This chapter reviews pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica from the dawn of early agricultural villages to the rise of the Aztec empire and its clash with the Spanish invaders. When Cortés and his conquistadores landed on the eastern coast of Mexico in 1519 A.D., they encountered a remarkably diverse landscape of cultures and environments, a world of enormous linguistic and ethnic differences. The prehispanic inhabitants spoke many languages, employed a wide range of farming and water-control strategies, and lived in towns and cities of diverse form and function. Yet the peoples of Mesoamerica shared a great deal, including a reliance on similar staple foods, widespread trade, and related religious systems. Their shared ceremonial realm included a calendar, stepped pyramids, ritual sacrifice of blood, writing systems, and specific style of dress. The dietary “trinity” of corn, beans, and squash provided a nutritious diet, despite the lack of domesticated animals.

In Mesoamerica we see the emergence of cities and states in many different regions. We begin with San José Mogote in the Valley of Oaxaca. This large village was the central community in the valley beginning with the transition to a sedentary way of life until the rise of Mesoamerica’s first urban civilization, centered at Monte Albán, over 1,000 years later in 500 BC. The rapid transformation from simple village society to the construction of impressive ceremonial centers occurred precociously on Mexico’s Gulf Coast, along with the development of an interregional style, the Olmec Horizon. San Lorenzo and La Venta are two lowland centers that belong to this early development. Considering its early date, El Mirador in the Petén lowlands of northern Guatemala is an unusually large and spectacular settlement.

Late in the Formative period, major urban centers were established in the highlands; hilltop Monte Albán in the Valley of Oaxaca and giant Teotihuacan in central Mexico illustrate this episode of development. Following the onset of the Classic period in AD 200–300, both cities grew significantly. Teotihuacan became one of the largest cities in the world at the time. Impressive centers, including Tikal and Palenque, also were built in the Maya lowlands during the Classic era, although none of the Maya centers equaled the size of Teotihuacan. Indigenous writing developed in several areas but was most intensively utilized by the Classic Maya, who used writing to record life histories and relationships. This cultural innovation was not seen north of Mexico prior to the arrival of Europeans.

Mesoamerican states were relatively long-lived but not entirely stable. Between AD 700 and 900, the Mesoamerican world underwent a sequence of upheavals and transitions that included the decline and depopulation of most extant centers. The succeeding Postclassic period was characterized by somewhat greater political fragmentation and fewer architecturally massive centers. Yet places like Tula, on Mesoamerica’s northern frontier, and Chichén Itzá, in the northern Yucatán, did rise to power for several centuries. The greatest exception to this Postclassic pattern was Tenochtitlán, which became the largest city in the history of pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica during the last decades before Spanish conquest. Although the Aztec rulers of Tenochtitlán established a tributary domain that stretched as far as Guatemala, the Aztec empire never encompassed the entire extent of Mesoamerica.

As part of this examination of pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica, specific blocks and site sections cover the Mesoamerican ballgame, the archaeological importance of nonresidential architecture, settlement pattern survey, Mesoamerican writing, raised and drained fields, the importance of markets, and an anthropological consideration of Aztec human sacrifice.