40 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 146 
again it is central Mexico that directs the destiny of southeastern 
Mesoamerica. 
It is not until the abandonment of Chichen Itza and the opening of 
the Mayapan Phase, however, that there is any evidence in the Maya 
area of Mexican settlement patterns, that is, of urbanism. Chichen 
may possibly have been a city, but no survey which could determine 
this has, to our knowledge, been carried out there. In the Late Post- 
Classic, Mayapan was a walled town with a dense population (Jones, 
1952), and so was the spectacularly located walled site of Tulum 
(Sanders, 1960, pp. 212-218) on the east coast of the Yucatan penin- 
sula. We know from post-Conquest documents (e.g., Tozzer, 1941, 
p. 230) that Mayapan was a militaristic despotism in which a handful 
of Mexicanized overlords held sway over much of the peninsula by 
holding Maya tribal chiefs and their families as hostages to exact 
tribute from surrounding provinces; it was these who inhabited the 
town. 
Thoroughly defensible sites are located on strategic hilltops over 
most of the highland country of southeastern Mesoamerica, and we 
think it justifiable to consider the Late Post-Classic, to which these 
are assigned, as a thoroughly militaristic period. Some of these hilltop 
posts, such as Mixco Vie jo or Iximche in the Guatemalan highlands, 
are obviously based on central Mexican models, with typically Mexi- 
can double temples, ballcourts, and other buildings surrounded on all 
sides by tremendous ravines. 
Sanguinary activities of a similar cast were taking place in Oaxaca, 
where the unscrupulous and warlike Mixtec took over the more 
promising valleys from the Zapotecs. The marvelous Mixtec art 
style, however, with its finely painted codices, turquoise mosaics, 
and superb goldwork, really belongs with the cultures of northern 
Puebla and central Mexico in general (Nicholson, 1961). Since the 
expanding Aztec empire had little success with the Mixtec or Zapo- 
tec, its conquests did not reach very far into southeastern Meso- 
america; while the province of Soconusco, on the Pacific coast of 
Chiapas and Guatemala, was added to the Aztec state, Aztec arms 
had never even penetrated into the Maya area stricto sensu by the 
time of the Spanish Conquest. 
Several conclusions can be reached by this tentative survey of 
southeastern Mesoamerica. One may see that there have been two 
great centers of diffusion throughout its cultural development, one 
within and one without the area as defined. The first of these, and 
the most ancient, was the lowland region of southern Veracruz and 
western Tabasco, the nucleus of a diffusion network that ran mainly 
