Mexico and Central America 200 BCE

What is happening in Mexico and Central America in 200BCE

By this time, the centres in the Olmec heartland are in decline. Several of them have experienced the mysterious fate of having their ceremonial structures and objects deliberately and elaborately desecrated, and their central areas deserted.

Elsewhere in Mexico and Mesoamerica, other centres, such as those of the Zapotec, the Mixtec and the early Maya, continue to develop. Indeed, this is a period of strong population growth, especially in the Mayan heartland of the Yucatan lowlands and in the central Valley of Mexico. Some centres are growing into the earliest cities of Mesoamerica, most notably at Monte Alban, in the west, and Teotihuacan, in the Valley of Mexico.

As well as physical expansion, these Mesoamerican societies experience continued cultural advance. Almost certainly by this date the first writing system has been developed, and the highly sophisticated Mesoamerican calendar, which involves two separate but inter-meshing dating systems, has appeared.

Next map, Mexico and Central America in 30 BCE