Mesoamerican Archaeology. Группа авторов
Teotihuacan as the historical model for Tula in Central Mexico, and a possible candidate for Tollan in historical accounts. Teotihuacan was the first great city-state to have an effect on political affairs over an area reaching to the ends of eastern and western Mesoamerica (see Chapters 4 and 5). It is possible that there were multiple models for the Toltecs of Postclassic historical tradition. In the Postclassic Maya lowlands, Chichen Itza may have had the same kind of reputation that Teotihuacan had in Central Mexico, as a city much more powerful than any that followed in the late historic period.
Postclassic Mesoamerican historical traditions traced innovations in governance to legendary cities whose most likely models flourished in the Classic period. The peoples of the Classic period who left recorded traditions of history linked their rulers to supernatural beings active in the first days of time, before the sun rose, when the world was dark. The same imagery is found in post-conquest histories, many of which describe times before the calendar was in use, before the sun rose for the first time. The most elaborate of these postconquest traditions detail cycles of creation and destruction of the world and living beings before their current era. These traditions are not segregated from the histories of the first great city-states or from the detailed records of the actions of particular noble and ruling families. They testify to a broadly shared sense of Mesoamerican history.
In that broad Mesoamerican historical imagination, common history began when time could be counted with the calendar. The deeds of early heroes and gods prepared the way for human beings. Human beings created great cities which were destroyed, from which the later peoples dispersed. Individual royal and noble histories were validated by connection to these great city-states. Specific local events, institutions, and practices were linked to earlier times. Mesoamerican people practiced “indigenous archaeologies” to collect materials from earlier times, with Olmec objects employed by Classic and Postclassic Maya and at Tenochtitlan (Hamann 2002; Joyce 2000b). The histories archaeologists must reconstruct from fragments were known to and valued by Mesoamerican peoples, who conserved knowledge to the present day.
Mathematical and calendrical knowledge represented in indigenous writing crosses distinct language boundaries, persists from early in the history of recognizably Mesoamerican societies, and is still in use today, despite five centuries of colonization. The persistence of these practices was not automatic; it came about through learning by new practitioners, supported by the value placed on this knowledge by other members of Mesoamerican societies. The practices that the calendar and mathematics enabled reproduced not only knowledge of how to record time and quantities of things but also understandings of the orderly progress of time, of the repetition of cycles, of change and continuity. These concepts became part of a way of viewing the world, reproducing that way of viewing the world as numbers and dates were produced. The same is true of other features that early anthropologists suggested defined a Mesoamerican cultural area, when they are viewed as historically reproduced practices.
Alternative Models for Mesoamerica
Mesoamerica is mainly a concept that anthropologists have found useful as a way to refer to groups of people who lived within a defined geographic region over a long period time and who shared the aforementioned cultural features. These shared features coexisted with and crosscut social, linguistic, ecological, and political boundaries. The only viable social mechanism to explain the development of Mesoamerica as a cultural tradition, crosscutting all sorts of boundaries, is a long history of intensive interaction among social groups in the region.
In this sense, the term Mesoamerica is analogous to terms like Western civilization. These suggest the existence of various kinds of historical connections among a set of interacting societies that led to shared values, practices, and institutions, despite variation in language, political structure, religion, and cultural practices (Joyce 2000c; Pye and Clark 2000). Mesoamerican peoples had less intensive interaction with the societies to their north and south, making it possible for archaeologists and ethnographers to discern boundaries to an area of intense interaction that is Mesoamerica as a geographic region. Within this area, the intensity of interaction even produced shared features in unrelated languages spoken across the region.
Mesoamerica as a Linguistic Area
Three major language families, Mixe-Zoque, Totonac, and Mayan, are composed of languages spoken only by Mesoamerican peoples (Campbell 1976). Another major family, Oto-Manguean, includes some languages in neighboring parts of Central America. Nahuatl, the language of the Mexica of central Mexico, is a branch of the Uto-Aztecan language family extending through northern Mexico into North America. Smaller numbers of people in Mesoamerica spoke apparently isolated languages: Huave, Tarascan, and Xincan. On the southern boundary of Mesoamerica, the Lencan language family is now recognized as the northernmost outlier of a South American language family (Figure 1.2).
Figure 1.2 Distribution of languages within Mesoamerica at the time of the Spanish conquest.
Each of the language families named is historically independent, as distinct from each other as German is from Mandarin. Linguists note that despite a lack of common roots, a variety of shared features are found in languages whose speakers formed Mesoamerican societies. These features are found in Nahuatl but not in its close northern Mexican relatives, illustrating their origin not in the development of the broader language family but through interaction among speakers of the languages. Because they are found only in these languages, these features must have developed historically in the region. Because the features are found in unrelated languages, they must result from intensive contact between speakers of different languages.
These patterns have been used to define a Mesoamerican linguistic area: a zone in which, through intensive interaction, speakers of unrelated languages adopted common linguistic features (Campbell 1976; Campbell et al. 1986). Historical linguistic studies suggest that the Mesoamerican language area had taken its present form before 1000 BCE, when a series of loan words for important cultural concepts spread throughout Mesoamerica, apparently from a Mixe-Zoque source language, at the same time that Gulf Coast Olmec sites were engaged in intensive long-distance trade for jade, obsidian, and other valuables (Campbell and Kaufman 1976).
Mesoamerican languages share features of grammar, sounds (phonology), and meaning (semantics). Grammatical and semantic features directly reflect the shared practices of the Mesoamerican tradition. Number systems based on 20, and numeral classifiers, special forms used in counting different categories of things, are widely shared traces of the use of common calendars and mathematics. Shared phonological features mean that Mesoamerican languages sound similar to each other, even when unrelated. This suggests that speakers of different languages adapted to each other’s manner of speech.
Poetic aspects of speech are also found in unrelated Mesoamerican languages. Shared poetics hint at the ceremonious and ritual contexts within which cross-language communication would have been most likely, as guests were entertained during social, political, and religious events. Mesoamerican formal speech typically employs metaphors arranged in paired couplets. Many of the specific metaphors are shared by unrelated Mesoamerican languages. Words for locations are often derived from parts of the body, for example the word “stomach” meaning “inside.” Common figures of speech like calling the door of a building its “mouth,” the bark of a tree its “skin,” and the eye of a person the “seed of the face” can be related to conventions of visual representation. For example, on some Classic Maya temples, the doorway is marked as the mouth of an animal by architectural sculpture.
The way independent, unrelated languages grow to resemble each other is via a historical processes of mutual translation. The process through which colonial speakers of Yucatec and Spanish clerics together created a new form of the Mayan Yucatec language is a colonial example (Hanks 2010). This documented historical process provides a model for thinking about the situations in which a Mesoamerican linguistic area could have emerged. Given the diversity of different languages spoken within a relatively restricted area, it is