It’s Still Complicated: Further Reflections on Formative Central Mexican - Gulf Olmec Interaction

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Papers in Honor of Deborah L. Nichols" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

This paper honors Deborah Nichols's legacy of research on craft production, exchange, and Formative period interregional interaction. In 2015 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. Here 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 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. In this paper I seek to refine models of Formative period interregional interaction drawing on evidence for significant variation among communities and institutions in the Southern Gulf lowlands with respect to their external relations.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• Papers in Honor of Deborah L. Nichols

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 50021