Utah Archaeology 2004

Greater Mesoamerica - The Archaeology of West and Northwest Mexico

5 8 Book Revien* s Greater Mesoamerica: The Archaeology of West and Northwest Mexico, edited by Michael S. Foster and Shirley Gorenstein. University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City. 2000. 307 pages, 135 figures, 3 tables. $ 65.00 cloth Reviewed by: Walter A. Dodd, California State University, Fresno. Fresno, CA 93740- 8001 Archaeological field studies in North America have been chiefly conducted north of the international boundary that separates the United States and Mexico, and have also focused on southeastern Mexico and nearby Guatemala. The intervening region of west and northwest Mexico, on the other hand, represents a vacuum in knowledge that, until recently, has drawn limited interest. The new book Greater Mesoamerica brings together the varied research findings of many of the principal scholars, both Mexican and American, who are now doing . significant research in this relatively unexplored area. The resulting volume has several goals: ( 1) summarize, analyze, and synthesize old and new data obtained through fieldwork; ( 2) convey the intellectual excitement of current research problems; ( 3) remove the west and northwest Mexican region from the shadows of its better known neighbors to the north and south, through careful reconstruction of both its internal cultural development and external connections; and ( 4) argue that the region is more or less an integrated extension of Mesoamerican themes, but that its local evolutionary histories are different in character and deserving of study in their own right. There are 15 chapters in the book. Chapters 2 through 7 are devoted to the archaeology of west Mexico, which largely encompasses the present- day states of Jalisco, MichoacBn, Guanajuato, Colima, and Nayarit. Chapters 8 through 14 deal with northwest Mexico, as defined by the states of Sinaloa, Zacatecas, Durango, Chihuahua, and Sonora. The book is fittingly dedicated to one of the contributors, J. Charles Kelley, a life- long pioneer in the prehistory of northwest Mexico who died in 1997. The opening chapter lays out a common thread that unifies all articles in the collection. Shirley Gorenstein and Michael Foster review the ways in which " Mesoamerica" has been spatially and conceptually defined, and argue that a reevaluation of the meaning and use of the term is long overdue. They give a clarion call for a more balanced inquiry into what constitutes the Mesoamerican phenomenon, one that requires both local and distant human interactions across a much larger tract known as " Greater Mesoamerica." In their view, the region was not a cultural backwater, but instead played a fundamental role in synergistic processes that led to L'talr Archaeology 17: 58- 61. 2004 Usah Arclraeolr,~ 4.2 004' 59 more complex social formations both within and outside the region. It is apparentthat socioeconomic and ideo-logical changes were internally and externally driven across the entire Greater Mesoamerican landscape. All of the book's authors provide evidence to support this basic premise. Complex behavioral and material histories, which evolved in a bewildering array of natural and cultural environments, are individually documented in each article. These include: the interesting Chupicuaro manifestation along the Rio Lerma in Guanajuato ( Charles Florence); the Bajio and Tunal Grande areas north of the Lerma ( Beatriz Braniff C.); the distinctive Te6chitlan tradition of the lake districts in Jalisco ( Phil Weigand); the fascinating Tarascan state on Michoachn's Central Plateau ( Helen Perlstein Pollard); diverse marine adaptations associated with embayments of the South Coast ( Joseph Mountjoy) and mangrove swamplands of the Northwest Coast ( Stuart Scott and Michael Foster); the ecologically transitional valleys of southern Zacatecas between the Bajio and Chalchihuites zones ( Peter JimCnez Betts and Andrew Darling); and the great desert and mountain traditions of Mexico's arid north, such as Loma San Gabrie1, lChalchihuites ( Michael Foster), PaquimC ( Ronna Bradley), and Trincherasl HuatabampolRio Sonora ( Maria Elisa Villalpando). Two chapters in the book emphasize single topical problems that are more specific in content, and thereby depart from the sweeping- style surveys of the aforementioned sections. In one article, J. Charles Kelley presents an intriguing hypothesis or model to explain how Mesoamerican influences permeated west and northwest Mexico. The lynchpin of his hypothetical argument is the notion of a network of foot traffic ( and water transport in some places) that would have carried Mesoamerican- inspired goods and ideas from a Valley of Mexico heartland to the northwestern frontier and beyond. Solid ethnohistoric data exist to bolster Kelley's proposal of human carriers bearing burdens. In a second article, J. Charles Kelley and Ellen Abbott Kelley recount their captivating quest to decipher how one complex feature- a pecked cross- circle- functioned at a Classic period Chalchihuites site in western Zacatecas. They present a very convincing case for one potential way that a calendrical- astronomical setup might have operated over a 400- year period, and they cite several compelling lines of evidence to implicate Teotihuacano foreigners in the sophistocated planning and execution of the system. Significantly, the program-matic work of the Kelley's is experimental by design and alert to the dynamic aspects of past behavior. If one steps back and looks at the collective efforts that make up this edited volume in its entirety, it can be concluded that Greater Mesoamerica does succeed on several counts. It presents a wealth of spaceltime data to illustrate that evolution has indeed occurred; in essence, " what" has transpired in many different environmental contexts is made abundantly clear, although the questions of " how" and " why" it turned out that way is consider-ably more tenuous. One of the encouraging trends in the archaeology of this region is that topics and problems have been formulated to stimulate debate on a number of issues. For instance, Ronna Bradley pays particular 60 Hook Rei~ irws attention to research problems that have generated considerable controversy over the last four decades in Chihuahua ( e- g., understanding the nature of Casas Grandes, cerros de trincheras, early agriculture, etc.). It is also noteworthy that several researchers have begun to carry out regional survey programs ( e. g., Whalen and Minnis in the Casass Grandes hinterland, Hard and Roney along the Rio Casas Grandes, etc.) that go beyond the site- oriented approach. Michael Spence, in the concluding chapter, argues that recent archaeological fieldwork in west and northwest Mexico has also succeeded in generating revolutionary new perspectives. He observes that researchers who work in this area of Mexico are freeing themselves ( and others) from the straight- jacketed conventions of centralismo, in which the Mexican frontier and hinterland are essentially denied both a supporting role in the evolution of Mesoamerican civilization and a central role in their own societal development. He also questions the utility of concepts like " core" and " periphery" and whether they are really reflective of past reality. Spence's comments are evocative of acentrism, a long held tenet in evolutionary biology, whereby no one system assumes a " higher," " more advanced," " superior," " progressive," or " centralized" position with respect to others. Despite the fact that an impressive evolutionary record has been generated for the region, and that new perspectives are being used to analyze it, there are other counts on which the research falls short. Most studies are still typological rather than populational in focus, and the tendency persists to want to pigeonhole things into categories or labels. The majority of research has also concentrated on stratifiedlcivilized societies, and less so on the simpler Paleoinidan, Archaic, and early Formative occupations. At the same time, Spence seems justified in condemning those who would indiscriminately ascribe cultural developments in west and northwest Mexico to the diffusional or colonial influence of Teotihuachn, especially when solid evidence is lacking. Some investigators also add that caution must be used in getting the facts right and in making certain interpretations ( e. g., Spence argues that accurate dating procedures continue to be necessary for the valid reconstruction of cultural sequences, Villalpando notes that it may be difficult to establish that houses were contemporaneous, etc.). A more important shortcoming, however, is that there is almost no general theory development, and there are few testing regimes that can lead to falsification of hypothetical claims. The usual custom is to advance an intuitive explanation without any recourse to testing one's ideas or positing a theoretical justification for them ( there are many such ideas in this book); in the absence of test procedures or theoretical warrants, they are merely " just-so" stories. I continue to believe that Charles Darwin laid out the definitive paradigm for doing research in the biological and historical sciences, and yet most archaeologists remain ignorant of Darwinian concepts and how they can be applied to the interpretation of their data. Most archaeological accounts gloss over variation, stress adapta-tion rather than selection, assume that goal- direction ( human intent) is equivalent to selection, or confuse proximate causation with ultimate causation. Lidah Archaeology 2004 6 1 Faced with the challenges of interpreting a magnificent evolutionary record, archaeological investigators who work in west and northwest Mexico now have the opportunity to begin exploring new theoretical and method-ological vistas. They can take pride in the fact that they have a wonderful material record that presents many formidable patterns in need of explanation. The detection of patterns, and the inference of testable Darwinian explanations to account for them, is the first step on the road to becoming a true historical science. As archaeologi-cal inquiry matures here, the entire expanse of Greater Mesoamerica promises to become one of the great testing grounds for hypotheses about behavioral and artifactual evolution. This is an exciting prospect for archaeologists who do research in this part of the world, and indeed for all anthropologists in general.