Quotes About Mesoamerican

Far more than the casual recreation we think of when it comes to games of skill in Mesoamerican cultures the ball game was a sacred ritual that reenacted the struggle between the forces of good and evil. It might also have been a way for groups to avoid warfare by solving conflicts through a match instead, one that occasionally ended with human sacrifice…

Maize in the milpa, the Yale archaeologist Michael D. Coe wrote, "is the key Ã¢â'¬Â¦ to the understanding of Mesoamerican civilization. Where it flourished, so did high culture.

One of the few things we do know for sure about Teotihuacan is that its name was not Teotihuacan. That name means "city of the gods," and it's what the Aztecs called the place centuries later when they stumbled across its deserted ruins—for like so many other great Mesoamerican urban centers, this city was flourishing and then it wasn't.

All of these parallels between Mesoamerican and ancient western Eurasian writing testify to the underlying universality of human creativity. While Sumerian and Mesoamerican languages bear no special relation to each other among the world's languages, both raised similar basic issues in reducing them to writing. The solutions that Sumerians invented before 3000 B.C. were reinvented, halfway around the world, by early Mesoamerican Indians before 600 B.C.

All of these parallels between Mesoamerican and ancient western Eurasian writing testify to the underlying universality of human creativity.