Thomas Guderjan | University of Texas at Tyler (original) (raw)
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Papers by Thomas Guderjan
The Latin Americanist, May 11, 2018
Ruben Flores's Backroads Pragmatists explores a transnational flow of ideas about education and e... more Ruben Flores's Backroads Pragmatists explores a transnational flow of ideas about education and ethnic difference that were exchanged among intellectuals and school officials in Mexico and the United States during the period 1920-1950. The "backroads pragmatists," as Flores calls adherents to John Dewey's experience-based educational philosophy, were specialists in rural education who worked in remote settings in the southwestern United States, "where they struggled to understand the meaning of the modern nation in the context of localism and difference" (11). As they sought out ways to best serve Mexican-American students, and then later to achieve racial integration in public schools, the pragmatists looked to Mexico's example of how to use the school to bring marginalized rural groups into the national fold. Flores points out that the backroads pragmatists' now-forgotten political activism was an important part of the U.S. civil rights movement. In segregation cases involving Mexican-American communities in California and Texas in the 1940s, these same figures served as expert witnesses arguing for integration, and in their testimonies Flores finds evidence of the impact of Mexican rural educational policy on their arguments. Flores first introduces readers to the U.S.-educated Mexicans who implemented Dewey's ideas in Mexico. Beginning in the 1920s, individuals like Moisés Saénz and Manuel Gamio worked in the newly reorganized Secretaría de Educación Pública (SEP) and used Dewey's philosophy to design policies to bring education and literacy to the country's large, isolated rural population. In the SEP's rural schools in this era, students learned practical skills from a curriculum tailored to their local context. Admirers of Dewey in the United States traveled to Mexico to tour these rural schools that so thoroughly implemented pragmatism at a national scale, something they could only dream of in a U.S. context. Flores argues that this contact with Mexico profoundly shaped the backroads pragmatists' research and thinking for decades. To trace this impact, Flores introduces a range of characters who traveled south to Mexico to observe rural schools, usually led by SEP officials. Drawing from a rich historiography of education in Mexico, he reconstructs what the visitors saw in rural schools and the messages they heard from Mexican officials. Flores then focuses on the careers of three key figures. Loyd Tireman, an education specialist working in New Mexico, set up experimental schools for Spanish-speaking children that were structurally, philosophically, and even visually similar to Mexican rural schools.
Southwestern Historical Quarterly, 2007
On the surface, this is a book about the American Southwest and how the romanticized version of i... more On the surface, this is a book about the American Southwest and how the romanticized version of it that exists in the minds ofAmericans living outside the Southwest came to exist. I know firsthand how powerful that construction was and still is. It was this vision that drew me into my first archaeological field school in northern Arizona thirty years ago. However, below the surface, this book is a biographically oriented case study on how anthropology developed as a discipline in its early days. Each of the four female anthropologists (Elsie Clews Parsons, Ruth Benedict, Ruth Underhill, and Gladys Reichard) examined in this book began her career in New York City and was deeply influenced by Franz Boas and his other students. More important, though, were their interaction with each other, and their other personal relationships. Catherine Lavender takes the reader through each of their biographies to help understand the feminist anthropologists who participated in the construction of the American Southwest.
The Latin Americanist, Jun 1, 2015
Journal of Field Archaeology, 1989
is a small Late and Tenninal Classic transshipment point on the north end ofAmber;gris Ca:lJBeliz... more is a small Late and Tenninal Classic transshipment point on the north end ofAmber;gris Ca:lJBelize. It was well situated to have participated in the Maya maritime trade network that served lar;gepopulation centers on Corozal and Chetumal bays and those communities linked to these bays by the New River and Rio Hondo. A sample ofTenninal Classic obsidian was sourced using visual) x-ray jluoresence) and neutron aaivation techniques. Although the bulk of the obsidian derivesfrom EI Chayal in Guatemala) as is common during the Tenninal Classic in northern Belize) an unusually lar;ge proportion comesfrom Mexican sources.Because of its strategic location) San Juan functioned as a funnel through which goodsfrom the north passed before being dispersed into northern Belize.
University of Arizona Press eBooks, Aug 23, 2022
Ethnohistory, Apr 1, 2011
Ancient Mesoamerica, 2006
The identity of the Classic Maya was expressed through public architecture and the creation of sa... more The identity of the Classic Maya was expressed through public architecture and the creation of sacred landscape, which incorporated the landscape of creation and the concept of the world tree. Pyramids, plazas, stelae, and ballcourts were important components of this landscape. In the Peten, architectural complexes known as "E-groups" were another component. E-groups are well-known astronomical "orientation calendars" that were first built in the Terminal Preclassic period. Named after Group E at Uaxactun, they consist of three buildings on the east side of a public plaza and a fourth in the middle of the plaza or on the west side. Terminal Preclassic E-groups functioned as solstice and equinox markers. However, their function changed in the Early Classic period, arguably due to influence from Teotihuacan, to a focus on agricultural seasons. In this paper, I argue that pseudo-E-groups were built well into the Late Classic period in the eastern Peten and were a defining architectural complex for the region. The original, functional Terminal Preclassic E-groups were based on ritual activities focused on solar events. By the Early Classic, E-groups had become multipurpose parts of the sacred landscape of public architecture. Late Classic pseudo-E-groups, however, had become nonfunctional for either solar or agriculturally oriented observation. Nevertheless, they had become so deeply embedded into the template of sacred space and architecture that pseudo-E-groups were constructed to reinforce the identity of cities and the validity of their rulers.
The 81st Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, 2016
The 80th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, 2015
University Press of Colorado eBooks, Oct 25, 2021
The Latin Americanist, May 11, 2018
Ruben Flores's Backroads Pragmatists explores a transnational flow of ideas about education and e... more Ruben Flores's Backroads Pragmatists explores a transnational flow of ideas about education and ethnic difference that were exchanged among intellectuals and school officials in Mexico and the United States during the period 1920-1950. The "backroads pragmatists," as Flores calls adherents to John Dewey's experience-based educational philosophy, were specialists in rural education who worked in remote settings in the southwestern United States, "where they struggled to understand the meaning of the modern nation in the context of localism and difference" (11). As they sought out ways to best serve Mexican-American students, and then later to achieve racial integration in public schools, the pragmatists looked to Mexico's example of how to use the school to bring marginalized rural groups into the national fold. Flores points out that the backroads pragmatists' now-forgotten political activism was an important part of the U.S. civil rights movement. In segregation cases involving Mexican-American communities in California and Texas in the 1940s, these same figures served as expert witnesses arguing for integration, and in their testimonies Flores finds evidence of the impact of Mexican rural educational policy on their arguments. Flores first introduces readers to the U.S.-educated Mexicans who implemented Dewey's ideas in Mexico. Beginning in the 1920s, individuals like Moisés Saénz and Manuel Gamio worked in the newly reorganized Secretaría de Educación Pública (SEP) and used Dewey's philosophy to design policies to bring education and literacy to the country's large, isolated rural population. In the SEP's rural schools in this era, students learned practical skills from a curriculum tailored to their local context. Admirers of Dewey in the United States traveled to Mexico to tour these rural schools that so thoroughly implemented pragmatism at a national scale, something they could only dream of in a U.S. context. Flores argues that this contact with Mexico profoundly shaped the backroads pragmatists' research and thinking for decades. To trace this impact, Flores introduces a range of characters who traveled south to Mexico to observe rural schools, usually led by SEP officials. Drawing from a rich historiography of education in Mexico, he reconstructs what the visitors saw in rural schools and the messages they heard from Mexican officials. Flores then focuses on the careers of three key figures. Loyd Tireman, an education specialist working in New Mexico, set up experimental schools for Spanish-speaking children that were structurally, philosophically, and even visually similar to Mexican rural schools.
Southwestern Historical Quarterly, 2007
On the surface, this is a book about the American Southwest and how the romanticized version of i... more On the surface, this is a book about the American Southwest and how the romanticized version of it that exists in the minds ofAmericans living outside the Southwest came to exist. I know firsthand how powerful that construction was and still is. It was this vision that drew me into my first archaeological field school in northern Arizona thirty years ago. However, below the surface, this book is a biographically oriented case study on how anthropology developed as a discipline in its early days. Each of the four female anthropologists (Elsie Clews Parsons, Ruth Benedict, Ruth Underhill, and Gladys Reichard) examined in this book began her career in New York City and was deeply influenced by Franz Boas and his other students. More important, though, were their interaction with each other, and their other personal relationships. Catherine Lavender takes the reader through each of their biographies to help understand the feminist anthropologists who participated in the construction of the American Southwest.
The Latin Americanist, Jun 1, 2015
Journal of Field Archaeology, 1989
is a small Late and Tenninal Classic transshipment point on the north end ofAmber;gris Ca:lJBeliz... more is a small Late and Tenninal Classic transshipment point on the north end ofAmber;gris Ca:lJBelize. It was well situated to have participated in the Maya maritime trade network that served lar;gepopulation centers on Corozal and Chetumal bays and those communities linked to these bays by the New River and Rio Hondo. A sample ofTenninal Classic obsidian was sourced using visual) x-ray jluoresence) and neutron aaivation techniques. Although the bulk of the obsidian derivesfrom EI Chayal in Guatemala) as is common during the Tenninal Classic in northern Belize) an unusually lar;ge proportion comesfrom Mexican sources.Because of its strategic location) San Juan functioned as a funnel through which goodsfrom the north passed before being dispersed into northern Belize.
University of Arizona Press eBooks, Aug 23, 2022
Ethnohistory, Apr 1, 2011
Ancient Mesoamerica, 2006
The identity of the Classic Maya was expressed through public architecture and the creation of sa... more The identity of the Classic Maya was expressed through public architecture and the creation of sacred landscape, which incorporated the landscape of creation and the concept of the world tree. Pyramids, plazas, stelae, and ballcourts were important components of this landscape. In the Peten, architectural complexes known as "E-groups" were another component. E-groups are well-known astronomical "orientation calendars" that were first built in the Terminal Preclassic period. Named after Group E at Uaxactun, they consist of three buildings on the east side of a public plaza and a fourth in the middle of the plaza or on the west side. Terminal Preclassic E-groups functioned as solstice and equinox markers. However, their function changed in the Early Classic period, arguably due to influence from Teotihuacan, to a focus on agricultural seasons. In this paper, I argue that pseudo-E-groups were built well into the Late Classic period in the eastern Peten and were a defining architectural complex for the region. The original, functional Terminal Preclassic E-groups were based on ritual activities focused on solar events. By the Early Classic, E-groups had become multipurpose parts of the sacred landscape of public architecture. Late Classic pseudo-E-groups, however, had become nonfunctional for either solar or agriculturally oriented observation. Nevertheless, they had become so deeply embedded into the template of sacred space and architecture that pseudo-E-groups were constructed to reinforce the identity of cities and the validity of their rulers.
The 81st Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, 2016
The 80th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, 2015
University Press of Colorado eBooks, Oct 25, 2021
The Value of Things, 2017
Prehistoric to Contemporary Commodities in the Maya Region
Perspectives on the Archaeology of Chetumal Bay, 2016
This chapter used remote sensing as a proxy for ancient Maya agricultural production and contextu... more This chapter used remote sensing as a proxy for ancient Maya agricultural production and contextualizes the data via comparison with ethnographic data to argue that large scale, intensive agricultural systems were present in the Rio Hondo floodplain during the classic Maya period.
This volume summarizes many aspects of more than twenty years of fi eld research at the ancient M... more This volume summarizes many aspects of more than twenty years of fi eld research at the ancient Maya city of Blue Creek in northwestern Belize. Blue Creek was a medium-sized Maya kingdom whose wealth was built upon access to large-scale and high-quality agricultural lands and its location at the headwaters of the Rio Hondo. The Rio Hondo is the northern-most river draining the Maya lowlands into the Caribbean Sea and provided access to markets and polities of northern Yucatan. The studies in the volume provide an overview of Blue Creek combined with detailed studies of aspects of production, trade, distribution, and the organization and functional interactions within the community.
Quaternary Science Reviews, 2009
In the Maya Lowlands of Mexico, Belize, and Guatemala two main types of wetlands have played impo... more In the Maya Lowlands of Mexico, Belize, and Guatemala two main types of wetlands have played important roles in human history: bajos or intermittently wet environments of the upland, interior Yucatá n and perennial wetlands of the coastal plains. Many of the most important Maya sites encircle the bajos, though our growing evidence for human-wetland interactions is still sparse. The deposits of these wetlands record two main eras of slope instability and wetland aggradation: the Pleistocene-Holocene transition as rainfall increased and forests eclipsed savannas and the Maya Preclassic to Classic as deforestation, land-use intensity, and drying increased. The ancient Maya adapted with terraces around these bajo margins but retracted in the Late Preclassic in some areas. The perennial wetlands of the coastal plains have different histories, and the first conceptual model of human-wetland interaction described intensive wetland agriculture in the Preclassic through Classic based on raised fields and canals. But a second model arose that interpreted the wetland stratigraphy and canals as more indicative of natural aggradation by accelerated erosion and gypsum precipitation that buried Archaic and Preclassic fields and there was little Classic era use. We present new data on a third and fourth model in this study. The third is a hybrid of the models one and two, including the Archaic to Preclassic aggradation of the second model, and the first model's Classic period fields and canals as piecemeal attempts by the Maya to adapt to these and other environmental changes. The fourth conceptual model describes a very Late/Terminal Classic, preplanned project on a floodplain. These wetland fields were short-lived, aggraded rapidly but with some reoccupation in the Postclassic. All of these new models display the burgeoning evidence for intricate Maya interactions with wetlands, and the diversity of evidence from the relatively few studies underscores the infancy of our understanding of Maya interaction with tropical wetlands.
PNAS, 2019
We report on a large area of ancient Maya wetland field systems in Belize, Central America, based... more We report on a large area of ancient Maya wetland field systems
in Belize, Central America, based on airborne lidar survey coupled
with multiple proxies and radiocarbon dates that reveal ancient
field uses and chronology. The lidar survey indicated four main areas
of wetland complexes, including the Birds of Paradise wetland field
complex that is five times larger than earlier remote and ground
survey had indicated, and revealed a previously unknown wetland
field complex that is even larger. The field systems date mainly to
the Maya Late and Terminal Classic (∼1,400–1,000 y ago), but with
evidence from as early as the Late Preclassic (∼1,800 y ago) and as
late as the Early Postclassic (∼900 y ago). Previous study showed
that these were polycultural systems that grew typical ancient
Maya crops including maize, arrowroot, squash, avocado, and other
fruits and harvested fauna. The wetland fields were active at a time
of population expansion, landscape alteration, and droughts and
could have been adaptations to all of these major shifts in Maya
civilization. These wetland-farming systems add to the evidence for
early and extensive human impacts on the global tropics. Broader
evidence suggests a wide distribution of wetland agroecosystems
across the Maya Lowlands and Americas, and we hypothesize the
increase of atmospheric carbon dioxide and methane from burning,
preparing, and maintaining these field systems contributed to the
Early Anthropocene.