individual and group action they can see archaeologically, and the questions they have, as social scientists, about how societies come to have an appearance of coherence over space and time – as something like Mesoamerica, for example. Viewed from the perspective of communities of practice, the people who used a writing system at a Maya city to record local history were not just learning to create documents; they were taking on roles in a structure that reproduced values. One advantage of this way of thinking is that it bases the identification of groups of people on their participation in activities, in practices, not in a preexisting essence. Another is that it allows for the same person to participate in multiple communities of practice. The Maya scribe might also simultaneously be thought of as part of a community of practice of cuisine, sharing taste for certain foods and their presentation with others who were not practitioners of writing history.
Practices may continue to be learned throughout a lifetime and can be shared with other people located at a distance. As a result, a concept of community of practice allows us to recognize fundamental Mesoamerican ways of doing things that circulated through the participation of small numbers of people in distant places in practices adopted in adulthood. When archaeologists talk about village leaders in highland Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and Honduras using the same symbols as the leaders of Olmec communities in the Gulf Coast of Mexico between 1100 and 500 BCE, this is the identification of a distributed community of practice, or a network of local communities of practice, that promoted the use of cacao, jade, and certain ideas about relationships of humans and forces beyond the human that became enduring parts of Mesoamerica.
The Mesoamerican Subject
What was produced by participation in networks of communities of practices was a self-consciousness as a subject and a historical consciousness as a subject connected to others. Mesoamerican archaeology, in its contemporary form, is about these Mesoamerican people and their lives.
Mesoamerican archaeologists have always been concerned with the social position of the people they studied. Initially, this was framed in terms of group identity, particularly ethnic or ethnolinguistic identity, to link ancient sites with contemporary peoples, to allow researchers to use extensive observations of living people to fill in their static picture of the past. The assumption was that each group of people had a unique ethnic identity, coinciding with their styles of material culture and language.
Researchers were aware of, and interested in, social differences within these societies. While all the residents of Tenochtitlan might be Mexica, or speakers of Nahuatl, only some were nobles, and only one was the tlatoani (“speaker,” the title for the maximum political authority). Archaeologically, some people are more visible than others, and some people’s actions were likely to have had more extensive effects than others. Some had been warriors and others craft workers; archaeologists could identify differences between people with different life courses in excavations. Burials, especially, forcefully suggested highly individualized statuses.
The identification of specific human actors in visual images was a tool of early forms of archaeological research into different human subjectivities. A. M. Tozzer’s study of the art of Chichen Itza identified different ethnic groups, occupational groups, and social status groups represented by figures carved throughout the site (Tozzer 1957). Once Tatiana Proskouriakoff (1960) established that Classic Maya art and inscriptions recorded histories of the lives of individual people, the door was opened for the development of detailed interpretations of Maya Classic texts as genealogies of specific nobles and rulers. Similar efforts have been made in other literate traditions in Oaxaca and even in art lacking formal texts from the Gulf Coast of Mexico.
Proskouriakoff followed her initial insight by drawing attention to women in Classic Maya art and political history (Proskouriakoff 1961). Other scholars followed her lead in identifying noble Maya women, even reigning women, through iconography, the interpretation of texts, and burial analysis (Marcus 1976). Starting in the 1980s, a flood of publications extended recognition of the presence and actions of women, from Gulf Coast Olmec sites to Tenochtitlan, the Maya lowlands to Oaxaca. Archaeologists expanded from seeking histories of women to broader exploration of Mesoamerican concepts and experiences of gender beyond a binary, and including masculinities (Joyce 2000a; Meskell and Joyce 2003). Scholars engaged in household archaeology began to question the assumption that the interests of all members of a household were the same and started to create models of the dynamics between men and women and people of different ages within households (Hendon 1997, 2010).
The chapters in this volume follow in this trajectory. They use materials to build up understanding of the daily lives of diverse kinds of people, whose actions produced continuing ways of being that are reflected in language, in values placed on specific materials and technologies to work them, and in agriculture and cuisine and beliefs and religious practices. Rather than being concerned with distributions of things, Mesoamerican archaeology based in practice theory is a study of the kind of lives people could have lived in the communities and networks of practice that archaeology allows us to recognize. The subject of Mesoamerican archaeology becomes people and their ability to learn, formulate goals, carry out their projects, and live with their consequences.
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