Two Independent Cradles: Mesoamerica and the Andes

Two of the world's handful of truly independent, or "pristine," centers of civilization arose in the Americas: Mesoamerica, stretching from central Mexico to Costa Rica, and the central Andes, running along the Pacific coast and highlands of present-day Peru and Bolivia. The Mesoamerican Preclassic, or Formative, period runs conventionally from around 2000 BCE, when settled village life and pottery became widespread, to about 250 CE, and is subdivided into Early, Middle, and Late phases. Andean prehistory follows a different scheme, devised by John H. Rowe in 1962 from ceramic seriation in the Ica Valley, which divides the sequence into the Preceramic or Archaic, the Formative or Initial Period, and a recurring alternation of pan-Andean "horizons" of wide stylistic diffusion with fragmented "intermediate periods." Neither chronology depends on the other, and no credible archaeological or genetic evidence links the rise of civilization in Mesoamerica to that in the Andes, or either of them to the civilizations of the Old World; each developed its own agriculture, architecture, and religious symbolism from local antecedents.