Early Mesoamerican Social Transformations: Archaic and Formative Lifeways in the Soconusco Region
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Early Mesoamerican Social Transformations: Archaic and Formative Lifeways in the Soconusco Region
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| ISBN-13: | 9780520950566 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of California Press |
| Publication date: | 10/04/2011 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 304 |
| File size: | 7 MB |
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Early Mesoamerican Social Transformations
Archaic and Formative Lifeways in the Soconusco Region
By Richard G. Lesure
UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS
Copyright © 2011 the Regents of the University of CaliforniaAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-520-95056-6
CHAPTER 1
Early Social Transformations in the Soconusco
AN INTRODUCTION
Richard G. Lesure
THE PERIOD 3500 B.C. TO 500 B.C. was one of momentous change in Mesoamerica. At the beginning of that span, the region was sparsely occupied by low-level food producers whose rhythms of existence were dominated by the concerns of hunting and gathering. By 500 B.C., it was populated with settled agriculturalists in a landscape increasingly full of people. Proto-urban communities, laid out according to spatial schemes that would continue through the Spanish Conquest two millennia later, were foci of social and political life. Public rituals included worship of deities that were to persist into the Classic and Postclassic eras. Though there was a complex history still to come, Mesoamerica as a culture area or civilization is by that point recognizable.
Major developments between 3500 B.C. and 500 B.C. included the shift from the Archaic to the Formative period after 1900 B.C., a far-reaching social transformation that involved the appearance of permanent villages, the introduction of pottery, the refocus of subsistence organization toward agriculture, and a steep rise in population. The transition to the Formative was followed—still in the second millennium B.C. and thus rapidly on archaeological time scales—by the first indicators of inequality and sociopolitical complexity, including the emergence of settlement hierarchies, monumental sculpture with themes of rulership, and massive earthen platforms or modifications to the landscape. The period also includes, from 1400 B.C., a series of stylistic horizons involving the virtually pan-Mesoamerican dissemination of strikingly recognizable visual culture—including, most famously, Olmec art.
Despite the concentration of those three phenomena in the pivotal second millennium B.C., considerations of them as a package, in a unit of time that straddles the divide between Archaic and Formative, is still relatively rare. One reason is the great disparity in the quantity of available evidence on either side of the point at which pottery enters the archaeological record. But relevant as well is a tendency toward fragmentation of inquiry into multiple paths with different theoretical inspiration and little in the way of intersection or cross-communication among them.
In this book, the period between 3500 B.C. and 500 B.C. is taken as crucial to understanding the genesis of Mesoamerican civilization, but the focus is narrowed from Mesoamerica as a whole to one particular region: the Soconusco, on the Pacific coast of Chiapas, Mexico and adjacent Guatemala. A volume focusing on the early archaeology of the Soconusco but with an eye on the topic of early Mesoamerican social transformations more generally is appropriate for several reasons, but most obviously because recent fieldwork makes the region the best-known case from the lowlands of Mesoamerica for understanding social change through the entire span of 3500 B.C. through 500 B.C. The emerging picture contrasts in various ways with those for the Southern and Central Highlands, and claims that early developments in the Soconusco were precocious, distinctive, or even unique have entered larger interpretive discussions in Mesoamerican archaeology. Yet much of the evidence on which those claims are based remains only summarily published.
The time is ripe for a volume of essays showcasing both the diversity of current work on the early archaeology of the Soconusco and the growing opportunities for synergy as research in multiple subregions yields a richer understanding of the whole. My goal in this introduction is to set the topics and perspectives of the papers that follow into a series of larger contexts. Because an excellent recent review of Southeastern Pacific Coast archaeology is available (Love 2007), I have made no effort here to be comprehensive. Instead, I review the larger importance of work on early Soconusco, introduce the region and its prehistory, and provide a brief overview of the chapters that follow.
THE REGION
The Soconusco region is a narrow strip of the Pacific coast of Chiapas, Mexico and adjacent Guatemala (Figures 1.1 and 1.2). Sharply delimited inland by the Sierra Madre Mountains, it extends from around the modern town of Mapastepec, Chiapas southeast to the Tilapa River in Guatemala (Lowe, Lee, and Martínez 1982:55–62). High rainfall feeds numerous rivers that cross a short coastal plain to feed freshwater marshes and brackish estuaries and lagoons. To the northwest, the Chiapas coast is drier, and indeed there is variation within the Soconusco itself. As one moves to the southeast, the coast widens and rainfall increases. In Guatemala, the southeastern boundary of the Soconusco as a geo graphical region is marked by an inland extension of the coastal plain, but early settlement related to that of the Soconusco stretched throughout Pacific-coastal Guatemala into El Salvador. One essay included here (Chapter 9) extends coverage of the book into this related area.
The Soconusco and adjacent coastal Guatemala are rich in natural resources. Since biotic communities tend to run in narrow strips parallel to the ocean, a range of wild resources would have been readily accessible to ancient inhabitants. Indeed, the sheer richness and diversity of aquatic resources have figured prominently in claims that subsistence well into the Formative was focused more on hunting, gathering, and fishing than on agriculture.
THE LARGER IMPORT OF EARLY SOCONUSCO
The period 3500 B.C. through 500 B.C. is of interest for studying the genesis of Mesoamerican civilization because it unites a set of deeply transformative developments—but also because scholarly work on those developments ranges across the full theoretical diversity of contemporary anthropological archaeology. Understandings of the transition to the Formative, the emergence of sociopolitical complexity, and the pan-Mesoamerican occurrence of Olmec art are drawn increasingly from evidence found in the Soconusco.
Changing Subsistence From Archaic to Formative
The subsistence systems of ancient urban Mesoamerica were the products of a complex history. Of the three key crops—maize, beans, and squash—the staple maize, in particular, was deeply interwoven into the economic, social, and symbolic fabric of life (Taube 2000). There were, though, other domesticated plants, including avocado, maguey, and amaranth (McClung de Tapia and Zurita Noguera 2000). The Soconusco, in the fifteenth century A.D., was important as a source of cacao for the distant Aztec capital, and cacao residue has been identified on a pottery sherd from the period of interest here (Powis et al. 2008). There has been ongoing speculation that root crops such as manioc were important Formative-period crops in the Soconusco and on the Gulf Coast (Clark, Pye, and Gosser 2007:28–29; Pool 2007:75). Wild animals everywhere provided sources of protein, but in certain contexts domesticated animals formed an important component of the diet. Dogs were eaten at Early Formative San Lorenzo on the Gulf Coast (Wing 1981) and at Middle Formative La Blanca in the Soconusco (Wake and Harrington 2002).
The full story of agricultural origins in Mesoamerica is thus long and complicated. Still, despite some recent efforts to displace it in favor of a subsistence transformation (to maize as a staple) at 1000 B.C., the transition to the Formative stands out as pivotal in terms of demography, subsistence, and lifeways. Debate over the causes of the transition has centered around climatic fluctuations, population growth, and the systems perspective developed by Kent Flannery. In Flannery's model for the Valley of Oaxaca, the growing productivity of maize in relation to that of wild mesquite eventually triggered removal of mesquite trees to clear the way for farming on river banks, the most desirable lands of the valley for agriculture (Flannery 1986a:504–506, 1986b:26–27). Such a shift in priorities among subsistence options could have generated a cascade of other changes, including greater sedentism and population growth.
Recent work has tended to add to, rather than winnow down, the list of potentially relevant variables. Now—to a set of possibilities that included climatic fluctuations, the changing productivity of maize, and localized population dynamics—we might add status competition (Blake et al. 1992a; Clark and Gosser 1995), differences between highland and lowland environments (Piperno and Pearsall 1998), population histories at vast scales (Bellwood 2005), and specific technological innovations (Neff et al. 2006c).
More than one of these factors may be relevant for explaining the Formative transition, but it is unlikely that all are equally relevant. One way to weigh their respective importance would be to trace their articulation from Archaic to Formative in different contexts and compare the results. Such an effort is hampered by the chronic low visibility of preceramic sites in Mesoamerica and the consequent rarity of sustained work on Archaic adaptations. Pathbreaking efforts in the semi-arid highland settings of Tehuacán (MacNeish 1964, 1981) and Oaxaca (Flannery 1986c) sparked relatively few comparable efforts in other regions. Voorhies's (1976, 2004) work over three de cades therefore places the Soconusco alongside Tehuacán and Oaxaca as one of a handful of Mesoamerican regions in which a social understanding of Archaic adaptations is possible. Voorhies and colleagues suggest that Archaic inhabitants of the Soconusco were mobile low-level food producers and hunter-gatherer-fishers who visited the estuary to process marsh clams for transport to inland base camps (Kennett, Voorhies, and Martorana 2006; Michaels and Voorhies 1999; Voorhies 2004). A recent addition to this work is a better understanding of how Archaic adaptations changed in the centuries leading up to the transition to the Formative (Chapter 2 in this book).
Despite the greater archaeological visibility of sites from the ceramic era, the continued evolution of subsistence systems during the Formative period also needs further work. An important issue is again the degree of variability between regions, particularly during the Early Formative (the second millennium B.C.). The case of the Soconusco has figured prominently in arguments supporting a high degree of variability, with discussion centering on three topics: manioc, aquatic estuary fauna, and maize.
Lowe (1975:10–14) suggested that root crops, specifi cally manioc, might have been a significant food source in Early Formative Soconusco. The idea was based on a perceived lack (at Altamira, Chiapas) of manos and metates suitable for the grinding of maize and an abundance, instead, of small obsidian chips seemingly suitable for the grater boards used in the processing of manioc. Direct evidence of manioc continues to be rare or non existent at lowland Formative sites (Pool 2007:75), and Clark's (1981, 1994) use-wear analysis of Early Formative obsidian indicates that the chips were used for a variety of domestic tasks that did not include grating. Clark, Pye, and Gosser (2007:28–29, 31) nevertheless favor keeping open the possibility of manioc as a food source in the earlier Formative.
A second suggestion—championed particularly by Blake et al. (1992a, 1992b) as part of a larger argument on maize that I will come to a moment—is that wild aquatic fauna of the Soconusco estuaries was an important focus of Early Formative subsistence. Neff et al. (2006c) pick up on that suggestion in their efforts to explain the Formative transition in coastal Guatemala, but there have been relatively few empirical contributions to this topic in the last fifteen years (however, see Lesure, Wake, and Steadman 2009; Wake 2004a, 2004b; Wake and Steadman 2009). Wake and I review the available data from the Mazatán zone in Chapter 4.
The third topic is the role of maize in the diets of Formative villagers during the second millennium B.C. Isotopic studies of human bone provide an important source of evidence. Certain aspects of diet can be investigated by measuring ratios of stable isotopes of carbon and nitrogen. Maize in particular has an unusually high 13C/12C ratio in comparison with other common plant foods in the Americas, and it is the only cultivated C4 plant. As a result, if maize was a dietary staple, it should have left an isotopic signature in human skeletons. Blake et al. (1992a) found no such signature in the Soconusco during the second millennium B.C. and suggested that agriculture was not particularly important in the Formative transition there (see also Ambrose and Norr 1992; Blake et al. 1992b; Chisholm and Blake 2006; Chisholm, Blake, and Love 1993; Clark and Gosser 1995). Blake and his colleagues, inspired by Hayden's (1990) ideas on the role of plentiful environments in the emergence of social in e quality and food production, have suggested that greater sedentism, demographic expansion, and the adoption of pottery in the Soconusco were the result of fundamentally social processes, such as spiraling status competition. Maize might have been consumed as beer at feasts rather than as a dietary staple.
This work in the Soconusco helped bring diversity and variation to the foreground in studies of Formative-period subsistence. Temporal variation is one factor. If maize was originally cultivated for its stalk sugar (Smalley and Blake 2003), then it becomes important to determine the point at which the focus of selection changed from stalk to grain (Webster 2011). There is some evidence to suggest that the shift to maize as a staple may have occurred around 1000 B.C. in multiple parts of Mesoamerica (Clark, Pye, and Gosser 2007; Rosenswig 2006; Smalley and Blake 2003; Webster 2011). Still, regional diversity is an important topic. Was the initial Formative subsistence system in the Soconusco unique, or did it fit into some larger pattern of variation? For instance, was it typical of early adaptations in lowland tropical forests but different from those of the semi-arid highlands (Piperno and Pearsall 1998)? If there were such differences between highlands and lowlands, then why was the transition from Archaic to Formative essentially simultaneous in the Gulf Coast, the Valley of Oaxaca, Morelos, and the southern Basin of Mexico (Lesure 2008)? Evidence on interregional diversity should prove important for evaluating a more sophisticated generation of explanations for the Archaic-Formative transition.
Sociopolitical Complexity
A second major social transformation in the period of interest here is the emergence of sociopolitical complexity. With the initial Early Formative period (1900–1400 B.C.) poorly known in many areas, the sequences of Tehuacán and Oaxaca have again proved influential as rough models of the trajectory that might have been followed in other areas. The sequences in those cases begin early, are relatively complete, and suggest a developmental sequence of gradually increasing complexity that satisfies common sense. Agricultural villages of the initial Early Formative were egalitarian, though in the Valley of Oaxaca San José Mogote was already by far the largest center (Marcus and Flannery 1996:78). In the later Early Formative, a continuum of status differences, increasing investment in public architecture, and a two-tiered settlement hierarchy suggest the emergence of chiefdoms (Marcus and Flannery 1996:96–110). The subsequent Middle Formative (1000–400 B.C.) witnessed consolidation of the hierarchical system, with population expansion, greater disparities in the distribution of high-status goods, truly monumental public architecture and sculpture, and the emergence of three-tiered settlement hierarchies (Marcus and Flannery 1996:111–134).
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Table of Contents
Chapter 1. Early Social Transformations in Soconusco: An
Introduction Richard G. Lesure
Part I: Archaic to Formative: Transformations in Subsistence Chapter 2. A Gender-Based Model for Changes in Subsistence and Mobility during the Terminal Late Archaic Period on the Coast of Chiapas, Mexico Barbara Voorhies and Douglas J. Kennett
Chapter 3. Evidence for the Diversity of Late Archaic and Early Formative Plant Use in the Soconusco Region of Mexico and Guatemala Michael Blake and Hector Neff
Chapter 4. Archaic to Formative in Soconusco: The Adaptive and Organizational Transformation Richard G. Lesure and Thomas A. Wake
Part II: Emergent Complexity: The Archaeological Records of Early Political Centers Chapter 5. Building History in Domestic and Public Space at Paso de la Amada—An Examination of Mounds 6 and 7
Michael Blake
Chapter 6. Paso de la Amada as a Ceremonial Center Richard G. Lesure
Chapter 7. A History of Disaster and Cultural Change in the Coatán River Drainage of the Soconusco, Chiapas, Mexico Gerardo Gutiérrez
Chapter 8. La Blanca and the Soconusco Middle Formative Michael Love and Julia Guernsey
Part III: Beyond the Individual Study Area: Grappling with Issues of Scale Chapter 9. Early Formative Transitions in Settlement and Subsistence at Chiquiuitan, Guatemala Molly Morgan
Chapter 10. Jocotal Settlement Patterns, Salt Production, and Pacific Coast
Interactions Mary Pye, John Hodgson, and John E. Clark
Chapter 11. An Early Mesoamerican Archipelago of Complexity Robert M. Rosenswig
Chapter 12. Concluding Thoughts: Macro-Regional Synthesis in the Archaeology of Early Mesoamerica Richard G. Lesure