As the editors of this volume acknowledge, interregional interaction is a broad and amorphous term that encompasses a vast range of different processes, from trade and war to pilgrimage and migration. Spanning three thousand years of Mesoamerican history and varied interactions between different regions of Mesoamerica, this volume presents a diverse set of interdisciplinary perspectives on cultural contact, sometimes at the cost of the larger cohesion of the volume. The essays are organised chronologically, with framing contributions by the editors and other distinguished scholars in the field. Specialists in the various topics addressed in this volume will find particular essays of interest.
The editors are to be commended for including essays from peripheral and often marginalised regions of Mesoamerica, rather than focusing exclusively on central Mexico, Oaxaca and the Maya region. Contributions that bring much-needed geographic diversity into a field too often dominated by Mesoamerica's most charismatic civilisations include Guy David Hepp's survey of Early Formative ceramics from the Pacific Coast of Oaxaca; Philip Arnold and Lourdes Budar's multifaceted survey of relationships between the Tuxtlas and the coastal Maya; and José Luis Punzo Diaz's essay on the Chachihuites Culture in north-west Mexico. Indeed, the only essay to revisit familiar sites of interregional interaction is D. Bryan Schaeffer's review of the Teotihuacan-style tripod form in the Maya area.
The volume also represents a wide range of methodological approaches, from Kerry Hull's linguistic study of foreign loan words in Eastern Ch'olan to Charles Knight's archaeometric study of the distribution of Zaragoza-Oyameles obsidian throughout Mesoamerica. Timothy Knab and John Pohl use modern ethnographic models of ritual administration in Cholula to argue for rotating power systems in the ancient city, in contrast to the lineage-based models more familiar from Aztec and Maya city-states. Notably absent are any bioarchaeological studies that might offer direct evidence about the movement of people throughout Mesoamerica.
The geography and kinds of evidence vary from chapter to chapter, but few of the essays are explicit about the mechanisms that drive the many processes of interregional interaction described in the text. Joyce Marcus encapsulates the complexity in the opening to her essay: “interaction comes in many forms: long-distance versus local, peaceful versus hostile, direct versus indirect, long-term versus short-term, multidirectional versus unidirectional, and transformative versus nontransformative” (p. 341). Yet, as the editors of the volume note in their Introduction, “the majority of the chapters are perhaps less concerned with the specific mechanisms by which interaction took place, and more focused on the processual outcomes of such interaction, its material manifestations, and its relationship to wider sociocultural dynamics” (p. 17). But can there really be meaningful discussion of outcomes without clarity about mechanisms, difficult though they may be to discern? Surely the ways that foreign things, ideas or people reached a new place affected the ways that they were adopted and transformed. It should be possible to make models and predictions about patterns that can be observed in the archaeological record, a point that Gary Feinman emphasises in his introductory essay. A few essays begin to undertake this work: Jesper Nielsen, Elizabeth Jiménez García and Iván Rivera's catalogue of Teotihuacan-style monuments in Guerrero is notable for the precision it offers about mechanisms of interaction, drawing contrasts between sites with local emulations of Teotihuacan motifs and others with stronger evidence for a direct Teotihuacan presence. Niklas Schulze and Blanca Maldonado turn to colonial textual sources to explain the “surprising homogeneity” (p. 331) in the form and composition of copper bells at the Aztec Templo Mayor. Englehardt and Carrasco, in their essay on the role of cross-linguistic transmutations in early script formation, also offer substantial rigour about models in the early sections of their paper.
One of the strongest contributions, ironically, questions the importance of interregional interaction. Joyce Marcus's concluding provocation suggests that competition between neighbouring Zapotec or Maya city-states, rather than far-flung interregional contacts, was the principal driver of social change in ancient Mesoamerica. Although this essay may downplay the transformative impact of Teotihuacan on the Maya area, it is a salutary reminder that we need to be attentive to processes of interaction at all scales.
The essays in this volume bolster a growing consensus that interregional interaction was the norm and not the exception in ancient Mesoamerica. It seems that people were constantly on the move; that Mesoamerican cities were cosmopolitan, multi-lingual and multi-ethnic places; and that even the most remote peripheries of Mesoamerica were not isolated from broader currents of interregional exchange. What would it look like if we assumed that interregional interaction was a norm, and not an exception, in Mesoamerican history? How would that change the terms of debate and the kinds of questions we might ask about archaeological materials? The editors assert in the Introduction that “interregional interaction in a sense ‘created’ what we now label ‘Mesoamerica’” (p. 6), but there is still much more work to do in order to interrogate that fascinating premise.
