Revisiting the Early Oaxacan Village: New Perspectives on Some of Mesoamerica’s First Settled Communities

Summary

This is an abstract from the "A Construir Puentes / Building Bridges: Diálogos en Oaxaca Archaeology a través de las Fronteras" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Since its publication in 1976, *The Early Mesoamerican Village has been a landmark for the systematic study of early settled communities. Based on research in the Valley of Oaxaca, *EMV has helped many students of archaeology to better understand household and community organization and broader concepts of survey and sampling. Scalar approaches of *EMV to the region, site, household, and activity area, became foundational reading in the discipline. *EMV also comprises a series of case studies assessing systems theory models and ecological functionalism, sometimes finding these unsupported in favor of sociopolitical factors. Among the interpretations proffered by *EMV that carried the most weight in subsequent research by Flannery and Marcus is that of public/private spatial dichotomy and gendered divisions of labor, with women and men occupying discrete spaces and employing dichotomous material culture in their daily lives. In this presentation, I discuss how new findings and theoretical approaches, including those focused on agency and materiality, are changing our understandings of early Mesoamerican villages. With particular emphasis on Early Formative (2000–1000 BCE) contexts, I argue that there is still much to learn from *EMV but that its concepts of public/private space and gender, in particular, need revision.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• A Construir Puentes / Building Bridges: Diálogos en Oaxaca Archaeology a través de las Fronteras

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 33081