Mesoamerican Archaeology. Группа авторов
and social memory and time in archaeology. She is committed to decolonizing archaeological practice through collaboration with Indigenous descendant communities. She currently directs a community-engaged household archaeology project at Tepeticpac, Tlaxcala. She has published widely in peer-reviewed journals, such as American Anthropologist, Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, and Ancient Mesoamerica.
Christopher A. Pool is university research professor in anthropology at the University of Kentucky. His research interests include the origins and operation of ancient polities and economies, the archaeology of landscapes and social memory, historical ecology, geoarchaeology, archaeometry, and ceramic analysis. He pursues these interests primarily through fieldwork on the Olmec and later cultures of the southern Gulf Coast of Mexico.
Cynthia Robin is professor of anthropology at Northwestern University. She has conducted fieldwork at Maya archaeological sites in Belize. Her research focuses on the everyday lives of ordinary people in the past and the development of sustainable lifeways.
Ludo Snijders is an independent research who received his PhD from Leiden University, The Netherlands. He has studied Mesoamerican manuscripts from the perspective of cultural biography and is specialized in the application of noninvasive techniques for the recovery of palimpsests.
Nawa Sugiyama is assistant professor at the University of California, Riverside. Her research at Teotihuacan, Mexico, has covered topics pertaining to the construction of ritualized landscapes, human–animal interactions, and urban foodways.
Saburo Sugiyama is research professor in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State University. He has conducted fieldwork at the Feathered Serpent Pyramid and the Moon and the Sun Pyramids and currently investigates Plaza of the Columns Complex in Teotihuacan. His research focuses on ancient urbanism, monuments, ritual and polity, and cognitive archaeology.
Julie K. Wesp is assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology and a faculty affiliate in the Science, Technology, and Society Program at North Carolina State University. Her research draws on bioarchaeological methods to reconstruct daily life in the past and contribute to Latin American history with current research projects in Mexico and Colombia.
Rosemary A. Joyce
This book is an introduction to archaeological research on societies that flourished in Mexico and Central America before European colonization, whose descendants continue to occupy the region today. Archaeologists studying these societies describe them as part of a cultural area, Mesoamerica (Figure 1.1). Contemporary indigenous peoples who survived colonization have continuing traditions of practices recognizably connected to those of the period before colonization. Yet these people, past or present, never expressed an identification at this regional scale: instead, a mosaic of communities varying in size from small villages to large cities, governed in a variety of ways, with individual histories that intersected but unfolded in their own ways occupied this geographic territory. This book treats Mesoamerican archaeology as the exploration of the material traces of learned practices, reproduced over generations, through which people in this area engaged with each other, producing shared values and identities. This reinterpretation of Mesoamerica identifies it as a label for what, using anthropological concepts developed since the 1990s, we can call localized communities of practice and more widely distributed networks of practice.
Figure 1.1 Map of Mesoamerica.
To understand this approach, this chapter outlines how time is understood and measured in research on Mesoamerica; describes the practices that define Mesoamerican cultural traditions, giving special attention to mathematics, calendars, and writing that are the most distinctive aspects of these societies; and considers alternative ways of thinking about Mesoamerica as a linguistic area, as a geographic region, and as a network of communities of practice.
History, Chronology, and Time in Mesoamerican Archaeology
There is no single chronology that is employed by all archaeologists for all of Mesoamerica, but a broad division into Archaic, Formative (or Preclassic), Classic, Postclassic, and Colonial periods is generally recognized. Precise beginning and ending dates vary with the region and often with the specific author. The contributions to this volume are no exception. With slight differences, however, the contributors draw on a single chronological framework for these major periods (Table 1.1).
Table 1.1 Summary chronological framework for Mesoamerica
| Dates in years | Period |
|---|---|
| 8000–1600 BCE | Archaic |
| 1600–900 BCE | Early Formative |
| 900–400 BCE | Middle Formative |
| 400 BCE –250 CE | Late Formative |
| 250–600 CE | Early Classic |
| 600–1000 CE | Late Classic |
| 1000–1521 CE | Postclassic |
| 1521–1820 CE | Colonial |
The words used to name these spans of time are significant; they demonstrate that this chronological framework comes from a particular theoretical perspective, one associated with the idea of cultural evolution. From a cultural evolutionary perspective, the history of Mesoamerica is also the story of the gradual development of a cultural peak in the Classic period from its initial roots and of a decline after that peak. Each span of time had a particular character and a characteristic level of development. In the Archaic, people lived as mobile hunter-gatherers. The Formative (or Preclassic) was initiated by the advent of the first settled villages of farmers. While some Formative villages had leaders in ritual, war, and other activities, these forms of leadership were not codified into permanent, inherited statuses. With the Classic period, fully developed forms of permanent status, and extreme divisions among people, were realized in cities. The Classic cities collapsed, and in the Postclassic new urban societies emerged that were less impressive, smaller, more secular, or otherwise disadvantageously compared with their Classic predecessors.
These broad time spans, in other words, were not simply periods of abstract time, but rather stages of cultural development. Stages are diagnosed by specific features, like agriculture, pottery, settled villages, hereditary status, and cities. These can be developed at various dates by different peoples. As a result, despite using the same broad categories, researchers working in different sites assigned slightly different dates to each stage. The beginning of the Classic period in the Basin of Mexico was correlated with the maximum development of the great city of Teotihuacan. In the Maya area, it was tied to the first use of writing and calendars on public monuments.
Despite a general move in archaeology away from this early form of cultural evolutionary theory, Mesoamerican archaeology is stuck using an inherited framework of time periods that are really stages.