Ancient Civilizations in Credo: Americas

Term denoting the culture of ancient Mexican natives inhabiting the tropical coastal plain of the contemporary states of Veracruz and Tabasco, between 1300 and 400 B.C.

Indigenous people of Mexico, primarily in S Oaxaca and on the Isthmus of Tehuantepec.

One of the great cultures of mesoamerica, Maya civilization extended throughout southern Mexico and northern Central America. The Maya territory included what are now the southernmost Mexican states of Yucatán, Campeche, Quintana Roo, Tabasco, and Chiapas, as well as all of Belize and Guatemala and the westernmost parts of Honduras and El Salvador.

Member of an American Indian people who migrated south into the valley of Mexico in about 1168.

Pre-Columbian empire, W South America.

From Chambers Dictionary of World Historyy
The term pre-Columbian civilizations denotes the cultures that developed in parts of Mexico and Central America (Mesoamerica) and western South America (Andean region) prior to European incursions into the continent from the 16c.

In North American archaeology, name given to those people who built mounds in a large area from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico and from the Mississippi River to the Appalachian Mountains. The greatest concentrations of mounds are found in the Mississippi and Ohio valleys.

From Concise Encyclopedia of Latin American Literature
The Maya were the only people of America's high cultures who developed a glyph-writ language (a partly ideographic, partly phonetic mode of writing) capable of recording events.

From Britannica Concise Encyclopedia
Religions of the pre-Columbian cultures of Mexico and Central America, notably the Olmec, Maya, Toltec, and Aztec. All religions of Mesoamerica were polytheistic. The gods had to be constantly propitiated with offerings and sacrifices. The religions also shared a belief in a multilevel universe that had gone through five creations and four destructions by the time of the Spanish conquest. Mesoamerican religions heavily emphasized the astral bodies, particularly the sun, the moon, and Venus, and the observations of their movements by astronomer-priests were extraordinarily detailed and accurate.

From Encyclopedia of American Studies
There are two distinct architectural traditions that comprise Native American architecture. Tribal architectures are those buildings that manifest the identity of a particular tribe and differentiate that tribe from all other tribes and nontribal peoples. Intertribal architectures, on the other hand, are buildings that manifest the shared identity of Indian peoples and therefore differentiate Indians collectively from non-Indians.

In Milestone Documents of World Religions
The Popol Vuh (or Popol Wuj) is one of the most important examples of pre-Columbian literature to survive the Spanish conquest of the Americas. It is a work of epic poetry that tells the origin story of the Maya and, more specifically, the Quiché, a Mayan ethnic group that dominated the highlands of modern-day Guatemala during the postclassic period of Mayan history (925–1530 ce).

From The Columbia Encyclopedia
Quipus or khipus (kē'pōz), groups of strings, knotted for tally, which were used by the Inca for keeping records and sending messages. The quipu, which is believed to have predated the rise of the Inca, was based on the decimal system. Small cords with knots in them were attached to a main cord or a top band; the color of the cord, its place, its size, and the knots in it were all of significance to the record or the message.

From Handy Answer: Native American Almanac
Cahokia in 1000 C.E. was the largest city in North America. Like Mesoamerican cities, the city featured pyramidlike mounds, wide plazas, and paved streets. Near present-day St. Louis, Cahokia centered on canals fed by the Missouri, Illinois, and Mississippi rivers. Trade items arrived by the tons in long canoes from the Great Lakes, the Gulf of Mexico, the Atlantic coast, Ontario, and Yellowstone. Founded around 750 C.E. and inhabited until 1350, Cahokia spread for five square miles, contained 120 temple mounds, and was home to 15,000 people. The city was related to thousands of smaller Mississippian mound centers that spread along river valleys from Lake Superior to the Mississippi Delta and from the western Appalachian valleys to the Oklahoma prairie.

Inca site in Peru, about 50 mi (80 km) NW of Cuzco. It is perched high upon a rock in a narrow saddle between two sharp mountain peaks. The imposing city is one of the largest pre-Columbian sites found virtually intact.

When scholars use the term Mesoamerica, they are referring to a vast and geographically varied territory unified by a set of cultural traits not shared by peoples living immediately beyond its boundaries.

From The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia
Town in the north of the state of Chiapas in southern Mexico, 150 km/93 mi southeast of Villahermosa; population (2005) 37,300. A few kilometres from the city are the ruins of a series of Maya temples dating from about the 4th century AD.

From The Hutchinson Unabridged Encyclopedia
Earthwork built by Hopewell Indians in the 2nd–1st centuries BC in Ohio, USA. It is 405 m/1,330 ft long, 1.3 m/4 ft high, and about 6 m/19 ft across and may have been constructed in the shape of a snake for religious purposes.

Ancient commercial and religious center in the central valley of Mexico, c.30 mi (48 km) NE of Mexico City. The largest (c.7 sq mi/18.1 sq km) and most impressive urban site of ancient America. Once thought to be the great religious center of the Toltec, it is now held to be the relic of an earlier civilization.