Mesoamerican Archaeology. Группа авторов
humid lowlands root crops, particularly manioc (or yuca) were important. The primary sources of animal protein suggested by animal bones recovered by archaeologists include land animals such as deer and peccary, hunted with blowguns, snares, and nets. Birds, especially waterfowl such as ducks, and fish were important as well. Domesticated dogs and turkeys provided protein in certain places and times.
Foods and beverages prepared from specific plants were widely used in religious rituals and social ceremonies. Chia, a seed plant, was used by the Mexica (the proper name for the group often called Aztecs) to make images of supernatural beings displayed and consumed in ritual. Cacao drinks were made from the seeds from pods of a tree growing in wet lowlands. An alcoholic drink the Mexica called pulque was made from fermented hearts of maguey, a succulent plant cultivated in drier areas. Honey from native stingless bees was used by the lowland Maya to brew another alcoholic drink, balche, consumed in ritual. Cultivation of these plants and distinctive techniques of food processing, preparation, and serving constituted a distinctive Mesoamerican cuisine (Coe 1994). Through their preparation and consumption, residents in these places reproduced their historical connections to ancestors and nonhuman forces.
Household compounds were also the site of craft production. Production and circulation of goods has been reconstructed using techniques that create a chemical profile of the raw materials used, such as obsidian, iron ore, and jade or the mixtures of clay and other materials that characterize pottery workshops. As a result, scholars know that craft products such as pottery, stone tools, and woven textiles were redistributed within the local community and beyond through a combination of social ties and markets.
Participation in craft production was more than simply a source of economic wealth. Throughout the history of Mesoamerica, it was intimately related to the constitution of personhood. Practice of a craft helped define a person’s place within their society (Hendon 2010). In the most highly stratified Mesoamerican societies, craft specializations were shared by residents of neighboring house compounds or whole communities, contributing to their identification as a group.
Social Identities and Differences
Residential compounds could be large enough to house multiple generations of related families or multiple families related as patrons and clients. The greatest intensity of production, and the most diversity, took place in or near larger and more lavish compounds that are interpreted as residences of rulers and other nobles. These were sites of the structural reproduction of Mesoamerican economies and forms of political structure through the organization of domestic labor (Hendon 1996, 1997). As such, they were also the focus of ceremonies marking changes in the status of members of the group over their life course, through which people’s identities were created and reconstituted.
In the material remains that archaeologists study, one moment of the life course is especially visible, marked by monuments, tombs, and temples: the transformation of living members of the group into ancestors following death. From the Formative period on, in many Mesoamerican societies the remains of the dead were placed near the buildings occupied by the living. Social commemoration of other points in the lives of inhabitants of house compounds is also indicated by residues archaeologists can detect and descriptions in texts from before and after colonization. Experiences of each person during life can be described based on the remains of their bodies (Chapter 14). Events anticipating and accompanying childbirth and marking moments in the maturation of children into adults often involved feasts. Feasting is evident archaeologically in the remains of vessels and residues of foods consumed and through the discarded tools used in such events, notably small-scale clay figurines, some transformed into musical instruments.
Archaeologists argue that caring for the bodies of deceased members of a group and keeping them near the living was a means for Mesoamerican people to create historical continuity between generations, allowing ancestors to remain engaged with their descendants (Gillespie 2001, 2002; Hendon 2000; McAnany 1995). Distinct practices of caring for the dead employed by separate groups would have contributed to differentiation within societies, like that noted between residents of individual household compounds at Teotihuacan (Chapter 5).
A select body of people who claimed legitimacy in exercising powers of governance emerged through exclusive practices in everyday life, including use of distinctive cuisine, dress, and architectural ornamentation. Together, these practices and the materials employed in them constituted a high culture (Joyce 2000c). This involved using more things made by skilled craft workers using rare and valuable materials like jade, rare feathers, fine textiles, and, in the Postclassic period, metal alloys as well as the consumption of distinctive foods that others were restricted from using in everyday life.
Throughout their history, Mesoamerican societies used some of these materials as items of wealth and standards of value, reflected in economic, social, and political practices that were included in the original trait list. Craft specialists worked obsidian, jade and other greenstones, and feathers into ritual regalia that could be adapted as signs of distinction between social segments or insignia of specific offices and became parts of high culture. Scribes, astronomers, and calendar specialists developed ways to record indigenous wisdom. Histories of political dynasties recorded using these technologies also formed part of high culture.
Images carved in stone and painted in manuscripts provide records of marriages, wars, visits involving the offering of tribute and gifts, and ritual performances. Many are accompanied by texts specifying the time, place, and people involved. They are preserved on durable stone monuments dating as early as the late Formative period that hint at the broader existence of records written on perishable materials like the paper and deerskin in use when Europeans invaded the region. In the sixteenth century, European colonizers collected some manuscripts while destroying many others. Literate Mesoamerican people continued to produce historical texts after colonization, rapidly developing mastery of European script and working to preserve ancestral knowledge (Chapter 10).
Mathematics, Calendars, and Writing
The development of calendars, mathematical notation, and writing served to represent the distinctive perspectives of Mesoamerican peoples, making these the most diagnostic features of these societies. Indigenous calendars in use in the early sixteenth century shared a basic structure. All were based on counting sets of individual days. The earliest recorded date preserved is on a late Middle Formative monument from San Jose Mogote in what today is Oaxaca. However, it is likely that, in addition to being used to measure time, Mesoamerican mathematics were originally developed for broader use, including in economic transactions (Freidel 1993). Understanding Mesoamerican historical consciousness thus begins with understanding math.
Mathematics
The universal sign for the number 1 in different Mesoamerican writing systems was a dot. In the written texts of the sixteenth-century Mexican highlands, larger numbers were represented by rows of dots, sometimes linked by lines (Chapter 13). In the Maya manuscripts created in Yucatan at the same time, in contrast, a separate sign stood for the number 5. Represented as a solid bar, the same sign can be recognized in inscriptions on earlier Classic Maya monuments. It also appears in monuments from Classic and Late Formative Oaxaca (Chapter 8). In some examples, the bar is drawn as a thumb, suggesting it stood originally for five fingers.
Using these two symbols, numbers could be expressed through combinations of dots (standing for one digit) and bars (standing for five). One dot (1), two dots (2), three dots (3), four dots (4), one bar (5); bar and dot (6), bar and two dots (7), bar and three dots (8), bar and four dots (9); two bars (10), two bars and dot (11) two bars and two dots (12); and so on went the mathematical notation used by Postclassic Maya until after three bars and four dots (19) it reached a full set of 20, the base of the Mesoamerican mathematical system.
Rather than expressing 20 as a set of four bars, the Maya developed the use of place notation, including a third mathematical symbol that could serve as a placeholder, like the zero of Arabic math. This third symbol allowed Mesoamerican mathematicians to record multiplace numbers. Because the base of the Mesoamerican number system was 20 (rather than the familiar