MESOAMERICA BEFORE MESOAMERICA: THE LATE ARCHAIC PERIOD (4000-2000 BC)

The outer boundaries of the culture area “Mesoamerica” correspond well with the outer limits of maize farming as it eventually became established in adjacent regions of a contiguous area. This culture area would eventually extended over a thousand miles from northwest to southesat, through the midsection of the Middle American subcontinent. It began to take substantial shape around 4,000 years ago after several millennia of gestation. Maize domestication, a seminal development, had occurred over 2,000 years before, and it had been one of many innovations that collectively tipped the scales of societal development toward village life, as more and more people gave up traditional, mobile hunger-forager lifeways and settled down.

Besides plant domestication, other successful Late Archaic innovations contributed to the establishment of village farming: durable buildings, intensive techniques of cultivation and resource exploitation, and whole new industries such as production of ceramics and of prismatic blades. These new traits represented energy invested in land and belongings, which are hallmarks of sedentism.

INITIAL FORMATIVE (PRECLASSIC) PERIOD (2000-1200 BCE): EARLY MESOAMERICA

Widespread evidence for sedentism marked the start of the Formative period 1000 BC-250 AD , and during the Initial Formative period, village farming provided a basis for the preconditions and prototypes of Mesoamerican civilization (Clark 2010). Surpluses produced within villages began to underwrite sophisticated features like ballcourts and elite architecture. Villagers held new spirits in reference and expressed their beliefs as symbols in graphic and plastic forms.