The Central American cultural sphere mainly includes the development and decline of ancient Indian civilizations in central and southern Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, part of Nicaragua and part of the Caribbean, such as Olmec, Maya, Toltec, Teotihuacan, and Aztec.
The period from 1500 BC to 300 BC was the preclassical period of the Mesoamerican cultural circle. The Olmec civilization is representative of this period, and its main achievements are manifested in the remains of pyramids and stone carvings found during excavations. Jade carving is also one of the outstanding achievements of the Olmec people, mainly used to carve religious gods, among which the representative is a portrait of a child in his arms, standing upright, with the characteristics of a large head, the face of the child in his arms is like the face of a jaguar, such a child is called a tiger man, is a feature of Olmec culture, and is also speculated to be an early image of the American rain god.
The period from 300 AD to 900 AD was the classical period of Mesoamerican culture, represented by the Teotihuacan and Mayan civilizations.
Located about 45 kilometers northeast of Mexico City, the Teotihuacan site means City of the Gods in Indian language, a religious city ruled by a theocracy, with economic, political, administrative, religious, and military power entirely concentrated in the high priest. It is also the central city of an agricultural economic region, where people engaged in agricultural activities enter the city for religious worship. Around the 7th century AD, Teotihuacan began to decline, and suddenly it was completely abandoned around 900 AD.
The most splendid of ancient Indian culture is undoubtedly the Mayan civilization. She inherited and sublimated the characteristics of Olmec civilization from the fields of legislation, numbers, writing, etc. The Maya used the decimal system and had the concept of zero to million. The astronomical calendar owned by the Maya was also ahead of the world standard at the time. They had an extremely outstanding achievement in writing, and their hieroglyphs were composed of a combination of various patterns, partly to the point of recording speech and vocabulary. They already had paper and books, and had a collection, which was unfortunately destroyed by the early colonists as a cult book.
The most important city of the Old Empire of the Maya civilization was Tikal. However, at the end of the 9th century, the Maya suddenly ceased all activities for unknown reasons and migrated to the Yucatan Peninsula, entering the new imperial period of the Maya civilization. In the Yucatan Peninsula, the Maya came into contact with the Toltecs of the Central Highlands of Mexico and developed entirely new characteristics, notably the Quetzalcoatl cult. The representative city of the New Empire period is Chichen Itza, the most famous of which is the Pyramid of Kukulkán. Chichen Itza also has its own observatory, a special circular structure known to the Spaniards as the Snail Tower.
Between 900 BC and the Spanish colonization of the Americas, the period was the postclassical period of ancient American civilizations, represented by the Toltec and Aztec civilizations.
The Aztecs were once a people living in uncertainty. Their Lord God has sent an oracle: Where an eagle street serpent stands on a cactus, it is your dwelling. In 1325, on an island in Lake Testek, the Aztecs saw this and built Tenochtitlan, the predecessor of Mexico City.
