This volume marks a watershed in archaeological scholarship in southeastern Mesoamerica. With its diversity of societies, cultural features, and languages, this region holds great potential, which has gone largely unrealized, for elucidating the nature of Mesoamerica, the significance of the differences between Mesoamerican societies and their southern Central American neighbors, and the factors driving and constraining the emergence of complexity, inequality, and political centralization.
The chapters in Southeastern Mesoamerica reflect the diverse methodological and theoretical perspectives that inform current research in the area; many of these perspectives depart from conventional approaches. The nature of units of analysis receives considerable attention, as does interaction both within and beyond the southeast. Contributors insist that southeastern societies must be understood in their own terms, not framed by what they lack in comparison with their neighbors. Readers will often find themselves wishing for more detail on the archaeological data discussed, especially ceramics—but that is inevitable in a collection of this kind.
Alejandro Figueroa and Timothy Scheffler characterize the transition from foraging to farming documented at the El Gigante rockshelter, occupied from 9000 BC through AD 1000. These data, from outside the area usually identified as the core of Mesoamerica, provide new perspectives on processes leading to domestication and sedentary life, highlighting the importance of agroforestry and the relatively late development of agriculture.
Erlend Johnson's analysis of the distribution of Maya features in settlement patterns, architecture, and craft products reflects shifting perspectives on the impact of Copán on adjacent regions. La Unión in the Cucuyagua Valley was arguably a subsidiary center in Copán's polity, but there are many fewer Maya features in the nearby Sensenti Valley. Johnson suggests that Copán's political control did not extend much beyond 50 km from the city.
The chapter on Río Amarillo, located only 20 km from Copán's civic center, by Cameron MacNeil, Edy Barrios, Walter Burgos, Antolín Velásquez, and Mauricio Díaz García provides a complementary perspective. Sculpture and hieroglyphic texts leave no doubt that the center was part of the Copán state, but features of community layout, building techniques, and decorated pottery indicate significant linkages with non-Maya central Honduras.
William McFarlane and Miranda Stockett's work in the Jesus de Otoro Valley reveals monumental construction at some sites, especially Sinsimbla, but no dressed stone, ballcourts, or hieroglyphic texts. Ulúa polychromes and related painted pottery are common, but there are few indications of a Copán connection. The authors emphasize the variability in all these elements across the valleys of central Honduras.
Eva Martínez uses survey data to document the late and brief (ca. AD 600–1000) occupation of the Jamastrán Valley in southeastern Honduras. She problematizes the recogniton of archaeological sites and their linkage to social entities, using sherd densities as a proxy for population to define households, hamlets, villages, and clusters of settlements. Rank-size distributions do not suggest hierarchical relations or political unification.
Christopher Begley emphasizes that features shared by northeastern Honduran societies and their Maya neighbors must be understood locally, not as markers of an undefined Maya influence. Following Helms, he argues that local leaders used ballcourts and their supernatural associations to naturalize a new hierarchical sociopolitical order.
Lorena Mihok, Christian Wells, and Whitney Goodwin use demographic trends in the Bay Islands from about AD 600 to 1788 to explore the consequences of the arrival of Europeans. They emphasize the interesting contrast between authoritarian attitudes of the Spanish in dealing with Indigenous people and less nakedly exploitive English approaches; their insistence on embracing both under the label “royalization” is, however, puzzling.
Russell Sheptak suggests that archaeologists could profitably adopt the perspectives of historians in conceptualizing linguistic and ethnic groups, focusing on towns rather than reconstructed territories. He provides a nice example of how recognition of a community of practice in ceramic production reveals a connection between towns that is not otherwise clearly reflected in material remains.
Summarizing contact-period distributions of Indigenous groups, Gloria Lara-Pinto identifies several large ethnolinguistic provinces (mostly Lenca and Nahua-Pipil) that also correspond to polities. She sees these distributions as the result of the breakup of an original “Lenmichi” population (based on a controversial reconstructed language family embracing Lencan, Misumalpan, and Chibchan) and the arrival of proto-Ch'orti’ and Nahua-Pipil.
Pastor Gómez Zuñiga argues that “provinces” in colonial documents more often refer to ethnic or linguistic territories than to ancient political units. Noting that segmentary lineages, which were common features of Indigenous social systems, would create lines of political fission, he reconstructs a more varied political landscape than does Lara-Pinto, occupied by many simple chiefdoms with restricted territories.
William Fowler sees early colonial Spanish entradas into southeastern Mesoamerica as good analogs for prehispanic trade and military expeditions. Conventional interpretations of prehispanic travel estimate group size and range very conservatively, but the argument that constraints on Indigenous and Spanish mobility were essentially the same requires a detailed assessment of the effects of horses and maritime logistical support.
Rosemary Joyce proposes communities of practice—essentially interaction networks focused on shared concerns—as an analytical frame for Honduran archaeology, illustrating their potential with reference mainly to the production and use of painted pottery and carved marble vessels in the Classic period. Such communities are unlikely to correspond to the social groups that archaeologists often seek to recognize; as a complement to analysis of these other groups, however, the concept has the virtue of broadening archaeological views of social relations. Much of the significance of communities of practice stems from the fact that they cut across linguistic, ethnic, and cultural contrasts.
Like Joyce, Edward Schortman and Patricia Urban prefer heterarchical to hierarchical interpretations and deemphasize bounded territorial units in favor of intersecting interaction networks, which is another way of describing communities of practice. Their characterization of southeastern Mesoamerica—as a mosaic of cultural and social processes operating and producing patterns at multiple scales—nicely sums up the collective perspective. They close the volume aptly, pointing to a question most directly raised by Joyce but not pursued by any of the contributors: Why were hierarchies, which were so prominent in Lowland Maya societies, weakly developed and evanescent in the adjacent southeast?
There is much to like here. Southeastern Mesoamerica will be an essential reference for those interested in archaeology and ethnohistory in this area for a very long time.
