4. THE PRECLASSICAL OR FORMATIVE PERIOD.
The first stage of the history of ancient Mexico is known as the PRECLASSIC or formative period, and lasted approximately for six thousand years; that is, it starts in the year 6,000 B.C., and extends to about 200 BCE. This period is very long and covers the great effort made by our ancestors to pass from being nomadic hunter-gatherers, primitive savages, until they formed small villages and developed an efficient food system; an effective health system; a complex educational system; a system of social organization and a legal system. They had, moreover, a refined system of values and philosophical, ethical, moral, aesthetic and religious knowledge that allowed them to lay strong foundations over which one of the most important and ancient civilizations that remains alive to date, despite the aggression it has suffered over the past five centuries, was developed.
This valuable civilizing infrastructure that somehow remains alive and present today in contemporary Mexico and that the "imaginary Mexico"[1] of Guillermo Bonfil Batalla,[2] is reluctant to recognize, turns out to be the most important heritage bequeathed to us by the Old Grandparents of the Anahuac and is the deep foundation for all that we are today.
The relationship with nature and working with the land, especially with the milpa[3] invention, allowed the peoples of ancient Mexico
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- ↑ Thesis that sustains the existence of "two Méxicos". One "profound", rooted in the ancient time of the Anahuac and another "imaginary" that arises with the invasion and colonization
- ↑ Guillermo Bonfil Batalla (Mexico City 1935-1991), graduated from the Escuela Nacional de Antropología e Historia. Mexican Anthropologist and Ethnologist. He was Director General of the National Institute of Anthropology and History, and Director General of Culturas Populares. He founded the National Museum of Popular Culture. At his death, he was serving as national coordinator of the seminar for cultural studies of the National Council for Culture and the Arts (Conaculta). For him the ethnological research was inextricably linked to the transformation of social reality.
- ↑ Milpa is a crop-growing system used throughout Mesoamerica. Its primary productive components are corn, beans and squash, (with the inclusion of chili on some regions). It is not simply a cornfield, as defined simplistically by dictionaries. The word milpa derives from the Nahuatl milli, that is, a planted plot of land, and bread, on top of, in. It literarily means “what is planted of top of the field.
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