Mesoamerica

Mesoamerica is not a country group or a modern political project. It is an archaeologist's region, drawn by Paul Kirchhoff in 1943 around a bundle of shared traits rather than any coastline. Its peoples built pyramids, played a ritual ball game, kept a 260-day sacred calendar alongside a 365-day solar one, wrote in hieroglyphs, and lived on maize, beans, squash, and chocolate. The boundaries follow those traits, running from roughly the Panuco River in central Mexico south and east through Guatemala, Belize, El Salvador, and into western Honduras, with a frayed southern edge in Nicaragua and Costa Rica that specialists still argue about. Beyond them lived peoples who shared almost none of it.

The terrain is violently varied for so small a space. A volcanic chain runs its whole length; Popocatepetl still smokes above Mexico City, and the Sierra Madre ranges wall off highland basins where the air is thin and cool. Eastward the land collapses into the flat limestone shelf of the Yucatan, which has no surface rivers at all: rain sinks straight through the rock into cenotes and underground channels, and the Maya built their cities around them. Southward the Guatemalan highlands climb to Volcan Tajumulco at 4,220 meters, the region's high point, then fall away into tropical lowland rainforest. Offshore lies the second-longest barrier reef on the planet, running down the Caribbean coast.

The Olmec came first, along the Gulf coast around 1500 BCE, carving colossal basalt heads. Teotihuacan, whose builders' language is still unknown, grew past 100,000 people by 500 CE and laid out an avenue of pyramids that later peoples treated as sacred ruins. The Maya of the lowlands developed the only fully written script in the pre-Columbian Americas and tracked Venus with unnerving precision. The Aztecs, latecomers, raised Tenochtitlan on an island in a lake and ruled millions until Cortes landed in 1519. Smallpox and conquest destroyed the political order but not the people: several million still speak Nahuatl, Yucatec Maya, Zapotec, Mixtec, and dozens of other Mesoamerican languages, and the maize the region domesticated now feeds much of the world.