In 1570, Mercati wrote Metallotheca Vaticana, opus posthumum, in which he argued that before the use of iron, stone tools might have been made out of flint to be used “in the madness of war.” Mercati believed that fossils were organic in origin and that many of the flints called ceraunia, or “thunderstones,” had been fashioned by hand and not by natural forces such as lightning. He cited biblical and classical sources, such as Lucretius, for the use of stone tools. In making these arguments he would have been familiar with the ethnographic specimens from the New World sent as presents to the vatican.

Mercati’s ideas were not accepted by the learned world, and his book was not published until over 100 years after his death. Its appearance prompted the French scholar Antoine de Jussieu to write a paper to the Académie des Sciences on the possible human origins of stone tools and ethnographic comparisons in 1723. Mercati’s ideas were echoed by English aniquarians william dugdale in the seventeenth century and john frere in the late eighteenth century.

Tim Murray

References

Ceram, C. 1967. Gods, Graves and Scholars. Harmondsworth, UK: Pelican.

Mesoamerica

Coined in 1943 by the scholar Paul Kirchoff, the name Mesoamerica is used to describe the culture area of the ancient civilizations of central and southern mexico and northern Central America. The name was partly based on analogy with the term mesopotamia, since the geographic region involved lies between the great landmasses of North and South America.

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Mesoamerican Archaeological Sites

More than a geographic entity, however, Mesoamerica was a cultural entity. The peoples inhabiting the area shared a great many cultural traits that very clearly separated them from the peoples to their north and south. These traits included subsistence based on agriculture (the Mesoamerican cultigens maize, beans, and squash being the most important crops); cities with ceremonial precincts containing temple-pyramids; a fatalistic religion with a largely shared cosmology and pantheon of gods; the practice of human sacrifice; a ritual calendar of 260 days; and a ballgame played with a solid rubber ball.

Although Mesoamerican cultures shared many cultural traits, there were also differences among them. First and foremost of these differences was language: dozens of different languages were spoken by the various peoples of Mesoamerica, including Nahuatl (the language