Conclusion

The World as They Knew It

The Interaction Sphere Concept in Current Mesoamerican Archaeology

David Freidel

Before European explorers of the late fifteen and early sixteenth centuries launched the imperial and mercantilist projects of their rulers (Wallerstein 1974; Wolf 1982), congeries of complex societies had for thousands of years defined themselves as worlds without the sense of globe. This was not an accident of history but rather a human propensity, for the complex societies of the Western Hemisphere independently arrived at this cultural conclusion long before they encountered Europeans. The chapters in this book elucidate a range of possible social dynamics and empirical entailments of interaction that generated and sustained the institutional framework of the ancient Mesoamerican world. For it was a world, and not one predicated on a particular list of cultural traits or necessarily on impositions from dominant regimes but rather one largely built over generations on the needs and desires of people, to identify with others who spoke different languages, wore different clothes, worshipped different gods, and made different things. The practical consequences of such successful efforts to overcome the propensities of xenophobia were trade and emulation, and these register in the archaeological record as reviewed in this book. But trade can extend beyond such ancient worlds and emulation can be sporadic and selective in such frontier areas (McGuire 1989; Urban and Schortman 1986), so it is fair to say that the ancient Mesoamerican world was populated by peoples who defined themselves as “in” more than “out,” particularly in the frontier regions. I am here positing that while all such decisions were no doubt economic and political in the sense reviewed by Gary M. Feinman (chapter 1), they were also social and cultural ones. However parochial their views, and local their adaptations to environmental and material constraints, participants in the Mesoamerican world knew that it existed and that, friend or foe, their neighbors were their partners in it.

After Joseph Caldwell’s (1964) seminal introduction of the interaction sphere concept in the context of the Hopewell phenomenon in North America, this approach proved a productive theoretical challenge to culture area explanations. I later applied it to the case of lowland Maya Preclassic civilization in the context of a critique of culture area diffusionary schemes there (Freidel 1979). Some of its most famous variants in archaeology are derived from the World Systems model of Immanuel Wallerstein (1964) as alluded to by Gary M. Feinman at the beginning of this book. Recently in the arena of Neolithic and Bronze Age Eurasia, Michael Frachetti (2008, 2012) has challenged both basic expressions of the culture area migration-diffusion approach (Anthony 2010) and the World Systems core-periphery approach (Kohl 1987, but see also Kohl 2008 for a more recent perspective) to the dissemination of key innovations such as plant and animal domestication and metallurgy across the vast steppe terrain and the advent of social and cultural complexity among its peoples. Frachetti (2012:19) proposes that interaction in his case expressed “nonuniform institutional complexity” whereby “organizational structures—such as shared trade parameters, building conventions, ideological symbolism, or even the value or signification of particular technological innovations—demonstrate periodic institutional alignments among participant communities without demanding they be subsumed under a coherent political structure or social identity.” Several cases for interaction presented in this book illustrate nuanced patterns of production and distribution of things and distributions of technologies and material symbols that appear to reflect such nonuniformity: dynamic, selective and agent-driven interaction through space and time. These thoughts on nonuniform institutional complexity as an approach in important ways echo Feinman’s apt commentary at the opening of this book, and one can generally conclude that the editors and the contributors are striving to expand the scope of the concept of interaction.

Guy David Hepp’s chapter 2, with its focus on new discoveries and analyses from the site of La Consentida on the west coast of Oaxaca introduces several of the key themes of the book. First of all, it is one of several refreshing forays into important new research outside the main traditional foci of Mesoamerican archaeology. Second, Hepp discusses interaction at several different and ultimately contingent geographic scales, including the famous prospect of Pacific coastal trade and migration between Mesoamerica and South America. In looking at the origins and development of ceramic containers in light of La Consentida’s Early Formative Tlacuache phase assemblage, Hepp provides a closely argued comparison with other Early Formative ceramics that have been well researched and published—the Barra assemblages of coastal Chiapas and the Tierras Largas assemblage of the Valley of Oaxaca—and concludes that the Tlacuache phase assemblage is distinctive from Barra in forms, functions, and decoration. He suggests that the patterns in evidence point to the existence of a western Mexican Red-on-Buff horizon, or interaction sphere, distinct from an interaction sphere exemplified by Barra and related assemblages to the east on the Pacific coast of Guatemala. He is open to the prospect that the La Consentida ceramic tradition might be linked to South American ceramic traditions, though he is careful to point out that more research would be needed to pursue this matter. This inquiry touches on central issues perennially addressed in interaction sphere studies, namely, stylistic and technological innovation and diffusion.

As in the case of several other chapters, Hepp reviews the evidence for interaction derived from a series of data sets—including obsidian, material symbol systems—particularly as expressed in ceramic figurines and musical instruments, and greenstone artifacts. He notes that the patterns sometimes evidently contradict or deviate from the patterns seen in the ceramic spheres, but that nevertheless the people he studies certainly participated in regional interaction spheres evinced in these materials. This conclusion resonates with Frachetti’s nonuniform institutional complexity model introduced above, as it points to the prospect that the La Consentida community participated in several distinct exchange institutions at any given time and that its members had choices and agency regarding their participation in any one of them. Among the choices Mesoamericans could make were whether or not to adopt the social and cultural contextual baggage of materials that they brought into their communities through interaction. The book editors Joshua D. Englehardt and Michael D. Carrasco address this matter squarely in their chapter.

Ancient Mesoamericans were the only peoples in the Western Hemisphere to innovate writing systems that encoded spoken language (even while the Quipu systems of the Andean region remain under consideration). Following leads in the study of early writing elsewhere in the world, Joshua D. Englehardt and Michael D. Carrasco (chapter 3) propose that such innovation was enabled and facilitated through the regional interaction of sages using what they term iconographic systems. They propose that the people adept in such systems, what I call sages, with their learned and specialized skills in reading and relating visual iconographic configurations in terms of word symbols (storytelling, curing, and other performances of ritual involving declamation and singing, for example), were able to extract particular icons from exotic and borrowed contexts and situated them in novel ones. This process of decontextualizing and then recontextualizing an icon is well documented in the study of canons of art over time (Panofsky 1939) and makes good sense in the case at hand. It is a premise that also raises the issue of disjunction and continuity over time in the symbolic meanings linked to a given icon. Englehardt and Carrasco address this matter by looking at the variable compositional contexts of particular icons. For example, they observe that the Lazy-S scroll proposed by Reilly (1996) to have the meaning of cloud associated with rain in Middle Formative reliefs of Chalcatzingo and also to mean cloud in the Classic Maya script and Postclassic Dresden Codex, may have meant something related but different in the context of Classic Zapotec funerary imagery or Mixtec codices. Here the pervasiveness of the association with cloud and rain is strong enough for the authors to propose a secondary value to these contexts.

Still, it seems likely that the processes of recontextualizing icons in ways that attached them to words would have proceeded in the presence of a broad command of both the donor and receptor iconographic systems among the cosmopolitan sages doing this work. Surely such manipulation in ignorance of one of those systems would have generated arbitrary repurposing and not the enduring and continuous development of icons into word-based symbols that the authors illustrate, for example, in their intriguing “mat-throne” collocation. In sum, the authors agree that the kind of borrowing and resituating they describe actually implies a high degree of common-language-based conversation about the religious and ritual precepts informing the iconographic systems. Whether such linguistic interaction involved lingua franca, facility in several languages, or more likely both references the strong traditions in linguistic anthropology focused on these matters and referenced by the authors.

A core issue in this inquiry, and one that really extends into the authors’ recent article in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal (Carrasco and Englehardt 2015), focusing on the Early Formative style Cascajal Block, is the innovation of linear arrangement of icons in ways that suggest their recontextualization and transformation into word symbols. In this chapter the authors imply that the CB pattern is an example of column arrangement, but a perplexing fact of the matter is that the icons appear to be arranged in horizontal lines in basic violation of virtually all uncontested examples of early Mesoamerican texts. That said, their brief for the juxtaposition of a throne and a mat icon as expressing a kenning, royal power, is pretty persuasive. Kent Reilly and I (2010) proposed that the icons on the CB commemorate the laying out of iconic tokens in an act of divination, and Englehardt and Carrasco do not take issue with this possibility. In our reading, Reilly and I proposed that in fact the horizontal linear reading worked in “boustrophedon” fashion, that is, reading from left to right and then right to left from top to bottom. What if the pervasive shared cultural condition for the recontextualization of icons into word symbols was the perception of casting and arranging of divining tokens as what Scott Ortman (2012) calls a “conceptual metaphor” in this case representing the primordial act of creation, one through which the oracular divine speaks to the sage? While many diving tokens in Mesoamerica are simple and neutral forms, such as seeds or maize kernels, many others arranged on diving tables are iconic objects (Brown 2014).

Columnar arrangement of tokens is actually the likely basis for numeracy prior to its use in literacy in Mesoamerica. Bar and dot notation, with dots representing the number 1 and bars the number 5, most likely derived from the manipulation of actual artifacts on smooth surfaces (Freidel et al. 2017; Freidel et al. 2015). In the Mesoamerican vigesimal system of place notation, which must have had its origins in the Middle Formative period and which certainly was in place by the Late Formative, the bars and dots are arranged in columns. In this perspective the Cascajal Block may represent the first step toward word-based reading of icons, before the horizontal linear arrangement of divining tokens was effectively integrated into columnar calendar calculations based in numbers. When writing systems do emerge, they generally include elements of human beings, particularly heads but also hands, and these are already present in the iconographic depictions that presage true writing (Carrasco and Englehardt 2015). Prudence Rice (2017) suggests that these elements reference “disindividuated” fragments of votive ceramic figurines, an artifact category well represented in Middle Formative Mesoamerica. I would add that they also likely represent the appropriation by sages and rulers of the oracular voice represented in the inscriptions as they emerge as human declarations from supernaturally inspired divination patterns.

The sages highlighted here must have been familiar with several languages in order to interact in ways that eventually generated written scripts, and Kerry M. Hull in chapter 4 programmatically reviews several features of linguistic interaction that affirm this premise. Surely many Mesoamericans were multilingual in the deep past as they were at the time of the Spanish arrival, especially in frontier areas. Experts in ancient Mesoamerican languages have their differences, but generally ascribe to methodologies that can identify loanwords and developmental dynamics affected by these traditions, and these strands of argument support other evidence for long-term regional interaction between neighboring peoples. As a Mayanist focused in part on the relationship between Teotihuacan and the lowlands in the Early Classic period (Freidel et al. 2007), I am particularly curious about how that social and cultural interaction bears on this issue of linguistic interaction. Hull, in chapter 4, defers to other experts who see the impact of Nawa on Mayan lowland languages as occurring after the fall of Teotihuacan, now placed around AD 550. David Stuart (2000), on the other hand, is confident that the lowland Maya called Teotihuacan Puh, “place of cattail reeds,” and the Nawa term for “place of cattail reeds” is Tollan. It seems unlikely to me that the Maya were retrospectively imposing this famous name on Teotihuacan. Hull (2006) has written on Classic Maya political history, and the relationships between Cholan and Yucatecan as he reviews them in this chapter are, in my view, highly relevant to such history. He makes a good case for intensive interaction between these languages in the Classic period and even proposes the possibility of a lingua franca based on them. I am pursuing the prospect (Freidel 2012, 2018) that the Kaanul kings and queens he identifies with Calakmul, but which earlier in the Classic were evidently seated at Dzibanche, presided over a realm that was predominantly central peninsular and northern lowland Maya and Yucatecan speaking. The prolonged conflicts between Kaanul and the kings of Tikal, ancient Mutal, may have been based on an ethnic division as Tikal, and its southern lowland allies were likely Cholan speakers. In the last analysis, Hull makes clear that linguistic interaction can be usefully coordinated with other kinds of interaction in the elucidation of Mesoamerican ancient history.

The slab-footed tripod vase or cup, along with its often-accompanying knobbed lid, is a leitmotif of Early Classic regional interaction emanating from Teotihuacan. D. Bryan Schaeffer proposes (chapter 5) that this ceramic form exemplifies the consecration of foreign origin, lending objects prestige and power. This is a well-sustained principle expressed in many styles and fashions that have moved with trade, diplomacy, and war in worlds, ancient and modern. But the notion of the sacred implied by the term “consecration” is expressed in the movement of religious ideas, and certainly universalizing religions are distributed in the context of consecrated artifacts. While Schaeffer alludes to the possibility, citing Annabeth Headrick, that the tripod pattern itself may have had sacred connotations, in actuality it is the symbolism found on tripod cylinders that might support the notion of religious and political significance. The “dazzler” vessel from the Copán tomb that most posit to be that of the queen founder of the dynasty is particularly expressive of this reality. According to David Stuart (2004), Karl Taube (2004), and others, it depicts the personification of a fire shrine “origin house,” in ancient Mayan a Wite’ Naah. As Schaeffer observes, the goggle-ornamented eyes in the doorway are likely those of the king founder of the Copán dynasty K’inich Yak K’uk’ Mo’. The Wite’ Naah cult introduced into the Maya lowlands by Kaloomte’ Sihyaj K’ahk’ in AD 378 was the most important religious interaction between Teotihuacan and the Maya lowlands. The Huunal tomb, which likely held the remains of this king, had a second tripod cylinder ornamented with insignia framed by feathers such as banners. These are the “in-line triad” and “bigote” (Langley 1993) that most scholars see as a variant of the Storm God. However, I argue (Freidel 2012, 2018), following Susan Milbrath (2000), that this is the name of the Teotihuacan Moon Goddess. If I am right, then the king carried a ceramic gift declaring the feminine divine from Teotihuacan, while his wife had a representation of him as the male divine. Together they were “mother-fathers,” founding ancestors. However this argument ends, the vessels were clearly very sacred. If Schaeffer is right that the vessel form itself was consecrated as exotic among the Maya, I would suggest that this status might have derived over time from the symbolism placed on such vessels. In any case, I quite agree with him and with Joseph Ball (1983) that the distribution of this exotic form in the Maya lowlands registers emulation and political interaction more than trade in ceramic containers or even the widespread gifting of such containers from highland Mexico to the Maya area. But if exotic containers themselves were rare and prestigious evidence of cosmopolitan aesthetic, it remains the case that Early Classic Mesoamericans exchanged other more tangible materials over distance and that such trade remains a source of potential practical economic and political interaction over distance.

The material stakes in question register in posited military interaction. At Yaxuna in the northern Yucatán, I participated in a project that discovered a remarkable Early Classic ceramic effigy of a female deity (Ardren 2002; Stanton et al. 2010; Suhler 1996; Suhler and Freidel 1998; Tiesler et al. 2017) that I identify as the Maya version of the Teotihuacan Moon Goddess. What I take to be carved stone versions of this young female were discovered in offerings in the Pyramid of the Moon (Sugiyama and López Austin 2007) and as in the case of such massive ritual offerings, Yaxuna Burial 24 evidently contained an aggregation of sacrifices. The Yaxuna context contained royal insignia jewels, and hence the sacrifices were probably of high elite status (Freidel 2014). Furthermore, Yaxuna project staff have posited that this tomb is evidence of a military takeover in the era of the Entrada of Sihyaj K’ahk’. Jesper Nielsen and his colleagues, in chapter 6, clearly favor the projection of military power by the government of Teotihuacan during the Early Classic period based on their research in Guerrero.

Nielsen (2003) has been an advocate for Teotihuacan militarism and imperialism for a long time, and the first third of this chapter is devoted to reviewing arguments favoring this position. So I take the opportunity to briefly state some of my own views on this vital kind of interaction. I concur with Sugiyama (2005) that the iconography and complex ritual deposits at Teotihuacan affirm that its government had long-term military programs. However, Teotihuacan’s iconographic programs also express religious and cosmological principles that appeal to the practical agrarian concerns of the majority of people governed by Teotihuacan’s elusive rulers. This is hardly contradictory in Mesoamerican history: the Templo Mayor was dedicated to Tlaloc, essential rain-bringer, and Huitzilopochtli, exemplary warrior. The complex relationship between economic, and foundationally agricultural, prosperity, and military power should be expanded and elaborated in our pursuit of good-fit models of regional interaction. So while the Classic period Feathered Serpent, the Storm God, the Moon Goddess, the Sun God (a Maya deity incorporated in the Wite’ Naah Fire Shrine cult, see Taube 2004) certainly perform as war gods (among several others), they also perform as rain bringers and crop sustainers. As the great One Rabbit famine showed in the case of the Mexica, military power can prove necessary when food security by means of rain magic and trade or tribute prove insufficient.

Nielsen and colleagues (chapter 6) review the case for a Teotihuacan military presence in Guerrero primarily through the iconography of carved stone monuments. These monuments certainly display Teotihuacan style symbolism, including bleeding hearts and weaponry that imply warfare and sacrifice. But the sustained resistance to the notion of direct military intervention among many Maya archaeologists should give caution to deducing major imperial projection based on such data. In the Maya case there is clear textual evidence to support the Entrada of Sihyaj K’ahk’ in AD 378, and archaeological evidence suggestive of the deposal and sacrifice of royalty at Tikal in the context of that Entrada. I think that the Entrada also registers in sacrificial interments at El Peru-Waka’ in northwestern Petén and at Yaxuna in the Yucatán. That said, a case for imperial conquest analogous to ancient conquests discerned archaeologically elsewhere in the world has not been established through a range of artifact categories beginning with pervasive imposition of architectural designs replete with imperial propaganda and continuing through quotidian categories such as ceramics. As Schaeffer proposes in chapter 5, the slab-footed tripod vessels of the Maya lowlands are overwhelmingly local and likely express emulation rather than imperial subjugation. And the Teotihuacan inspired symbolism in the Maya lowlands is rapidly and quite thoroughly syncretized with long-established Maya symbolism yielding an innovative and cosmopolitan elite culture that is quite distinct from art in the Mexican city. The relationship between Teotihuacan and the Early Classic lowland Maya is real and transformative of those kingdoms that embraced it, but it does not appear to be an imperial imposition. I believe it will turn out to be a major political and commercial alliance, with the military component being one of support for one faction against another in an internecine lowland Maya struggle (Freidel 2014). Nielsen and his colleagues are certainly correct that Teotihuacan-inspired monuments in Guerrero invite more archaeological investigation of trade routes linking southeastern Mesoamerica to that capital.

Speaking of trade, López de Gómara (Simpson 1964), biographer of Hernán Cortés, describes a foray inland of Spanish on the coast of Veracruz in which they encountered communities storing large quantities of bulk trade goods shipped by coastal canoe headed inland to the heart of the Mexica empire. While Mesoamerican archaeologists pay lip service to the role of contact period coastal trade on the Gulf of Mexico, Philip J. Arnold III and Lourdes Budar, chapter 7, underscore the antiquity of this form of regional interaction as registered in ceramics and figurines. I have suggested (2014) that Middle Formative Olmec shipped salt from the coast of the Yucatán through La Venta by means of canoes, an idea favored by Richard Diehl (2006). Arnold and Budar’s systematic and informative review of select expressions of interaction and with its focus on the Tuxtla Mountains begins with a consideration of the Stela-Base-Throne (SBT) complex of monuments that links the southern Gulf Coast lowlands to part of the Maya area to the east. Stelae as such occur in the Middle Formative at La Venta, and these are candidates for at least one independent innovation of the idea. As Reilly (1994, 2002; see also Freidel and Reilly 2010; González Lauck 2010) observes, the iconographic program on the majority of the La Venta stelae ranged along the southern base of the pyramid is resonant with incised pictographic programs on greenstone celts of the time. It is quite possible that these original stelae were commemorative of such celts, which were widely distributed between the southern Gulf Coast lowlands and the Maya area in Early into Middle Formative times. But the SBT complex is a distinct complex of monuments with a different distribution. While this chapter elucidates that distribution, it also points to the usefulness of considering the dynamics of selective participation in interaction as expressed through particular artifact categories, a matter of agency that I brought up in the context of Frachetti’s nonuniform institutional complexity model. Particularly with regard to the fine paste ceramics, which Arnold and Budar show have likely origins in the southern Gulf Coast lowlands, interaction between this region and the Maya lowlands, particularly along the coast, was two-way and important not just in the Postclassic and contact periods but much deeper in time.

Charles L. F. Knight’s cogent discussion, chapter 8, of the enormous Early Classic city of Cantona in eastern Puebla challenges the notion that Teotihuacan completely dominated Mesoamerican regional interaction in that era. More than a decade of research at the site shows that it lacks the architectural or artifactual signatures of Teotihuacan influence touted in other studies of Early Classic interaction. While it is of a scale to rival Teotihuacan, it lacks prodigious pyramids and its residents built a sprawling nucleated community rather than an orthogonal grid plan. Clearly their organizational model—however conceived politically, socially, and religiously—was distinct and autochthonous despite being less than 150 km away and situated near highly desirable obsidian sources. Knight’s careful analysis of obsidian artifacts and available sourcing information suggests that Teotihuacan received prestigious gifts form Cantona but did not regularly trade with this city. Moreover, the distribution of projectile point types, particularly with regard to what appear to be deliberately distinctive crafting techniques, suggestively links Cantona in independent trade networks with other parts of Mesoamerica. While more work needs to be done on the sourcing side of this inquiry, this is a very useful reality check on the notion that Teotihuacan uniformly dominated interaction spheres in Mexico during its apogee.

The northern frontier of Mesoamerica is one of the key areas in which to test the hypothesis posed at the beginning of this essay that Mesoamerica constituted a self-defining world. José Luis Punzo Díaz, in this theoretically stimulating and programmatic review, chapter 9, proposes that this northwestern section of Mesoamerica was not a passive recipient of innovations and ideas as might be construed in a World Systems approach, but rather a dynamic and agentive zone in which elites participated in the exchange of prestigious commodities. His notion of the Chalchihuites phenomenon as a buffer zone comprised of a diverse mixture of groups with varying subsistence regimes and participating in relations stimulated by encounters with Core-area Mesoamericans resonates with the nonuniform institutional complexity model proposed by Frachetti for the Eurasian steppe in relation to southwestern Asia. This is especially clear in Punzo’s declaration that the florescence of the northwestern area was not the product of colonization but of “selective appropriation and differential use of this corpus of pan-Mesoamerican ideas to variable degrees.” His careful assessment of the data suggests that the Chalchihuites phenomenon arose not as a stimulus response to Teotihuacan but rather after the decline and fall of that metropolis. This substantial review and synthesis contain many more valuable aspects, but for my purposes I can conclude that Punzo Díaz persuasively shows that the self-defining dynamic I propose was in the capable hands of local people interested in enhancing their local status and power and not the product of imposition from the core area.

Timothy J. Knab and John M. D. Pohl (chapter 10) offer a bold vision of local people shaping their interaction within regions in their model of rotating power, social capital, and trade in the context of Pre-Columbian and postcontact Cholula. While they are careful to insist that the conquest dramatically changed the religion and social institutions of this preeminent Mesoamerican city, they also provide reasons for their view that deep structures persisted across this divide in the collective organization and maintenance of social capital. They suggest that the political economics of Cholula’s very complex Catholic festival cycles register the perpetuation of cults focusing on Quetzalcoatl for which the Pre-Columbian city was justly famous. Those cults were managed by the city’s traders, glossed as Pochteca along with many other trader sodalities of highland Mexico, including those of the Aztec empire. They make the persuasive argument that just as the enduring and evolving Catholic festival sodalities of Cholula require long-term accumulation of social capital extending across large groups of people, so the accumulation, transport, exchange, and disbursement of trade commodities required such social capital to finance the expeditions and absorb the risk. This is a quite different scenario than the one most Mesoamerican archaeologists are familiar with in the case of the Aztecs. The Aztec Pochteca evidently received financing for expeditions from wealthy aristocrats as well as from the state and gave profitable returns on such investments. In light of the arguments favoring some form of collective governance in the case of Teotihuacan, this model would seem to have significant potential for elucidating the interface of social institutions and regional exchange interaction deeper in time.

The Templo Mayor excavations have revealed a startling abundance of cached offerings deposited with successive expansions of the pyramid. Niklas Schulze and Blanca E. Maldonado, chapter 11, situate their sample of over 3,000 copper bells from the offerings within a clear and substantial consideration of the present state of metallurgical studies in Mesoamerica. Despite a frustrating lack of archaeological information on the location and organization of workshops, mines, and other aspects of the operative chain of metal ore to finished artifacts, their contextual control of the Templo Mayor sample and their close analysis of this sample yield some very intriguing possibilities. They conclude, based on the remarkable internal stylistic consistency of the sample and comparable metallurgical coherency, that the copper bell offerings were most likely the product of institutional production organized by the Aztec state. They speculate that the workshops may well have been located in the capital nearby. A second likely source for bells was acquisition by the state from markets, where traders would have brought them from other crafting localities. Placed within the larger context of imperishable offerings going into the repeated expansions of the Templo Mayor, jades, and other preciosities, I am reminded of anthropologist David Graeber’s (2011) proposition that currencies are first and foremost tokens of debt, backed by states and demanded by them as taxes and tribute. Copper bells in the Late Postclassic and contact periods were indeed currency, along with copper axes in some areas. The wide array of materials incorporated into the Templo Mayor offerings express a ranging interest in the precious and exotic, no doubt for good religious and ritual reasons. But the pattern these authors see in the bells suggests to me that this state had identified an emerging currency token and was stimulating its manufacture and use as such within Mesoamerica’s larger political and economic interaction sphere. This kind of deliberate stimulating of currency production to facilitate state control was something colleagues and I identified with Spondylus in the Late Preclassic period of the Maya lowlands (Freidel et al. 2002).

Before Schulz and Maldonado focus on the Templo Mayor deposits, they situate their discussion in a broad review of the state of metallurgy studies in Mesoamerican archaeology today. The intriguing possibility that lower Central American and South American metallurgy predates Mesoamerican metallurgy by centuries if not millennia leaves open the prospect of long-distance trade, exchange, and diffusion between the continents. They then show how interaction within Mesoamerica linked craftspeople over distances and gradually expanded the distribution of metals as sacred media analogous to the much earlier and more pervasive jade and other greenstones. As with Hepp’s opening chapter in this book on early interaction spheres in coastal Oaxaca and adjacent areas, these authors show how this concept comfortably and productively operates at varying geographic scales, from the continental to the local.

The scale of interaction in Mesoamerica is a focus of Joyce Marcus’s chapter 12, and she argues that competition among polities within the Valley of Oaxaca and within the Mirador zone of northern Petén are more likely drivers of increased scalar integration than are any outside sources of stimulation. In this context she particularly voices skepticism for the idea that Teotihuacan might have projected conquest power into the Early Classic Maya lowlands. Marcus is exceptionally well prepared, through long-term research and prolific publication, to advocate for the role of competition and warfare in the consolidation of a large state in the Valley of Oaxaca. But in the case of the Preclassic Maya lowlands, there are a number of new discoveries and research programs that make that situation rather different. We now know that the earliest documented solar commemorative architectural complex, E Group in the parlance of southeastern Mesoamerica, dates to the transition between the Early and Middle Preclassic periods (1000 BC) at the site of Ceibal. This is in the Petexbatún area on the Pasión River, far south of the Mirador area (Inomata et al. 2013). As James Doyle (2012) argues, E Groups characterize the first ceremonial centers throughout the core area of Petén, not just in the Mirador area. They are distributed in a pattern that appears to be cooperative more than competitive, with closely adjacent but distinct “viewsheds.” The Mirador area itself contains a number of large sites with massive central architecture dating to the Preclassic, not just El Mirador and Nakbe. Preclassic Calakmul, while home to an impressive main pyramid, pales in comparison to Yaxnohcah to the southeast (Reese-Taylor 2017), and more and more large Preclassic sites are being discovered every year in the central interior of the peninsula. This landscape, more densely populated with large communities in the Preclassic period, will have to be much better understood archaeologically before we can address the kinds of interaction that its inhabitants undertook that moved them in the direction of increased scalar complexity. Personally I believe that El Mirador will prove to have held hegemonic sway over a large portion of the lowlands during the Late Preclassic period. I do not think that this polity could have accomplished such a feat primarily through warfare, though not doubt people fought wars in this period. Rather I predict that the evidence will eventually support El Mirador as a polity coordinating trade and commerce within the lowlands and beyond. It may well presage Knab and Pohl’s Cholula model, presented in chapter 10, of collective rule and social capital in this regard. While this is speculation, it is certain that we are just at the beginning of our investigation of Preclassic lowland Maya civilization.

The rich and varied applications of the idea of interaction in this book demonstrate that it remains highly useful in the creation of archaeological models for Mesoamerica. It is a relatively neutral term for comparing complicated sets of data, and in that regard it starts to really show its value when it can be used as an armature for models of social institutions and cultural realities of the kind that people experience and experienced in the past. All of the contributors have this goal in mind, even as they are operating at different stages on the path toward it. The book moves us effectively along that path.

References