The prehistoric period

More than 10,000 years ago, the Middle American Indians were hunters who roamed the country in bands of four to ten persons. Their quarry were mammoths, llamas, bison, and wild horses, as can be seen from the remains found at Tequixquiac, north of the central valley of Mexico. Some also hunted small game and gathered the seeds of wild plants. The seed gatherers and the big-game hunters coexisted for thousands of years, until a climatic shift around 7500 bc favoured the seed gatherers.

About 4500 bc, cultivated squash and gourds became part of the subsistence of the Indians, and they adopted a seasonal nomadic pattern. Around 3500 bc the basic crops were domesticated: maize, beans, and squash have been found in remains at Tehuacán. The Neolithic Period was beginning. By 2500 bc farming supplied about 10 percent of the food intake of the people, and by 2000 bc the first permanent settlements based on farming had been established, apparently villages of fewer than 100 persons. After 2000 bc farming became of major importance, and in the main areas the people were fully sedentary. They now produced forms of pottery.

From 1500 bc to the beginning of the Christian Era (often called the Formative period), the basic techniques of intensive agriculture were worked out, the full range of cultivated plants was developed, the pottery and art styles were formed, and the transition from small villages to ceremonial towns of 5,000 inhabitants was completed. The archaeological evidence of this may be seen in the central valley of Mexico at El Arbolillo, Zacatenco, Tlatilco, and, finally, Ticoman. The same developmental sequence occurred in the Formative period of highland Guatemala, as shown in the excavations at Kaminaljuyú near Guatemala City.

From the beginning of the Christian Era to about ad 1000 the cultures of Middle America passed through their Classic, or Florescent, period. In the Pyramids at Teotihuacán and at Cholula, in the Oaxaca valley at Monte Albán, in the ruins at Tikal and Uaxactún in Petén, and at Copán and Piedras Negras, there is monumental testimony to the rise of theocratic civilizations. The differentiation between the earthbound peasants and the class of priests is marked by the spread of the hieratic art called by archaeologists the Olmec style, the greatest example being at La Venta in Tabasco, Mexico. Olmec art made much use of carved jade and the symbol of the jaguar. In the symbolic vocabulary of Middle America, the jaguar is associated with Tlaloc, the god of rain and fertility, and therefore represents the forces of nature that make the crops grow. Tlaloc also dwells in caves from which lightning is thought to come; caves mean towns and settlements, so the jaguar probably represents the control of society as well as of nature. Jaguars are carved on axes, pots, and human likenesses; men wear jaguar skins; and human faces are depicted with jaguar-like mouths.

This symbolism fitted well the new theocratic societies of the Maya—the Nahuatl, the Zapotec, and the Mixtec. Large raised pyramids were built for the public enactment of religious rites by the ruling priestly class. These structures were ceremonial centres where priests and specialists lived, and where the populace assembled for periodic rituals. The priests were important in the agricultural cycle, for which the ancient calendars were first devised. These calendars evolved into precise instruments for the measurement of time and came to express the philosophical ideas of the priestly intellectuals. The full poetry of Middle American calendrics is expressed in the Maya calendar “long counts,” for which stone pillars were erected.

The ceremonial centres of the Classic period produced many luxury items made from imported goods such as seashells, feathers, obsidian, fine flint, jade, cotton, and cocoa beans. The centres paid for these imports by exporting finished ceremonial objects to the peripheries. The economy of the city-states of this period depended on the intensive cultivation of maize and on huge drafts of peasant labour for the building of the temple complexes. The building was done with a rather simple technology for beasts of burden, a functional wheel, and metal tools were lacking. The major achievements of the Classic period were its calendrics and its religious thought, which represented the efforts of the priestly class to systematize the universe and make it predictable.

Around the end of the Classic period a warrior group came into power. With the coming of the warriors a period of militarism began. War gods replaced the rain gods, and the jaguar symbolism gave way to the eagle complex in iconography. Human sacrifice, an occasional thing in the Classic period, became a mass phenomenon under the warlords of the Toltec and Aztec empires. The Toltecs, and later the Aztecs, were expansionist. When the Spaniards arrived, the Aztec Empire extended over most of Middle America, from the central valley to Yucatán, with garrisons, frontier fortifications, and foreign colonies. With the fall of the Aztec capital in 1519, the Guatemala conquest of 1524, and the long-drawn-out battles with the Indians of the northwest region, the Spaniards ended the isolation of Middle America.