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- In world history, Mesoamerica was the site of two historical transformations: (i) primary urban generation, and (ii) the formation of New World cultures from the mixtures of the indigenous Mesoamerican peoples with the European, African, and Asian peoples who were introduced by the Spanish colonization of the Americas.
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Mesoamerican civilization, the complex of indigenous cultures that developed in parts of Mexico and Central America prior to Spanish exploration and conquest in the 16th century. In its accomplishments Mesoamerican civilization was a New World counterpart to those of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, and China.
- pre-Columbian Civilizations
pre-Columbian civilizations, the aboriginal American Indian...
- Mesoamerican Civilization Summary
Mesoamerican civilization, Complex of aboriginal cultures...
- Mesoamerican Indian
Mesoamerican Indian, member of any of the indigenous peoples...
- pre-Columbian Civilizations
- Repeated Reinventions
- The Geography of the Americas
- Early Developments in Mesoamerica
- Tenochtitlan
- Comparing the Americas to Afro-Eurasia
- For Further Discussion
By Cynthia Stokes Brown
Civilization in Mesoamerica flourished and crashed repeatedly, giving rise to a distinctive worldview and some remaining mysteries.
The Americas constitute one of the world’s four geographical zones. Each of these belts is a large area of the world that developed almost entirely separately from the others during the eras of hunting and gathering and of early agriculture. The four world zones are the Afro-Eurasian zone, the Americas, the Australasian zone, and the Pacific.
About 245 million years ago, when all the continents on Earth were fused into one continent called Pangaea, North and South America were more closely packed together. The current shape of Mesoamerica (Middle America) began to emerge as Pangaea broke up, and North and South America separated, not to be rejoined again until about 3 million years ago. This reconnection happened as two tectonic plates moved against each other, causing volcanoes to erupt, which created islands. Sediment gradually filled in among the islands. This had an enormous impact on Earth’s climate, because it reconfigured the ocean currents. Since the Atlantic current could no longer flow into the Pacific Ocean, it turned north up the coast of North America and over to Europe, carrying warm water from the Caribbean that raised temperatures in Europe.
People in the Americas developed an entirely different menu of foods than those in Mesopotamia for the simple reason that the indigenous plants and animals were different than those in the Fertile Crescent. Instead of wild grains, goats, and sheep, people in the highlands of Mexico had corn (sometimes called maize), beans, peppers, tomatoes, and squash as their staple foods. The ancestor of modern corn, called “teosinte,” has cobs about the size of a human thumb. It took people about 5,000 years, until 2000 BCE, to domesticate teosinte and breed corncobs large enough to support city life. They also cultivated peanuts and cotton. The only animals that could be domesticated were dogs and turkeys.
The founding culture of Mesoamerica appeared along the southwestern curve of the Gulf of Mexico, near the present city of Veracruz. This culture emerged in a series of river valleys, as Uruk did in Mesopotamia. Called the Olmecs (the “rubber people”), this culture lasted from about 1400 BCE to 100 BCE. It produced nearly imperishable art, notably large carved heads of volcanic rock, the largest weighing some 20 tons and standing about 10 feet tall. Monumental sculptures or tombs are typically indicative of a civilization with powerful leaders, but this culture probably ranks more as a chiefdom than as a state with extensive coercive power. The last Olmec site, Tres Zapotes, declined by about 100 BCE for unknown reasons. Was it volcanic eruptions? A shift in the flow of rivers? Scholars believe that the Olmecs may have deliberately destroyed their capital. Was there civil unrest? Class strife? No one knows.
As the Olmecs declined, their neighbors to the east — the Maya — prospered in an area the size of Colorado or Great Britain. This area, around the curve of the Gulf of Mexico on the Yucatán Peninsula and south into present-day Guatemala, had poor, infertile soil and no large rivers, not what one would expect for a flourishing civilization. Yet its people built terraces to trap silt from the small rivers and grew corn, beans, squash, peppers, cassava (manioc root), and cacao (chocolate). With no beasts of burden, their luxury goods were portable by humans — feathers, jade, gold, and shells.
The Maya organized themselves into small city-states instead of one big empire. The largest was Tikal, which by 750 CE had about 40,000 inhabitants, in specialized occupations and ruled by elites. The city-states fought each other frequently with the main purpose being to capture their enemies in order to sacrifice them to the Mayan gods.
We know about the Maya because they developed the most elaborate and sophisticated writing system of the several different ones used in Mesoamerica. Mayan writing included both pictographs and symbols for syllables. Since the 1980s scholars have made great strides in deciphering this script. Many carved inscriptions have survived, but only a few accordion books on bark or deerskin remain.
Maya shaman/priests worked out remarkable systems of cosmology and mathematics. They devised three kinds of calendars. A calendar of the solar year of 365 days governed the agricultural cycle and a calendar of the ritual year of 260 days dictated daily affairs; these two calendars coincided every 52 years. A third calendar, called the Long Count calendar, extended back to the date August 13, 3114 BCE (on the Gregorian calendar), to record the large-scale passage of time. The Maya calculated a solar year as 365.242 days, about 17 seconds shorter than the figures of modern astronomers. They also introduced the concept of zero; the first evidence of zero as a number dates from 357 BCE, but it may go back further, to Olmec times. In Afro-Eurasia, Hindu scholars first represented zero in the 800s CE.
The city that carried Mesoamerican civilization to its height proved to be Tenochtitlan (the-noch-tee-TLAHN), or “place of the cactus fruit” in their language, Nahuatl. Its people, called the Mexica (me-SHI-ka), came from northern Mexico looking for a place to settle. All the desirable places were already inhabited, except an island on the shore of a large lake in the Valley of Mexico, where they settled in 1325. They were given the name Aztecs by the German explorer and naturalist Alexander von Humboldt in the early 19th century.
The Mexica/Aztecs built up their food production by creating floating islands of soil, called chinampas, held together by willow trees. Their men hired themselves out as paid soldiers to other towns until they became strong enough to conquer others on their own. In 1428 they allied themselves with two other neighboring cities to form the so-called Triple Alliance and set out to conquer other cities to provide tribute that could support the Alliance’s expanding population. The conquests would also provide sacrificial victims for their religious rituals, carried down from the Olmecs, Mayans, and Teotihuacánians.
By the early 1500s the Aztecs had conquered most of Mesoamerica and had imposed their rule on an estimated 11–12 million people. The annual tribute they received in corn alone amounted to 7,000 tons. They also received 2 million cotton cloaks, as well as jewelry, obsidian knives, rubber balls, jaguar skins, parrot feathers, jade, emeralds, seashells, vanilla beans, and chocolate. Without money, everyone was paid in food and goods. Their population had grown to at least 200,000–300,000 in the capital, several times the size of the contemporary London of King Henry VIII.
The Aztecs bestowed great honor to their warriors, building their society around a military elite. A council of the most successful warriors chose the ruler. Warriors could wear fine cotton cloth and feathers instead of clothing made from the fibers of an agave-like plant; they were believed to go straight to the paradise of the Sun God if they died in battle. (This also applied to women who died in childbirth with their first child.) Priests also ranked among the elite. Most people were commoners who cultivated land and a large number of slaves worked mostly as domestic servants.
The Aztecs adopted traditions that dated back to the Olmecs. They played the same ball game and kept a sophisticated calendar. They adopted traditional religious beliefs, holding that the gods had set the world in motion by their individual acts of sacrifice. Priests practiced bloodletting on themselves and believed that ritual sacrifice of humans was essential to prevent the destruction of the Fifth Sun by earthquakes or famine. The god of war, Huitzilopochli (we-tsee-loh-POCK-tlee), came to be the prevailing god in Tenochtitlan, and his priests placed more emphasis on human sacrifice than did earlier traditions. Priests laid the victims — mostly captives of war — over a curved stone high on a pyramid and cut open the chest with an obsidian blade to fling the still-beating heart into a ceremonial basin, while the desired blood flowed down the pyramid.
Aztec society provided universal schooling for both boys and girls between 15 and 20 years of age. It’s likely they were the only people in the world to do this in the early 16th century. Commoner boys learned to be warriors; girls learned songs, dances, and household skills. A third kind of school provided lessons in administration, ideology, and literacy for elite boys.
To compare the Americas with Afro-Eurasia, let’s look around the Americas a bit. We have seen agrarian civilization develop in Mesoamerica; can we find it anywhere else?
In South America, civilization developed along the lengthy coastline on the western side of the continent. Plate tectonics formed a unique landscape with high mountains near the ocean as the Nazca plate slid beneath the South American plate. Early states developed along the coastline, but they could not overcome the frequent floods, earthquakes, and torrential rains to continue their development and grow their populations. Finally, in the 15th century, the Incas built a state high in the mountains with its capital at Cuzco, at 13,000 feet. At its height the Inca Empire controlled 10–11 million people, covering lands from present-day Quito, Ecuador, all the way to Santiago, Chile. Strikingly, this civilization had no written language; it used knots tied into ropes as a system of writing called quipu. But smallpox spread to this area even before the Spanish soldiers arrived, and by 1527 the Spanish conquistadors under Francisco Pizzaro had used their technological advantage to conquer a vast Inca civilization compromised by disease.
Nowhere else in the Americas did civilization, as we have defined it, emerge. Many wonderful cultures and chiefdoms arose, but none achieved the surplus of food necessary for highly dense populations. The cultivation of tobacco and corn spread widely. Even the basin of the Amazon River may have been more densely populated than previously suspected. People farmed, but everywhere they needed to supplement their agriculture with hunting and gathering.
The Americas did not develop many of the technological innovations present in Afro-Eurasia. For example, Americans did not use wheels (except the Maya, who put them on toys!), probably because they had no large domestic animals to pull wheeled devices. Americans did not melt iron or steel; they used obsidian (glassy volcanic rock that can be sharpened to a thinness of one molecule) for blades. They had no swords or guns. They had no horses, which had evolved in the Americas but which had gone extinct at the end of the last ice age, about when humans were arriving in the Americas.
How much long-distance trade and travel occurred in the Americas? Not as much as in Afro-Eurasia, which stretched out east to west so that people could travel at approximately the same latitude (the distance from the equator) in similar climates. The Americas stretched north and south, with huge changes in climate. Crops could not be carried or exchanged because they would not grow at different latitudes without time to adapt. Americans built large canoes but not sailing vessels, and they stayed close to the shore and in calm waters. They made north-south connections, but these were less frequent than the east-west connections of Afro-Eurasia.
As a result of these factors, states and civilizations arose somewhat later in the Americas than they did in Afro-Eurasia. Once American civilizations emerged, they were not able to connect with each other, share their innovations, or learn collectively to the same extent as their counterparts in Afro-Eurasia. The civilizations created were similar in all their basic characteristics to those in Afro-Eurasia and seemed likely to continue their development if they had not been prematurely cut down by Europeans.
In the Questions Area below, provide your answer to the following question: Do you think the north-south orientation of the Americas, as opposed to the east-west orientation of Afro-Eurasia, is a convincing explanation for the differences between the two world zones?
[Sources and attributions]
Jan 22, 2021 · Ancient Mesoamerica (modern-day Mexico and Central America) witnessed an extraordinary flourishing of cultures from the beginnings of the Olmec civilization around 1200 BCE, through the Maya civilization and on to the catastrophic fall of the Aztec civilization in the 16th century CE.
- Mark Cartwright
- Publishing Director
- What are the 4 Mesoamerican civilizations in order?4 Mesoamerican civilizations in order of appearance are: the Olmecs, the Maya, the Toltecs, and the Aztecs.
- What are the 3 notable Mesoamerican civilizations?3 notable Mesoamerican civilizations are: the Olmecs of Mexico (1200-400 BCE), the Classic Maya of Mexico and Central America (250-950 CE), and the...
- Is Mesoamerican the same as Aztec?Mesoamerica is not the same as Aztec. The Aztecs were present in Mexico whereas Mesoamerica has a wider significance that includes Mexico and Centr...
- What was the first civilization in Mesoamerica?The first great Mesoamerican civilization was the Olmecs of Mexico (1200-400 BCE).
As in other areas of early civilization, the first complex societies did not appear in just one area of Mexico and then gradually expand to occupy Mesoamerica; instead, there were several developmental centers, including the South Gulf Coast, the Valley of Mexico, the Valley of Oaxaca, and the Maya lowlands and highlands (Figure 13.2).
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Art historians and archaeologists divide Mesoamerican history into distinct periods and some of these periods are then further divided into the sub-periods—early, middle, and late.
The Archaic period in Mesoamerica stretched from 8000 to 2000 BCE, during which scores of cultures adapted to the region’s ecological diversity by domesticating wild food sources like “beans, squash, amaranth, peppers, and wild Maize ( teosinte ).” 4 The maize of large kernels of today took thousands of years of domestication for Mesoamericans t...
