LISTA (Library & Information Science Abstracts), Ebsco’s free database, gets 29 hits for the search: mesoamerican or meso american. Many of these are book reviews, and might give you some useful ideas on what to order. If you are limiting to strictly a reference collection (handbooks, encyclopedias, etc., you can add those terms, for example: (mesoamerican OR meso american) and reference gets 5 hits. If you really want a comprehensive collection, you would no doubt want to try other words as well, such as Maya*, Aztec*, Olmec* etc. Several of those book reviews are for the Oxford Encyclopedia of Mesoamerican Cultures. 3 vols. Oxford Univ. Apr. 2001. c. 1500p. ed. by David Carrasco. illus. ISBN 0-19-510815-9. $395. Some of these refer back to a “...standard, landmark reference publication for Mesoamerica, the 16-volume Handbook of Middle American Indians, ... completed in 1976 and supplemented with thematic volumes during the 1980s”. Possibly these encyclopedias would be very helpful for checking references at the end of articles, to get more suggestions for titles.
If "price is no object", you could search Worldcat, the free web version of the enormous (60+ million records) OCLC database of library holdings in most major academic and public libraries (and many not so major ones). In advanced search, the title search mesoamerica* gets 911 hits, and keywords anywhere increases that to over 1600. You can even search by call number, which is a type of subject search. If you wanted to limit to "scholarly" items, or at least books more likely to be in academic libraries, you can browse through the list until you find one published by a university press – or even include "university press" in the advanced search for Keywords: mesoamerica* university press gets 12 hits, for example. You can then click on one of the titles to get the libraries that hold it, and click on one of them to display their catalog record with the call number. Most academic libraries use Library of Congress classification, and F1219... is the call number for books on Mesoamerican history and culture. Call numbers can be used as subject headings by looking for the pattern of where the "Cutter Numbers" for authors or titles start, for example: Prehistoric Mesoamerica / by Richard E.W. Adams is call number F1219.A22 1991, and when you try a few titles you will notice the pattern where .A22 is for the author Adams, etc.
Worldcat actually links you to individual libraries’ catalogs. In the Adams example above, if you click on University of Maryland’s catalog, you can go to the basic Search and scroll to Call Number search. F1219.Z gets you close to the more specific subjects, such as F1219.1.C35 S4 1991, Settlement archaeology of Cerro de las Mesas, Veracruz, Mexico / edited by Barbara L. Stark. You can also choose "Subject Beginning with...", and search the more familiar subject headings, starting with things like "Indians of Mexico..." and all of its subheadings. If you are near a large library, you could try its catalog under "Indians of Mexico – Bibliography" to get list of references, hopefully with some critical notes on those references.
The Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian has Links, including archives and libraries. Above all, if you are comfortable with Spanish, it would be wise to search the Mexican Government site, especially the Biblioteca Nacional and any other museo... sites that turn up in the www.gob.mx search engine.
