Ice Age Migrations
Scientists believe that people in Asia followed this into the Americas while hunting migrating animals.
What is a land bridge?
The name for the ancient region of the Valley of Mexico throughout Central America.
What is Mesoamerica?
The Maya settle this region of Mexico at its southern tip.
What is the Yucatan Peninsula?
These are pictograph symbols used to convey syllables, words, and ideas
What hieroglyphics?
Mayans practiced this in order to please the gods and maintain order in the cosmos.
What is human sacrifice?
The name of the channel of water that separates North America from Asia?
This was the most important crop of the Mesoamericans
What is maize (corn)?
This allowed the Maya to communicate their business transactions, royal histories, and most importantly, their complex mythology and cosmology across their vast territory.
What is a writing system?
This caused the million of Maya descendants and Mesoamerican historians and archaeologists to struggle to reclaim the language and literature of the ancient Maya civilization
What is the destruction of the Maya codices by the Spanish?
This Maya calendar was used to keep track of the constant birth, death, and rebirth of the cosmos every 5125 years.
What is the "long-count" calendar?
The mass movement of people or animals from one place to another.
This black volcanic glass was used by many ancient Americans to make tools, weapons, and crafts.
What is obsidian?
Though they may share language and ethnicity with others, these autonomous large towns have their own government and economic activity.
What are city-states?
During the 1950s the linguist Yury Knorozov demonstrated this ground-breaking discovery about Mayan writing.
What is that it is also was phonetic as well as hieroglyphic?
This watery and underground spaces of darkness and animals held sacred value for the Maya people
What are caves?
This is the biggest social and cultural adaptation of not only ancient Americans, but of most ancient civilizations.
What is settled farming?
Name ANY two bizarre cultural practices of the Olmec?
What are?
1.shaping infants' heads like ears of corn
2. filing teeth
3. shaving heads
4. crossing babies' eyes
This mathematical concept was first discovered and introduced in America by the Maya people and was essential in understanding their cosmology.
What is the concept of zero?
This other unique discovery about the complexity of Mayan writing reveals this about their logograms: or a character that represents a single word or phrase.
What is that logograms can have more than one meaning or syllabic value?
This Maya book of counsel and "talking mat leaves" also conveys the mythical origins of the universe and the Maya people
What is The Popol Vuh?
This is the one of the benefits of settled farming and allows for diversity of tasks and roles withing a society.
What is specialization of labor?
The Olmec started this important economic activity in central Mexico.
What is trade?
These priests not only charted the stars and movement of the celestial bodies, but they also wrote them in calendars in order to share times and seasons for agriculture, but also religious festivals and observance.
Who are daykeepers?
So far, Mayanists have been able to decipher this amount of characters in the the ancient Maya writing system.
What is 800 characters?
These animals were especially venerated as beings of immortality, wisdom, and vehicles into the cosmic realm of mystery and spiritual forces.
What are snakes?