The Routledge Handbook of Mesoamerican Bioarchaeology

Vera Tiesler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN: 9781000586329
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

This volume brings together a range of contributors with different and hybrid academic backgrounds to explore, through bioarchaeology, the past human experience in the territories that span Mesoamerica.

This handbook provides systematic bioarchaeological coverage of skeletal research in the ancient Mesoamericas. It offers an integrated collection of engrained, bioculturally embedded explorations of relevant and timely topics, such as population shifts, lifestyles, body concepts, beauty, gender, health, foodways, social inequality, and violence. The additional treatment of new methodologies, local cultural settings, and theoretic frames rounds out the scope of this handbook. The selection of 36 chapter contributions invites readers to engage with the human condition in ancient and not-so-ancient Mesoamerica and beyond.

The Routledge Handbook of Mesoamerican Bioarchaeology is addressed to an audience of Mesoamericanists, students, and researchers in bioarchaeology and related fields. It serves as a comprehensive reference for courses on Mesoamerica, bioarchaeology, and Native American studies.

0.1 FOREWORD

DOI: 10.4324/9780429341618-1

Over the past 38 years, doing research in Peru as a paleopathologist and bioarchaeologist I have followed parallel developments in Mesoamerican bioarchaeology as an interested observer. Although I have only participated in excavations of Mesoamerican skeletal remains once (Costa Rica in the summer of 1980), over the years I have contributed to a number of conferences and publication projects examining similarities and differences between the ancient inhabitants of Andean South America and Mesoamerica (Verano and Ubelaker 1992: Disease and Demography in the Americas; Scherer and Verano 2014: Embattled Bodies, Embattled Places: War in Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica and the Andes; Tiesler and Lozada 2018: Social Skins of the Head: Body Beliefs and Ritual in Ancient Mesoamerica and the Andes; Tiesler and Scherer 2018: Smoke, Flames, and the Human Body in Mesoamerican Ritual Practice; Tiesler, Suzuki, and Pereira in press: Tratamientos mortuorios del cuerpo humano: perspectivas tafonómicas y arqueotanatológicas). Vera Tiesler organized and carried forward many of these collaborative endeavors, and I have greatly enjoyed working with her as a contributing author, friend, and colleague. Her contributions to Mesoamerican scholarship and comparative studies are particularly important for expanding our perspectives beyond the regional, national, and temporal frameworks to which we often limit ourselves.

In the Routledge Handbook of Mesoamerican Bioarchaeology, Tiesler brings together the contributions of numerous scholars to address diverse research topics in Mesoamerican bioarchaeology. These topics include broad geographic and temporal surveys as well as applications of methodological advances in the excavation and analysis of Mesoamerican skeletal remains. Chapters in the volume feature contributions on cultural modification of the body (cranial and dental modification), reconstructions of diet and disease, population mobility, and the bioarchaeology of the Early Colonial period, among others. A useful review is provided of similarities and differences in the way human remains are studied and conserved in the various countries that constitute Mesoamerica today. With 36 chapters written by leading researchers, this volume is a tour de force in Mesoamerican bioarchaeology. In imagining and structuring this handbook, Vera builds upon decades of research and numerous publications on her collaborative field and laboratory projects, and the contributing authors clearly demonstrate the value of such collaborative work. This volume is a major addition to the Routledge Handbook series, and will serve as a critical reference for Mesoamerican bioarchaeology for years to come, both for scholars and interested readers familiar with Mesoamerica and for those of us who work in other geographic regions and who may be less familiar with recent advances in Mesoamerican bioarchaeology. I am saving a spot on my bookshelf for this volume and eagerly await its publication.

John Verano Professor of Anthropology Tulane University

0.2 INTRODUCTION

DOI: 10.4324/9780429341618-2

Vera Tiesler

This chapter introduces the eight central parts and the 36 chapters that make up the Routledge Handbook of Mesoamerican Bioarchaeology, now safely in the reader’s hands or digital devices. In this avant propos I wish to provide a brief biocultural synopsis of Prehispanic Mesoamerica and the academic coverage of its archaeologically retrieved skeletal remains, most of which has been treated properly under the academic hood of “bioarchaeology”. Initially an Anglo-Saxon line of research defined by the study of human remains from a biocultural perspective and as an integrated part of the material culture of the past (Blakely 1977; Buikstra 1977), bioarchaeology was widely adopted in Mesoamericanistic and specifically Maya scholarship during the 90s of last century (Buikstra 1997; White 1999; Whittington and Reed 1997). Since then, “bioarchaeology” had been promoted actively and directly by a long string of international courses, workshops, and collaborative research partnered by anglophone scholars both in Mexico as among its Central American neighbors. In its course, “bioarchaeology” has rapidly evolved into the conceptual umbrella under which most of the regional research on archaeologically retrieved human remains is conducted by local students and scholars.

Already during the 60s and 70s of last century, Frank Saul (1972) had concocted an “osteobiographic” approach specifically for ancient Mesoamericans and announced it as a novel way to learn about ancient peoples and their lifestyles from an actor-based approximation. More specifically formulated was William Haviland’s work on living stature and its relationship to wealth and residency at Tikal (Haviland 1967, 1992). Both Haviland’s and Saul’s work are now considered landmark studies in Mesoamerican and especially Maya bioarchaeology in that their interpretations clearly correlate skeletal data with mortuary and socioculturally relevant contextual information. Although it may be argued that neither Saul nor Haviland laid out any grounded conceptual schemes for the incorporation of skeletal studies, it was the first time that human skeletons were studied as active stakeholders of past cultural interaction and lived experience.

Taking stock of today’s Mesoamerican bioarchaeology sets the stage for the vision and organization of this Handbook, which provides systematic coverage of human skeletal research conducted across the territories of ancient Mesoamerica. Today, this area spans most parts of Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica. Before the European contact, this was the setting of complex, state-level societies that evolved, flourished, and perished here during three thousand years. The Mesoamerican landscapes are noted for their data-richness by world (bio)archaeological standards, allowing for robust interdisciplinary dialogues, which have fertilized local and international academic traditions in biological anthropology and archaeology and, more recently, proper bioarchaeological research.

Biocultural Regional Frames

When Spanish explorers first sighted the Mesoamerican Coast back in the early 16th century, they hit upon a major native civilization that was definitely more sophisticated and vast than anything they had previously encountered in the New World. The area that encompassed the Mesoamerican world was then densely settled by complex agricultural populations, which were administered by urbanized ruling elites, knowledgeable in reading and writing and erudite in astronomic and calendar recording. Beyond general cultural elements it is a deeply engrained native worldview, unique to Mesoamerican peoples, that has evolved and unified here during at least three thousand years of shared past. Such is the vivified notion of cosmic cycling and the transformations of the world’s constitutive elements including living and dead humans. Far from denoting a state of existential absence or unidirectional transformation, life and death cycles are conceived body-anchored and semanticize regenerative cyclic transformation that connects with godly anecumene (López-Austin 1989, 2015). The perceived fluidity between life and death is also expressed spatially: instead of separating their mortal kin in cemeteries, the subsoil of milpas (cornfields) and residences were deemed among Mesoamericans apt burial locals to procure continuity and permanence (Scherer 2015). Fluidity and balance concepts characterize also diseases which in Mesoamerica adhere to complex cold-and-hot, illness-health-and-healing schemes, apt to be re-interpreted through the eyes of the informed modern scholar (Jaén 1978, 1996; Jaén and Murillo 2005).

The human body was recognized by ancient Mesoamericans as a blue-print and embodied model of their native universe (López-Austin 1989). Conceived as a organic capsule that housed divine forces, humans shared body secretions and essences (in ancient times human sacrifices) with the gods in order to repay their favors and thus prevent harm and extermination (Monaghan 2000; Martínez 2007; Velásquez 2015). In such a cosmic anatomy, the head was represented as a leafy tree or simply as the “apex” of the mythical sacred mountain (López Austin and López Luján 2009; Taube 2004), its trunk mutated into the life-giving entrails of the sacred mountain with the anatomic portals conceived as “caves”. Such ancestral body conceptualization has allowed today’s scholars to insufflate their bioarchaeological interpretations with a culturally aligned perspective of physical embodiment.

Past the colonies, during the first half of the last century, Paul Kirchhoff 1943 (Figure 0.2.1) demarcated Mesoamerica for modern scholarship. Following the academic tradition of cultural historicism still in vogue at that time, Kirchhoff defined this cultural sphere by its suite of shared material and ideological elements, which include state level political structures, urbanization, pantheistic religious concepts, a cosmological notion of balance with the sacred world, a vigesimal numeric system, calendrical counts and glyphic writing, ball playing and religious monumental platform constructions. Shared subsistence staples, such as maize, squash, beans, amaranth, and chili, further define Mesoamerica.

Mesoamerican civilization looks back to a continuous occupation of several thousand years. Here, incipient agriculture began almost ten thousand years ago, defining the Archaic period (BC 8000–2000), which led to the establishment of sedentary agricultural villages (Prufer et al. 2014). The two thousand years that encompass the Formative period (2000 BC–AD 250), saw the rise of first hierarchically organized social organizations. These were noticeably the Gulf Coast Olmecs that extended ties with other peoples north along the coast and towards the Highlands, the Maya area and southwards across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. These networks, together with the beliefs and rituals that accompanied them, laid the basis for subsequent Mesoamerican cultural evolvement during the Classic period, which roughly spans the first millennium ad. The Early Classic was dominated by Teotihuacan and Monte Albán in Central Mexico and Lowland Maya society to the east. The latter was organized along extended family relationships and as territorial units. The political landscape was dynamic, as the distribution of power fluctuated, as the dynastic histories of all major centers among the city-states show. Maya leaders were related through family ties, which were constantly reinforced through strategic marriage bonds (Martin and Grube 2008; Martin 2020).

Figure 0.2.1 Map of Mesoamerica with broad cultural divisions and major sites mentioned in the text.

Source: Drawing by LBA/UADY and V. Tiesler

After the tumult of Teotihuacan’s collapse around 600 ad, population shuffling and conflicts between several important Highland centers ensued. Epiclassic period Nahua groups started to migrate from the north, while merchant folk from the Gulf Coast gained prominence around the shores of Mesoamerica. The close of the first millennium was marked by the irrevocable decline of many important Classic period nations, such as Zapotec Monte Albán or the Lowland Maya inland hegemonies.

The Postclassic period (900–1521 AD) brought along pan-Mesoamerican ideological shifts and a Nahua-dominated streamlining of ideological systems. Oligarchic councils now operated in much of Central Mexico and in the Maya area; corporate or dual rulership replaced the more theocratic and governments of previous times and obliterated the former personal cults of Maya royalty, which perished during the so-called “Maya collapse”. Evermore powerful, wide-ranging networks of pochteca merchants dominated the economic networks towards and during the Postclassic era, while military orders gained prominence towards the second half of the Postclassic period and dominated Mesoamerica during the times of the Aztec empire.

The Prehispanic Mesoamerican cultural traditions shifted abruptly after the Spanish conquest and as subjugation started in the early 16th century. However, the geocultural space formerly occupied by Prehispanic communities has remained resilient and after two centuries of dramatic population decline past the European contact, now is still home to a group of highly complex native peoples who retain language, cultural, and historical ties amongst each other (Figure 0.2.1). Among the deep legacies of native cultures are today’s Maya, Zapotec and Mixtec, Purepecha, Totonac, Huastec, and Nahua (Manzanilla and López Luján 1994; Sharer and Traxler 2006). A set of sub-regions within Mesoamerica is defined by an aggregate of geographic and cultural attributes. These areas include Central Mexico, West Mexico, the Gulf Coast Lowlands, Oaxaca, the Southern Pacific Lowlands, and the Southeast Mesoamerican borderlands of Honduras, Nicaragua, and northern Costa Rica. The Maya area is generally divided into Lowland and Highland regions; the latter is home to inland Peten and Yucatecan groups.

Taking Stock of Mesoamerican Bioarchaeology in Mexico and Central America

In Mexico and the modern Central American countries that were formerly occupied by Mesoamerica, research of archaeologically retrieved skeletons remains inextricably entwined with its massive pre-Columbian legacy. This is showcased by Mexican physical anthropology, or more recently, bioarchaeology, which now stands somewhat at the intersection between archaeology and taphonomy, forensic sciences and medical anatomy, osteology and dental anthropology, epigraphy and art history. This has changed radically from the 19th century, when skeletal studies on the ancient Mesoamericans set out as case descriptions and standard inventories of small skeletal collections that contained the basic information on (mainly cranial) morphology and measurements (León 1919; see also Comas 1966; Serrano and Villanueva 1997). Toward and past the Mexican Revolution and up to the years of President Lazaro Cárdenas, Mexican physical anthropology evolved from the isolated and uncoordinated research efforts that characterized it during the latter part of the 19th century, to its firm establishment within the exhibit halls, classrooms, and laboratories of the National Museum of Mexico in Mexico City (founded in 1825; Tiesler and Jaén 2012).

Apart from their pre-Columbian legacy, the postconquest (novo-Hispanic, post-colonial and post-revolutionary) trajectories of the modern Latin American countries that share the Mesoamerican territories have left strong imprints on the social contexts in which the ancient and not-so-ancient human remains are conceived and studied. In this area, corpses and skeletons are not only celebrated during the days of the dead but may physically embody acts of massive structural, social, and direct violence that include massacres and systematic assassinations. In such a context, death simply cannot be studied as an abstract or purely scientific phenomeno...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Contributors
• 0.1 Foreword
• 0.2 Introduction
• PARTI Framing Mesoamerican Bioarchaeology
• PART II Across the Human Landscapes of Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica
• PART III The Bioarchaeology of Cities, Neighborhoods, and Communities
• PART IV The Body as a Cultural Construct
• PART V Life Style, Diet, and Health
• PART VI Population and Mobility
• PART VII Breaking New Grounds in Methodology
• PART VIII The Bioarchaeology of the Thresholds of Modernity: Learning From the Past to Meet Today’s Challenges
• Index