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UNESCO World Heritage Status

This page groups sacred sites by whether UNESCO has formally recognized them. Wikipedia notes elsewhere that cultural traditions can be "recognized by UNESCO as Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity," the same kind of international listing that applies to World Heritage sites. Browsing by UNESCO status lets a visitor see which sacred sites carry that international recognition and which do not.

Facts

Overview

What Defines This Grouping

Sites of the wider Mesoamerican world - the culture area whose societies shared a family of religious ideas expressed in pyramid-temples, ballcourts, a 260-day ritual count and a calendar round - held here where a site cannot be assigned to one of the named traditions the atlas records separately. 2

Peoples and Traditions Covered

Unrelated peoples over three thousand years - Olmec, Zapotec, the builders of Teotihuacan, Maya, Mixtec, Toltec and Mexica among them - speaking languages from several unrelated families, and never one polity, one pantheon or one religion. 2

Origins

Whose Classification This Is

"Mesoamerica" is a scholar's category. It was coined by Paul Kirchhoff in 1943 to name the area whose peoples shared a defined list of cultural traits at the time of the Spanish conquest. It is not a name any of those peoples used of themselves, and its boundaries have been argued over ever since. 2