ABSTRACT
As Olmec power declined, around 700 bce, populations were surging throughout the Americas. Mesoamerica (Mexico and Central America) saw the greatest increases, based on productive agriculture and trade between its very varied regions, from mountains and plateaus to tropical river lowlands and shoreline swamps. Cities with cores of plazas, temples, and palaces surrounded by commoners’ homesteads and fields burgeoned in many regions. Market economies supported craftspeople, and taxes in the form of tribute goods supported aristocracies, priests, and bureaucrats. Kingdoms were created, commissioning great art and architecture, much of it preserved, and music, dance, theater, poetry, science, and histories, little preserved except as carried on in folk traditions, because Spanish invaders burned books and banned performances. We depend on ethnographies recorded after the Spanish conquests by missionary priests and on legal cases where native noble families pressed claims for their estates or communities argued for their customs. Archaeologists and ethnohistorians attempt to trace sixteenthcentury cultures back through the material remains of their forebears to interpret these residues of earlier societies.
