3,000 years, one map
Mesoamerica from 1500 BCE to the fall of Tenochtitlan in 1521. Cities rise out of the terrain, reach their height, and dim. Soft light marks shared culture; dashed rings mark political control; lines mark documented relationships.
The core sample on the right is drawn to true scale. Watch how little of it the Mexica occupy.
Loading terrain and research data…
What the map is showing you
Every city on the map is a stepped pyramid that grows and brightens toward its apogee, dims as it declines, and is left as dark basalt once abandoned. By 1521 the map is littered with the past while a few centres still glow — that is the point. The exam asks about the Olmecs, the Maya, Teotihuacan and the Mexica as if they were a sequence; here you can see they overlapped, and how much of the story was already over when Tenochtitlan was founded.
The core sample is drawn at true scale, oldest at the bottom. Its four lanes — Gulf, Central Mexico, Oaxaca and Maya — are shaded by how prominent the most important city in each region was in every year, so the column is itself a chart of where the action was. Playback runs at a constant speed: the whole story takes about a hundred seconds, and the Triple Alliance lasts about three of them.
Soft light on the ground is shared culture, never a border. A dashed ring is political control, and only ever appears around a state or alliance that exercised it. A raised line is a documented relationship — trade, a resident community, a war — with the certainty of the evidence shown in the panel when you tap either end.
Sources & caveats
Dataset last reviewed September 3, 2026. It separates archaeological and cultural traditions, named cities, spheres of influence, political alliances and modern periodizations, and never draws a cultural tradition as a country: there is no “Olmec country” and no “Maya Empire” on this map.
Every light pool and ring is approximate. Cultural regions are drawn as soft light with no edge; political control as a dashed ring around the centre that exercised it. Their sizes are provisional, derived from where the documented sites are, and are under specialist review — the research package ships no reviewed boundary polygons yet, and the Triple Alliance’s tributary provinces are not drawn at all until it does.
The relief is stylised: heights are exaggerated so the highlands read at a glance, and the coastline is modern. Neither carries a historical claim.
Dates are shown with the precision the evidence supports. “c.” means approximate; a range means the event is bounded, not that it lasted that long.
Geographic data used
- Terrain
- Terrain Tiles (terrarium), AWS Open Data / Mapzen — Elevation: NASA SRTM and USGS GMTED2010 via the AWS Terrain Tiles.
- Terrain
- Natural Earth 1:50m land polygons — Made with Natural Earth.
- Sites and chronology
- Natural Earth 1:10m physical vectors · Natural Earth contributors / NACIS · Public domain
Optional recommended credit: Made with Natural Earth. - Sites and chronology
- Natural Earth I with shaded relief · Natural Earth contributors / NACIS · Public domain
Optional recommended credit: Made with Natural Earth. - Sites and chronology
- NASA Shuttle Radar Topography Mission Global 1 arc second V003 · NASA JPL / NASA EOSDIS LP DAAC / USGS · U.S. public domain / openly shared without restriction
Scholarly citation recommended: NASA JPL (2013), NASA SRTM Global 1 arc second, DOI 10.5067/MEASURES/SRTM/SRTMGL1.003. - Sites and chronology
- Continuo de Elevaciones Mexicano · Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía (INEGI) · INEGI terms of free use
Fuente: INEGI, Continuo de Elevaciones Mexicano; include product version and disclose transformations. - Sites and chronology
- Zonas Arqueológicas abiertas al público · INAH, Dirección de Operación de Sitios · Términos de Libre Uso MX
Name the dataset and INAH, give the source URL, and state the consultation date. - Sites and chronology
- Wikidata archaeological-site points · Wikimedia community / Wikimedia Foundation · CC0 1.0
Optional recommended credit: Data from Wikidata. - Sites and chronology
- Electronic Atlas of Ancient Maya Sites subset · Walter R. T. Witschey and Clifford T. Brown; Data Basin distribution · CC BY 3.0
Walter R. T. Witschey and Clifford T. Brown, Electronic Atlas of Ancient Maya Sites (2010), plus the Data Basin source. - Sites and chronology
- Northern Guatemala lidar-derived Maya features · Marcello Canuto, Francisco Estrada-Belli, Thomas Garrison, Stephen Houston, and collaborators / Dryad · CC0 1.0
Scholarly citation of the dataset DOI and authors is strongly recommended. - Sites and chronology
- Lidar Survey of Middle Usumacinta Region, Mexico · Takeshi Inomata / NCALM / OpenTopography · CC BY 4.0
Inomata, T. (2022), Lidar Survey of Middle Usumacinta Region, Mexico, NCALM, distributed by OpenTopography, DOI 10.5069/G95B00NF.
The full research package — sources, per-record confidence, review checklist — is in the site’s repository.
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