ABSTRACT
With these words the nineteenth-century explorer John L. Stephens described his initial reaction to the ruined Mayan city of Copán. Stephens and his fellow traveler, artist Frederick Catherwood, were the first explorers to describe the lost cities of the Mayas to American and European audiences. These spectacular ruins, which had lain abandoned in the jungle for almost a millennium, excited the public’s imagination (Figure 1.1), and a number of far-fetched theories arose attributing the construction of the cities to the ancient Greeks, Egyptians, Lost Tribes of Israel, and even refugees from the mythical continent of Atlantis (see the discussion of some of these “theories” in the Introduction). Against these popular notions, Stephens had the correct explanation from the start:
These ancestral Mayan peoples and their contemporaries throughout Mesoamerica not only built the ancient cities discovered by Stephens and Catherwood, but they also forged a distinctive civilization whose legacy survives throughout Mesoamer-
ica today. The antecedents of Mesoamerican culture can be traced back to the Pleistocene Ice Age over 10,000 years ago, when the first hunters and gatherers arrived in Central America. Sometime between 5000 and 3000 B.C., during the Archaic period, the descendants of the earliest inhabitants brought about what was probably the single most important innovation in Mesoamerican history, the domestication of maize or corn. The initial impact of maize cultivation was minimal, but after several thousand years, the crop had improved and people depended on the triad of maize, beans, and squash to fulfill most of their subsistence needs. The process of plant domestication was slow and uneven across Mesoamerica, and in most regions sedentary villages emerged before full agricultural dependence.
