Mesoamerica
Mesoamerica is the region extending from central Mexico south through 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 discovery of the New World by Columbus. Mesoamerican is the adjective generally used to refer to that group of Pre-Columbian cultures.
Some common shared Mesoamerican traits include intensive agriculture based heavily on maize (corn); worship of a set of deities including a rain god, a sun god, a feathered-serpent god (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 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 CE, and perhaps even going as far back as the beginning of the Current Era.
Mesoamerican civilizations included the Olmec, Zapotec, Teotihuacan, Maya, Mixtec, Huastec, 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 acception of the term has generally fallen out of favor, see Middle America.
Related topics
- Human antiquity in Mesoamerica
- Mesoamerican chronology, languages
- Zapotec calendar, calendar, numerals
- Aztec calendar, mythology
- Mesoamerican practices: agriculture, obsidian use, trephinning
- Mesoamerican iconography: jaguar
- Spanish conquest of: Yucatán, Michoacán,
