The Huastec or Téenek are an indigenous people of Mexico, living in the La Huasteca region including the states of Hidalgo, Veracruz, San Luis Potosí and Tamaulipas concentrated along the route of the Pánuco River and along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico.
The Zapotecs are an indigenous people of Mexico. The population is concentrated in the southern state of Oaxaca, but Zapotec communities also exist in neighboring states. The present-day population is estimated at approximately 400,000 to 650,000 persons, many of whom are monolingual in one of the native Zapotec languages and dialects. In pre-Columbian times, the Zapotec civilization was one of the highly developed cultures of Mesoamerica, which, among other things, included a system of writing. Many people of Zapotec ancestry have emigrated to the United States over several decades, and they maintain their own social organizations in the Los Angeles and Central Valley areas of California.
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 Tēcuāntepēc.
Tehuantepec is a city and municipality in the southeast of the Mexican state of Oaxaca. It is part of the Tehuantepec District in the west of the Istmo Region. The area was important in pre Hispanic period as part of a trade route that connected Central America with what is now the center of Mexico. Later it became a secondary capital of the Zapotec dominion, before it was conquered by the Spanish in the early 16th century.
Mesoamerican languages are the languages indigenous to the Mesoamerican cultural area, which covers southern Mexico, all of Guatemala and Belize and parts of Honduras and El Salvador and Nicaragua. The area is characterized by extensive linguistic diversity containing several hundred different languages and seven major language families. Mesoamerica is also an area of high linguistic diffusion in that long-term interaction among speakers of different languages through several millennia has resulted in the convergence of certain linguistic traits across disparate language families. The Mesoamerican sprachbund is commonly referred to as the Mesoamerican Linguistic Area.
Juchitán de Zaragoza is an indigenous town in the southeast of the Mexican state of Oaxaca. It is part of the Juchitán District in the west of the Istmo de Tehuantepec region. With a 2020 census population of 88,280, it is the third-largest city in the state. The majority of the indigenous inhabitants are Zapotecs and Huaves. The town also serves as the municipal seat for the surrounding municipality, with which it shares a name. The municipality has an area of 414.64 km2 and a population of 113,570, the state's third-largest in population.
In Zapotec cultures of Oaxaca, a muxe is a person assigned male at birth who dresses and behaves in ways otherwise associated with women; they may be seen as a third gender.
The Zapotec languages are a group of around 50 closely related indigenous Mesoamerican languages that constitute a main branch of the Oto-Manguean language family and which is spoken by the Zapotec people from the southwestern-central highlands of Mexico. A 2020 census reports nearly half a million speakers, with the majority inhabiting the state of Oaxaca. Zapotec-speaking communities are also found in the neighboring states of Puebla, Veracruz, and Guerrero. Labor migration has also brought a number of native Zapotec speakers to the United States, particularly in California and New Jersey. Most Zapotec-speaking communities are highly bilingual in Spanish.
Mesoamerica is a historical region and cultural area that begins in the southern part of North America and extends to most of Central America, thus comprising the lands of central Mexico, Belize, and Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua, and northern Costa Rica. In the pre-Columbian era many societies flourished in Mesoamerica for more than 3,000 years before the Spanish colonization of the Americas, begun at Hispaniola island in 1493. In world history, Mesoamerica was the site of two historical transformations: (i) primary urban generation, and (ii) the formation of New World cultures from the mixtures of the indigenous Mesoamerican peoples with the European, African, and Asian peoples who were introduced by the Spanish colonization of the Americas.
Isthmus Zapotec, also known as Juchitán Zapotec, is a Zapotecan language spoken in Tehuantepec and Juchitán de Zaragoza, in the Mexican state of Oaxaca. According to the census of 1990 it has about 85,000 native speakers, however this number is rapidly decreasing, as speakers shift to Spanish.
Mesoamerica, along with Mesopotamia and China, is one of three known places in the world where writing is thought to have developed independently. Mesoamerican scripts deciphered to date are a combination of logographic and syllabic systems. They are often called hieroglyphs due to the iconic shapes of many of the glyphs, a pattern superficially similar to Egyptian hieroglyphs. Fifteen distinct writing systems have been identified in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica, many from a single inscription. The limits of archaeological dating methods make it difficult to establish which was the earliest and hence the progenitor from which the others developed. The best documented and deciphered Mesoamerican writing system, and the most widely known, is the classic Maya script. Earlier scripts with poorer and varying levels of decipherment include the Olmec hieroglyphs, the Zapotec script, and the Isthmian script, all of which date back to the 1st millennium BC. An extensive Mesoamerican literature has been conserved, partly in indigenous scripts and partly in postconquest transcriptions in the Latin script.
The Zapotec civilization was an indigenous pre-Columbian civilization that flourished in the Valley of Oaxaca in Mesoamerica. Archaeological evidence shows that their culture originated at least 2,500 years ago. The Zapotec archaeological site at the ancient city of Monte Albán has monumental buildings, ball courts, magnificent tombs and grave goods, including finely worked gold jewelry. Monte Albán was one of the first major cities in Mesoamerica. It was the center of a Zapotec state that dominated much of the territory which today is known as the Mexican state of Oaxaca.
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.
Joyce Marcus is a Latin American archaeologist and professor in the Department of Anthropology, College of Literature, Science, and the Arts at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. She also holds the position of Curator of Latin American Archaeology, University of Michigan Museum of Anthropological Archaeology. Marcus has published extensively in the field of Latin American archaeological research. Her focus has been primarily on the Zapotec, Maya, and coastal Andean civilizations of Central and South America. Much of her fieldwork has been concentrated in the Valley of Oaxaca, Mexico. She is known for her "Dynamic model", four-tiered hierarchy, and her use of interdisciplinary study.
Kent Vaughn Flannery is a North American archaeologist who has conducted and published extensive research on the pre-Columbian cultures and civilizations of Mesoamerica, and in particular those of central and southern Mexico. He has also published influential work on origins of agriculture and village life in the Near east, pastoralists in the Andes, and cultural evolution, and many critiques of modern trends in archaeological method, theory, and practice. At the University of Chicago he gained his B.A. degree in 1954; the M.A. in 1961 and a Ph.D. in 1964. From 1966 to 1980 he directed project “Prehistory and Human Ecology of the Valley of Oaxaca, Mexico.” dealing with the origins of agriculture, village life, and social inequality in Mexico. He is James B. Griffin Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Michigan. In 2005, he was elected to the American Philosophical Society.
Guiengola is a Zapotec archeological site located 14 km (8.7 mi) north of Tehuantepec, and 243 km (151 mi) southeast of Oaxaca city on Federal Highway 190. The visible ruins are located between a hill and a river, each carries the name of Guiengola. The name means "large stone" in the local variant of the Zapotec language. There are two main tombs that have been excavated, and both seem to be family interment sites. Both have front chambers that are for religious idols, while the rear chambers are for the burial of important people. The site also has fortified walls, houses, ballgame fields, other tombs and a very large "palace" with remains of artificial ponds and terraces. In the center of the site are 2 plazas, one lower than the other, and 2 pyramids, one to the east and one to the west.
Ronald M. Spores is an American academic anthropologist, archaeologist and ethnohistorian, whose research career has centered on the pre-Columbian cultures of Mesoamerica. He is Professor Emeritus of anthropology at Vanderbilt University's College of Arts and Science, where he has been a faculty member for over four decades. Spores is most renowned for his scholarship conducted on the cultural history of the Oaxacan region in southwestern Mexico. In particular, he has made many contributions on the Mixtec culture, investigating its archaeological sites, ethnohistorical documents, political economies, and ethnohistory in both the pre-Columbian and Colonial eras. He was co-director of the Proyecto Arqueológico de la Ciudad Yucundaa Pueblo Viejo de Teposcolula, Oaxaca, sponsored by the Fundación Alfredo Harp Helu, the National Geographic Society, and INAH (2004–2010), and currently (2017) directs research on the sixteenth century Casa del Cacique de Yanhuitlan, Oaxaca, and related investigation of the surrounding Prehispanic-Colonial city and region. He is also Research Associate at the American Museum of Natural History, New York, and at the University of Oregon and investigator on the Proyecto Geoparque de la Mixteca Alta, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México/UNESCO, centered at Yanhuitlan, Oaxaca (2016-2017). Recent research relates to the colonial Manila Galleon trade between the Philippines and Acapulco.
Lambityeco is a small archaeological site just about 3 kilometers west of the Tlacolula city in the Mexican state of Oaxaca. It is located just off Highway 190 about 25 km (16 mi) east from the city of Oaxaca en route to Mitla. The site has been securely dated to the Late Classical Period.
Huamelulpan is an archaeological site of the Mixtec culture, located in the town of San Martín Huamelulpan at an elevation of 2,218 metres (7,277 ft), about 96 kilometres (60 mi) north-west of the city of Oaxaca, the capital of Oaxaca state.
Regional communications in ancient Mesoamerica are believed to have been extensive. There were various trade routes attested since prehistoric times. In this article, especially the routes starting in the Mexico Central Plateau, and going down to the Pacific coast will be considered. These contacts then went on as far as Central America.
