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

Author(s): Peter Peregrine

Year: 2017

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.

Cite this Record

Information Exchange in the Postclassic Oikoumene:a view from midcontinental North America.. Peter Peregrine. Presented at The 81st Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, Vancouver, British Columbia. 2017 ( tDAR id: 429410)

Keywords

Geographic Keywords
North America - Midwest

Spatial Coverage

min long: -104.634; min lat: 36.739 ; max long: -80.64; max lat: 49.153 ;

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 12163