Originally published by Prentice-Hall in 1975.

"...This is very likely the best single volume on Middle America, and I recommend it highly. It should be an excellent text for introductory college courses." - American Anthropologist

"...should attract a wider readership including anthropologists and other scholars interested in that region. It is, I believe, the first work since Eric Wolf's Sons of the Shaking Earth, published in 1959, to attempt to cover the entire sequenceof Middle American cultural development from the time of the earliest aboriginal inhabitants up to the present day." - Science

"...should attract a wider readership including anthropologists and other scholars interested in that region. It is, I believe, the first work since Eric Wolf's Sons of the Shaking Earth, published in 1959, to attempt to cover the entire sequence of Middle American cultural development from the time of the earliest aboriginal inhabitants up to the present day." - Science

"...This is very likely the best single volume on Middle America, and I recommend it highly. It should be an excellent text for introductory college courses." - American Anthropologist