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The literature and texts created by indigenous Mesoamericans are the earliest-known from the Americas for primarily two reasons: Firstly the fact that the native populations of Mesoamerica were the first to enter into intensive contact with Europeans, assuring that many samples of Mesoamerican literature have been documented in surviving and ...
An extensive Mesoamerican literature has been conserved, partly in indigenous scripts and partly in postconquest transcriptions in the Latin script. After the Spanish conquest of the Aztec Empire in 1521, Spanish colonial authorities and Catholic Church missionaries aimed to purge indigenous culture, religion and traditional institutions, which ...
One activity that was popular widely among Mesoamerican cultures is the ball game, similar to football, or soccer in the United States. Some societies played the game using their hips instead of feet, called Ullamalitzli. Evidence of the ball game has been found in nearly every Mesoamerican society, including the Olmec, Tlaloc, Aztec and more.
The symbols on the Cascajal block are unlike those of any other writing system in Mesoamerica, such as in Mayan languages or Isthmian, another extinct Mesoamerican script. The Cascajal block is also unusual because the symbols apparently run in horizontal rows and "there is no strong evidence of overall organization.
Mixtec writing is classified as logographic, meaning the characters and pictures used represent complete words and ideas instead of syllables or sounds.In Mixtec the relationships among pictorial elements denote the meaning of the text, whereas in other Mesoamerican writing the pictorial representations are not incorporated into the text. [2]
During the 19th century, the word 'codex' became popular to designate any pictorial manuscript in the Mesoamerican tradition. In reality, pre-Columbian manuscripts are, strictly speaking, not codices, since the strict librarian usage of the word denotes manuscript books made of vellum, papyrus and other materials besides paper, that have been sewn on one side. [1]
Mesoamerica and its cultural areas. Mesoamerica is a historical region and cultural area that begins in the southern part of North America and extends to the Pacific coast of Central America, thus comprising the lands of central and southern Mexico, all of Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, and parts of Honduras, Nicaragua and Costa Rica.
Although probably not exactly a depiction of the same feathered-serpent deity worshipped in classic and post-classic periods, it shows the continuity of symbolism of feathered snakes in Mesoamerica from the formative period and on, for example in comparison to the Maya Vision Serpent shown below.