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Mesoamerica is the region extending from central Mexico south to the northwestern border of Costa Rica that gave rise to a group of stratified, culturally related agrarian civilizations spanning an approximately 3,000-year period before the European discovery of the New World by Columbus. Mesoamerican is the adjective generally used to refer to that group of Pre-Columbian cultures. This refers to an environmental area occupied by an assortment of ancient cultures that shared religious beliefs, art, architecture, and technology that made them exceptional in the Americas for three thousand years.
Some common shared Mesoamerican traits include the three-stone hearth, a certain kind of sandal, intensive agriculture based heavily on maize (corn); worship of a set of deities including a rain god, a sun god, a feathered-serpent god (known to the Aztecs as Quetzalcoatl); a Vigesimal numbering system; the use of a 260 day ritual calendar in addition to the solar year calendar (see: Mesoamerican calendars); the construction of temples elevated atop stepped pyramids; a ritual ball-game (see:Mesoamerican ballgame); and various other artistic and cultural conventions.
Mesoamerica is also a canonical example of a Linguistic area: all of the major Mesoamerican languages show some subset of a pool of common traits. Mesoamerica's economy and geopolitics benefited from extensive use of a lingua franca, the Nahuatl language, at least since the 7th century, and perhaps even going as far back as 2,000 years.
Mesoamerica is one of our planet’s six cradles of early civilizations. Many viewpoints of the ancient cultures of Belize, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Mexico continue to the present time today. Several of these cultural inventions and traits have spread throughout the world, both past and presently speaking. Mesoamerican metacivilizations included the Olmec, Zapotec, Teotihuacan, Maya, Mixtec, Huastec, Totonac, Toltec, Tarascan, and the Aztec.
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- Mixtec This is art that tells the history of the people who created mountain kingdoms through art, occupation, and the interweaving of royalty. Mystic artistry created some of Mesoamerica’s most attractive jewelry, pottery, and bone carvings.
- Toltec Originally a wandering warrior group, the Toltec established a center in Tula, near the edge of Mexico’s barren north edge. They may have occupied cities as far away as Chichen Itza in Yucatan. Their accomplishments became well-known to the Aztec and other Mesoamericans.
- Huastec Chieftains, whose images were carved into large stone sculptures, dominated linguistic relations of the Maya, the Huastec were of the Gulf Coast region.
- Aztec Cultures From a marshy island beneath today’s Mexico City, the Aztec established a territory that stretched south to Guatemala. Honor from their subjects ranged from military uniforms to loads of cacao and maize. Aztec accounts serve as an important source for Mesoamerican history; the names they applied to ancient cultures are the ones we use today.
In some writings from the 1920s and 1930s the alternative term Middle America was used to refer to Mesoamerica, but that acception of the term has generally fallen out of favor. See Middle America.
Related topics
- Human antiquity in Mesoamerica
- Mesoamerican chronology, languages
- Zapotec calendar, mythology
- Maya calendar, numerals
- Aztec calendar, mythology
- Mesoamerican practices: agriculture, obsidian use, trephinning
- Mesoamerican iconography: jaguar
- Spanish conquest of: Yucatán, Michoacán, Guatemala
Bibliography
- Gamio, Manuel. La Población del Valle de Teotihuacán. Mexico City: Talleres Gráficos de la Secretaría de Educación Pública, 1922.
- Kirchhoff, Paul. "Mesoamérica." Acta Americana, 1 (1943):92-107.
- Sahagún, Fray Bernardino de. Florentine Codex: General History of the Things of New Spain. C. H. Dibble and A. J. O. Anderson, trans., Santa Fe: School of American Research and the University of Utah Press (1950-).
- Wauchope, Robert, ed. Handbook of Middle American Indians. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964.
- Weaver, Muriel Porter, The Aztecs, Maya, and Their Predecessors, Third Edition. New York: Academic Press, 1993.
- West, Robert C. and John P. Augelli. Middle America: Its Lands and Peoples, Third Edition. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1989.
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