NATIVE CULTURES OF MEXICO & CENTRAL AMERICA

Anthropology, Comparative Cultures, Native Cultures of Mexico & Central America

Anthropology, comparative Cultures, Native Cultures of Mexico & Central America

Introduction

Middle America, comprised of Mexico and upper Central America, was one of the two wellsprings of indigenous high civilization in the Pre-Columbian New World. The origins and early development of its inhabitants, who ultimately created the Maya, Aztec, Zapotec and other great nations of Mesoamerica, are topics of avid, sometimes contentious, archaeological research. Still disputed, for example, is when the first humans set foot in the Americas and from where they originated. The date of initial arrival has recently been pushed back from 12 000 to more than 13 000 years ago, but an increasing number of archaeologists argue for multiple migrations beginning as early as 30 000 to 40 000 years ago. Southeast Asia, across the Bering Strait, is considered the primary source of immigration, although other places and routes have been hypothesized. As the Paleoindian period hunters and wild food gatherers expanded into Middle America, they devised a variety of subsistence strategies to deal with their new and changing post-Pleistocene habitat. Ultimately they abandoned their mobile foraging and collecting lifeway for an agricultural mode of subsistence and settled in permanent villages. This remarkable but incompletely understood Archaic period transformation, commencing around 11 000 years ago, laid the foundation for the complex societies that ensued (Turner, 1978).

When, how, and why the first native people arrived in Middle America and the story of their transformation from itinerant hunters and wild food gatherers to the architects of imposing states and empires are subjects that intrigue archaeologists and the lay public alike. Beyond questions about initial entry, some of the most interesting, albeit baffling, issues involve the early periods of the area's prehistory, when the idea of farming originated as a subsistence alternative to hunting and gathering and when permanent villages, with the social and political arrangements that living within them entailed, began to dot a landscape that had previously hosted only temporary encampments. Definitive answers to these questions are still elusive, but recent archaeological research is beginning to provide insight into the patterns and processes of development (Cordell, 1992).

Essential to understanding the pre-Columbian evolution of Middle American culture and society is the construction of a reliable chronology. To do so depends on accurate age determinations, and while a number of methods are available to archaeologists, radiocarbon (14C) dating stands out as the technique most widely applied whenever organic materials are available for analysis. Unfortunately the accuracy of this method is affected by temporal variations in cosmic radiation and radioactive atmospheric carbon, resulting in dates that can be hundreds of years more recent in time than their actual calendar equivalents. Calibration formulae have been developed, but until recently they were not applied to published dates. Moreover, calibration for the earliest periods of Middle American prehistory is still imprecise. Consequently, even today some published dates are calibrated while others are ...