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Mesoamerica was originally defined as a culture area based on a checklist of traits ranging from basic religious concepts to minor details of costume (Kirchhoff 1968 [1943]). The compilation of a trait list is now rejected as too crude a way to group societies or archaeological sites because it treats all similarities as being of equal importance and provides no way to explain how or why such connections came into being. Archaeologists still find the concept of Mesoamerica useful because it allows them to connect cultures which, through extensive interaction, developed a common set of values and practices that continued to develop over a long period of time, from at least 3500 years before European contact.

We can thus reimagine the Mesoamerican trait list as indicating shared practices in a number of distinct social domains. The most important of these domains are (1) the economy, (2) philosophical and scientific understanding of how the world works, and (3) social differentiation (Table 1.2). What we see today as a continuous Mesoamerican tradition is the result of generations of practices by people working within the bounds of what they understood to be both possible and desirable. In this sense, Mesoamerica had a beginning point, a period when the practices and beliefs we recognize as Mesoamerican emerged. Gordon R. Willey (1966: 78) long ago identified Mesoamerica’s origins with the time period beginning around 2000 BCE when village life dependent on corn agriculture took form, in settlements where social stratification first becomes evident. Many of the practices identified as typical of Mesoamerican culture are expressions of social differences that first took emerged in early villages. This volume begins coverage of Mesoamerica at this moment of early village life and emergent social stratification (Chapters 2 and 3).

Table 1.2 Archaeologically identifiable defining traits of Mesoamerica, organized according to social and cultural practices

Arena of practice	Traits from original definition of Mesoamerica
Subsistence production	Agriculture based on corn, beans, and squash, dependent on human labor using digging stick
	Agricultural intensification including raised fields (chinampas)
	Plants raised for specialized uses: cacao, amaranth, maguey
	Corn processed by soaking with lime and grinding on metates
Long-distance exchange	Valuables such as obsidian, cacao, and jade
Cosmology and ritual	Numbers 4, 5, 7, 9, 13, and 20 significant
	shared calendars: solar year of 18 months of 20 days plus a set of 5 final days; 260-day ritual cycle of 13 day names combined with 20 numbers
	Use of writing and positional mathematics to record astronomy and calendar, in paper and deer skin books (codices) and more permanent media
	Ritual warfare, special warrior costumes, and human sacrifice
	Specialized architecture for ritual: ball courts, temples, observatories, including use of stucco
Social stratification	Status expressed in costumes, including gender specific forms of dress, role-specific headdresses, warrior outfits, and ornaments such as lip plugs, pyrite mirrors, and polished obsidian mirrors and earplugs

In any social world, intentional and unreflexive actions carried out by people, acting along with other humans and in concert with nonhumans (animals, things, and forces beyond the human, like rainfall), produce, reproduce, and transform structures. People reproduce and transform social structures through their choices among possible ways to act that they see open to them. In the process of exercising their perceived ability to act (or agency), reproducing and transforming structure, people create and add to individual and group histories, shaping the constraints and possibilities of agents in succeeding generations. People make their choices of action, and understand their implications, based on their philosophies of being (ontologies), their understandings of the nature of the origins of things (cosmologies), and their broader view of relations among all beings. In many ways, the most distinctive aspects of Mesoamerica belong to this philosophical domain.