Ancient Mesoamerican polities are an important source of data for considerations of state development, despite internal debate over their size and complexity. We review complex political units, usually referred to as “states” and “empires,” in ancient Mesoamerica and reach the following conclusions: these polities tended to be hegemonic, rather than territorial, in composition; they melded ritual and political action; and they utilized the ruler as a symbol of the “body politic.” We also note the apparently larger size of most Maya polities as compared to other Mesoamerican city-states. Besides reviewing the commonalities among ancient Mesoamerican states, we also highlight the variation among these polities and the need to consider historic and archaeological data contextually in making interpretations of political structure.

Landscapes figure centrally in conceptions and writings about ancient Mesoamerica. This selective review considers four interrelated kinds of landscapes investigated archaeologically in Mesoamerica: ecology and land use, social history, ritual expression, and cosmologic meaning. The literature on each topic is large, and from its inception, Ancient Mesoamerica has contributed significantly. Discussion here focuses on how we got to where we are in Mesoamerican landscape archaeology, important current developments, and directions for the decades ahead.

In this article I consider recent research on urbanism in ancient Mesoamerica, especially over the past twenty years. I focus on the theoretical perspectives that archaeologists use to address cities, urbanism, and urbanization. I argue that despite some significant advances in how we understand urbanism, most research continues to be embedded within cultural evolutionist, functionalist, and elitist theoretical frameworks. I highlight approaches drawn from poststructural theory that hold promise for developing a more dynamic, complex, and culturally compelling view of Mesoamerican urbanism. Using examples from pre-Hispanic Oaxaca, I discuss how a focus on practice, social negotiation, and materiality draws attention to the actions of people within their social, cultural, and material settings rather than on abstract high-level forces such as cultural evolutionary structures or the functioning of urban centers within broader societies.

The role of human ecology in a Mesoamerican context requires both rigor and imagination to assess the sophistication and accomplishment of the many diverse groups sharing its varied resources. Three overlapping and complementary ecological orientations from recent literature found generally elsewhere—outside the culture area—are (1) resilience and vulnerability of communities and their landscapes, (2) economic tasking logics, and (3) complexity trajectories. Mesoamerica charted a unique economic, political, and ideological course when compared to the Old World, one significantly affected by its environmental opportunities and constraints. Brief attention is given to lessons learned.

A survey of the Mesoamerican geoarchaeological literature published from 1990 to the present—in celebration of Ancient Mesoamerica's first 20-year katun anniversary—shows the full spectrum of small, focused projects to broad-range programs. Some scholars defend subdisciplinary boundaries and only do their research as physical science. Others combine natural with social science investigations, and some delve well into the humanities. I suggest here that the more successful programs are the latter because I believe the human experience in ancient Mesoamerica does not fit neatly into one or two of our Western disciplinary categories. Hopefully the next katun can be characterized by more open inquiry including the fullest range of scholarship from the natural sciences, through the social sciences, and embracing the humanities. The growth of new “bottom-up” approaches and post-structural theory—often including agency, practice theory, and resistance—help broaden inquiry and therefore bode well for the next katun.

Research in Mesoamerican ethnohistory has made great strides over the past few decades. Innovations and refinements in the field follow several themes, including increased availability and more sophisticated interpretations of pictorial codices, the bringing to light of additional documentary materials and their translations, an increase in research on colonial life, a continuing interest in the Spanish conquest itself, and the development of particularly useful interpretations and perspectives from anthropology, history, and art history. Building on these themes, ethnohistory is in a position to further develop documentary analyses and text translations, encourage multidisciplinary and comparative research endeavors, and generate more sophisticated models for understanding culture change.

This essay surveys recent trends in studies of Mesoamerican visual culture. Visual culture is defined here as more than an inclusive art history. I outline a tradition of approaches and methods in visual culture studies, arguing that this tradition pays particular attention to the reception and use of objects, as well as to their place in ancient economies. Several current trends in Mesoamerican studies, especially Postclassic period world-systems approaches and Classic period Maya courtly studies, have been particularly fecund strategies for visual culture studies. Other major trends in the field include studies of the symbolism of architecture and urban planning as well as performance studies. The insistence on economic contexts, the desire to capture indigenous visualities, and the need to situate the visual experience in larger cultural phenomena all bode well for future interdisciplinary work in visual cultural studies.

This article presents some of the authors' perspectives on the past 20 years of work that applies the results of research in historical linguistics to the understanding of the histories and cultural practices of pre-Columbian Mesoamericans. It focuses on major cultural transformations to which both historical linguistic and archaeological data can contribute, such as the spread of agriculture, and migrations in Mesoamerican prehistory. It also addresses major culture-historical studies on narrower topics: on Nawa and its place in the prehistory of Mexico, in particular confirming standard views that Nawas were immigrants into Mesoamerica; on Archaic and Formative period interactions involving Oto-Mangeans, which is work that is largely still to be done; on the prospects for work on long-distance contacts between Mesoamerica and North America; on the contributions of historical linguistics in Mesoamerican epigraphy; and on the value and prospects of updating the methodology of glottochronology.

Despite a long history of contributions by physical anthropologists to our understanding of the Mesoamerican past, it has only been over the past few decades that a closer relationship has developed between bioarchaeology and archaeology in the region. The next step should be the integration of bioarchaeologists in the planning as well as the execution of projects. In this review of the present status of bioarchaeology in Mesoamerica we examine its contributions to several broad topics, emphasizing its growing theoretical component and the development of new methods like isotopic analysis, and suggest some lines of inquiry for future investigations.

The two decades since the publication of Regional Perspectives on the Olmec have seen a great expansion of basic archaeological research in the “Olmec heartland” region of Mexico's southern Gulf lowlands as well as important new work on Formative period interregional interaction and its effects on local economies and polities. Olmec research, however, has not achieved as prominent a place as it merits in comparative research on the evolution of social complexity. In this essay I review this work and make some suggestions for future research directions.

In the past 20 years, what were once considered specialized auxiliary subdisciplines or analytical approaches such as bioarchaeology, paleozoology, subterranean archaeology, and material culture studies have become central to all research due to refinements of their analytic tools. Meanwhile, building on earlier progress in epigraphy, work on the Classic period truly has become historical archaeology. These advances provide a much greater understanding of ancient Maya ecology, economy, and politics and insights into the details, not just trends, in culture history. Realization of this potential, however, is imperiled by problems in research design and interpretation. Project structures rarely allows for complete and independent application of these enhanced fields, while the traditional elements of ceramic classification and chronology have not kept pace. The erratic sample of both Maya lowland and highland regions needs to addressed, rather than glossed over by extrapolations or assumptions about interaction and expansionism. Institutional structures and financial limitations have led to many superficial studies masked by quasi-theoretical terminologies. Constructive solutions, most exemplified in some current projects, include the obligation to try to apply all available techniques and approaches. To make that feasible, larger projects should be fragmented into multi-institutional collaborations. Greater emphasis must be given to classifications and excavations that generate ceramic microchronologies. Above all, we must investigate the extensive unstudied or understudied regions. Finally, most challenging is the need to collectively confront academic structures that encourage rapid, incomplete studies and discourage more substantial publications and long term multi-institutional research.

Aztec culture provides a gateway to Mesoamerican studies because it represents the connecting point between the pre-Hispanic past and the globalized present. Current research on the Aztecs comes from several disciplines: anthropology, history, art history, religion, and literature. The nearly fifty articles on the Aztecs published by Ancient Mesoamerica since its inception in 1990 encompass the various branches of Aztec scholarship. In this article we discuss major themes in recent scholarship on the Aztecs: environment and subsistence, settlement and demography, economy, politics, and social relations, ideology and masterworks, and interregional relations.