| A | B |
|---|
| isthmus | a narrow strip of land that connects two larger landmasses |
| tropical | a warm and rainy climate |
| Meso-America | a region that extends southeastward from central Mexico and includes the countries of Guatemala, El Salvador, and Belize and parts of Honduras and Nicaragua |
| Yucatan Peninsula | an area of dense jungle in southeastern Mexican, extending into the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea |
| slash-and-burn agriculture | relating to a type of agriculture in which patches of land are prepared for planting by cutting down and burning the natural vegetation |
| Chavin | an Andean culture that flourished between 900 and 200 B.C. |
| textile | a woven or knitted or cloth |
| Nazca | an ancient Andean culture that arose near what is now the southern coast of Peru and prospered from 200 B.C. to 600 A.D. |
| aquifer | an underground water source |
| Moche | an ancient culture that inhabited what is now the northern coast of Peru from A.D. 100 to 700 |
| Olmec | the earliest known Meso-American culture which flourished from 1200-400 B.C. and was centered along the Gulf Coast of what is now southern Mexico |
| mother culture | a culture that influences the customs and ideas of later cultures |
| Maya | a civilization of present-day southern Mexico and northern Central America, which reached its height from AD 250-900 |
| maize | a type of corn grown by native American civilizations |
| stele | a carved stone slab set upright in the ground usually commemorating a person or event |
| glyph | a symbol, usually carved or engraved, that represents a syllable or whole word; a symbolic picture used in Mayan writing |
| codex | a book of the type used by the Meso-American civilizations to record important historical events |
