Mesoamerica names a culture area running from central Mexico into western Honduras and El Salvador, whose sequence begins with the Olmec of the Gulf coast in the second millennium BCE and continues through Teotihuacan, the Maya cities, Monte Alban, Tula and Tenochtitlan to the Spanish conquest. What defines the boundary is not politics but practice: maize agriculture, the two calendars, screenfold books, ballcourts and a shared repertoire of images.
Writing developed here independently of the Old World. Maya script is fully phonetic and has been substantially deciphered since the 1970s, while the central Mexican systems are more pictographic and were still being produced under Spanish rule. Of the books made before the conquest almost nothing survives. Burning by missionaries, above all the ceremony conducted by Diego de Landa at Mani in 1562, destroyed the great majority, and four Maya codices and a small group of central Mexican ones remain.
What survives instead was written after the conquest, often at Spanish direction, in indigenous languages and in Latin script: the encyclopedia compiled by Bernardino de Sahagun with Nahua scholars, the Popol Vuh, the books of Chilam Balam. Every one of them is a source and a problem at once, and the atlas treats them as testimony given under a specific pressure.