Search - Empires in the Americas: A Journey Back in Time (Lost Treasures of the Ancient World) on DVD

An decent introduction but has its flaws

C. Fountain | Los Angeles, CA USA | 08/28/2009

(3 out of 5 stars)

"I bought this DVD hoping to be able to use it in a class on Latin American culture and civilization. There is much to recommend it, but in the end I decided against showing it to students.

The positives first: this video gives a relatively balanced account of the Inca and Aztec worlds and is free from the sensational style that characterizes some other videos on the subject (the "Lost Worlds" and "Ancient Mysteries" type videos). The experts brought in to discuss these two civilizations are also good. Probably the best thing is that the video presents reconstructions of both Tenochtitlan and Machu Picchu that help give the viewer a sense of what those cities looked like pre-conquest.

The first of the two big negatives, for me, is that the video focuses heavily on the conquest period, rather than on a description of what these civilizations were like before the Europeans arrived. I was looking for a video that would concentrate on the Inca and Aztec empires themselves, not on their downfall. The second negative is that the narrator consistently mispronounces the Inca and Nahuatl names and terms (ex. Huitzilopochtli, roughly wee-tzee-lo-poach-tlee, becomes "wit-luh-puck-tlee"). I was wincing at his butchering of these words throughout the video, though besides that I didn't find his British accent hard to understand.

In the end, I could only recommend this video for those interested in the Aztec and Inca civilizations within the context of their conquest, and with the caveat to follow the pronunciation of the experts interviewed rather than the narrator."