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of the aztecs), about thirty different Mayan languages, the Zapotec and Mixtec languages of Oaxaca, and the Tarascan or Purépecha spoken in western Mexico.
The olmecs, who flourished between about 1200 and 400 b.c., are considered to have had the first complex society in the area, and it appears that they developed many of the cultural patterns that later became the hallmarks of Mesoamerican civilization. Other Mesoamerican groups adopted these patterns, adding their own distinctive characteristics.
See also
Belize; Guatemala; Maya Civilization
The origins of Mesopotamian archaeology lie in nineteenth-century adventurism, tempered by the practical intelligence and broad learning that was the Victorians’ defining hallmark. A handful of intrepid travelers (notably Pietro della Valle, L’Abbé de Beauchamp, and Karsten Niebuhr) had ventured through Mesopotamia in earlier centuries, stopping at nineveh, Babylon, and other sites whose identification survived in local folklore. Some brought back occasional inscriptions and other artifacts but, despite legends of buried treasure, none attempted any significant excavations.
A major turning point came in the first decades of the nineteenth century when Babylon, Nineveh, and a number of other Mesopotamian sites were systematically inspected and surveyed by Claudius Rich, a talented linguist who was the East India Company’s resident in Baghdad (in what is now Iraq). Rich’s accounts of his discoveries (1813, 1818, 1836, and 1839), and the collection of his finds bought by the british museum in 1825, inspired the first generation of Mesopotamian explorers. First in the field were the French, under paul-émile botta, who after brief soundings at Nineveh in December 1842 spent two seasons (1843–1844) excavating the Palace of Sargon II at Khorsabad (ancient Dur Sharrukin), the third of four Assyrian capitals (the others being Ashur, Kalhu [nimrud], and Nineveh). Botta was relatively well financed by the louvre Museum and approached his task with the discipline of a trained surgeon and naturalist, although not yet with any understanding of the principles of stratigraphy. Botta was succeeded by Victor Place, who led from 1852 to 1854.
The first British excavations were made by austen henry layard, who had set out overland from England in 1839 intending to reach Ceylon, but having been captivated by the Assyrian sites resolved to stay and dig. Eventually gaining the financial support of the British ambassador in Istanbul, Sir Stratford Canning, Layard, aged only 28, began excavating at Nimrud (ancient Kalhu, which he believed to be Nineveh) in November 1845. There he immediately came upon the palace of the ninth-century b.c. Assyrian King Ashurnasirpal II. During the next eight years Layard and his assistant Hormuzd Rassam uncovered no less than eight royal palaces, as well as temples and other imposing structures, whose sculpted bas-reliefs, ivory carvings, and cuneiform tablets (written in the then-still-undeciphered Assyrian language) were a revelation to Victorian Britain, whither the major finds were shipped.
Layard’s priorities, as prescribed by the British Museum, were “to obtain the largest possible number of well-preserved objects at the least possible outlay of time and money.” His method was equally direct: he dug trenches along the sides of the palace rooms to expose the whole of the carved stone slabs without removing the earth from the center. Consequently few of the chambers were fully explored and many small objects and other evidence were left or lost. There was no recognition in this method of the stratigraphic principles—rudimentary as they still were—now beginning to be observed in the excavation of European prehistoric sites. It did however provide enough trophies of art (including some three kilometers of sculpted wall reliefs), architecture, and inscriptions to sustain the British Museum’s grudging and inadequate support.
The initial phase of Assyrian excavation by
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