The Legacy of Mesoamerica History and Culture of a Native American Civilization, 2nd Edition

INTRODUCTION 29

Figure A.12 Mesoamerican culture area and its main subareas. After Gordon R. Willey, et al.,
“The Patterns of Farming Life and Civilizations,” in The Handbook of Middle Americans,
Volume I: National Environment and Early Cultures,volume editor Robert C. West, general
editor Robert Wauchope. Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1964, p. 461.

traditions, the study of which would provide a way to explain the particular combi-
nation of traits that characterized each area.
The Mexican scholar Paul Kirchhoff (1943) provided the best-known application
of the culture historical approach to the pre-Spanish natives of Mesoamerica. Kirch-
hoff placed most of the peoples of Mexico and Central America within the
“Mesoamerican” culture area, and he defined the area by the languages spoken and
the presence of a long list of cultural traits. Essential or diagnostic traits of the
Mesoamerican culture area for Kirchhoff included the lake gardens (chinampas),
cacao, bark paper, obsidian-edged swords, stepped pyramids, writing, solar calen-
dars, ritualized human sacrifice, and long-distance trade. The native peoples in the
northern part of Mexico, on the one hand, and the southeastern part of Central
America, on the other, were said to have spoken different languages and to have ex-
hibited distinct cultural traits. Thus, they constituted separate culture areas from
Mesoamerica: namely, the “Southwest” culture area to the north, and the “Chibcha”
culture area to the south (Figure A.12).
Much of the research on Mesoamerica by the Culture Historians centered on the
so-called Olmec culture, initially reconstructed through excavations at the archaeo-
logical site of La Venta in Tabasco, Mexico. The Olmec culture provided the Cul-
ture Historians with a key to the origin of the Mesoamerican civilization. Olmec

Southwest Area

Chiohimeca

Frontier

Central

Veracruz

' Southern

Veracruz-Tabasco

Olmec

Heartland

Mava Lowlands

Oaxaca /

Maya Highlands C hi b chan Area

Southern

Periphery

Central Mexico

Guerrero-.

Western Mexico I

Huaxteca

Northern \

Frontier

o 600

im

N