(2018) Orienting West Mexico. The Mesoamerican World-System 200–1200 CE (original) (raw)
Related papers
2018
Modeling asymmetrical relationships between larger and smaller states has been a longstanding topic for Veracruz prehistory, spanning the Classic and Postclassic eras. Beginning with Santley's identification of Middle Classic period (A.D. 450-600) Matacapan as a Teotihuacan-related settlement in southern Veracruz, researchers have framed research around understanding the region's relationships with larger, more powerful states. While Santley's interpretations owed much to World Systems Theory and core-periphery models, later researchers did not simply adopt the approach, they adapted it to better fit the data. Stoner and Pool describe complexity in local engagements in southern Veracruz with the larger Teotihuacan state, applying the term disjuncture, to describe variable levels of not always overlapping affiliations between different smaller polities and Teotihuacan. For south-central Veracruz, Stark evaluated asymmetrical elite relations by describing how elite interactions among these regions could be enacted via craft production, exchange networks, and emulation processes for both Classic period engagements with Teotihuacan and the later Postclassic Aztec imperial occupation. Stark and Chance describe Late Postclassic era (A.D. 1350-1520) dynamics between provincials in Veracruz and the Aztec imperial state, showing how social and political affiliations expressed by both elites and commoners helped create distributions of material connections that did not always overlap. Overall, the focus on modeling asymmetrical relations in south-central and southern Veracruz, has resulted in the creation of more powerful analytical tools, including more precise ways of mapping social connections (e.g. networks) alongside spatial distributions to understand how smaller polities interact both with each other, and with large distant states. Session Title: Universalidad y variabilidad en la arqueología mesoamericana: una evaluación crítica de las teorías y la práctica vista desde la Costa del Golfo
International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences, 2015
Mesoamerica is a geographical and cultural area that includes most of Mexico and parts of Central America where an ancient civilization thrived between 3000 and 500 years ago. The states and societies that formed ancient Mesoamerica shared a number of characteristics, including: intensive agriculture, markets, urbanism, writing, religion, calendar, social organi- zation, and monumental architecture. However despite a high degree of cultural, ideological, and economic integration, Mesoamerica remained politically fragmented throughout its history. In this article, I attribute the persistent fragmentation to the cross-scale interaction of interregional trade and regional-scale political economic strategies and use world-system theory and collective action theory to elucidate their interaction.
Ancient Mesoamerica, 2006
The authors challenge the argument by other world-system scholars that Lower Central America fell outside the Mesoamerican world-system during the late Postclassic period. Drawing on ethnohistoric and archaeological information, it is argued that native peoples along the Pacific Coast of Central America from El Salvador to the Nicoya Peninsula (Costa Rica) are best understood as part of the Mesoamerican periphery. The Central American peoples south of Nicoya formed both a chiefly world-system of their own and part of the Mesoamerican frontier by engaging in networks of trade and preciosity exchanges with the coastal Mesoamericans in Nicoya and Nicaragua. Support for this argument is based primarily on two “microhistoric” case studies of peoples located on both sides of the Mesoamerican/Lower Central America border, specifically the Chorotegans of the Masaya/Granada area of Nicaragua and the Chibchans of the Diquis/Buenos Aires area of Costa Rica. Archaeological information on sites ...
The Casas Grandes regional system: A late prehistoric polity of northwestern Mexico
Journal of world prehistory, 2001
Casas Grandes, or Paquimé, is located in northwestern Chihuahua, Mexico, although it is one of the pueblo-style cultures that are best known from the adjacent southwestern U.S. At its apogee (ca. A.D. 1200-1450), Casas Grandes has been characterized as the largest and most complex prehistoric community in the puebloan world. It is further famous both as the center of one of the major interaction systems of the region, as well as a link between the cultures of Mesoamerica and those of the U.S. Southwest. Despite its acknowledged status as one of late prehistoric North America's few indigenous complex societies, the Casas Grandes polity has been so little studied that most aspects of its size, structure, level of centralization, and mode of operation remain obscure. The writers' work in Chihuahua has been designed to remedy this situation. In contrast to the original and highly influential interpretation that has prevailed for the last 25 years, the work reported here argues that the Casas Grandes polity, like its Chacoan and Hohokam counterparts of the adjacent southwestern U.S., existed at an intermediate level of sociopolitical complexity, so that it was not able to exert a uniform hegemony even over its near neighbors. Envisioned instead is a less comprehensive, less centralized situation of irregular control in a politically unstable context.
Interregional Interaction in Ancient Mesoamerica
Interregional Interaction in Ancient Mesoamerica, 2019
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