The Virtual Mesoamerican Archive (VMA) is a portal site designed to offer students, faculty, and other serious learners an alternative to Google, which will produce more than a million and a half search results when, for example, the word "Aztec" is searched. Our intention is to help you gain quick and accurate search results, harvesting quality materials from the websites of collaborating institutions and individuals. This site is being built on a shoestring budget and is growing only gradually, so please forgive any typographical errors or omissions of obviously relevant material that might appear here, and if you would be interesting in helping to underwrite the project, please contact Stephanie Wood (swood@uoregon.edu).

The VMA includes images of three dimensional cultural heritage materials, photographs from ancient and historical settlements, and reproductions of manuscripts (see the Digitized Materials database). The VMA currently targets materials relating to the Mesoamerican cultures of the period 1800 B.C.E. through 1800 C.E. Thus, we include primary source materials that illuminate life for indigenous peoples in the region stretching from modern Mexico south to Honduras from formative times through the late Spanish-colonial period. See our Editorial Policy page for more information about our selection and harvesting methods.

The Virtual Mesoamerican Archive was conceived by Stephanie Wood and Judith Musick and constructed with the assistance of our staff at the Wired Humanities Project (WHP) at the University of Oregon. We gratefully acknowledge the Center for the Study of Women in Society, the College of Arts and Sciences, and the Vice-President for Research at the University of Oregon for their generous funding of the WHP, making this site possible. We especially appreciate the vision of Vice-President Richard Linton, who has recognized the need for a humanities computing center here at the University of Oregon. We would also like to express a special thank you to Ryan Clark, Ginny White, and William Henderson for their graphic designs, database construction, and web interface work, and to Ariel Vaughn, for her many hours of labor entering data and her careful attention to detail. Shannon Mudge, a former Graduate Research Fellow, provided considerable help in the expansion of the scholars database, as did our intern (2006-07), Alyssa Engelberg. Finally, we wish to acknowledge another talented intern, Kristin V. Landau, who compiled a very thoughtful list of contributions for our websites and articles database (2007-08).

Advisory Board of the VMA

• Aguilar, Manuel, Associate Professor of Art History, California State University, Los Angeles
• Haskett, Robert, Professor of History, University of Oregon
• Leibsohn, Dana, Professor of Art History, Smith College
• Máynez Vidal, María del Pilar Isabel, Linguistics Professor, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México
• Smith, Michael E., Professor of Anthropology, School of Human Evolution & Social Change, Arizona State University
• Musick, Judith, Director, Wired Humanities Project, University of Oregon
• Smith, Michael
• Wood, Stephanie, Associate Director, Wired Humanties Project, University of Oregon

If you are a scholar of Mesoamerican cultures and societies, whether pre-Columbian or colonial, and you might be interested in joining the advisory board, please bring this to the attention of Stephanie Wood, swood@uoregon.edu. We seek a diverse group of specialists with different temporal, cultural, thematic and disciplinary interests, whether living and working in modern Mesoamerica or in other parts of the world.