Through several millennia and up to the present, complex forms of indigenous belief and ritual have developed in Mesoamerica, the area between North America proper and the southern portion of isthmic Central America. The term Mesoamerica, whose connotation is at once geographical and cultural, is used to designate the area where these distinctive forms of high culture existed. There, through a long process of cultural transformation, periods of rise, fall, and recovery occurred. On the eve of the Spanish invasion (1519), Mesoamerica embraced what are now the central and southern parts of Mexico, as well as the nations of Guatemala, Belize, El Salvador, and some portions of Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica.

Distinctive forms of social organization began to develop in this area from, at the latest, the end of the second millennium BCE. Parallel to these social and economic structures, various forms of religion also flourished...