1000 artworks to see before you die: All about the Ancient Americas

A snake uncoils itself in the woods of Ohio. America's forests are full of reptiles, but this one is different. Its vast green body is half a kilometre in length, its head a massive tumulus. It is an earthwork serpent, one of the most spectacular ancient monuments in the Americas. At first sight it's tempting to compare it to the earthworks and barrows of neolithic Europe, and in fact there are burial mounds in Ohio that are as old as Stonehenge. But the builders of the Great Serpent Mound were doing something different from Europe's megalith-builders — they were drawing a picture to be viewed from the sky. Nor is it the only such sky-picture in the Americas.

Thousands of miles to the south is to be found the most mysterious American work of art of all. The Nazca desert in Peru has a geological peculiarity — it is composed of a thin layer of dark stones on top of lighter-colour stones. The Nazca, who flourished here in the first millennium AD found that by brushing away the dark stones, they could "draw" white lines in the earth — and they did this on a colossal scale, over hundreds of years. The Nazca Lines are immense earthworks created in this simple communal way. The mystery is: why would an ancient people make vast drawings of birds, a killer whale, a monkey, lizards and a human figure, not to mention the abstract lines and shapes that got their works the name "Lines", all of which are visible only from the sky? They must have been addressing something in the sky — not aliens in flying saucers, as some suggest, but their gods. And what they showed their gods were symbolic animals: a serpent in Ohio, birds, reptiles and whales in Peru. This preoccupation with animal "totems" makes the earthworks deeply American. Such animal imagery is connected with shamanism — the belief that a questing holy man can gain access to the powers and knowledge of animals on a hallucinatory night journey.

Such ideas may seem "primitive", yet the Nazca Lines are awe-inspiring, and in central America the same rich imaginative world nurtured great urban civilisations. What is primitive and what is sophisticated? The urban peoples of ancient Mexico played a ball game in which losers could be sacrificed and the ball might be a human head — but the evidence for this consists of great works of art. At Teotihuacan a great city rose up with temples and pyramids; yet the rites at its Pyramid of the Sun would probably not have been indecipherable to the mound-builders in Ohio's forests.

Key works

• Jade ornament for chest or belt in the form of a grotesque face, from the Monte Albán archaeological site, Mexico, and now in the National Museum ofAnthropology, Mexico City (c200BC-AD250)• Clay model of ball game and spectators, from western Mexico and now in Yale University Art Gallery (c200BC-AD250)• Colossal stone head, La Venta archaeological site, Mexico (1st millennium BC)• Nazca Lines earthworks, Peru (c100BC-AD700)• Mask covered with blue and red mosaic, from Teotihuacan, Mexico, and now in the National Museum of Anthropology, Mexico City (c150-600)• Decorations on the facade of the Temple of the Feathered Serpent, Teotihuacan, Mexico (c200)• Tomb paintings, Monte Albán, Mexico (c400)• Sacrifice of ball game loser, stone relief in ball court at El Tajín archaeological site, Veracruz, Mexico (c800)• Great Serpent Mound, Adams County, Ohio, US (c1070)• Powhatan's Mantle, animal hide decorated with human and animal figures from Chesapeake Bay, US (before 1638)• Painted wooden mask in the form of a wolf, made by the Tlingit of the Pacific Northwest and now in the British Museum (before 1867)