Mesoamerican Peoples

What makes Mesoamerica a single field of study is a set of institutions shared across languages and centuries. David Carrasco's survey sets out the principal ones. A 260 day divinatory count and a 365 day solar year run together and mesh into a calendar round of fifty two years, after which the combination repeats; the closing of that cycle was marked in central Mexico by extinguishing every fire and kindling a new one.

The ballgame is played on masonry courts from the Gulf coast to Honduras across two thousand years, and it is not only sport. Courts sit within ceremonial precincts, the game is associated with the passage of the sun and with the underworld, and in the Popol Vuh the Hero Twins are summoned to Xibalba because their play disturbs its lords.

Bloodletting and sacrifice belong to the same economy. The gods are understood to have given their own substance to set the world moving, and human offerings, from the piercing of tongue and ear to the killing of captives, are repayment on a running debt rather than appeasement of anger. The atlas records both the practice and the vocabulary in which it was justified, and notes that the scale reported by Spanish witnesses remains a matter of continuing scholarly argument.

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.