Beans of Power: Phaseolus and Late Preclassic Rulership on the Pacific Coast

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Beyond Maize and Cacao: Reflections on Visual and Textual Representation and Archaeological Evidence of Other Plants in Precolumbian Mesoamerica" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Rulership in Mesoamerican societies was inextricably tied to generative aspects of agriculture. Becoming a focal point for the maintenance of cosmological order provided a pathway for asserting control of aspects of the natural world, like rainfall, that directly influenced agricultural productivity. Textual descriptions even associate the process of coming into power with sowing, and the maintenance of that power with cultivation and growth, including an aspect of verticality that is conspicuously vegetal. Discussion of this special relationship between royal power and agriculture has largely centered around maize and cacao. I introduce a time and place for which an early exercise in rulership coincided with a peculiar abundance of Phaseolus beans recovered archaeologically. In comparison to earlier and contemporary contexts from the Pacific Coast, the bean assemblage from the Middle to Late Preclassic El Ujuxte site (ca. 600 cal BCE–200 cal CE) is unprecedented in its diversity, including all five domesticated bean species found in Mesoamerica—Phaseolus acutifolius, P. coccineus, P. dumosus, P. lunatus, and P. vulgaris. I situate this explosion in Phaseolus diversity in context with changes in ritual practices associated with the emergence of rulership to consider how these little legumes can enrich our understanding of major sociopolitical changes.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Beyond Maize and Cacao: Reflections on Visual and Textual Representation and Archaeological Evidence of Other Plants in Precolumbian Mesoamerica   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39766.0