Mesoamerica
Terms
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- Maya
- A member of a Mesoamerican Indian people inhabiting southeast Mexico, Guatemala, and Belize, whose civilization reached its height around A.D. 300-900. The Maya are noted for their architecture and city planning, their mathematics and calendar, and their hieroglyphic writing system.
- Major Theme
- The Mesoamerica civilizations thrived because of their intelligence to use their geography for them.
- Aztec
- A member of a people of central Mexico whose civilization was at its height at the time of the Spanish conquest in the early 16th century.
- Olmecs
- An early Mesoamerican Indian civilization centered in the Veracruz region of southeast Mexico that flourished between 1300 and 400 B.C., whose cultural influence was widespread throughout southern Mexico and Central America.
- Valley of Mexico
- is a highlands plateau in central Mexico roughly coterminous with the present-day Distrito Federal and the eastern half of the State of Mexico. Surrounded by mountains and volcanoes, the Valley of Mexico was a center for several pre-Columbian civilizations, including Teotihuacan, the Toltec, and the Aztec.
- Sapa Inca
- The ruler of the Inca Empire used this title, which means, "The Only One Divinity."
- Quechua
- the language of the Incan civilizations.
- Chavín
- An early pre-Incan civilization that flourished in northern and central Peru from about 900 to 200 B.C., known for its carved stone sculptures and boldly designed ceramics.
- Stela
- An upright stone or slab with an inscribed or sculptured surface, used as a monument or as a commemorative tablet in the face of a building.
- Cuzco
- A city of southern Peru in the Andes east-southeast of Lima. Founded according to legend by Manco Capac around the 12th century, it became the center of the vast Inca Empire.
- Chinampas
- method of ancient Mesoamerican agriculture which used small, rectangle-shaped areas of fertile arable land to grow crops on the shallow lake beds in the Valley of Mexico; often referred to as "floating gardens."
- Pachacuti Inca Yupanqui
- literally "world transformer." Was the ninth emperor of the Incas and expanded the Incan Empire to nearly all of South America.
- Inca
- a member of any of the dominant groups of South American Indian peoples who established an empire in Peru prior to the Spanish conquest.
- Tenochtitlán
- An ancient Aztec capital on the site of present-day Mexico City. Founded c. 1325, it was destroyed by the Spanish in 1521
- Teotihuacán
- the ruins of an ancient Mesoamerican city in central Mexico, near Mexico City, that flourished a.d. c200-c750 and is the site of the pyramids of the Sun and Moon and of many temples, palaces, and dwellings.
- Nazca
- of or pertaining to a pre-Incan culture of SW Peru, dating from 200 b.c., characterized by polychrome pottery and the employment of irrigation techniques in agriculture.
- Moche
- of, pertaining to, or characteristic of a pre-Inca culture that flourished on the northern coast of Peru from the 3rd century b.c. to the 7th century a.d. and is especially noted for fine pottery vessels with stirrup spouts, some bearing drawings of all aspects of cultural life.
- Nahuatl
- is a group of related languages and dialects of the Aztecan branch of the Uto-Aztecan language family.
- Ayllu
- the basic political unit of pre-Inca and Inca life. These were essentially extended family groups but they could adopt non-related members, giving individual families more variation and security of the land that they farmed. They would often have their own huaca, or minor god, usually embodied in a physical object such as a mountain or rock.