Mesoamerican Influence

Introduction The study of the interaction between Mesoamerica and the North American indigenous populations has been conducted by archaeologists for generations now. Recent research expands upon the movements of the North American populations in the Mesoamerican territories back to the Archaic Period (Huckell). This research also expands understanding and realigning previous beliefs held by earlier archaeologists about the origins of Mesoamerican artifacts excavated in the Southwest. Archaeological evidence indicates that, with the exception the traditions of the maritime northwest, Artic, and the far north, the flow of movement within the entire North American population reinforces that concept that no one culture is left in an isolated bubble
Recent studies in the origins of the first cultivated maize has pushed back the traditional time of its emergence in Central Balsas River Valley, in southwestern Mexico around “8700 calendrical years B.P.”. This date arrives from stratigraphy and the radiocarbon dating of an assembly of stone tools which includes handstones and milling stone bases where traces of starch grain and phytolith are obtained during from the excavation at Xihuatoxtla Shelter, (Ranere,5014). Despite this earlier time of cultivation, the use of maize did not reach prominence in Mesoamerica for thousands of years, while its cultivation and even thousands longer to reach cultivation in the North American traditions. Studies into sites like Cerro Juanaguena in Chihuahua, Mexico, which straddles the Mesoamerican and American Southwest cultures, shows that maize cultivation has not occurred until 3000 B.P. (Hard,1661). Sites like Old Corn in the southeastern Plateau, McEuen Cave in the Gila River valley, and Clearwater near the Santa Cruz River in the Sonoran Desert, show an emergence of maize cultivation around 2100 cal B.C., (Merrill). While a dispersal from the sites like Cerro Juanaguena could be viewed as the source of movement of maize into the American Southwest, due to the relative proximity of the two areas, yet current genetic studies of the early maize variants in the American Southwest finds that they match those that would have come from a Pacific dispersal, (Merrill). The entrance of maize in the Mississippi Valley at the site of Cahokia, where storage in holding pits occurred, shows to be around 170 B.C., (Riely,490), and by A.D. 600 long distant trade of furs enabled the diffusion of maize to reach all the way to the subarctic climate of Canada, (Boyd). With this slow yet wide spread use of maize Mesoamerica has left a invaluable mark upon the North American