The Aztecs occupied territory in Mesoamerica, and the capital city Tenochtitlán was located in what today is Mexico City. A militant warrior tradition characterized Aztec culture. They developed a system of feudalism which had similarities to that of Japan and Europe. The Aztecs were ruled by a single monarch, who exerted power over local rulers.
The Aztecs had an agricultural economy, with cacao beans sometimes used as currency. They practiced chinampa agriculture, where farmers cultivated crops in rectangular plots of land on lake beds. A priestly class oversaw polytheistic religious rituals, which sometimes included human sacrifice. Although Aztec society was patriarchal, women were able to own property and agree to business contracts.
Indigenous clans in the Andean highlands of South America developed a rich and complex culture, leading to the rise of an empire in the fifteenth century C.E. These people—the Incas—conquered a large territory and absorbed many groups in central and western South America. In ninety years, the Inca Empire grew into a stretch of land that covered over 3,000 miles. Despite its large size, the Inca Empire was centralized, led by a king and a privileged class of nobles. The capital city was Cuzco, in present-day Peru, but the Incas also occupied other large urban centers.
The Inca Empire had a mandatory public service system, called the mit’a. Their economy was rooted in agriculture, as the Incas had adapted to the steep, rugged terrain of the Andes with the use of extensive irrigation techniques. Their polytheistic religion was based on worship of the sun and incorporated ancestor worship. They developed a system of record-keeping called quipu; it used knotted strings to record numeric data, such as tax obligations and census records. Living in a patriarchal society, Inca women had few rights.