Mesoamerican Archaeology. Группа авторов
Archaeologists still find the concept of Mesoamerica useful because it allows them to connect cultures which, through extensive interaction, developed a common set of values and practices that continued to develop over a long period of time, from at least 3500 years before European contact.
We can thus reimagine the Mesoamerican trait list as indicating shared practices in a number of distinct social domains. The most important of these domains are (1) the economy, (2) philosophical and scientific understanding of how the world works, and (3) social differentiation (Table 1.2). What we see today as a continuous Mesoamerican tradition is the result of generations of practices by people working within the bounds of what they understood to be both possible and desirable. In this sense, Mesoamerica had a beginning point, a period when the practices and beliefs we recognize as Mesoamerican emerged. Gordon R. Willey (1966: 78) long ago identified Mesoamerica’s origins with the time period beginning around 2000 BCE when village life dependent on corn agriculture took form, in settlements where social stratification first becomes evident. Many of the practices identified as typical of Mesoamerican culture are expressions of social differences that first took emerged in early villages. This volume begins coverage of Mesoamerica at this moment of early village life and emergent social stratification (Chapters 2 and 3).
Table 1.2 Archaeologically identifiable defining traits of Mesoamerica, organized according to social and cultural practices
| Arena of practice | Traits from original definition of Mesoamerica |
|---|---|
| Subsistence production | Agriculture based on corn, beans, and squash, dependent on human labor using digging stick |
| Agricultural intensification including raised fields (chinampas) | |
| Plants raised for specialized uses: cacao, amaranth, maguey | |
| Corn processed by soaking with lime and grinding on metates | |
| Long-distance exchange | Valuables such as obsidian, cacao, and jade |
| Cosmology and ritual | Numbers 4, 5, 7, 9, 13, and 20 significant |
| shared calendars: solar year of 18 months of 20 days plus a set of 5 final days; 260-day ritual cycle of 13 day names combined with 20 numbers | |
| Use of writing and positional mathematics to record astronomy and calendar, in paper and deer skin books (codices) and more permanent media | |
| Ritual warfare, special warrior costumes, and human sacrifice | |
| Specialized architecture for ritual: ball courts, temples, observatories, including use of stucco | |
| Social stratification | Status expressed in costumes, including gender specific forms of dress, role-specific headdresses, warrior outfits, and ornaments such as lip plugs, pyrite mirrors, and polished obsidian mirrors and earplugs |
In any social world, intentional and unreflexive actions carried out by people, acting along with other humans and in concert with nonhumans (animals, things, and forces beyond the human, like rainfall), produce, reproduce, and transform structures. People reproduce and transform social structures through their choices among possible ways to act that they see open to them. In the process of exercising their perceived ability to act (or agency), reproducing and transforming structure, people create and add to individual and group histories, shaping the constraints and possibilities of agents in succeeding generations. People make their choices of action, and understand their implications, based on their philosophies of being (ontologies), their understandings of the nature of the origins of things (cosmologies), and their broader view of relations among all beings. In many ways, the most distinctive aspects of Mesoamerica belong to this philosophical domain.
Mesoamerican Philosophies of Being and Becoming
Mesoamerican peoples were agriculturalists, living in socially differentiated communities, understanding themselves to exist in specific kinds of relations to other humans and nonhuman entities and forces. A high number of Mesoamerican practices relate to ideas about how the universe was formed and persists and to the practices humans needed to carry out as a result of those understandings.
Social difference itself was intimately bound up with propositions about the nature of the universe and the relations people had to forces and beings beyond the human. While maize agriculture was not always the single basis of Mesoamerican economies, maize became a defining part of Mesoamerican ideas about the nature of being, or ontology. In oral traditions the survival of maize spirits was attributed to the actions of nobles and the supernatural beings they claimed as their predecessors (Monaghan 1990; Taube 1985, 1989). Narratives about maize formed part of Mesoamerican beliefs and practices concerning the relationship between human beings, supernatural beings, and ancestors, part of the ontologies of Mesoamerican peoples.
Ontologies and cosmologies portrayed the universe as composed of multiple domains, with the world of contemporary human life adjacent to others inhabited by nonhuman entities and ancestors. Access to these otherworlds took place through rituals, using certain pathways, particularly features that pierced boundaries with an underworld (caves, wells) or that rose up into the upperworld (Gillespie 1993). Four world directions defined by the movements of the sun framed this shared geography. The limits of the east and west directions were marked on the horizon by the northern and southern extreme positions of the sun on the solstices in December and June and the midpoint position of the sun on the equinoxes in March and September (see Aveni 1980).
Cities, towns, and villages incorporated buildings that were stages for Mesoamerican rituals: ball courts, temples, and astronomical observatories. These were often juxtaposed with unmodified features of the surrounding countryside, such as the alignment of the Temple of the Moon at Teotihuacan with the mountain Cerro Gordo or the placement of the Pyramid of the Sun over a cave (see Chapter 4). Structures with distinct functions, such as ancestral shrines, could be placed in regular directional relationships to other buildings (see Chapter 7). Site planning embedded the built environment within a cosmological order. Ceremonies and rituals in these places enacted philosophies of being and reproduced them.
The Economy
Adjacent to structures that were dedicated sites of ceremonies and rituals, in villages, towns, and cities, other groups of buildings formed residential spaces, household compounds with associated exterior spaces, courtyards, or patios. Mesoamerican archaeologists in the 1970s and 1980s developed a new focus on life in such settings: household archaeology (Wilk and Ashmore 1988; see Chapters 5, 6, 12, and 14). Residential compounds were the workplaces of the population, not just their private dwellings. Here, people carried out the activities necessary for their subsistence and also engaged in more specialized craft production.
Agriculture was the basis of Mesoamerican society. Farming depended on human labor; there were no large domestic animals. People improved production through irrigation, the construction of terraces on slopes, and raised fields in swampy areas, all based on human labor. They cultivated a variety of plants that left behind burned seeds, pollen, and other detectable residues, including maize (corn), beans, squash, chili peppers, fruits, and tubers. In the dry highlands other seed-bearing plants, amaranth and chenopods, were important. In some parts