Cultivation of maize, the fundamental food crop of the New World, dates back at far as 2500 B.C. About a thousand years later, settled village life developed in Mexico, presumably as better and more productive strains of maize evolved. Not long before the Christian era monumental cult centers began to take form in such places as the Guatemalan highlands (Mayas) and the central Mexican plateau (Toltecs). What archaeologists call the “classic” stage of the Amerindian cultures of Central America emerged by about A.D. 300 and lasted for about six hundred years. During this time, Mayan and Toltec temples attained vast size and systematic elaboration. The Mayas developed an accurate calendar and a from of writing which scholars today can partly decipher. Priestly control and management of society seem clear; but the details of the ideas and myths, religious principles, and administrative organization by which the effort of ordinary farmers was mobilized to raise the great temples, and how expert stone masons and other artisans were maintained, cannot now be known.