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Mesoamerica and its cultural areas. Mesoamerica is a historical region and cultural area that begins in the southern part of North America and extends to the Pacific coast of Central America, thus comprising the lands of central and southern Mexico, all of Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, and parts of Honduras, Nicaragua and Costa Rica.
Mesoamerican and Central America in the 16th century before the arrival of the Spanish. Of all prehispanic Mesoamerican cultures, the best-known is the Mexica of the city-state of Tenochtitlan, also known as the Aztecs. The Aztec Empire dominated central Mexico for close to a century before the Spanish conquest of the Aztec empire (1519–1521).
Human sacrifice was a religious practice principally characteristic of pre-Columbian Aztec civilization, although other Mesoamerican civilizations like the Maya and the Zapotec practiced it as well. The extent of the practice is debated by modern scholars.
The Olmecs were the first Mesoamerican culture to produce an identifiable artistic and cultural style and may also have been the society that invented writing in Mesoamerica. By the Middle Preclassic Period (900–300 BCE), Olmec artistic styles had been adopted as far away as the Valley of Mexico and Costa Rica.
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 more than three thousand years.
Map of Pre-Columbian states of Mexico just before the Spanish conquest. The pre-Columbian (or prehispanic) history of the territory now making up the country of Mexico is known through the work of archaeologists and epigraphers, and through the accounts of Spanish conquistadores, settlers and clergymen as well as the indigenous chroniclers of the immediate post-conquest period.
Mesoamerica is considered one of the six sites around the globe in which civilization developed independently and indigenously. This civilization is considered the mother culture of the Mesoamerican civilizations. The Mesoamerican calendar, numeral system, writing, and much of the Mesoamerican pantheon seem to have begun with the Olmec.
The Zapotec civilization (Be'ena'a "The People"; c. 700 BC–1521 AD) is an indigenous pre-Columbian civilization that flourished in the Valley of Oaxaca in Mesoamerica. ...