Aqueduct: A long pipe, usually mounted on a high stone wall that slopes gently, used to carry water from the mountains to the lowlands.
Archaeology: The scientific study of past civilizations.
Causeway: A raised highway over water.
Conquistador: A leader in the Spanish conquest of the Americas during the 1500s.
Conscription: Compulsory, or required, enrollment of persons in public service, particularly the military.
Divination: The study of physical material—for example, tea leaves or a person's palms—in order to discover what the future holds.
Extended family: A household comprising not just immediate family (parents and siblings), but also grandparents, aunts and uncles, cousins, and other relatives.
Hieroglyphics: A system of written symbols, often consisting of pictograms, which look like the things they represent, and phonograms, which represent a specific syllable.
Jade: A greenish gemstone that acquires a high shine when polished.
Maize: Corn.
New World: The Americas, or the Western Hemisphere.
Observatory: A building set aside for the purpose of studying natural phenomena such as the movement of bodies in the heavens.
Plaza: A large open area or public square, usually but not always in the center of a town.
Staple: A commodity with widespread or constant appeal.
Who flourished between 1200 and 100 B. c. The Olmec were noted for their sophisticated 365-day calendar, their system of mathematical notation, and the creation of some sixteen giant stone heads, weighing as much as 30,000 pounds, which archaeologists in the 1800s began finding throughout the jungles of Central America.
Both the Olmec and the people of Teotihuacan (tay-oh-tee-hwah-
KAHN) in Mexico built enormous stone pyramids, the most well known of which was the Pyramid of the Sun in Teotihuacan. These structures are particularly impressive in light of the fact that no premodern American culture had use of the wheel or—with the exception of the Incas' llamas—domesticated beasts of burden. Teotihuacan, which flourished from a. d. 100 to 750, was at one point the sixth-largest city in the world.
A map of the Americas showing the three major Mesoamerican civilizations of the Middle Ages: the Maya, the Aztecs, and the Incas. Illustration by XNR Productions. Reproduced by permission of the Gale Croup.
World History
