Pre-Columbian Civilizations
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50 free Pre-Columbian Civilizations trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Long before 1492, the Americas were home to cities larger than most in Europe, calendars that tracked the sky across thousands of years, and empires that ran without iron, horses or the wheel. The Olmec, Maya, Aztec and Inca are the best-known names, but they shared two continents with mound builders on the Mississippi, cliff-dwelling farmers in the Southwest and desert artists on the coast of Peru. This quiz covers the ground a class unit or a pub round on the subject would: capital cities and famous ruins, rulers and conquistadors, gods and creation stories, the crops and animals people depended on, and the engineering that kept mountain and lake cities fed. Questions on the Spanish conquests of Mexico and Peru sit beside ones on writing, record keeping, sport and trade. It suits students revising Mesoamerican and Andean history, teachers who need a ready-made review, and anyone who has stood at a ruin and wanted the story behind it. Every answer comes with a short explanation, so a wrong guess still teaches something.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which modern metropolis covers the ruins of Tenochtitlan, the Aztec capital founded on an island in Lake Texcoco?
Mexico City
Mexico City was founded by the Spanish directly on top of the conquered island, and Aztec temple ruins still lie in its historic center.
Q 02Which Inca citadel, high in the Andes of Peru, did Hiram Bingham bring to international attention in 1911?
Machu Picchu
Machu Picchu was no secret locally: a Peruvian explorer had written his surname and the year 1902 in charcoal on one of its temples.
Q 03What did Aztec shoppers use as small change for everyday market purchases, with cotton cloth serving for larger ones?
Cacao beans
Cacao beans had to be imported from the lowlands, and a standard length of cotton cloth was worth anywhere from 65 to 300 of them.
Q 04What did Olmec sculptors carve from basalt boulders of up to 50 tons, some hauled more than 150 km?
Colossal heads
Colossal heads number just seventeen confirmed examples, each with its own distinctive headdress, and are thought to portray individual rulers.
Q 05Which number did Maya scribes write as a shell, alongside the dots and bars used for other values?
Zero
Zero let Maya scribes write any number with just three symbols, the other two being a dot for one and a bar for five.
Q 06Which Spanish conquistador scuttled his own ships off Veracruz before marching inland against the Aztec Empire?
Hernán Cortés
Hernán Cortés sank the fleet to rule out retreat, having already sailed from Cuba in open mutiny after the governor revoked his commission.
Q 07Which ancient culture of southern Peru scraped giant hummingbird, monkey and spider figures into the desert floor?
Nazca
Nazca people made the figures by clearing reddish surface pebbles to expose paler soil, and the dry, windless climate has preserved them ever since.
Q 08At which Maya city does the El Castillo pyramid cast a serpent-like shadow down its staircase around each equinox?
Chichén Itzá
Chichén Itzá draws equinox crowds for the effect, yet the shadow shows for several weeks, so it could never have fixed the date on its own.
Q 09Which crop did Inca farmers freeze-dry on cold Andean nights to make chuño, a long-lasting staple?
Potato
Potato was the Inca staple and had been domesticated in the Andes 7,000 to 10,000 years ago; about 3,000 varieties still grow in the region.
Q 10Without a writing system, on what did Inca officials called quipucamayocs record census counts and tax obligations?
Knotted cords
Knotted cords called quipus stored numbers in a decimal system, and colonial courts later accepted them as valid records of past payments.
Q 11Which Spanish conquistador, who never learned to read, seized the Inca emperor at Cajamarca in 1532 with under 200 men?
Francisco Pizarro
Francisco Pizarro went on to found Lima on Peru's coast in 1535, which he counted among the most important things he ever created.
Q 12Which Inca emperor offered a room filled with gold as his ransom, only to be garroted by the Spanish?
Atahualpa
Atahualpa had just won a three-year civil war against his half-brother Huáscar, whose execution he arranged while he was himself a prisoner.
Q 13Which Aztec emperor was ruling when the Spanish entered Tenochtitlan in 1519, only to die during an uprising there?
Moctezuma II
Q 21Which language did the Inca Empire promote as its official tongue, one still spoken by millions across the Andes?
Quechua
Quechua had spread across the central Andes long before the Inca rose, so the empire was adopting a language many of its subjects already spoke.
Q 22In the Popol Vuh, the creation story of the K'iche' Maya, the gods finally make lasting humans from which crop?
Maize
Maize succeeded in the story where mud and then wood had failed, and the real plant was bred in southern Mexico about 9,000 years ago.
Q 23Which material formed the solid balls of the Mesoamerican ballgame, which players struck with their hips?
Rubber
Rubber was made by mixing tree latex with the juice of a morning glory vine, and the balls could weigh as much as 9 pounds.
Moctezuma II died in June 1520, and accounts still differ on whether the Spaniards or his own people killed him.
Q 14Which Aztec god of wind and learning, linked to the planet Venus, has a name meaning 'feathered serpent'?
Quetzalcoatl
Quetzalcoatl had a Maya counterpart named Kukulkan, and both names describe the same plumed snake deity found across Mesoamerica.
Q 15Which Andean animal did the Inca rely on to carry loads, having no horses, oxen or wheeled carts?
Llama
Llama herds roughly marked the empire's limits: the Inca realm at its height coincided with the range of llamas and alpacas.
Q 16Which bird, perched on a cactus on Mexico's flag, marks where Aztec legend says Tenochtitlan was founded?
Eagle
An eagle devouring a rattlesnake appears on the national emblem, but older Aztec manuscripts vary, and some show the bird alone on its cactus.
Q 17Which disease, carried from Europe, struck Tenochtitlan in 1520 and left the Aztecs weakened before the final siege?
Smallpox
Smallpox swept the city in the autumn of 1520, after the Spanish had been driven out, and the new emperor Cuitláhuac was perhaps among its victims.
Q 18What name is given to the artificial farming islands the Aztecs built up from mud and reeds in shallow lakes?
Chinampas
Chinampas are often called floating gardens, but they never floated: farmers fenced off patches of lake bed and piled on sediment until the plot stood above the water.
Q 19Which ruined city, home to the Pyramid of the Sun, did the Aztecs name 'birthplace of the gods'?
Teotihuacan
Teotihuacan was once the largest city in the Americas, with perhaps 100,000 people, yet it fell around 550 CE, centuries before the Aztecs named it.
Q 20Which language of the Aztecs gave English the words tomato, avocado, coyote and chili?
Nahuatl
Nahuatl is far from a dead language: well over a million people speak its modern varieties, most of them in central Mexico.
Q 24Which stone edged the Aztec macuahuitl, a wooden sword whose blades could be sharper than a steel razor?
Obsidian
Obsidian was so useful for tools and weapons that its wide use may help explain why Mesoamerica did so little metalworking.
Q 25Which stone was pieced into the funerary mask of Pakal, king of Palenque, and set into the teeth of Maya lords?
Jade
Jade of an apple-green shade was the kind the Maya valued most highly, and they associated the stone with their sun god.
Q 26Which Maya city, among the largest ever built, stands in a rainforest national park in northern Guatemala?
Tikal
Tikal may have held as many as 90,000 people before it was abandoned by the end of the 10th century, and its ruins went unexplored until 1848.
Q 27What are the water-filled sinkholes of Yucatán called, which the Maya used for drinking water and sacrificial offerings?
Cenotes
Cenotes number an estimated 10,000 across the peninsula, and the word comes from a Yucatec Maya term for any place with reachable groundwater.
Q 28Which farming structures, called andenes, covered about a million hectares of the Inca Empire and cut frost damage?
Terraces
Terraces cut like stairs into the mountainside also caught more sunshine and held back erosion, and they helped feed roughly ten million Inca subjects.
Q 29What did the Inca weave into cables for bridges over Andean gorges, as Peruvian villagers still do every June?
Grass
Grass of a tough highland kind called ichu was woven into large bundles, and the last such bridge is rebuilt across the Apurímac River every year.
Q 30Which Inca ruler, renamed after beating the Chanka, began turning the kingdom of Cusco into an empire?
Pachacuti
Pachacuti was a prince called Cusi Yupanqui when he rallied the army to defend Cusco, after its ruler had fled the Chanka attack.