The Early Mesoamerican Village

Updated Edition

Kent V Flannery

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781315418674
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: Social Sciences

One of the classic works of archaeology, The Early Mesoamerican Village was among the first studies to fully embrace the processual movement of the 1970s. Dancing around an ongoing dialogue on methods and goals between the Real Mesoamerican Archaeologist, the Great Synthesizer, and the Skeptical Graduate Student, it is both a seminal tract on scientific method in archaeology and a series of studies on formative Mesoamerica. It critically evaluates techniques for excavation, sampling of sites and regions, and stylistic analysis, as well as such theoretical factors of explanation as population pressure, trade, and religion and launched similar studies for several later generations of archaeologists. A new Foreword by Jeremy Sabloff is featured in this edition.

Chapter 1

RESEARCH STRATEGY AND FORMATIVE MESOAMERICA*

KENT V. FLANNERY

One can still not confidently predict even on what problem 60% of his data is going to bear before going into an intensive excavation project. [Richard E.W. Adams 1969: 36]

Current lack of concern with the development of planned research designs generally obviates the recovery of data pertinent to questions which derive from current theoretical interests.

The methodology most appropriate for the task of isolating and studying processes of cultural change and evolution is one which is regional in scope and executed with the aid of research designs based on the principles of probability sampling. [Lewis R. Binford 1964: 425–426]

“The Near East,” Sir Mortimer Wheeler once remarked at lunch, “is the land of archeological sin.” Such a statement could have been made only by a man who had never worked in Mesoamerica.

How sad that Sir Mortimer could not have been with David Grove, Jorge Angulo, and me on that sunny morning in the 1960s when we came across a Mesoamerican archeologist at work on a Formative site in the Central Mexican Symbiotic Region. Four stalks of river cane, stuck loosely in the ground, defined a quadrilateral (though not necessarily rectangular) area in which two peones picked and shoveled to varying depths, heaving the dirt to one side. On the backdirt pile stood the archeologist himself, armed with his most delicate tool—a three-pronged garden cultivator of the type used by elderly British ladies to weed rhododendrons. Combing through every shovelful of dirt, he carefully picked out each figurine head and placed it in a brown paper shopping bag nearby—the only other bit of equipment in evidence. This individual was armed with an excavation permit that had been granted because, in the honest words of one official, “he appeared to be no better or worse than any other archeologist who had worked in the area.” When questioned, our colleague descended from the backdirt pile and revealed that his underlying research goal was to define the nature of the “Olmec presence” in that particular drainage basin; his initial results, he said, predicted total success.

As Grove, Angulo, and I rattled back along the highway in our Jeep, each of us in his own way sat marveling at the elegance of a research strategy in which one could define the nature of a foreign presence in a distant drainage basin from just seven fragmentary figurine heads in the bottom of a supermarket sack. All through that day and the next, I could not shake the feeling that we had looked through a tiny window into the heart of some unexpected Truth. And then, over a beer on the plaza of some forgotten nearby pueblo, it came to me. In terms of scientific method, what we had done, we and 50 years of our predecessors in the archeology of Formative Mesoamerica, was only a fraction of a brownie point better than what we had seen going on between those four stalks of river cane.

This is a book about Formative villages and some of the ways they can be studied. The area considered is the southern half of Mexico and the western part of Guatemala, two regions that belong to the culture area called Mesoamerica. The time period covered is roughly that of 1500 to 500 B.C., a millenium of great importance in Mesoamerican prehistory. It was at the start of this period that true, permanent villages of pole-and-thatch (wattle-and-daub) houses first became widespread in Mesoamerica. Out of this initial stage of agriculturally based villages, the later high civilizations of Mesoamerica developed. With the appearance of these “primary village farming communities,” Mesoamerica first became definable as a culture area, distinct from the desert food-gatherers to the north and the tropical forest peoples to the south. Thus, a major concern of Mesoamerican archeologists, since at least the 1920s, has been to find out as much as possible about the early Mesoamerican villages for which this book is named.

But there is a tremendous credibility gap between what Mesoamerican archeologists say they are interested in, and what they really do. The only way I can think to illustrate this is to present a parable. I will reduce myself and all my colleagues in the archeology of Formative Mesoamerica to a series of three imaginary characters to whom, for the sake of hurting no one’s feelings, I will attribute some of the real events of the last two decades in Mesoamerica.

Mesoamericanists at Work: A Modern Parable

The first protagonist to be presented is a composite character whom I will call the “Real Mesoamerican Archeologist,” or “R.M.A.” for short. I have worked side by side with R.M.A. for nearly 18 years, and I like him. Like so many Mesoamerican archeologists, he is amiable, friendly, loyal, kind, and hospitable. He is totally in love with Mesoamerica, with its food, its drink, its people. He still believes in the romance of archeology; his eyes glisten and his voice grows husky as he looks at an Olmec jade. He is open and incredibly generous with his unpublished data. He would rather spread out all his sherds on the table for you than eat dinner, but he would rather drink beer with you than spread out all his sherds. He may not be able to remember the best route back to his site, but he never forgets which stall on the plaza has the best carnitas. In his off-hours, away from the site, he is still a Mesoamericanist; that is, he belongs to a group that includes some of the most colorful characters and greatest beer drinkers, hell raisers, folk singers, pub crawlers, satyrs, nymphomaniacs, and storytellers in all of archeology.

R.M.A. is an anthropologist, and his goals are those of anthropological archeology. As far as the Formative is concerned, what he wants to do is ambitious and commendable.

I want to pick a valley which is a real hydrographic unit: you know, define it by the boundary of the watershed. Then I want to do a real settlement pattern survey. Then pick some really good sites, get the whole sequence. I want to know the ecological adaptation of the early villages to the area, and get some data on social and political organization. Make some real solid population estimates. Then I want to define the relationship of my area with the valleys of Puebla and Morelos, the Gulf Coast, highland Guatemala. Really pin down the trade wares and outside influences. Maybe even work on how the “village Formative” turned into the “temple Formative.” I’d really like to reconstruct the whole Formative way of life.

But if you had visited R.M.A. in the field, you would gradually have begun to wonder how his research strategy could accomplish the goals he had set for himself. During the first field season, he completed his intensive survey, which consisted of recording all those mounds which require four-wheel drive to get over. On one of the mounds near the Río San Jacinto, he found some “good stuff—you know, zoned rocker stamping and white-rim black ware,” and decided to give it a test. He put in two pits of the type I like to call “telephone booths”—each 1.5 by 1.5 m, and carried 5 m to sterile soil by horizontal 20-cm levels. It’s dark down inside a telephone booth, but if you poke around sometimes you can feel which way the cultural strata are running—at least, in the case of the coarser deposits like, say, pea gravel. One pit, his “richest,” had a really interesting feel because it was dug in the slopewash off the edge of the site, and the strata crossed all his arbitrary levels at a 45° angle.

During his second season, R.M.A. put a 20-m trench right through the center of the site. In order to “refine” the stratigraphy this time, his arbitrary levels were only 10 cm deep, though admittedly 20 m long. Since the center of the site was a buried artificial mound, his trench went through 5 m of Classic pyramid fill composed of basketloads of Early Formative, Middle Formative, and Late Formative debris. R.M.A. was delighted with the tremendous variety of sherds, which included some types never found before in the region.

Back at his lab, he divided a long table into chalked sections corresponding to his arbitrary levels, and laid out the whole sequence. Over a beer, I asked him if he didn’t think it was unusual to find fragments of Early Classic Thin Orange pottery side-by-side with the limbs of hollow Formative figurines. “You have to expect a little intrusion,” he explained. “You can’t see all the gopher burrows after 2000 years.”

I have to hand it to R.M.A., because he turned that 5 m of totally mixed mound fill into a seriated sequence of pottery types which looked—when presented as a graph of frequency polygons, or “battleships”—totally convincing. He did it by observing which attributes showed some difference from one level to another, by combining these into modes, and combining these again into types. Never have the esthetic qualities of sampling error been more tastefully displayed. R.M.A. identified most of the pottery types on the basis of published reports from nearby valleys, but, in the end, he had six unidentified types left over. These he lumped together to form a new phase, which he named “San Jacinto” and placed at the very beginning of the sequence. The sequence from Mound 1 of the Río San Jacinto project went into one of R.M.A.’s now-famous preliminary reports. (They are famous because R.M.A. has produced more preliminary reports, and fewer final reports, than anyone outside Near Eastern prehistory.) As usual, his report was reviewed by his former professor, the Great Synthesizer, or “G.S.,” as we will call him in the pages that follow. G.S. began in archeology just like R.M.A., but he soon learned that center-digging mounds wasn’t where it was at. Writing about other people’s center-digging of mounds was where it was at; and especially the center-digging of his former students, who were gentlemanly about their unpublished data. In addition, G.S. had once discovered a carbonized corncob on his backdirt pile, which directed his theoretical interests to “the ecological approach.” Thus, he was in a better position to put the Río San Jacinto pottery sequence in an “ecological perspective” than almost any other reviewer. G.S.’s review of R.M.A.’s report was thoughtful and kindly disposed, but just as I feared, he also thought it peculiar that Teotihuacán Thin Orange should occur in all levels in association with limb fragments of hollow Olmec figurines. Nevertheless, he concluded by saying that “this volume is a welcome addition to the all-too-scanty literature on the Formative of the middle Río San Jacinto basin.”

When I last saw R.M.A., he was serving his 3-year stint as a department chairman—chafing behind his desk, itching to get back to the field. In the interim, he was sending one of his students to the drainage of the Río San Pedro, which adjoined the San Jacinto. R.M.A. had never personally been to the San Pedro but, given the richness of Mesoamerica, he knew his student would find “good stuff” there. His orders were to survey intensively just as R.M.A. had, to pick a good mound, test it with telephone booths, center-trench it, lay out the pottery sequence, seriate it, and compare it with the sequence from San Jacinto. The strategy was so original that the student had had no trouble obtaining a National Science Foundation Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant.

“I’d like to have you talk to the kid before he goes to the field,” said R.M.A. “I’ve had him read a lot of your articles…”

“Sure, I’ll be glad to.”

“… and he disagrees with nearly all of them.”

With that preparation, I must now introduce you to the student, for he is the third of the principal characters in this parable. I will call him the “Skeptical Graduate Student,” or “S.G.S.” He is obnoxiously smart, and has only a vestigial respect for established authority. Idealism sticks out all over him. His edges are rough. He understands the New Math. I knew he was going to make some wise remark, and I was trying to think of a suitable put-down in advance when he asked politely, “Tell me, Mr. Science, do you really think that a person can define the ecological adaptation of a Formative people, reconstruct their way of life, figure out their social and political organization, and uncover their relationship with other Formative peoples by putting a couple of telephone booths into a mound?”

“I don’t think so,” I admitted.

“Then why do people go on doing it?” he asked.

“I’ve sort of been wondering about that myself.”

“I’ve been reading Binford,” he began. I stiffened a little at that, because these religious fanatics always make me nervous. “He says,” S.G.S. went on, “that the methodology most appropriate for the task of isolating and studying processes of cultural change and evolution is one which is regional in scope, and executed with the aid of research designs based on the principles of probability sampling.”

Smart-ass kid, I thought to myself.

“Do you know Binford personally?” he finally asked.

“Yes,” I answered. “I was with him the day he fed 5000 undergraduates with a few loaves of bread and a newspaperful of fish.”

Archeological Research Strategy

By now the crafty reader will have guessed that the three allegorical characters introduced in the parable above are all part of one personality. All of us engaged in Formative archeology have varying degrees of each—skeptical graduate student, real Mesoamerican archeologist, and great synthesizer—carrying on a dialectic inside our heads. Periodically, each of us senses that the methodology and research strategy we use in the field cannot possibly yield the kinds of information we claim in the grant proposals we are after. But for how long can we continue to blame this on the shortcomings of the sites themselves, or fatalistically rationalize, as does R.E.W. Adams (1969) in the quote at the beginning of this book, that “one can still not confidently predict even on what problem 60% of his data is going to bear before going into an intensive excavation project”?

Let us momentarily yield the floor to the Skeptical Graduate Student, and he will direct us to a paper by Stuart Struever (1969) entitled “Archeology and the study of cultural process: Some comments on data requirements and research strategy.” In this paper, Struever, an archeologist working in the midwestern United States, outlines a research program that is “regional in scope” and “based on the principles of probability sampling” as Binford (1964) has suggested. Struever’s ideas are founded, not on some idealistic a priori notions of what archeology should be in the future, but on what he has actually been doing during a 15-year project in a 19-mile stretch of the lower Illinois River basin. He sees such a project proceeding along three main lines:

1. Reconstructing subsistence-settlement systems.

2. Obtaining population measures for geographic areas and for a series of prehistoric socio-political units, ranging from household to polity.

3. Inferring aspects of prehistoric social struc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Contributors
• Foreword (2009)
• Chapter 1 Research Strategy and Formative Mesoamerica
• Chapter 2 Analysis on the Household Level
• Chapter 3 Analysis on the Community Level
• Chapter 4 The Village and Its Catchment Area
• Chapter 5 Sampling on the Regional Level
• Chapter 6 Analysis on the Regional Level: Part I
• Chapter 7 Analysis on the Regional Level: Part II
• Chapter 8 Analyzing Patterns of Growth
• Chapter 9 Analysis of Stylistic Variation within and between Communities
• Chapter 10 Interregional Exchange Networks
• Chapter 11 Interregional Religious Networks
• Chapter 12 A Prayer for an Endangered Species
• Subject Index