These volumes engage a timely and important topic in archaeology—memory studies—in very different ways. In Memory Traces: Analyzing Sacred Space at Five Mesoamerican Sites, Cynthia Kristan-Graham and Laura M. Amrhein bring together authors working at archaeological and ethnohistorical sites in Mexico who explore the construction, functions, and meanings of socially constituted landscapes through the lens of memory studies. In Social Identities in the Classic Maya Northern Lowlands: Gender, Age, Memory, and Place, Traci Ardren uses the concept of the social imaginary as developed by Benedict Anderson and Charles Taylor to explore how identities are enacted, enmeshed, and maintained through practice, identifying memory as the “glue” that holds people together within the communities that constitute their imagined social whole. While these volumes take distinct approaches to memory, together they emphasize the value of multiple ways of interrogating the past, highlight what is gained and lost in each approach, and underscore the need to incorporate multiple ways of knowing into the study of past lifeways.
Memory Traces is a collection of essays that focus on landscape and its social construction, with a strong emphasis on the constitution, function, and memorialization (or erasure) of sacred spaces. The volume began as an SAA session, and, as often happens, some of the original authors dropped away and others were added to strengthen the volume. In this case, all the original contributions by archaeologists found homes in other publications and the volume transformed into a strong exemplar of the contributions made by analyses grounded in art history and related disciplines, framed by chapters focused on landscape archaeology and physical geography. The bulk of the volume explores the definition, use, and theorization of sacred space at five Mesoamerican centers: Teotihuacan, El Tajín, Tula, Chichén Itzá, and Tonina. The editors situate the discussion in the context of work by twentieth-century artist Robert Smithson, whose Hotel Palenque and Incidents of Mirror Travel in Yucatan play with the idea of the ephemerality of the physical elements that reinforce memory traces. The chapters in the volume explore the ritual use of spaces and identify different functions—and diverse ways to achieve the same function—at the five centers examined. With the notable exceptions of the Early Classic period central Mexican powerhouse of Teotihuacan and the Classic period Tonina sculptures appropriated and reimagined in colonial-period Ocotsingo, Chiapas, most of the case studies focus on Postclassic (A.D. 800–1519) centers. At Teotihuacan, Sarro and Robb suggest that murals on interior walls created backdrops for ritual processions whose participants populated the scenes. They propose that the paintings lack a central figure because the ruler himself embodied the focus of the composition when he entered the room, so that the paintings depict practice but do not contain it wholly. Koontz explores the integrative function of ritual spaces at Tula and El Tajín, arguing that they served to bring disparate social factions, tentatively identified as warriors and merchants, together in royal accession rituals imbued with maize symbolism. Colonnaded entryways at both sites depict individuals gathered to witness the installation of the ruler; these entryways channeled participants into the ceremony. The spaces and their decoration serve as models of and models for participation, creating settings for and memorials of these integrative rituals. At Tula, Kristan-Graham expands upon this interpretation to assert that interior spaces link past and present and erase distinctions between public and private space by evoking mythic-historic places important to residents’ shared political and social identities, in what she terms architectural veneration and interior landscapes. Amrhein and Looper argue that the resonance between gender representation and performance is fundamental to the construction of sacred space at Chichén Itzá and that the House of the Phalli, like sacred spaces Teotihuacan, Tula, and El Tajín, must be understood as settings for performances of social cohesion that are inherently gendered. The final case study in the volume examines the reuse of mutilated stelae from Tonina as baptismal font bases in the colonial-era San Jose de Polonia church in nearby Ocosingo, Chiapas. Wren, Nygard, and Spencer argue that the systematic mutilation of Classic period art represents an attempt to denigrate idols, dispel their power, and visually confirm the authority of the Spanish crown and the Christian god it proselytized. In sum, all the chapters explore the ways in which Mesoamerican art creates, supports, and informs ritual space, underscoring its importance in the fabric of the centers it enhanced.
Ardren's exploration of how rituals of integration create multiple social imaginaries, in contrast, focuses on extensive archaeological investigations at sites on the Yucatan peninsula, principally Chunchucmil and Yaxuna. These extended archaeological case studies allow Ardren to link practice, imagined communities, the built environment, and portable material culture in mutually supporting arguments. The focus on archaeological evidence contrasts with the Kristan-Graham and Amrhein volume, but the larger contrast lies in the extended discussion and uniform application of a single interpretive framework. Ardren uses Anderson and Taylor's emphasis on the social imaginary, conceived, echoing Taylor's view, not as a set of ideas, but rather as that which enables the practices of a society by making sense of them (p. 154). Ardren ambitiously links several social imaginaries, including the urban imaginary shaped by the social experience of living in a Maya city as instantiated through circulation; elite and commoner imaginaries created through shared social memories and their strategic manipulation; social imaginaries of childhood and perceived connections with the divine; and social imaginaries that enabled gendered practice and complicated its intersection with imaginaries of power. This approach is used to interpret patterning in the built environment in the Late, Terminal, and Postclassic periods, with an emphasis on the identities made possible by participation in multiple social imaginaries. The case studies successfully illustrate the utility of the approach in that they help us understand daily practices and their ideological underpinnings more thoroughly. Archaeologists less enamored of postmodern approaches grounded in symbolic anthropology and practice theory may find the theoretical discussions excessive, but even the staunchest processualists are likely to find the data that ground the theory informative and the reconstructions of past lifeways compelling. The volume is a valuable contribution to the archaeology of the northern Maya Lowlands and a clear example of the felicitous intersection of social theory and dirt archaeology.
Both volumes engage topics that have been actively pursued by increasing numbers of archaeologists in recent years: the archaeology of identities, social memory, and practice theory. While the theoretical underpinnings of the research are emphasized to different degrees, authors in both volumes focus on the active constitution of social experience, how elements of material culture play a dynamic role in constituting that experience, and how the practices involved shape social reproduction. Each volume, however, leaves something on the table by narrowing the methodological focus within the publication. While the emphasis on archaeology and art history by turn is valuable and instructive, the enriched perspective provided by their simultaneous employment and the addition of other perspectives is even more effective. Multidisciplinary projects such as the University of Pennsylvania's Early Copan Acropolis Program (ECAP) at the Classic Maya center of Copán, Honduras, illustrate the power of a conjunctive approach.
The ceramic vessel known informally as “The Dazzler” (ECAP Object 1/6/208-1 and 2), for example, has been the focus of simultaneous multidisciplinary analysis to stunning result. The lidded cylinder tripod was found in the upper chamber of the Margarita tomb (ECAP Burial 93-2), the A.D. fifth-century interment of a woman thought to be the wife of the dynastic founder, K'inich Yax K'uk' Mo'. Stylistic analysis augments INAA to suggest the vessel was made in highland central Mexico but painted by a Copán artist. Conservation intervention salvaged the painted design and revealed departures from manufacturing norms, and iconographic, epigraphic, and art-historical analyses suggest the vessel depicts the spatially contiguous, Teotihuacan-style Hunal structure in which the founder was likely buried. The Dazzler, therefore, materialized the alliance it was likely made to commemorate—the fabric of rulership forged in central Mexico, the representation and communication of it distinctly Maya. The multidisciplinary approach brings together the evidence necessary to understand the object, its social meaning, and its role in Early Classic Maya statecraft, producing a synthetic interpretation greater than the sum of its parts.
Memory Traces and Social Identities in the Classic Maya Northern Lowlands provide valuable contributions to the archaeological investigation of social memory and its roles in precolumbian Mesoamerica. The volumes’ diverse approaches illuminate the importance of a multidisciplinary approach to interrogating the archaeological record; additional lines of evidence enrich them further.
