Mexican histories of the sixteenth century describe significant contacts between northern groups and the ancestors of the Mexica. The Mexica collectively described the mobile northern groups as Chichimecs. Mexica traditions describe the origin of the founders of Tenochtitlan as a place called Aztlan, also said to be located to the north. Archaeologists working in northern Mexico and the Southwest United States have repeatedly documented evidence of interaction between residents of sites in these areas and places in Mesoamerica. A dramatic example is the substantial evidence of the use of cacao, a Mesoamerican food, in Chaco Canyon in New Mexico (Crown and Hurst 2009).
The difficulty of defining a boundary for Mesoamerican geography is even more acute on its southeastern periphery. Based on a review of relatively sparse archaeological data on distributions of selected settlement features and artifacts, the Ulua and Lempa rivers of Honduras and El Salvador were originally identified as the eastern geographic boundaries of Mesoamerica (Lothrop 1939). Later archaeological research showed that even the most complex settlement features proposed as diagnostic of Mesoamerica, ballcourts, were constructed in regions east of these river valleys (Joyce and Hendon 2000). The immediate neighbors of eastern Mesoamerican peoples were not mobile hunter-gatherers, but farmers, many organized in stratified societies that were important trading partners for Mesoamerican states (Joyce 2013). Objects made in the Maya area have been recovered archaeologically as far south as Costa Rica, and gold ornaments of Costa Rican or Panamanian style have been found in sites in the Maya lowlands.
Rather than try to define a geographically bounded region, we might instead think of Mesoamerica as a network of places linking societies with different forms of governance, different social practices, different histories and values. Where the network of societies involved the most intensive participation in practices, we recognize the continuity of the Mesoamerican tradition. In other places, interactions along the network were less intensive, or more selective, resulting in the adoption of cacao drinking in some social circles in the Southwest United States, and promoting the building of ballcourts for the rubber ball game in eastern Honduras.
Imposing a concept of boundaries may actually impede our recognizing significant ways that lives of Mesoamerican people were entangled with those of people whose histories and practices were different. The same is true within the geographic space thought of as thoroughly Mesoamerican: what people’s lives were like varied, in ways the concept of Mesoamerica may obscure.
Mesoamerica as a Lived Place
The juxtaposition of highland valleys, basins, and plateaus with lowland regions with markedly different environments and natural resources created the potential for significant movement of natural resources between starkly different environments (Sanders and Price 1968). Mesoamerica’s highlands and lowlands contrast in the distribution of a wide array of natural resources.
Marked wet and dry seasons affect the highlands and lowlands differently and create varying conditions within each zone. Seasonal rainstorms move in across the coast, shedding most of their moisture where they first cross the drier, hotter land surface. Annual rainfall decreases from east to west across the Maya lowlands and Gulf Coast of Mexico. Along the Pacific Coast, rainfall drops off sharply from the coast to the steep edge of the mountains. Heavier rainfall allowed the development of wet tropical forest in the southern Maya lowlands, eastern Yucatan peninsula, and Gulf Coast of Mexico and in places along the coastal strip of the Pacific lowlands. Here, high canopies formed by tall trees screen the ground surface, so little undergrowth develops. In these tropical forests, a high number of plant and animal species are found, scattered over the area so that in any area there is a low number of individuals of each species. The ceiba tree and native fruit trees such as nance, sapote, and avocado grow in wet tropical forests.
In contrast, in western Yucatan, the Motagua river valley, and dry upland basins with less rainfall, dry tropical forests develop, still characterized by high species diversity. Dry plant communities include distinctive species, like nopal cactus and maguey. In the highest mountain ranges, tropical forests give way to upland pine forests. These are the home of the quetzal bird, prized for its long green tail feathers, and of unique plants such as the bromeliads that grow clinging to the branches of trees.
The volcanic mountains that parallel the Pacific Coast include a series of obsidian flows used at different times by different groups within Mesoamerica. Guinope and La Esperanza in Honduras, Ixtepeque, El Chayal, and San Martin Jilotepeque in Guatemala, Tepeapulco, Pachuca, and Zinapecuaro in Mexico were all heavily exploited by Mesoamerican people, and the material and tools produced were traded over long distances. Other rock formations produced a variety of green stones worked into ritual implements and costume ornaments. Major serpentine resources are known in west Mexico and the upper Motagua valley in Guatemala, which is also the sole confirmed source of jade consumed throughout eastern and western Mesoamerica (Lange 1993).
The lowlands have fewer mineral resources. In some areas, locally available chert and limestone were exploited in place of obsidian and volcanic rocks. But lowland peoples also obtained minerals from the highlands through exchange for more perishable lowland resources. Precious substances employed in important Mesoamerican practices, such as cacao, and bird feathers used for costume, were products of the lowland tropical forests. Deer, tapir, peccary, jaguar, monkey, and crocodile, animals abundant in the wet tropical forests, were also exchanged with highland societies. Access to the coast provided lowland peoples with marine resources, including shells, stingray spines, and salt. The movement of local resources back and forth between highlands and lowlands and within each zone enabled practices through which diverse societies were integrated into a single Mesoamerican world, a network of communities of practice.
Mesoamerica as a Network of Communities of Practice
The anthropological concept of a community of practice (Lave and Wenger 1991; Roddick and Stahl 2016) recognizes that people identify with those with whom they share practices that promote values. Developed originally from observation of learning in contemporary small groups, such as tailors’ workshops, the concept can be used to understand everything from the shared identity of graduates of a training course, to the commonality among members of a family who learn how to act and how to evaluate action through growing up together. The learning and sharing of practices create identities, including identities based on differences within such communities of practice.
The concept of communities of practice has its roots in practice theory, as developed in anthropology after the 1960s (Ortner 1984, 2001). Practice theories posit that the focus of social analysis should be on the ways that people work within structures to which they are habituated while growing up in a particular society (Lave and Wenger 1991). Structures are not abstract entities outside people; they are embodied by human actors and come to be naturalized in unquestioned assumptions about the world. Actors can become aware of structures but never completely recognize the structures that influence their actions and are reshaped through them.
From this perspective, people engage in performances that are more or less routinized, with both expected and unexpected outcomes. Reformulation of structures, and their reproduction over time, including with changes, are products of these actions. When people choose their actions from among multiple options that they perceive as possible, we can say that they are exercising agency (Dobres and Robb 2000). A requirement of agency theory is that people understand themselves to have choices (although they need not be correct in this understanding or know all the options available to them). This knowledgeability places them in a position to consciously intend some outcome that may reinforce or change structures. But even when exercising agency, an actor is as likely to produce unintended consequences as those they intend. Debate exists over whether agency is always a property of an individual or can be exercised by a group (such as a household, a craft group, or a military society, to give a few Mesoamerican examples).
Concepts of agency and practice provide archaeologists with a set of tools
