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Mesoamerican)
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 in the Americas for three thousand years.
Characteristics
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 atop step-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, despite being made up of many different language families. Mesoamerica's economy and geopolitics benefited from extensive use of a lingua franca, the Nahuatl language, since at least the 7th century, and perhaps going back as far as 2,000 years.
Mesoamerica is one of our planet’s six cradles of early civilizations. Many traits 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, in both past and present. Mesoamerican metacivilizations included the Olmec, Zapotec, Teotihuacan, Maya, Mixtec, Huastec (also located on Aridoamerica), Pipil, Totonac, Toltec, Tarascan, and the Aztec.
In some writings from the 1920s and 1930s the alternative term Middle America was used to refer to Mesoamerica, but that term has since generally fallen out of favor.
See also
Bibliography
