The Development of Complex Societies in Ancient Mexico

Between 9,000 and 4,000 years ago, most of Mexico was inhabited mainly by hunter-foragers who lived in small bands that moved with the seasons to exploit cactus fruits, deer herds, nuts, and the hundreds of other plant and animal species in their range, depending on the season. Since these bands were small in size and never stayed in one place for a sufficient period of time to have much long-term effect on the plant and animal populations on which they subsisted, the hunter-foragers’ overall impact on their environment was low. A few groups along the margins of the lake in the Valley of Mexico may have been sedentary villagers, as were some groups along the coasts, and their role in the domestication of plants and animals and the eventual spread of agriculture is unclear. Some researchers suggest, however, that by about 4,000 years ago, maize cob size had become large enough that people over large areas of the Mexican highlands could subsist mainly on maize.

The recent re-dating of some of the supposedly earliest domesticated maize in Mesoamerica (Ancient Mexico) to about 3500 B.C. raises the possibility that initial agriculture evolved out of intensified foraging by groups of people who were relatively sedentary, perhaps living all or most of the year in one or a few places, and that they were perhaps even in the process of developing social differences (social hierarchy) that increased the intensity of their foraging. However maize was domesticated, and by whom, maize appears to have reached sufficient productivity to permit the village-farming way of life soon after about 2000 B.C., and agricultural communities appeared at about this time in many different areas.

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