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Mesoamerican peoples were agriculturalists, living in socially differentiated communities, understanding themselves to exist in specific kinds of relations to other humans and nonhuman entities and forces. A high number of Mesoamerican practices relate to ideas about how the universe was formed and persists and to the practices humans needed to carry out as a result of those understandings.

Social difference itself was intimately bound up with propositions about the nature of the universe and the relations people had to forces and beings beyond the human. While maize agriculture was not always the single basis of Mesoamerican economies, maize became a defining part of Mesoamerican ideas about the nature of being, or ontology. In oral traditions the survival of maize spirits was attributed to the actions of nobles and the supernatural beings they claimed as their predecessors (Monaghan 1990; Taube 1985, 1989). Narratives about maize formed part of Mesoamerican beliefs and practices concerning the relationship between human beings, supernatural beings, and ancestors, part of the ontologies of Mesoamerican peoples.

Ontologies and cosmologies portrayed the universe as composed of multiple domains, with the world of contemporary human life adjacent to others inhabited by nonhuman entities and ancestors. Access to these otherworlds took place through rituals, using certain pathways, particularly features that pierced boundaries with an underworld (caves, wells) or that rose up into the upperworld (Gillespie 1993). Four world directions defined by the movements of the sun framed this shared geography. The limits of the east and west directions were marked on the horizon by the northern and southern extreme positions of the sun on the solstices in December and June and the midpoint position of the sun on the equinoxes in March and September (see Aveni 1980).

Cities, towns, and villages incorporated buildings that were stages for Mesoamerican rituals: ball courts, temples, and astronomical observatories. These were often juxtaposed with unmodified features of the surrounding countryside, such as the alignment of the Temple of the Moon at Teotihuacan with the mountain Cerro Gordo or the placement of the Pyramid of the Sun over a cave (see Chapter 4). Structures with distinct functions, such as ancestral shrines, could be placed in regular directional relationships to other buildings (see Chapter 7). Site planning embedded the built environment within a cosmological order. Ceremonies and rituals in these places enacted philosophies of being and reproduced them.