Stephens and Catherwood Prove the Ruins Are Native and a Field Begins

Mesoamerican archaeology excavates and interprets the material culture of ancient Mexico and Central America, establishing what religious practices are archaeologically attested at a given site and how confidently they can be dated. The American traveler John Lloyd Stephens and the English artist Frederick Catherwood set out for Central America in 1839, visiting Copan, Palenque and dozens of other ruined cities, and their account, published as Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan, demonstrated for the first time to a wide readership that the ruins had been built by the ancestors of the living Maya rather than by some vanished outside civilization, a conclusion most contemporaries had assumed was impossible.

Stephens and Catherwood's founding recognition, that the archaeological record belonged to a documented, continuous indigenous tradition rather than a lost foreign one, is what makes Mesoamerican archaeology able to connect an excavated temple, stela or offering directly to Aztec, Maya and other Mesoamerican religious practice rather than treating the ruins as an unexplained curiosity. The atlas relies on the discipline wherever a claim about ancient Mesoamerican ritual or cosmology needs grounding in what a specific excavated site actually contains.