|
Zapotec Writing
The Zapotec script is the writing system of the Zapotec culture and represents one of the earliest writing systems in Mesoamerica. Rising in the late Pre-Classic era after the decline of the Olmec civilization, the Zapotecs of present-day Oaxaca built an empire around Monte Albán. One characteristic of Monte Albán is the large number of carved stone monuments one encounters throughout the plaza. There and at other sites, archaeologists have found extended text in a glyphic script. Some signs can be recognized as calendar information but the script as such remains undeciphered (if not undecipherable). Read in columns from top to bottom, its execution is somewhat cruder than that of the later Maya script and this has led epigraphers to believe that the script was also less phonetic than the largely syllabic Maya. According to Urcid (2005), the script was originally a logo-syllabic system and was probably developed for an ancient version of contemporary Zapotecan languages, b ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Monte Albán
Monte Albán is a large pre-Columbian archaeological site in the Santa Cruz Xoxocotlán Municipality in the southern Mexico, Mexican state of Oaxaca (17.043° N, 96.767°W). The site is located on a low mountainous range rising above the plain in the central section of the Valley of Oaxaca, where the latter's northern Etla, eastern Tlacolula, and southern Zimatlán and Ocotlán (Oaxaca), Ocotlán (or Valle Grande (Oaxaca), Valle Grande) branches meet. The present-day state capital Oaxaca City is located approximately east of Monte Albán. The partially excavated civic ceremonial center of the Monte Albán site is situated atop an artificially leveled ridge. It has an elevation of about above mean sea level and rises some from the valley floor, in an easily defensible location. In addition to the monumental core, the site is characterized by several hundred artificial terraces, and a dozen clusters of mounded architecture covering the entire ridgeline and surrounding flanks. Th ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
La Venta
La Venta is a pre-Columbian archaeological site of the Olmec civilization located in the present-day Mexican state of Tabasco. Some of the artifacts have been moved to the museum "Parque - Museo de La Venta", which is in nearby Villahermosa, the capital of Tabasco. Overview The Olmec were one of the first civilizations to develop in the Americas. Chronologically, the history of the Olmecs can be divided into the Early Formative (1800-900 BCE), Middle Formative (900-400 BCE) and Late Formative (400 BCE-200AD). The Olmecs are known as the "mother culture" of Mesoamerica, meaning that the Olmec civilization was the first culture that spread and influenced Mesoamerica. The spread of Olmec culture eventually led to cultural features found throughout all Mesoamerican societies. Rising from the sedentary agriculturalists of the Gulf Lowlands as early as 1600 BCE in the Early Formative period, the Olmecs held sway in the Olmec heartland, an area on the southern Gulf of Mexico ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Chiapas
Chiapas, officially the Free and Sovereign State of Chiapas, is one of the states that make up the Political divisions of Mexico, 32 federal entities of Mexico. It comprises Municipalities of Chiapas, 124 municipalities and its capital and largest city is Tuxtla Gutiérrez. Other important population centers in Chiapas include Ocosingo, Tapachula, San Cristóbal de las Casas, Comitán, and Arriaga, Chiapas, Arriaga. Chiapas is the southernmost state in Mexico, and it borders the states of Oaxaca to the west, Veracruz to the northwest, and Tabasco to the north, and the Petén Department, Petén, Quiché Department, Quiché, Huehuetenango Department, Huehuetenango, and San Marcos Department, San Marcos departments of Guatemala to the east and southeast. Chiapas has a significant coastline on the Pacific Ocean to the southwest. In general, Chiapas has a humid, tropical climate. In the northern area bordering Tabasco, near Teapa Municipality, Teapa, rainfall can average more than pe ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Isthmus Of Tehuantepec
The Isthmus of Tehuantepec () is an isthmus in Mexico. It represents the shortest distance between the Gulf of Mexico and the Pacific Ocean. Before the opening of the Panama Canal, it was a major overland transport route known simply as the Tehuantepec Route. The name is taken from the town of Santo Domingo Tehuantepec in the state of Oaxaca; this was derived from the Nahuatl term (" jaguar mountain"). Geography The isthmus includes the part of Mexico lying between the 94th and 96th meridians west longitude, or the southeastern parts of Veracruz and Oaxaca, including small areas of Chiapas and Tabasco. The states of Tabasco and Chiapas are east of the isthmus, with Veracruz and Oaxaca on the west. At its narrowest point, the isthmus is across from gulf to gulf, or to the head of Laguna Superior on the Pacific coast. The Sierra Madre del Sur mountain range breaks down at this point into a broad, plateau-like ridge, whose elevation, at the highest point reached by the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Teotihuacan
Teotihuacan (; Spanish language, Spanish: ''Teotihuacán'', ; ) is an ancient Mesoamerican city located in a sub-valley of the Valley of Mexico, which is located in the State of Mexico, northeast of modern-day Mexico City. Teotihuacan is known today as the site of many of the most architecturally significant Mesoamerican pyramids built in the pre-Columbian Americas, namely the Pyramid of the Sun and the Pyramid of the Moon. Although close to Mexico City, Teotihuacan was not a Mexica (i.e. Aztec) city, and it predates the Aztec Empire by many centuries. At its zenith, perhaps in the first half of the first millennium (1 CE to 500 CE), Teotihuacan was the largest city in the Americas, with a population of at least 25,000, but has been estimated at 125,000 or more, making it at least the sixth-largest city in the world during its epoch. The city covered and 80 to 90 percent of the total population of the valley resided in Teotihuacan. Apart from the pyramids, Teotihu ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Guerrero
Guerrero, officially the Free and Sovereign State of Guerrero, is one of the 32 states that compose the administrative divisions of Mexico, 32 Federal Entities of Mexico. It is divided into Municipalities of Guerrero, 85 municipalities. The state has a population of about 3.5 million people. It is located in southwest Mexico and is bordered by the states of Michoacán to the north and west, the State of Mexico and Morelos to the north, Puebla to the northeast and Oaxaca to the east. In addition to the capital city, Chilpancingo and the largest city Acapulco, other cities in Guerrero include Petatlán, Ciudad Altamirano, Guerrero, Ciudad Altamirano, Taxco, Iguala, Ixtapa, and Zihuatanejo. Today, it is home to a number of indigenous communities, including the Nahuas, Mixtecs, Tlapanec people, Tlapanecs, Amuzgos, and formerly Cuitlatec people, Cuitlatecs. It is also home to communities of Afro-Mexicans in the Costa Chica of Guerrero, Costa Chica region. The state was named after Vic ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Alfonso Caso
Alfonso Caso y Andrade (1 February 1896 – 30 November 1970) was an archaeologist who made important contributions to pre-Columbian studies in his native Mexico. As a university student, he was part of a group of young intellectuals known as '' Los Siete Sabios de México'' ("The Seven Sages of Mexico") who founded Mexico City's "Society for Conferences and Concerts", which promoted cultural activity among the student population. One of the other Sages was Vicente Lombardo Toledano, who became Caso's brother-in-law after he married Lombardo's sister, writer María Lombardo: the couple had four children. After her death in 1966, he married her sister Aida. Caso completed a law degree in 1919 and immediately started teaching at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. The systematic legal training he received would mark his archaeological and administrative work throughout his life. While a young lawyer, Caso visited the then-remote hilltop ceremonial center of Xochicalco in ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Monument 3, San Jose Mogote
A monument is a type of structure that was explicitly created to commemorate a person or event, or which has become relevant to a social group as a part of their remembrance of historic times or cultural heritage, due to its artistic, historical, political, technical or architectural importance. Examples of monuments include statues, (war) memorials, historical buildings, archaeological sites, and cultural assets. If there is a public interest in its preservation, a monument can for example be listed as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The '' Palgrave Encyclopedia of Cultural Heritage and Conflict'' gives the next definition of monument:Monuments result from social practices of construction or conservation of material artifacts through which the ideology of their promoters is manifested. The concept of the modern monument emerged with the development of capital and the nation-state in the fifteenth century when the ruling classes began to build and conserve what were termed monument ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Numeral System
A numeral system is a writing system for expressing numbers; that is, a mathematical notation for representing numbers of a given set, using digits or other symbols in a consistent manner. The same sequence of symbols may represent different numbers in different numeral systems. For example, "11" represents the number ''eleven'' in the decimal or base-10 numeral system (today, the most common system globally), the number ''three'' in the binary or base-2 numeral system (used in modern computers), and the number ''two'' in the unary numeral system (used in tallying scores). The number the numeral represents is called its ''value''. Additionally, not all number systems can represent the same set of numbers; for example, Roman, Greek, and Egyptian numerals don't have a representation of the number zero. Ideally, a numeral system will: *Represent a useful set of numbers (e.g. all integers, or rational numbers) *Give every number represented a unique representation (or a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mesoamerican Calendars
The calendar, calendrical systems devised and used by the pre-Columbian cultures of Mesoamerica, primarily a 260-day year, were used in religious observances and social rituals, such as divination. These calendars have been dated to early as ca. 1100 BCE. By 500 BCE at the latest, the essentials were fully defined and functional. 260-day calendars are still used in the Guatemalan highlands, Veracruz, Oaxaca and Chiapas, Mexico. The importance of aboriginal calendars in ritual and other aspects of Mesoamerican life was noted by many missionary priests, travelers, and colonial administrators, and later by ethnographers who described and recorded the cultures of contemporary Mesoamerican ethnic groups. Types of calendars Among the various calendar systems in use, two were particularly central and widespread across Mesoamerica. Common to all recorded Mesoamerican cultures, and the most important, was the 260-day calendar, a ritual calendar with no confirmed correlation to astronomic ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
