28 INTRODUCTION
Box A.4 recounts the contributions made by one of the key transitional figures
between the Romanticists and the Precursors, the French scholar and priest Brasseur
de Bourbourg.Box A.4 Brasseur de Bourbourg, a Scientific PrecursorBrasseur de Bourbourg served as parish priest in Guatemala for many years in the mid–nineteenth
century, during which time he also traveled extensively in Mexico. He obtained copies of
numerous native documents important for studying the aboriginal Mesoamerican cultures.
Brasseur was erudite, and he probably had access to more documentary and archaeological in-
formation on Mesoamerica than anyone else of his time. Unfortunately, many of his interpreta-
tions of history lacked objectivity and in some cases were downright speculative. For example,
in Brasseur’s (1857–1859) writings, petty Mesoamerican kingdoms were transformed into power-
ful empires, small towns into huge cities, minor priests into mighty prophets, and princely revolts
into bourgeois revolutions. Nevertheless, Brasseur’s general summary of events taking place in
Mexico and Central America before the conquest was profoundly secular in orientation, and pos-
sibly constituted the most exhaustive historical treatise on the subject ever attempted up to that
time. Unfortunately, during the last years of his life, Brasseur yielded to the lure of the Lost Con-
tinent of Atlantis tale in order to explain the origins of the Mesoamerican civilization. He died a
broken man, his new “theories” rejected by the emerging scientific community in Europe and the
United States.The final decades of the nineteenth century and beginning decades of the twen-
tieth century laid the groundwork for the development of a truly modern approach
to Mesoamerican studies. The number of scholars engaged in this study rapidly ex-
panded, and the methods of research became increasingly specialized. In particular,
formal excavations of archaeological sites helped create a Mesoamerican “archaeol-
ogy,” while expertise in documentary texts and written native languages helped give
rise to a Mesoamerican “ethnohistory.” Most studies of aboriginal Mesoamerica have
been carried forward in recent years by archaeologists and ethnohistorians, although
other specialists such as linguists, epigraphers, geographers, historians, and ethno-
graphers have also made major contributions. As already noted, many of these early
scientific scholars at first applied a culture history model in their studies of ancient
Mesoamerica.
Culture Historians
The approach to Mesoamerica taken by the Culture Historians represented an im-
portant advance over that of the Romanticists and Scientific Precursors, who tended
to explain the aboriginal cultures as transplants (diffusions) from somewhere else,
usually Asia, Europe, or a Lost Continent. Most Culture Historians, in contrast, ac-
cepted the indigenous source of the Mesoamerican cultures and concentrated on de-
termining the origins and changes of cultures within the Mesoamerican region.
Mesoamerica was viewed as a unified geographic area in which the diverse peoples
shared distinctive customs or cultural traits. These traits set them apart from the peo-
ples of other “culture areas.” Culture areas were thought to have common historical