Information Exchange in the Postclassic Oikoumene:a view from midcontinental North America.

Summary

Several years ago Steve Lekson and I proposed a Postclassic Oikoumene stretching from Mesoamerica through the Southwest and into midcontinental North America. A frequent question has been how such a "known world" could have been created in the absence of long-distance trade and transportation systems. In this paper I explore how information was exchanged among the peoples of midcontinental North America in the late prehistoric and early historic periods. I examine how hunters and gatherers serve as instruments of information exchange between sedentary agricultural communities around the world. And I argue that maize carried with it important cosmological, calendrical, and astronomical information that formed the basis of what we see empirically as a broadly similar iconography of supernatural beings within the Postclassic Oikoumene.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• The North American Continental System: Interaction and Exchange across the Continent   •
• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 12163