Teaching with Lost Settlement

The real history and science

In 1500 the Americas were home to hundreds of peoples. Tenochtitlan, the Mexica capital, stood on an island in Lake Texcoco, joined to the mainland by causeways and fed in part by raised fields called chinampas. Maize grew from what is now southern Canada to Chile, and cassava was a main food in the Caribbean and the tropical lowlands of South America.

Lasting contact with Europeans began in the Caribbean in 1492, among the Taíno. What followed was a two-way traffic in plants, animals and diseases that historians call the Columbian Exchange. Epidemics such as the smallpox of 1520 in Mexico killed very large numbers of people, though how many is still debated.

Within a generation the map had changed. Spanish forces and their Native allies besieged Tenochtitlan in 1521, and Mexico City was built on its ruins. A century later, farther north, the English at Plymouth in 1621 learned to plant maize from Tisquantum, whose own town had been emptied by an epidemic.

What the game simplifies

• The game is a sandbox, so history can go differently, and empires rise and fall by the players' choices. The real outcome, including the epidemics and the fall of Tenochtitlan, was shaped by forces no player controls.
• The game puts each player in the place of a single ruler. In the sources, decisions were often made by councils, alliances and families, and peoples changed and divided over time.
• The game shows peoples from many regions at once, while the written record for 1500 comes mostly from Europeans, and from Native accounts written down later.

Ideas for class

• The city on the lake: students read The Great Market of Tenochtitlan and the article on Tenochtitlan, then draw the city's island, causeways and market from the two descriptions, marking which details come from Cortés and which from the article.
• Whose account? Students compare a European account, such as News of the First Voyage, with a Native account written down later, such as The Smallpox in Mexico, 1520, and list what each can and cannot tell a player about the world of 1500.
• Turning points: students choose one real event, such as the epidemic of 1520 or the siege of 1521, read the sources and articles on it, and write a paragraph on what actually happened and how a sandbox game, where history can go differently, might treat it.

Printable source worksheet · How to teach with a source page