A. Hendon is professor of anthropology at Gettysburg College. She has carried out research at the Maya kingdom of Copán and in the lower Ulúa river valley in Honduras. She studies social identity, daily life, technology, and social memory. Her book Houses in a Landscape: Memory and Everyday Life in Mesoamerica was awarded the 2015 Linda S. Cordell Book Award in Archaeology.
Arthur A. Joyce is professor of anthropology at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He directs long-term interdisciplinary research in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca on issues of political dynamics, urbanism, religion, human impact on the environment, and the preceramic. He draws on theoretical and methodological inspirations ranging from the social sciences and humanities to the natural sciences.
Rosemary A. Joyce is professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. She conducts field and museum research on Honduras, in sites dating from the Formative through Republican periods. She uses analyses of ceramic artifacts to understand subjectivity (e.g., sex and gender) and materiality (e.g., technology and human–nonhuman networks of activity).
Stacie M. King is associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at Indiana University. Her research focuses on the long-term history of Oaxaca, Mexico, and her publications address colonial entanglements, household social organization, craft production, interregional interaction, mortuary practices, food sharing, and public outreach.
Linda R. Manzanilla is professor of archaeology at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM, Institute for Anthropological Research). She is also a member of El Colegio Nacional. Her research concerns the first urban settlements and early states. She is widely recognized for her innovative interdisciplinary research on households and neighborhoods at Teotihuacan. She holds a doctorate in Egyptology from the Sorbonne.
Marilyn Masson is professor of anthropology at the University at Albany State University New York. She directs a long-term archaeological research project in Yucatan, Mexico, with an international collaborative team. Her research interests include societal regeneration after collapse and culture contact from the perspective of household economies in urban and rural settings of late Pre-Columbian and early Colonial Maya society.
Lisa Overholtzer is assistant professor and William Dawson Chair at McGill University. Her research examines the everyday material practices of ordinary people in Postclassic and Colonial Central Mexico. She is interested in household production and consumption; gender, ethnic, class, and age-based identities; and social memory and time in archaeology. She is committed to decolonizing archaeological practice through collaboration with Indigenous descendant communities. She currently directs a community-engaged household archaeology project at Tepeticpac, Tlaxcala. She has published widely in peer-reviewed journals, such as American Anthropologist, Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, and Ancient Mesoamerica.
Christopher A. Pool is university research professor in anthropology at the University of Kentucky. His research interests include the origins and operation of ancient polities and economies, the archaeology of landscapes and social memory, historical ecology, geoarchaeology, archaeometry, and ceramic analysis. He pursues these interests primarily through fieldwork on the Olmec and later cultures of the southern Gulf Coast of Mexico.
Cynthia Robin is professor of anthropology at Northwestern University. She has conducted fieldwork at Maya archaeological sites in Belize. Her research focuses on the everyday lives of ordinary people in the past and the development of sustainable lifeways.
Ludo Snijders is an independent research who received his PhD from Leiden University, The Netherlands. He has studied Mesoamerican manuscripts from the perspective of cultural biography and is specialized in the application of noninvasive techniques for the recovery of palimpsests.
Nawa Sugiyama is assistant professor at the University of California, Riverside. Her research at Teotihuacan, Mexico, has covered topics pertaining to the construction of ritualized landscapes, human–animal interactions, and urban foodways.
Saburo Sugiyama is research professor in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change at Arizona State University. He has conducted fieldwork at the Feathered Serpent Pyramid and the Moon and the Sun Pyramids and currently investigates Plaza of the Columns Complex in Teotihuacan. His research focuses on ancient urbanism, monuments, ritual and polity, and cognitive archaeology.
Julie K. Wesp is assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology and a faculty affiliate in the Science, Technology, and Society Program at North Carolina State University. Her research draws on bioarchaeological methods to reconstruct daily life in the past and contribute to Latin American history with current research projects in Mexico and Colombia.
Rosemary A. Joyce
This book is an introduction to archaeological research on societies that flourished in Mexico and Central America before European colonization, whose descendants continue to occupy the region today. Archaeologists studying these societies describe them as part of a cultural area, Mesoamerica (Figure 1.1). Contemporary indigenous peoples who survived colonization have continuing traditions of practices recognizably connected to those of the period before colonization. Yet these people, past or present, never expressed an identification at this regional scale: instead, a mosaic of communities varying in size from small villages to large cities, governed in a variety of ways, with individual histories that intersected but unfolded in their own ways occupied this geographic territory. This book treats Mesoamerican archaeology as the exploration of the material traces of learned practices, reproduced over generations, through which people in this area engaged with each other, producing shared values and identities. This reinterpretation of Mesoamerica identifies it as a label for what, using anthropological concepts developed since the 1990s, we can call localized communities of practice and more widely distributed networks of practice.
Figure 1.1 Map of Mesoamerica.
To understand this approach, this chapter outlines how time is understood and measured in research on Mesoamerica; describes the practices that define Mesoamerican cultural traditions, giving special attention to mathematics, calendars, and writing that are the most distinctive aspects of these societies; and considers alternative ways of thinking about Mesoamerica as a linguistic area, as a geographic region, and as a network of communities of practice.
History, Chronology, and Time in Mesoamerican Archaeology
There is no single chronology that is employed by all archaeologists for all of Mesoamerica, but a broad division into Archaic, Formative (or Preclassic), Classic, Postclassic, and Colonial periods is generally recognized. Precise beginning and ending dates vary with the region and often with the specific author. The contributions to this volume are no exception. With slight differences, however, the contributors draw on a single chronological framework for these major periods (Table 1.1).
Table 1.1 Summary chronological framework for Mesoamerica
| Dates in years |
Period
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