Ancient cultural region that built stepped pyramids

Usage examples of mesoamerica.

On this basis, botanists conclude that lima beans (Phaseolus lunatus), common beans (Phaseolus vulgaris), and chili peppers of the Capsicum annuum I chinense group were all domesticated on at least two separate occasions, once in Mesoamerica and once in South America.

Water control systems also appear to have been associated with centralized political organization in some other areas of the world, including the Indus Valley of the Indian subcontinent, the Yellow and Yangtze Valleys of China, the Maya lowlands of Mesoamerica, and the coastal desert of Peru.

Chili peppers, squashes, amaranths, and chenopods are other crops of which different but related species were domesticated in Mesoamerica and South America, since no species was able to spread fast enough to preempt the others.

But the empires and states of Mesoamerica had no political relations with, and apparently never even heard of, the chiefdoms of the eastern United States 700 miles to the north or the empires and states of the Andes 1,200 miles to the south.

Those homelands were the Fertile Crescent and China in Eurasia, and the Andes and Amazonia, Mesoamerica, and the eastern United States in the Americas.

On this basis, botanists conclude that lima beans (Phaseolus lunatus), common beans (Phaseolus vulgaris), and chili peppers of the Capsicum annuutn I chinense group were all domesticated on at least two separate occasions, once in Mesoamerica and once in South America.

Of these, writing was traditionally the one most restricted geographically: until the expansions of Islam and of colonial Europeans, it was absent from Australia, Pacific islands, subequatorial Africa, and the whole New World except for a small part of Mesoamerica.

The most familiar examples are the combination of wheat and barley with peas and lentils in the Fertile Crescent, the combination of corn with several bean species in Mesoamerica, and the combination of rice and millets with soybeans and other beans in China.

With a mere 1,000,000 people, New Guinea could not develop the technology, writing, and political systems that arose among populations of tens of millions in China, the Fertile Crescent, the Andes, and Mesoamerica.

Another is that the three most densely populated American centers—the Andes, Mesoamerica, and the Mississippi Valley—never became connected by regular fast trade into one huge breeding ground for microbes, in the way that Europe, North Africa, India, and China became linked in Roman times.

Hemp, four cotton species, yucca, and agave variously furnished fiber for rope and woven clothing in China, Mesoamerica, India, Ethiopia, sub-Saharan Africa, and South America, supplemented in several of those areas by wool from domestic animals.

Mesoamerica, India, Ethiopia, sub-Saharan Africa, and South America, supplemented in several of those areas by wool from domestic animals.