Joseph Ball and the Reformulation of the Protoclassic: Revisiting Critical Issues

Summary

At the 1985 Maya Ceramic Workshop, Arthur Demarest noted the intense interest in the Protoclassic. Indeed, ceramists with only a mammiform support and a handful of sherds would pause to speculate on the significance of a statistically insignificant number of sherds. During the 1990s, Joseph Ball and I doggedly worked to reexamine every aspect of the Protoclassic issue. Aided by contributions of a number of colleagues, the resulting document attempted to strip the Protoclassic of association with a specific temporal period and specific culture-historical events, reducing it to a simple ceramic stage. In the wake of the publication, a number of attempts have been made to reestablish a Protoclassic. This presentation discusses the flaws in those proposals and clarifies points made in the original publication.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 20211