Meso America Flashcards
(26 cards)
Meso-America
a region and cultural area in the Americas, extending approximately from central Mexico to Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and northern Costa Rica, within which pre-Columbian societies flourished before the Spanish colonization of the Americas in the 15th and 16th centuries.
Glyph
a hieroglyphic character or symbol; a pictograph.
Olmec
a member of a prehistoric people inhabiting the coast of Veracruz and western Tabasco on the Gulf of Mexico
Aztec
a member of the American Indian people dominant in Mexico before the Spanish conquest of the 16th century.
Hernan Cortez
a Spanish Conquistador who led an expedition that caused the fall of the Aztec Empire and brought large portions of mainland Mexico under the rule of the King of Castile in the early 16th century.
Montezuma
emperor of the Aztecs at the time of the Spanish conquest.
Yucatán peninsula
in southeastern Mexico, separates the Caribbean Sea from the Gulf of Mexico, with the northern coastline on the Yucatán Channel.
Tikal
the ruin of an ancient city, which was likely to have been called Yax Mutal, found in a rainforest in Guatemala.
Chichen itza
a world-famous complex of Mayan ruins on Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula.
Quipu
an ancient Inca device for recording information, consisting of variously colored threads knotted in different ways.
Inca
a South American hummingbird having mainly blackish or bronze-colored plumage with one or two white breast patches.
Andes
a mountain range in W South America, extending about 4500 miles (7250 km) from N Colombia and Venezuela S to Cape Horn.
Quechua
the language of the Inca civilization, presently spoken by about 7 million people in Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, Chile, and Argentina.
Sacrifice
the offering of animal, plant, or human life or of some material possession to a deity, as in propitiation or homage.
Francisco Pizzaro
the Spanish conquistador known for conquering Peru’s Inca Empire and founding the city of Lima in 1535.
Stone heads
The Olmec colossal heads are at least seventeen monumental stone representations of human heads sculpted from large basalt boulders.
Maize
technical or chiefly British term for corn
Long count
a system of dating in the Maya calendar according to the time in numbers of baktuns, katuns, tuns, uinals, and days elapsed since an arbitrary point prior to 3000 b.c.
Machu Picchu
An Incan citadel set high in the Andes Mountains in Peru, above the Urubamba River valley. Built in the 15th century and later abandoned,
Copan
near the boundary between Honduras and Guatemala. As you’ll see, if you take the trouble to go through it, as I did, Copan is, or maybe was, for all I know, one of the most important centers of the Mayan civilization.
Popol vuh
the story of creation according to the Quiche Maya of the region known today as Guatemala.
Caral
a large settlement in the Supe Valley, near Supe, Barranca Province, Peru, some 200 kilometres (120 mi) north of Lima.
Calendar
a chart or series of pages showing the days, weeks, and months of a particular year, or giving particular seasonal information.
synonyms:
Observatory
a room or building housing an astronomical telescope or other scientific equipment for the study of natural phenomena.
