© Lonely Planet Publications
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History
While the history of Pacific Mexico is less dramatic than that of the nation –
there’s a distinct lack of grand pre-Hispanic civilizations on much of the
coast, and major development here didn’t really even begin till the 20th
century – there are, nevertheless, interesting stories to be told. And like the
rest of Mexico, it is a tale of disparity and casual cruelty, of altruism and
courage, of development, progress, decline and defeat, and a story of a nation
that at times feels like it will live forever in its past.
FIRST AMERICANS
Jürgen Buchenau’s travelsized Mexican Mosaic
(2008) is a handy historic
companion for the
historically inclined.
It’s widely accepted that, barring a few Vikings in the north and some possible
direct trans-Pacific contact with Southeast Asia, the pre-Hispanic inhabitants of the Americas arrived from Siberia. They came in several migrations
between perhaps 60,000 BC and 8000 BC, during the last Ice Age, crossing
land now submerged beneath the Bering Strait. The earliest human traces in
Mexico date from about 20,000 BC. These first Mexicans hunted big animal
herds in the grasslands of the highland valleys. When temperatures rose at the
end of the Ice Age, the valleys became drier, ceasing to support such animal
life and forcing the people to derive more food from plants.
Archaeologists have traced the slow beginnings of agriculture in the Valle
Tehuacán in Puebla state, where, soon after 6500 BC, people were planting seeds
of chili and a kind of squash. Between 5000 BC and 3500 BC they started to
plant mutant forms of tiny wild maize and to grind the maize into meal. After
3500 BC, beans and a much better variety of maize enabled the Valle Tehuacán
people to live semipermanently in villages. Pottery appeared around 2500 BC,
and some of the oldest finds in Mexico are from sites near Acapulco.
PRECLASSIC PERIOD (1500 BC–AD 250)
For a few interesting
articles on the preHispanic cultures of the
Pacific coast, including
the Opeño of northwestern Michoacán and the
Capacha of Colima, check
out www.famsi.org.
This epoch is generally defined by the rise and fall of the Olmec. Perhaps the
oldest Mesoamerican culture of dramatic scale, the Olmec lived near the Gulf
coast in the humid lowlands of southern Veracruz and neighboring Tabasco
from 1200 BC to around 600 BC. Their civilization is famed for the awesome
‘Olmec heads,’ stone sculptures up to 3m high with grim, pug-nosed faces
combining the features of human babies and jaguars.
During the civilization’s decline, the two great Olmec centers, San Lorenzo
in Veracruz and La Venta in Tabasco, were violently destroyed by marauding invaders from Oaxaca, marking a significant shift of power. By 300 AD,
Monte Albán (p232), the hilltop center of the Zapotecs of Oaxaca, had grown
into a town of perhaps 10,000. Many carvings here have hieroglyphs or dates
20,000–2500 BC
Humans arrive in Mexico, first
hunting and gathering across
the highland valleys, then
adopting agricultural practices
beginning in the Valle Tehuacán
of Puebla state. Pottery appears
around 2500 BC, with some
great finds near Acapulco.
1200 BC–AD 250
The Olmec civilization in
Tabasco and Veracruz is dominant from 1200 BC to 600 BC.
On the coast, independent
chiefdoms reign, pottery and
‘sophisticated’ architecture
(shaft-tomb construction)
begin to take root.
300–700
In the southern half of Mexico,
the Zapotecs begin to rise, first
destroying a few Olmec cities,
then building the hilltop center
Monte Albán. They also create
writing and number systems.
lonelyplanet.com
H I S T O R Y • • C l a s s i c Pe r i o d ( A D 2 5 0 – 9 0 0 )
in a dot-and-bar system, which quite possibly means that the elite of Monte
Albán invented writing and the written calendar in Mexico.
The early history of the rest of western Mexico remains shrouded in mystery.
Until the 1940s the area was all but ignored by archaeologists, probably because
it lacked the grand architecture, writing systems and dramatic religious deities
that attracted researchers to the rest of Mesoamerica. Archaeological sites went
unexcavated and unprotected for decades, and most were looted over the years
by non-archaeologists who sold their findings to collectors. When study of
the region’s ancient past began in earnest, archaeologists faced the challenges
of drawing conclusions from sites that no longer existed.
From Sinaloa south to the state of Guerrero, people lived in small, independent villages and chiefdoms. They practiced a religion focused on a cult
of the dead, but each village most likely had its own distinct culture and
language. Archaeologists and art historians treat western Mexico as a unified
region, El Occidente, which is defined by its tradition of shaft or chamber
tombs. These underground burial chambers at the base of shafts 2m to 16m
deep have been found throughout the area. The oldest of these have been
dated as far back as 1900 BC, but the most significant were probably built
between 1500 BC and 800 BC. Much of what is known of the cultures of
western Mexico is based on the excavation of these tombs and analysis of
the clay sculptures and vessels found within, some of which can be viewed
at the Museo Regional de Nayarit (p127) in Tepic.
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The highly interactive
website www
.ancientmexico.com offers
a terrific breadth of
material on the art,
culture and history of
ancient Mesoamerica.
CLASSIC PERIOD (AD 250–900)
The shaft-tomb tradition that so defined Nayarit, Jalisco and Colima began
to die out in the early Classic period, as culture from Teotihuacán, central
Mexico’s first great civilization, began to influence the character of the area.
Teotihuacán grew into a city of an estimated 125,000 people during its apogee between AD 250 and 600, and it controlled what was probably the biggest pre-Hispanic Mexican empire. Teotihuacán had writing and books, the
dot-and-bar number system and the 260-day sacred year. The building of a
magnificent planned city, located just 50km northeast of the center of modern
Mexico City, began around 300 BC and took some 600 years to complete.
Objects from Teotihuacán have been found in Nayarit, Jalisco, Colima and
Michoacán, which suggests that Teotihuacán was probably absorbing western
Mexican cultures into its sphere. Teotihuacán was probably interested in the
area for its precious stones and minerals.
The collapse of Teotihuacán in the 7th century was felt throughout western
Mexico – as it was throughout Mesoamerica – but the scattered, independent chiefdoms that characterized the coastal states continued well into the
Postclassic period. The fertile coastal ecology provided plentifully for the
people who hunted and farmed the coastal plains and upland valleys, and
fished the coastal waters.
250–900
The Classic Period. Great civilizations are on the rise in central Mexico (Teotihuacán) and
the Yucatán Peninsula (Maya)
with advances in architecture,
astronomy and the arts.
Teotihuacán absorbs westcoast shaft-tomb culture.
1100–1200
The Tarasco (Purépecha) culture
takes root in parts of Michoacán, Guanajuato and Guerrero,
with its center at the site of
Tzintzuntzan near Lake Pátzcuaro. Mixtec culture dominates the Zapotec in the south.
Mexico: From the Olmecs
to the Aztecs by Michael
D Coe gives a concise,
learned and wellillustrated picture of
ancient Mexico’s great
cultures.
Around 1325
Tenochtitlán, site of presentday Mexico City, is founded
by the Aztecs who dominate
the Pacific and Gulf coasts and
central Mexico. The Tarasco and
Yopes (present-day Acapulco)
resist Aztec expansion, but the
Mixtec fall.