Vernacular Architecture in the Pre-Columbian Americas

Christina Halperin, Lauren Schwartz, Christina Halperin, Lauren Schwartz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781138646155
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317238799
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

Vernacular Architecture in the Pre-Columbian Americas reveals the dynamism of the ancient past, where social relations and long-term history were created posthole by posthole, brick by brick. This collection shifts attention away from the elite and monumental architectural traditions of the region to instead investigate the creativity, subtlety and variability of common architecture and the people who built and dwelled in them. At the heart of this study of vernacular architecture is an emphasis on ordinary people and their built environments, and how these everyday spaces were pivotal in the making and meaning of social and cultural dynamics.

Providing a deeper and more nuanced temporal perspective of common buildings in the Americas, the editors have deftly framed a study that highlights sociocultural diversity while at the same time facilitating broader comparative conversations around the theme of vernacular architecture. With diverse case studies covering a broad range of periods and regions, Vernacular Architecture in the Pre-Columbian Americas is an important addition to the growing body of scholarship on the indigenous architecture of the Americas and is a key contribution to our archaeological understandings of past built environments.

Part I
Introduction

1 The archaeology of vernacular architecture in the Pre-Columbian Americas

Christina T. Halperin and Lauren E. Schwartz

Vernacular architecture is both everywhere and nowhere, and vernacular architecture of the Pre-Columbian Americas is no exception. At the heart of a study of vernacular architecture is an emphasis on ordinary people and their built environments. As Amos Rapoport (1969:2) estimates, about 95 percent of the world’s built environment is vernacular. And yet common peoples’ homes and buildings are so ubiquitous and omnipresent that we sometimes fail to ‘see’ them, to think about their variation, to appreciate their technology and aesthetics, and to consider the relationship between architecture and the people who construct, inhabit, and utilize them.

While the use of the term ‘vernacular architecture’ tends to be associated with the fields of architectural theory, architectural history, art history, cultural anthropology, folk studies, and geography, this book explores vernacular evaluations from the perspective of the archaeology of the Pre-Columbian Americas. It is perhaps ironic that when synthetic works on vernacular architecture include Pre-Columbian buildings, they mention the monumental constructions of the ancient world, such as the cut stone masonry pyramids and ballcourts of Mesoamerica or the elaborate palaces, plazas, and public buildings of the Andean region (Blier 2006:232, 238, 242; Crouch and Johnson 2001; Rudofsky 1964:7–8). Such a focus is not surprising since most formal studies of Pre-Columbian architecture elaborate on the grandest and most elaborate of buildings. Often built of non-perishable materials, these constructions tend to have a more enduring presence in the landscape. In turn, it is the elite and monumental architectural traditions of the ancient past that are overwhelmingly targeted today for protection, conservation, and reconsolidation.

This volume shifts our attention from these canonical and monumental buildings to investigate the creativity, subtlety, and variability of common architecture and the people who built and dwelled in them. The chapters build on a long history of archaeological research that considers ordinary buildings, most notably settlement pattern studies, household archaeology, landscape studies, and investigations of the social uses of space. The contributions in this volume, however, more pointedly take ordinary architecture as their center of analysis and, in many cases, explicitly draw from vernacular architecture studies outside the field of archaeology as frameworks for thinking about how the everyday was pivotal in the making and meaning of social and cultural dynamics. In turn, this compilation advances the field of vernacular architecture by providing a deeper and more nuanced temporal perspective of common buildings.

Rather than serving as a comprehensive or encyclopedic overview of vernacular traditions throughout all of the Pre-Columbian Americas, the chapters feature case studies from select time periods and regions. They include foci on the Mississippian period in the U.S. Southeast (Alt); the Chacoan period (850–1140 CE) in the U.S. Southwest (Throgmorton); the Postclassic period (900–1521 CE) in the Basin of Mexico (De Lucia); the Classic to Postclassic period transition (800–1100 CE) in the Maya area (Halperin); the Late to Terminal Classic period in northwest Honduras (Schwartz); the Middle Horizon Wari occupation of the Moquegua Valley of Peru (ca. 600–1000 CE) (Nash); part of the Late Intermediate period (1200–1450 CE) in the Chachapoya region of northeastern Peru (Guengerich); and late occupation (1300–1530 CE) in the Tumbes region in northwestern Peru (Moore) (Figure 1.1). Examples are drawn from ‘complex societies’ with institutionalized social hierarchies in order to provide contrasts with monumental or elite architectural forms if desired, although not every contributor drew on such comparisons as frameworks for analysis. Indeed, each case study provides a different perspective and makes use of varied analytical approaches to the study of Pre-Columbian vernacular architecture.

Figure 1.1 Map of the Americas showing locations of case studies mentioned in the volume.

Unlike vernacular architecture studies outside the field of archaeology, archaeological analyses must often rely on partial remains of ancient buildings. With most of the perishable roofs and walls having long disappeared, archaeologists focus on stone and earthen foundations of buildings, low wall foundations, floor treatments, postholes, daub, and other residues to identify, reconstruct, and analyze ancient buildings. In turn, ethnographic cases of perishable houses, ethnohistoric texts, and ancient imagery help round out the archaeological data to inform how ancient buildings may have looked. Thus, while artistic reconstructions of ancient buildings are helpful to visualize archaeological data, they are a combination of empirical archaeological data and informed interpretation (Figure 1.2).

Figure 1.2 Reconstruction drawing based on plan of archaeological house foundation after excavations, Terminal Classic (ca. 800–950 CE) Maya residential building, Structure T267A, Tayasal, Guatemala.

Flexible definitions

Despite the volume’s engagement with vernacular architecture studies outside the field of archaeology, its Pre-Columbian focus necessarily leaves behind some of the earlier 20th-century frameworks of vernacular studies. Some of these early works underscored a romantic longing for traditional architecture in the face of capitalism, industrialism, and modernism. In these studies, definitions of vernacular architecture emphasized the primitive, traditional, pre-industrial, and rural as counterpoints to the developed, urban, and modern (Deetz 1996:125–186; Oliver 1987; Rapoport 1969; Rudofsky 1964; Upton and Vlach 1986:xv–xvii; Vellinga 2011). Some approaches more explicitly examined the technologies of industrialization (and lack thereof) with vernacular architecture defined as buildings constructed using simple, non-industrial tools as well as locally available raw materials. In turn, vernacular architecture as ‘an architecture without architects’ (formal designers, specialized labor forces) highlighted the role of economic specialization, the emergence of capitalist workforces, and those ‘left out’ of such processes. A Pre-Columbian focus with its temporal range anytime before the 16th century, however, sidesteps the simplistic and oft-criticized temporal binary of ‘traditional’ and ‘modern.’ This is, of course, not to say that Pre-Columbian peoples did not have their own understandings of the past or did not create their own representations of the ‘traditional,’ as discussed further in the chapter.

More recently, scholars have situated their definitions of the vernacular using concepts of the ordinary, popular, informal, and non-elite. These analytical categories largely suit Pre-Columbian societies, and many of the contributions herein take them as their starting points. We feel, however, that the definitions of vernacular architecture must necessarily remain open and flexible to fit the historical contexts and types of questions posed. Such flexibility is exemplified in Henry Glassie’s assertion that the concept of vernacular architecture

marks the transition from the unknown to the known. The study of vernacular architecture is a way that we expand the record, bit by bit. At work, moving toward a complete view of the builder’s art, we bring buildings into scrutiny and toward utility in the comprehensive study of humankind.

(Glassie 2000:20)

In other words, the term does not designate a particular ‘form’ immutable across space and time, but as an analytical lens for thinking about poorly known or previously forgotten architecture. Here we seek to elucidate some examples of everyday, domestic, popular, and ordinary Pre-Columbian buildings and place them in their social and historical contexts.

In organizing this volume, we did not impose a single definition on the contributing authors. Instead the contributors present slightly different yet overlapping takes on the ‘vernacular.’ For Donna Nash, the vernacular is identified in terms of local architectural traditions, which clash or make compromises with more invasive imperial Wari architecture. Susan Alt examines the vernacular in its reference to – and creation of – tradition. For both Christina Halperin and Kellam Throgmorton, the vernacular is seen as a popular architecture that contrasts, but was also in discourse with elite and monumental buildings. Indeed, most contributions (Moore, De Lucia, and Schwartz) focus on vernacular architecture as non-monumental domestic architecture. Yet, as Alt’s and Halperin’s case studies reveal, ritual structures may also belong to vernacular traditions, and as Anna Guengerich’s study underscores, even ordinary domestic buildings can be monumental.

Ancient peoples and their buildings

One of the overarching emphases of the volume is that vernacular architecture is not just a study of the physical remains of buildings. Rather it is just as much about the people who built and dwelled in and around them. As such, it shies away from conceptions of vernacular architecture as anonymous, since it is through these very buildings that we seek to know people of the past. While in many cases architecture may reflect the social identities, technological know-how, and cultural dispositions of its builders and inhabitants, we also underscore the recursive relationship between people and their material constructions, and in turn, how social groups relate to each other and their landscapes through their architecture.

Even as far back as Lewis Henry Morgan’s (1965 [1881]) Houses and House-Life of the American Aborigines, a study of houses has given us a sense of the people who built and lived in them. Morgan, who pored over the few available documentary and archaeological accounts of architecture of his time, was particularly interested in the communal social and economic relations that were forged through the physicality of the house (e.g. size, layout, number of hearths, organization of space) as well as through the practices conducted within them. Despite his classification of societies into stages of cultural evolution (from savagery to barbarism to civilization), Morgan argued that many Pre-Columbian societies at different ‘stages’ practiced a similar type of communal social organization where multiple families lived in the same house or house complex. These societies included the Iroquois of the U.S. Northeast, the ancient Pueblo peoples of the U.S. Southwest, and the ancient cultures of Mexico, whose architectural traditions were quite varied.

Since Morgan’s work, archaeologists studying households continued to investigate house forms, sizes, and layouts to understand social organization, kinship, and household composition, especially as it related to agricultural and economic intensification (Flannery 1972; Gilman 1987; Wilk and Netting 1984). Archaeologists have also examined ordinary architecture alongside state and ceremonial works as one of the principal means of assessing the emergence of social complexity and relations of inequality. These studies include assessments of architectural labor investments, house sizes, segmentation of space, and building materials and techniques to identify an unequal access to extra-familial labor and the emergence or degree of social complexity (Abrams 1994; Kent 1990; Lesure and Blake 2002; Shaw 1992; Tourtellot et al. 1992; Trubitt 2000; Willey and Leventhal 1979). Such a focus differs from vernacular architecture studies working in historic and contemporary periods, which have often treated such status distinctions as self-evident rather than as a topic of inquiry (cf. Colloredo-Mansfeld 1994; Wilk 1983). Nonetheless, there is considerable overlap in and out of the field of archaeology in examining architecture as expressions of regionalism, ethnicity, and community origins (Aldenderfer 1993; Cameron 1998; Stanish 1989; Upton 1996; Upton and Vlach 1986). In this volume, Guengerich (Chapter 3) examines how social status in the community of Monte Viudo, Peru, was negotiated through the quality of stonework, elevation, and the implementation of design motifs on houses. Differing from earlier cultural evolutionary approaches concerned with identifying a society’s level of social complexity (e.g. chiefdoms vs. states), her analyses of architectural distinctions serve to ‘people’ the community of Monte Viudo and better understand the subtle sources and reflections of social diversity.

The idea of peopling the past has been a foundational pillar of household archaeology (Hendon 1996, 2007; Tringham 1996). The study of households narrows the lens through which one can assess larger social, political, economic, environmental, and cultural patterns. In turn, it identifies social change not as a product of externally determining forces, but as enacted in variable ways by men, women, children, and their families, kin-groups, neighborhoods, and communities (Brumfiel 1992; Hendon 2007; Varien and Porter 2008; Yaeger and Canuto 2000). As many have pointed out, however, households are not synonymous with houses (Blanton 1994; Morgan 1965; Netting 1984): household members may extend across several physical structures or even over different geographical regions while multiple households as well as both kin and non-kin groups may share the same physical house. As a result, early household archaeology studies tended to focus on what households do, such as the coordinated tasks of production, distribution, and reproduction (Ashmore and Wilk 1988; Gonlin and Douglass 2012; Wilk and Netting 1984; Wilk and Rathje 1982). Many of these studies focused on the practices of crafting, agriculture, subsistence regimes, goods dissemination, and social relations, with less attention devoted to architecture.

A concerted interest in ordinary architecture was also largely missing from some of the earliest house society approaches in archaeology (Gillespie 2000; Joyce and Gillespie 2000; cf. Beck 2007; Hutson et al. 2004). Taking inspiration from Claude Lévi-Strauss’s house societies, house society studies focus on households as corporate bodies reproduced through ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of contributors
• Part I Introduction
• Part II Building buildings
• Part III Structuring structures
• Part IV The temporality of vernacular architecture
• Part V Conclusion
• Index