The civilizations of Mesoamerica to me are the coolest.  Half of my family was from Mexico and reading about Teotihuacan and the Mayan was cool especially to see how far their influence spread.  My family is from the northern part of Mexico so the regions were not exactly the same, but none the less.  I once met a lady who is a professor at Stanford University who deals with ancestral lineage.  She would study the people from indigenous places from Mexico to South America and see how pure to their region they were.  She studied the DNA and could trace back many generations.  I know there are some who are pure Mayan or Aztec and my biggest question is, how can they be pure? There has to be some kind of cutoff where the lineage stopped.  When spain conquered Mexico the language changed to spanish and people were mixed blooded.  She was able to figure out how and whom were pure.  The Maya has to be the most studied civilizations in the classical era because they were so intelligent and they built such awesome structures.  Tourist still flock to see the ruins, to see where they had all those sacrifices and the pyramids.  They were able to use mathematics to plot the cycles of planets and predict eclipses of the sun and the moon.  They made calendars and were able to calculate the length of the solar year.  Could the Roman Empire do that?  I bet Socrates may have been able to come up with something like that.  Mesoamerica Civs were pioneers and much like the others who came before them were able to flourish off the land and construct new ways to live.  Every civilization used slaves and had to conquer, if they hadn't then we would not be reading about them.  The Maya's influence spread throughout Mexico and inspired other civilizations, to see people still celebrate and remember them now is truly a testament to their great civilizations.