Téenek

The Téenek, better known as the Huastec, are a Maya people of Mexico's Gulf coast, concentrated along the Pánuco River in the Huasteca. Their autonym means people from here, and their language was the first branch to split from Proto-Mayan, perhaps in the early second millennium BCE, making them the northernmost outlier of the Maya world.

Settled there since roughly 1000 BCE, they built step-pyramids and carved standing stone figures, and their painted pottery and shell work drew admiration from neighbouring peoples. Their peak came in the Postclassic, after Teotihuacan's fall.

Around 1450 the Aztec emperor Moctezuma I conquered them; Huastec towns paid tribute but kept much self-rule. Spanish conquest between 1519 and the 1530s ended that order; the friar Andrés de Olmos later wrote the first European grammar of their language, and many Huastecs were shipped into slavery in the Caribbean.