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Mesoamerican Sites
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Sites significant across Mesoamerican religious traditions more broadly, grouping cultures such as the Aztec, Olmec and Zapotec alongside the Maya where a site's specific tradition is shared or not sharply distinguished in the sources. Sacred sites are grouped by tradition at a fine grain here, so a heading can be narrow without that saying anything about the tradition's own reach.
Facts
Overview
What Defines This GroupingSites of the wider Mesoamerican world - the culture area whose societies shared a family of religious ideas expressed in pyramid-temples, ballcourts, a 260-day ritual count and a calendar round - held here where a site cannot be assigned to one of the named traditions the atlas records separately. 2 Peoples and Traditions CoveredUnrelated peoples over three thousand years - Olmec, Zapotec, the builders of Teotihuacan, Maya, Mixtec, Toltec and Mexica among them - speaking languages from several unrelated families, and never one polity, one pantheon or one religion. 2 Origins
Whose Classification This Is"Mesoamerica" is a scholar's category. It was coined by Paul Kirchhoff in 1943 to name the area whose peoples shared a defined list of cultural traits at the time of the Spanish conquest. It is not a name any of those peoples used of themselves, and its boundaries have been argued over ever since. 2 Learn More
Sacred sites of Mesoamerica
This small group gathers a sacred site of the wider Mesoamerican world, the region of central and southern Mexico and Central America whose civilisations shared a family of religious ideas expressed in pyramid-temples and ritual precincts.
The browser will find the site the atlas classes here. The entry describes its religious significance and history within the Mesoamerican tradition.
Sources
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