As early as the late sixteenth century, José de Acosta, a prescient Jesuit priest who had come to New Spain, speculated that the first inhabitants of the Americas might have migrated there from Asia across the Bering Strait, which was once a bridge between continents. It was an idea that took another three centuries to become commonplace. Nowadays, though there remains some uncertainty as to precise dates, it is widely thought that such migrations began about 50,000 years ago. It is believed that the migrants travelled south, dispersing over the great plains of the American Midwest, and reaching as far as South America. In the area that is now Mexico, they settled and developed primarily in the flat band of land that runs from Texas around the Gulf coast to the Yucatán peninsula, and also in the south and in the central basin where modern Mexico City now sits. It is important to stress that the boundaries of indigenous civilizations and settlements did not neatly coincide with those of present-day countries or provinces; the most notable illustration of this is the case of the Mayas, whose great civilization occupied significant parts of what is now Mexico, but also areas of Guatemala, Honduras, Belize and El Salvador. For that reason there is clearly a need for a term to refer to such areas without falling back on qualified references to modern nations, as I have just done; in 1943 a US anthropologist called Paul Kirchoff coined the term ‘Mesoamerica’.

There is evidence of agricultural activity and simple village life in Mesoamerica dating from about 1800 BC, while the earliest human remains found there date from approximately 12,000 BC. Thereafter, a number of civilizations grew, some more complex than others, the two most sophisticated being those of the Mayas and the Aztecs. These civilizations were based on agriculture, and had progressed beyond hunting and gathering. As the anthropologist Eric Wolf points out, however, ‘as soon as the basic need is met, [every human society] raises its sights and tries to transcend its earthbound limitations’. In other words, they also developed spiritually, intellectually and artistically.