Mesoamerica

The region of ancient complex civilizations in Mexico and Central America does not correspond neatly to modern political boundaries, so it is useful to label it by a special term. “Mesoamerica” is the word introduced by ethnohistorian Paul Kirchhoff (1943). Although its boundaries shifted somewhat over time, Mesoamerica includes all but far northern Mexico, and the northern parts of Central America covered by the countries of Guatemala, Belize, El Salvador, western Honduras and Nicaragua, and the northwestern tip of Costa Rica (Figure 1.2). North of Mesoamerica there were farming towns and villages whose cultures were generally related to those of the southwestern United States, and, in the more arid areas, bands of mobile hunter-gatherers. South of Mesoamerica, in southern Central America and northern South America, politically somewhat less complex societies occupied a large region that stretched southward to the states and empires of the central Andes – the Inka s and their numerous predecessors.

Societies within Mesoamerica tended to share a number of cultural features, perhaps most notably an intricate system of intermeshing sacred calendars. However, it is not useful to try to list a set of defining features that every society must have in order to be deemed truly “Mesoamerican.” It is better to say that while not all societies shared all the features, enough were shared to give Mesoamerican societies a recognizable “family resemblance.” In spite of these broad similarities, Mesoamerican societies were diverse in many ways. For example, there were hundreds of distinct languages, belonging to several families that are only remotely (if at all) related to one another. Within individual families, the diversity is comparable to that within the Indo-European family, which includes languages as different as English, Spanish, Russian, and Hindi. Regional styles of art and architecture were also markedly different.