for wages but were obligated—and perhaps perfectly will-
ing—to provide their services as tribute to the religious and
royal fi gures at the heads of their communities. While the
most substantial coordinated labor eff orts were performed
at the behest of the nobility, individuals were undoubtedly
occasionally employed on incidental bases. Members of the
middle class could have employed peasants for such tasks as
carrying goods, paying them with cacao beans. Labor would
also have been bartered among peasants. Women might have
exchanged hours of labor in such tasks as weaving, while men
would have assisted each other in building homes.
Th e city of Teotihuacán, in central Mexico, an urban
settlement serving much of the surrounding region, features
some of the most impressive feats of peasant labor found in
ancient America. Construction of the Pyramid of the Sun be-
gan around 100 c.e. and lasted at least a century. Th e pyramid
stood some 250 feet high, with a base of more than 700 square
feet. Nearby is the Pyramid of the Moon, standing almost 140
feet tall. Laborers moved more than 1 million cubic meters
of brick and rubble to fi ll the interior of the Pyramid of the
Sun. Artisans and sculptors decorated both pyramid com-
plexes with fresco paintings and monumental sculpture. Th e
rulers of Teotihuacán levied thousands of workers from the
surrounding countryside to raise these monuments.
Th e Chavín of the Peruvian Andes were one of the earli-
est advanced societies of South America. By the ninth cen-
tury b.c.e. they had developed a settled agriculture as well
as industries producing textiles, pottery, and metalworking
in gold, silver, and copper. Th ey gathered and traded stone,
wood, fi sh, shell, and pottery. In the arid lands near the Pa-
cifi c coast, fi shing was an important occupation. In the high-
lands the Chavín developed large villages and ceremonial
centers. Highly skilled masons and sculptors were employed
in the raising of ceremonial pyramids and other religious
structures. Th e mining of obsidian, a hard and useful volca-
nic rock, also became an important occupation.
Th e Moche followed the Chavín culture and fl ourished
at the beginning of the Common Era. Th ey worked as farm-
ers in the Andean valleys. Th ey were highly skilled pottery
artisans who pioneered the use of molds to mass-produce
vases, jugs, and drinking vessels. Large labor gangs and ma-
sons raised two adobe temples, known as the Pyramids of the
Sun and Moon, near the coast. Th e Moche are also known for
their irrigation systems, which were built to canalize sparse
groundwater and rainfall for agriculture. A long period of
heavy rain and fl ooding in the sixth century, however, per-
manently disrupted Moche civilization.
See also agriculture; architecture; art; astronomy;
building techniques and materials; ceramics and pot-
tery; children; cities; crafts; crime and punishment;
economy; family; foreigners and barbarians; gender
structures and roles; household goods; hunting, fish-
ing, and gathering; literature; migration and popula-
tion movements; mining, quarrying, and salt making;
metallurgy; money and coinage; nomadic and pastoral
societies; occupations; roads and bridges; slaves and
slavery; social organization; textiles and needlework;
towns and villages; trade and exchange; war and con-
quest; weaponry and armor; weights and measures.FURTHER READING
M. M. Austin and P. Vidal-Naquet, Economic and Social History of
Ancient Greece: An Introduction (Berkeley: University of Cali-
fornia Press, 1977).
Moses I. Finley, Th e Ancient Economy, 2nd ed. (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1985).
Charles Gates, Ancient Cities: Th e Archaeology of Urban Life in
the Ancient Near East and Egypt, Greece, and Rome (London:
Routledge, 2003).
Simon Goodenough, Citizens of Rome (New York: Crown, 1979).
Jac Janssen, Commodity Prices from the Ramessid Period: An Eco-
nomic Study of the Village of Necropolis Workmen at Th ebes
(Leiden, Netherlands: Brill, 1975).
Leonard Lesko, ed., Pharoah’s Workers: Th e Villagers of Deir el Me-
dina (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1994).
Martin A Powell, Labor in the Ancient Near East (New Haven,
Conn.: American Oriental Society, 1987).▶ exploration
introduction
In prehistory exploration and the migration of peoples were
essentially one and the same. People lacked the means of ex-
ploring their world, and life was a daily struggle for survival,
so exploration, as the term is understood in the 21st century,
was a low priority. Most of the world was unpeopled, however,
and much of the history of the world in ancient times was the
history of migrations as people spread out and settled new
lands, oft en to follow food supplies. As the glaciers from the
north receded, people expanded into what is now Europe to
fi nd an abundance of game and fertile lands.
Perhaps one of the best examples is the Americas, whose
human population was zero until some hardy Siberian hunt-
ers crossed the land bridge connecting Siberia and Alaska in
search of game. In time, members of their community fol-
lowed and began to make their way south through North
America, into Mexico and Central America, and fi nally to the
southern tip of South America. Th e people who undertook
these arduous migrations were explorers, but unlike the great
explorers of the 14th and 15th centuries, they did not return
to their homelands bearing new knowledge about the world.
Only later, when the great civilizations of Mesoamerica fl our-
ished, did people make an eff ort to explore outward. But even
then their primary goal was to secure and expand their bor-
ders rather than to seek new knowledge of contact with new
civilizations.
In Asia, too, exploration had ulterior motives. For some,
exploration took place mainly with a view to expanding re-exploration: introduction 435