Several years ago when I lived on a farm in northern Illinois, I was overjoyed to learn that the small highway that I lived on had previously been a Native American path, probably called the Piscasaw path after the name of the creek it followed. I checked into other Illinois highways and found that nearly every highway, aside from freeways and streets, had been an indigenous path or highway prior to the arrival of Europeans. Highways 41, 12, 14, 64, 34, and 45 radiating out from Chicago had all been indigenous paths. In fact, the same is probably true in any country in the western hemisphere. This indigenous sense of paths and travel has become part of the collective consciousness of all the people, no matter the race.
Whenever, the first peoples traveled from the Bering Strait, across Alaska, and then down to Patagonia, they didn't walk at random through the countryside. Instead, as long as 12,000 years ago there was a coastal path all the way along the Pacific Ocean. Here in California, highway 1 follows this ~12,000 year-old path for most of its course along the coast. Nearly every Pacific-coast country in North, Central, and South America has a similar coastal highway.
In the United States, a little of the indigenous sense of place is retained through these highways, which followed the terrain. That sense of place was greatly diminished when the Midwest was divided up into mile road grids in the 1860s and 1870s when thousands of settlers, like my great, great grandfather 'settled' there from Europe. Just like that, space could be halved, quartered and sold in a most efficient way. In most cases these mile roads did not follow the terrain and space began to have less meaning, except as private property.
The next step in the transformation of our collective sense of roads in the U.S., and further ridding our culture of its indigenous past, was the introduction of the interstate freeway system by President Eisenhower in the 1950s. To make the interstate 'freeways', hills and mountains were blasted away and huge bridges were constructed rather than winding down a valley to cross the rivers in a natural way. This is what 'free' way meant - speed was everything. Towns were bypassed and local economies were transformed and small businesses destroyed. Every interstate exchange became the same indistinguishable mix of corporate fastfood, corporate malls, and truck stops; place soon meant much less.
Today in Mexico and Central America, the elite economic powers that have brought structural adjustment, export economies, free trade for multinational corporations, and escalated immigration due to entrenched poverty, now try, led by the IMF and World Bank, to push the Plan Puebla Panama, which includes a superhighway through Mesoamerica and southern Central America. This superhighway, like the US interstates, would push Central America into the post-modern world where place has no meaning except as something which can be sold, developed, exploited, or used as entertainment, and in all cases, traveled over in the least amount of time possible.
So, to celebrate the indigenous highways of Central America, I have prepared a map [click to enlarge] to demonstrate some of the first roads in El Salvador, as one example. This is not meant to be an exhaustive list and should be taken with a grain of salt. Still, it shows how indigenous peoples traveled along the lay of the land moving between the early cities.
The course of the coastal or 'literal' highway of El Salvador dates from many thousands of years before the start of the Mayans or Lencas and is the oldest road. In some places it moves inland to avoid mangrove swamps and deltas. In other places, like La Libertad department, it follows the coast closely to avoid the steep hills which rise quickly from the sea.
The trail between Chalchuapa in the west and Quelepa in the east, as well as the trail from Chalchuapa west to Kaminaljuyu (later Guatemala City), became the Pan American highway. The Troncal del Norte highway from San Salvador north past Aguilares and into Ocotepeque, Honduras, likely did not become an indigenous path until the founding of the major Classic-era city of Cihuatán in the 8th century. But as the Cihuatanecos traveled north to Copán and the Atlantic Coast they would have established the route through Colima to Tejutla and then joined the existing route over the mountains past La Palma and Citalá to Ocotepeque.
As discussed earlier, there was a distinct connection between Chalchuapa and El Mirador in the Peten as early as 1400 BC. Again, after the Ilopango eruption in 210 AD, the Chorti followed this route to Belize and Tikal. The route would have gone through present-day Santa Ana, past Metapán and Esquipulas, Guatemala, to the Motagua valley. Because of the terrain, the route would have jogged east past Quirigua to go around the Santa Cruz mountains and Lago Izabal. Today there are highways that follow all of these routes. There also would have been a route north from Quelepa in eastern El Salvador to Los Naranjos site at Lago Yojoa, Honduras, and then on to the Atlantic coast. As mentioned earlier, one of the advantages of El Salvador's geography was the short distance between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. Later, routes were added between Copán and El Salvador. [Note: Click on map to enlarge. Typo - map should say 'Mayan and Lencan Roads'.]
By the 8th century AD, the Putún Maya arrived in El Salvador, the multi-cultural city-state of Cihuatán was established, and the indigenous highways and political structure of El Salvador would never be quite the same.
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