Maya Flasks & Carlson Intro Kislak Catalog 2007

the indigenous cultures
before european contact
For millennia the Americas evolved in near isolation, save
for the intrepid stream of people who began crossing the
Bering landbridge from Siberia roughly between 40,000
and 20,000 years ago (now, with rising sea levels, fifty-three
miles of ice and water separates Siberia from Alaska). The
small groups of hunters and gatherers from Asia flourished
in the Americas and over the course of thousands of years
spread throughout both North and South America, developing
a myriad of societies, languages, and civilizations that
rivaled the achievements of those in the Old World. These
two separate worlds knew nothing of each other until five
hundred years ago, even though several longships manned
by Norsemen traversed the treacherous north Atlantic seas
o= Greenland to fish the Grand Banks five hundred years
before Columbus. The remains of their tiny settlements have
been found on the frozen shores of Nova Scotia and Newfoundland,
but this initial contact did nothing to change the
course of history for the peoples of the Americas.
Since the concept of a cultural region called Middle
America or Mesoamerica was created in the 1940s, its territory
was imagined to comprise most of the modern countries
of México, Guatemala, Belize, western Honduras, and
El Salvador. Chronologically, the Pre-Columbian history of
the region has been traditionally divided into an Archaic period
(ca. 12,000–1500 b.c.), a Preclassic or Formative period
(ca. 1500 b.c.–a.d. 200), a Classic period (ca. a.d. 200–
900), and a Postclassic period (ca. a.d. 900–1500). Each
of these periods has its subdivisions, although authorities
have never agreed on precise divisions, due to significant
regional cultural variations. Greater Mesoamerica, however,
is a more modern conception that takes into account the
active cultural connections. These connections can now be
documented over a more extended region based on archaeological
data coupled with recent scholarship employing eth-
nohistorical and ethnographical sources. For example, if we
examine the evidence for the playing of rubber-ball games in
ballcourts—a defining characteristic of Mesoamerica—the
court found at Wupatki in northern Arizona provides the
northernmost example. In the twelfth century a.d., it was
a trading center where shell beads, copper bells, and even
the remains of more than forty macaws from the tropical
lowlands to the south have been recovered. Furthermore,
ballcourts have been found on some of the islands of the
Caribbean, where we know that some level of trading and
exchange contact was established. The discoveries of gold
bells and other gold artifacts from as far south as Costa Rica
and Panama have been found in the sacred well or cenote at
the great Late Classic to Early Postclassic pilgrimage center
of Chichén Itzá in the northern Yucatán peninsula. Data
such as these would suggest that we should explore the concept
of a Greater Mesoamerican sphere of cultural interaction
and exchange that would include much of the Four Corners
area of the American Southwest, with extensions into
what is now Costa Rica and Nicaragua—traditionally part
of Central America—and even portions of the Caribbean Islands.
Greater Mesoamerica naturally reflects the strengths
represented in the Jay I. Kislak Collection of Pre-Columbian
material culture as well as the Collection’s sources on paper
written about the region.
Within the traditional Mesoamerican area, it has always
been di