Early Mesoamerica: The Olmec and the Classic Maya

Core Idea

Mesoamerica, the region from central Mexico to northern Costa Rica, developed complex societies independently of Afro-Eurasia, based on maize farming. The Olmec of Mexico's Gulf Coast (c. 1200–400 BCE) built ceremonial centers and carved colossal stone heads, and many later Mesoamerican traditions appear in their art. The Classic Maya (c. 250–900 CE) of the Yucatán Peninsula and Guatemala built city-states ruled by divine kings, with monumental temples, a full writing system and precise calendars. In the 800s many southern Maya cities were abandoned, but Maya society continued in the north and Maya peoples live in the region today.

How It's Best Learned

Use a map to place Olmec, Maya and Teotihuacan sites, then compare them with river-valley civilizations already studied. Look at a translated Maya stela inscription to see that Maya texts record kings, wars and dates. Treat the Classic Maya collapse as a historical problem: list the proposed causes and the evidence for each.

Common Misconceptions

• The Maya mysteriously disappeared. (Many southern lowland cities were abandoned in the 800s, but northern cities such as Chichen Itza flourished afterward, and several million people speak Mayan languages today.)
• The Maya calendar predicted the end of the world in 2012. (The date marked the end of a large cycle in the Long Count calendar, and Maya inscriptions refer to dates far beyond it.)
• The Maya formed a single empire ruled from one capital. (The Maya lived in many rival city-states, such as Tikal and Calakmul, that fought, allied and traded with one another.)

Explainer

When you studied early civilizations in Mesopotamia, Egypt, India and China, you saw farming, cities, rulers, writing and monumental building. Mesoamerica developed all of these on its own, with no contact with those regions. That makes it a valuable test case for the idea that complex societies share common features.

The base was maize, domesticated in Mexico thousands of years earlier and grown with beans and squash. Along the hot, wet Gulf Coast of Mexico, the Olmec built ceremonial centers at San Lorenzo and later La Venta between about 1200 and 400 BCE. They carved huge stone heads, probably portraits of rulers, from basalt brought from far away. Olmec art includes jaguar imagery and other symbols that appear in later Mesoamerican cultures. For this reason some scholars call the Olmec a "mother culture," while others prefer to see several regional cultures growing up together.

The Maya lived to the east, in the Yucatán Peninsula, Guatemala and Belize. Their Classic period ran from about 250 to 900 CE. Cities such as Tikal, Calakmul, Copán and Palenque had stone pyramids, palaces and ballcourts. Each was ruled by a king who claimed a sacred link to the gods and performed rituals, including bloodletting, on the city's behalf. The Maya wrote in a script that combined word signs and syllable signs. Scholars deciphered much of it in the second half of the twentieth century, which revealed that carved stelae record royal births, accessions, wars and alliances. The Maya also tracked time with several calendars, including the Long Count, and used a symbol for zero in their counting.

In the 800s, one southern city after another stopped raising monuments, and populations fell. Evidence from lake sediments points to severe droughts. Inscriptions and fortifications show frequent warfare. Many researchers think drought, war, crowding and damage to forests and soils combined, and that people lost faith in kings who could not protect them. Northern cities such as Chichen Itza grew in the following centuries. Later, central Mexico would produce the Mexica (Aztec) Empire, which drew on this long Mesoamerican tradition.