Toward an Ulúa World: Defining, Delimiting, and Interpreting Interaction Networks

Summary

Framing the lower Ulúa valley and adjacent regions as part of a southeastern Mesoamerican frontier has always entailed an interest in external relationships, especially those connecting frontier regions with the Maya world to which they were supposedly peripheral. The belief that the periphery was occupied by simple non-Maya societies, lightly "influenced" by their more civilized western neighbors, appeared early in the development of orthodox frameworks and continues to influence archaeological perspectives. The advent of World Systems Theory and other core-periphery perspectives brought an interest in the character of the relationships but little advance in attention to the material remains that might reflect the supposed derivative nature of frontier cultural patterns.

Understanding interaction requires methodologies that move beyond unilateral region-to-region or community-to-community connections and focus instead on the development of innovative approaches to documenting multiple overlapping networks connecting many groups within many communities. Taking ceramic systems as our focal point, we explore the potential of pottery to map links among lower Ulúa valley groups and their counterparts in adjacent regions. Delineating the distributions of these likely traces of interaction illustrates a new and more sensitive framework for assessing the movement of ideas and things in a complex landscape.

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): 22601