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There is no single chronology that is employed by all archaeologists for all of Mesoamerica, but a broad division into Archaic, Formative (or Preclassic), Classic, Postclassic, and Colonial periods is generally recognized. Precise beginning and ending dates vary with the region and often with the specific author. The contributions to this volume are no exception. With slight differences, however, the contributors draw on a single chronological framework for these major periods (Table 1.1).

Table 1.1 Summary chronological framework for Mesoamerica

Dates in years	Period
8000–1600 BCE	Archaic
1600–900 BCE	Early Formative
900–400 BCE	Middle Formative
400 BCE –250 CE	Late Formative
250–600 CE	Early Classic
600–1000 CE	Late Classic
1000–1521 CE	Postclassic
1521–1820 CE	Colonial

The words used to name these spans of time are significant; they demonstrate that this chronological framework comes from a particular theoretical perspective, one associated with the idea of cultural evolution. From a cultural evolutionary perspective, the history of Mesoamerica is also the story of the gradual development of a cultural peak in the Classic period from its initial roots and of a decline after that peak. Each span of time had a particular character and a characteristic level of development. In the Archaic, people lived as mobile hunter-gatherers. The Formative (or Preclassic) was initiated by the advent of the first settled villages of farmers. While some Formative villages had leaders in ritual, war, and other activities, these forms of leadership were not codified into permanent, inherited statuses. With the Classic period, fully developed forms of permanent status, and extreme divisions among people, were realized in cities. The Classic cities collapsed, and in the Postclassic new urban societies emerged that were less impressive, smaller, more secular, or otherwise disadvantageously compared with their Classic predecessors.

These broad time spans, in other words, were not simply periods of abstract time, but rather stages of cultural development. Stages are diagnosed by specific features, like agriculture, pottery, settled villages, hereditary status, and cities. These can be developed at various dates by different peoples. As a result, despite using the same broad categories, researchers working in different sites assigned slightly different dates to each stage. The beginning of the Classic period in the Basin of Mexico was correlated with the maximum development of the great city of Teotihuacan. In the Maya area, it was tied to the first use of writing and calendars on public monuments.

Despite a general move in archaeology away from this early form of cultural evolutionary theory, Mesoamerican archaeology is stuck using an inherited framework of time periods that are really stages. Characteristics that were supposed to define the beginning of a stage are now found to have begun before the initial date of the stage. In the Maya area, the defining feature of the Classic period, written texts and dates on monuments, originated in Late Preclassic times. Archaeologists today treat stage names as labels for arbitrary time segments. Yet the unwanted implication of progress and decline remains embedded in the names for those stages.