Crafting the Complex: Material Culture and the Rise of Complexity in Formative Mesoamerica
Part of: Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)
Pre-Columbian Mesoamerica was home to several distinctive cultural groups. While these cultural groups were sometimes separated by hundreds of years, they were all united by several common features, including, but certainly not limited to: the creation and use of stylistic cultural and ritual objects, the construction of monuments such as stone pyramids, hieroglyphic writing, and a similar world-view conceptualizing ritualized blood sacrifice for the long-term benefit of the community. Before each of these cultural groups became the state-level organizations for which they are best known, they existed as small communal groups, likely bound to one another by kinship and reciprocal obligation. These cultural groups created similar types of artifacts and used them in similar ways in their daily lives. Over time, sometimes a long time, these cultural groups grew more and more complex, both socially and politically, eventually becoming the type of societies in which they are best known today. This session explores the creation and use of material culture among some of the various cultural groups that lived in Formative Period Mesoamerica and how the use of material culture can illustrate growing social, economic, and political complexity.
Other Keywords
Maya •
Oaxaca •
Mortuary Analysis •
Fill •
mortuary practices •
complexity •
Early Formative •
Formative Period •
heterarchy •
Mortuary statisitcs
Geographic Keywords
Mesoamerica •
United Mexican States (Country) •
Republic of El Salvador (Country) •
Belize (Country) •
Republic of Guatemala (Country) •
North America (Continent)
Resources Inside This Collection (Viewing 1-4 of 4)
- Documents (4)
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The Complexity of Trash: Reframing Construction Fill (2017)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
Mesoamerican archaeologists have traditionally, although not exclusively, viewed artifacts found in the context of construction fill as trash and devoid of primary contextual information, a view that has limited the questions that archaeologists are able to ask of these materials. This paper posits an alternative interpretation to the meaning of material culture used in construction fill, utilizing evidence from Formative period construction fill found at the site of Cahal Pech, Cayo, Belize....
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Death and the Origin of Enduring Social Relations (2017)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
Knowledge of Formative Period Mesoamerican archaeological sites often comes from narrow windows into buried sites. One feature has been a partial exception to this rule: burials. Groups of Formative Period burials, often accompanied by objects, have been recovered in many parts of Mesoamerica. Using models of mortuary treatment that saw burials as reflecting individual identity, burials provided one of the first ways researchers could examine the emergence of stratification within these...
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Evidence for the Emergence of Social Complexity in Early Formative Period Coastal Oaxaca, Mexico (2017)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
The emergence of sociopolitical complexity, and its connections to other developments such as changing subsistence and domestic mobility, has been a central theme of archaeology for over a century. Mesoamerica has been no exception to this trend, and scholars of pre-Columbian Mexico and Central America have scrutinized socioeconomic correlates of changing political integration and centralization. One concept central to this research has been that of hereditary hierarchical inequality. In fact,...
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Maya Mortuary Practices over Time and Space: The Effects of Socio-Political and Environmental Change on Mortuary Practices and the Statistical Analysis of Trends in Mortuary Characteristics (2017)
DOCUMENT Citation Only
Mortuary practices are created to convey something about the deceased individual, as well as their surviving relatives, but can also give insight into the religious, social, and political structure of the community. This paper focuses on Maya mortuary practices in Belize, and how/why those practices changed over the transition from the Formative period (2000 BC – AD 300) to the Classic Maya florescence (AD 300-800). Comparing differences of mortuary characteristics within and between...