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Mesoamericans

From the Olmecs to the Aztecs.

1,521 CE

Cortés, a few hundred Spaniards, tens of thousands of indigenous allies, and smallpox end the Aztec state.

1,521 CE – 1,821 CE

Three centuries of Spanish colonial rule over Mexico and much of the Americas.

1,428 CE – 1,521 CE

A tribute empire run from Tenochtitlan, a lake city of a quarter million people.

950 CE – 1,150 CE

A militarised state at Tula that later peoples treated as a golden age to claim descent from.

800 CE – 950 CE

Southern lowland cities are abandoned within a few generations. Drought is the leading explanation.

615 CE – 683 CE

Ruler of Palenque, buried beneath a pyramid under a carved sarcophagus lid.

250 CE – 900 CE

City-states across Yucatán and Guatemala with full writing, astronomy and a calendar of terrifying precision.

100 CE – 650 CE

A city of well over 100,000 with vast pyramids — and nobody knows what its builders called themselves.

900 BCE

Basalt boulders weighing up to forty tonnes, moved a hundred kilometres and carved into portraits.

900 BCE

Mesoamerican script appears, developed with no contact with the Old World.

1,500 BCE – 400 BCE

The earliest major Mesoamerican civilisation, known for colossal stone heads carved without metal tools.

1,650 BCE

A rubber-ball game played across Mesoamerica for three thousand years, sometimes ending in sacrifice.