Formative Communities of Practice and Disjunctures in Southern Gulf Lowland Interaction with Central Mexico

Summary

Recently Stoner and Pool called for an "Archaeology of Disjuncture" to refocus attention on variation in intra- and interregional interaction, illustrating the approach with the case of the Classic period of the Tuxtla Mountains in southern Veracruz. In this paper I extend application of the disjunctive approach into the Formative Period of the southern Gulf lowlands, focusing primarily on interactions with Central Mexico, and incorporating a Communities of Practice perspective on the formation and disruption of attendant horizon styles. Prominent models of Formative highland-lowland interaction grounded in paradigms of Culture History and World Systems Theory tend to treat the Southern Gulf Lowlands as a unitary entity represented at any point in time by a single pre-eminent Olmec or Epi-Olmec site. Although temporal disruptions in regional settlement systems are widely recognized, economic, political, and stylistic or symbolic interactions are often modeled as a tightly bundled whole. Here I review evidence for significant variation among communities and institutions in the Southern Gulf lowlands with respect to their external relations as a step toward a refined model of interregional interaction in the Formative period.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

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

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 21317