Abstract
Middle America, comprised of Mexico and upper Central America, was one of the two wellsprings of indigenous high civilization in the Pre-Columbian New World. The origins and early development of its inhabitants, who ultimately created the Maya, Aztec, Zapotec and other great nations of Mesoamerica, are topics of avid, sometimes contentious, archaeological research. Still disputed, for example, is when the first humans set foot in the Americas and from where they originated. The date of initial arrival has recently been pushed back from 12000 to more than 13000 years ago, but an increasing number of archaeologists argue for multiple migrations beginning as early as 30000 to 40000years ago. Southeast Asia, across the Bering Strait, is considered the primary source of immigration, although other places and routes have been hypothesized. As the Paleoindian period hunters and wild food gatherers expanded into Middle America, they devised a variety of subsistence strategies to deal with their new and changing post-Pleistocene habitat. Ultimately they abandoned their mobile foraging and collecting lifeway for an agricultural mode of subsistence and settled in permanent villages. This remarkable but incompletely understood Archaic period transformation, commencing around 11000years ago, laid the foundation for the complex societies that ensued.