Mesoamerica
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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.
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, mythology
- Maya calendar, numerals
- Aztec calendar, mythology
- Mesoamerican practices: agriculture, obsidian use, trephinning
- Mesoamerican iconography: jaguar
- Spanish conquest of: [[Spanish conquest of YucatᮼYucatᮝ], [[Spanish conquest of MichoacᮼMichoacᮝ], Guatemala