Coastal Connections: Pacific Coastal Links from Mexico to Ecuador

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Coastal Connections: Pacific Coastal Links from Mexico to Ecuador," at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Since the days of Marshall Saville and Samuel Lothrop, scholars have drawn attention to archaeological evidence linking the Pacific Coast societies of South America with those of Mexico and Central America. Various investigators pointed to the shared occurrence of shaft tombs, stirrup spout vessels, copper artifacts including axe monies and bells, and even hairless dogs. Nevertheless, these observations were untethered and did not forestall the imposition of the bounded Mesoamerican, ‘Intermediate’, and Andean culture areas that govern the parameters of most current research. The trait lists assembled by early scholars are now being supplanted by a more flexible understanding of the role played by coastal maritime networks in moving exotic crops, materials, and technologies over long distances. These include maize, cacao, Spondylus, copper, and gold (as well, perhaps, as other perishable and as yet unidentified materials) that indicate varying degrees of contact, influence and exchange linking northwestern South America, Central America and western Mexico. For this symposium we propose to address afresh the evidence for interaction along the Pacific littoral of South and Mesoamerica through more specific comparisons grounded in anthropological understandings of trade and interaction.