knowledge to create a strategy that worked for