CHAPTER 3 THE MESOAMERICAN WORLD AT SPANISH CONTACT 141itary units may have numbered a few thousand warriors. Political rulers in the area
were carried about on litters and enjoyed high (noble) status.
In general, the peripheral peoples in the northern part of the zone supplied the
Mesoamerican world with similar products to those yielded by their neighbors in the
southern part. In return they received manufactured goods, and in the process they
assimilated Mesoamerican cultural features. Their craft goods, rendered in the late
Mesoamerican international art style, and complex religious ideas about deities and
human sacrifice were typically Mesoamerican (Figure 3.3). It is noteworthy, however,
that the northern peoples failed to produce stone architecture or to sculpt monu-
ments.
Scholars once thought that the line between Northwest Mesoamerica and the
non-Mesoamerican frontier was located along the Rio Fuerte in Sinaloa. Recent his-
torical and archaeological evidence indicates, however, that the Mesoamerican pe-
riphery extended into the main river valleys of present-day Sonora. The
Opata-speaking inhabitants of Sonora were organized as transitional chiefdoms and
city-states similar to the other polities of the northern periphery. They must have
Figure 3.3 Figure
painted on a pottery
vessel from Sinaloa,
Mexico, in typical
Mesoamerican style.
After Charles J. Kelley,
“The Mobile Merchants
of Molino,” in Ripples in
the Chichimec Sea,eds.
Frances Joan Mathien
and Randall McGuire.
Carbondale, IL: Illinois
University Press, 1986,
p. 87.