Pots, Pans, and People: Chapter II

1 POTS, PANS, AND PEOPLE Material Culture and Nature in Mesoamerican Ceramics Eduardo Williams [17/09/2022]1 1 Preliminary version, not for citation. © Eduardo Williams, 17/09/2022. 2 CHAPTER II MATERIAL CULTURE AND NATURE: THEORETICAL BACKGROUND In this chapter I explore the theoretical background for the study of material culture and human adaptations to nature. The chapter is divided in three parts: (1) Material culture, or the artifacts, tools, instruments, and all objects used by people to adapt to their environment. Material culture is the main source of information used by archaeologists to infer the economy, technology, social organization, and ritual practices of ancient societies. The analysis of material culture is crucial to archaeological theory and methodology. (2) Cultural ecology, or the patterns of behavior that allow people to adapt to their environment, as well as their knowledge (and use) of specific natural environments and landscapes. Cultural ecology deals with many aspects of culture and the environment, including how humans can solve their subsistence problems, how groups of people understand their environment, and how they share with others their knowledge of the natural settings, resources, and landscapes. (3) In the last section, I explore the relationship between archaeology and anthropology over time, and the role of ethnoarchaeology as a possible bridge between these two disciplines, as well as an indispensable tool for archaeological interpretation. I also discuss the role of ethnohistory and other disciplines from the social sciences and humanities, which offer crucial perspectives for archaeological interpretation. Both ethnoarchaeology and ethnohistory are indispensable for the interpretation of the archaeological record, as the reader will see in this book. 3 Material Culture In recent decades the study of material culture has reached a new level of importance in social studies, not just in archaeology. Ian Hodder (1982), for instance, holds that ‘material culture is the main source of information from which archaeologists infer the economy, technology, social organization and ritual practices of ancient societies. Therefore, the analysis and interpretation of material culture are central to archaeological theory and methodology. To understand the relationship between material culture and human behavior, archaeologists need to develop models based on ethnographic analogies. Among many other archaeologists, Michael Schiffer has been concerned with material culture for a long time (e.g. Skibo and Schiffer 2008; Gould and Schiffer 1981). Schiffer (2017) discusses a ‘material-culture turn’ in the social sciences that has emerged in recent years. For many social scientists, the study of material culture has become an important part, if not the main focus, of their research projects. But it wasn’t always so. In contrast to archaeology, most social sciences lack a real need to engage material culture, and so it has been neglected as a source of data about human behavior (p. 206). Instead of focusing on material culture as a source of information, cultural anthropologists, sociologists, cultural geographers, social psychologists, and others have used interviews, questionnaires, and highly contrived experiments for learning about people’s behavior, thoughts, and beliefs (p. 206). According to Schiffer, the ‘material-culture turn’ in the social sciences began in the 1970s and occurred in part because the data-gathering techniques mentioned above had reached their limits of usefulness as measures of actual human behavior. More importantly, social scientists were beginning to apply archaeological perspectives on human behavior and material culture. Schiffer (2017) holds 4 that material culture remains to some extent in an ‘interdisciplinary limbo’ because the organization of social sciences in most universities has ossified, allowing no space for material-culture studies. That is why today material-culture researchers remain on the fringes of all disciplines that deal with people. Archaeology remains as the center of gravity, as the only social science that deals with material culture from all times and places. Indeed, archaeology continues to nurture material-culture studies, producing an abundance of theoretical works and creative case studies. Meanwhile, in the period since the late 1980s we have seen a fast‐expanding literature in material culture studies, with archaeology and anthropology playing a central role. But one sees in this literature a dissatisfaction with purely ‘culturalist’ studies of material culture, which ‘served simply to reduce things to meanings, or else to social relations’ according to Hicks and Beaudry (2010:2). Another useful perspective on material culture has been developed by Daniel Waugh (2005), who holds that the term ‘material objects’ refers to items with physical substance that have been shaped or produced by human action (though objects created by nature can also play an important role in the history of humankind). For example, coins and medals are the product of human activity, while an animal horn is not. But horns can take on meaning for humans if used as drinking cups or as decorative or ritual objects. According to Waugh (2005), we can write history using objects depending on what evidence has survived. It is sometimes surprising how much information has survived, but in the past most archaeologists tended to look mainly for large or ‘beautiful’ objects and throw away the rest. Today’s archaeologists record minute data, such as microscopic analysis of pollen that can provide important information on plant life in the past. 5 Historical analysis of material objects usually involves a careful description. When we analyze material evidence, we write an object’s biography. Each object has a story to tell, a story shaped by human use. The object’s description may provide material for generalization about technology, economy, or social relations within a given society and how they changed over time (Waugh 2005). An object’s biography should include information on its owners over an extended period and may reveal how the object was used or perceived in different settings, even in ways unintended by its creator. An artifact produced for a practical function in daily life may acquire symbolic value later in its history. Conversely, an object’s original function may become irrelevant because society no longer needs it or because people no longer know how it was originally used. Most objects have passed through several historical stages and the location of discovery is rarely the site where they were made. It is important to learn how things reached the location of discovery, therefore we should investigate what the context of discovery tells us about the object’s environment and associations. Finally, we would like to know whether the context provides information about the date of use or manufacture. Such evidence may reveal patterns of exchange and interaction. According to Waugh (2005), when using objects for research, we should start by asking about the original context, how and where they were found. Other important questions posed by Waugh (2005) about objects are where are they now? And how are they presented? This information can be rich and layered because each object has its own story (p. 4). Many objects studied by archaeologists, anthropologists, historians, and other scholars have been shaped or produced by human action. A coin, for example, is quite obviously the product of human activity. Roman coins remain as proof of Roman presence 6 in many parts of Europe, suggesting interaction with local groups such as the Celts of present-day Britain. Powell (1980) reports on a denarius of the first century (ca. AD 48) with high-relief figures that show how the Celts were seen by Roman coin engravers. On the obverse the coin shows a Gaulish head, while the reverse might well be an illustration from one of the early Irish epics (Powell 1980: Figure 76a). Figure 1. The Cherokee Chief Cunne Shote, painted by Francis Parsons in 1762 (Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa, Oklahoma). The main figure is surrounded by several ‘peace medals’ (after Pickering 2011, figure on cover). Like coins, medals also offer important clues for historical interpretation. Robert Pickering (2011) made a study of the so-called ‘peace medals’ that became tokens of political negotiation between early European settlers and native peoples in North America 7 (Figure 1). According to Pickering, since the early nineteenth century understanding peace medals has become quite problematic and as confusing as the political negotiations that the medals symbolize. Part of the problem pertains to the definition of the term ‘peace medal’. A clear and simple definition would refer to those medals specifically minted by the American and other governments for the purpose of distribution to native American leaders. One of the goals of peace medals was to attract attention: ‘Their size and the noble image of a president, king, or queen… tells the viewer that the person wearing the medal is important… Clearly, such fine medals denote important events and extraordinary people’ (p. 1). Pickering (2011) holds that peace medals found a positive reception on the part of many Indian groups, especially in the American Southeast and Midwest, because the wearing of large shell disks was recognized by chiefs and other members of the native elite long before Europeans arrived. Waugh (2005) mentions other items of material culture, such as animal horns. Even if they were not made by humans, horns may have special meaning if used, for instance, as a drinking cup or a decorative or ritual object. This idea can be illustrated with a class of objects excavated by Ian Hodder in Çatalhöyük, Turkey. Hodder (2006) tells us that Çatalhöyük was an early town (ca. 7400-6000 BC) in central Turkey with a population of some 3,000 to 8,000 people. One of the mysteries of Çatalhöyük is its great size and its long duration at such a very early date, at a time when people had started settling down into permanent villages and had begun domesticating plants and animals. Animal bones are among the most common artifacts excavated by Hodder at Çatalhöyük, often found in open refuse or midden areas between houses. Another kind of data consists of different types of animals in installations in several buildings at 8 Çatalhöyük. Buildings were decorated with animal heads (notably bulls), horns, teeth, tusks, and other parts set into walls and placed on pillars and modelled in plaster. Hodder found that cattle skulls were brought into some houses, the heads were plastered and the resulting bucrania were placed in the wall (Figure 2). Figure 2. This reconstruction drawing shows how the cattle heads may have looked in their original context at Çatalhöyük (adapted from Oates and Oates 1976: Figure on p. 91). Waugh (2005) holds that we should bear in mind that most objects have passed through several historical stages and the place of discovery is rarely the site of manufacture, hence the following questions one might ask about an archaeological find: (1) How did the object reach its location of discovery? (2) How does the context inform us about the object’s environment and associations? (3) Does the context hold information about the object’s date of manufacture or deposition? (5) Can this evidence reveal patterns of exchange and interaction? Waugh (2005) adds that sometimes, when encountering a type of object for the first time, we may try to establish its function based on our own experiences. Often such 9 analogies are accurate, but they may be misleading, for example if the object comes from a culture far removed in place and time from our own or if it was found in an environment far removed from its place of origin. In this case, close observation of an object (including usewear patterns) and its context can help establish function. A critical examination of the setting in which the object is found is also important. As an example, a tool assemblage2 around a hearth with bones of domesticated animals and features related to cooking and consuming food might help identify otherwise ‘anonymous’ objects as being connected with subsistence activities. Material Culture Studies Hicks and Beaudry (2010) hold that in recent years many researchers, including sociocultural anthropologists, have been using archaeological methods to study the modern and contemporary world. This is part of a multi‐disciplinary interest in the material dimensions of the world, and the debates and ideas generated by this approach might develop into a broader ‘material turn’ in the humanities and social sciences. Historians have also been part of this process, thanks to their interest in intellectual traditions that include different forms of ‘material histories’, from Marx's ‘materialist conception of history’ to Fernand Braudel’s historical materialism. These scholars often share the concept of objects as ‘alternative sources’ of information that complement documentary evidence to solve the questions posed by economic history and social history. By the same token, many geographers share an interest in material entities in the context of their efforts to understand 2 The term ‘assemblage’ is applied to a group of artifacts or ecofacts (bones, shells, plant remains, etc.) recovered from the same archaeological context. These objects are found near each other, and may be interpreted as evidence for specific events, practices, or activities in the past (Joyce and Pollard 2010). 10 the constitution of lived space. Finally, sociological accounts have focused on the involvement of objects in human relations. Before going further with my narrative, it is important to have clarity about the meaning of the word ‘culture’ as used here. In the following section I discuss the concept of culture and how it has changed through the years. The Culture Concept over Time British anthropologist Edward Burnett Tylor (1832-1917) is generally regarded as the founder of cultural anthropology (Street 2022). Tylor’s most important work is the book Primitive Cultures (1871), where we find his now-famous definition of culture: ‘That complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom, and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man [sic] as a member of society’. At the end of the 19th century, the definition of the word ‘culture’ already incorporated Tylor’s ideas, as we can see in the 1898 edition of Webster’s Dictionary: 1. The act or practice of cultivating, or of preparing the earth for seed and raising crops by tillage… 2. The act of, or any labor or means employed for, training, disciplining, or refining the moral and intellectual nature of man; as, the culture of the mind… 3. The state of being cultivated; the result of cultivation; physical improvement; enlightenment and discipline acquired by mental and moral training; civilization; refinement in manners and taste… The list of all the items of the general life of a people represents that whole which we call its culture [Tylor]. Moving ahead in time, we see that in the first quarter of the 20th century, scholars were still attempting to produce a concept that would allow them to explain human social behavior. 11 Franz Boas (1911) is a good example of these early theories, as he held that the psychological characterization of humans under the varying conditions of the race and the environment in which people live should include all their beliefs and customs. According to Boas, all the facts of the individual's ordinary life give us an opportunity to observe the manifestation of people's thought under varying conditions (p. 75). Boas further believed that the thoughts and actions of civilized man and those of man in a more primitive state of society are proof that in various groups of mankind the mind responds very differently when subjected to the same conditions... I propose to analyze the differences that characterize the mental life of man in different degrees of culture... It may be that the minds of different races present differences in organization... But it may also be that the organization of the mind is almost identical in all mankind; in other words, that mental activity obeys the same laws everywhere, but that the manifestations of these laws depend on the character of the individual experience which is subjected to the action of these laws (p. 75). In his book A History of Archaeological Thought, Bruce G. Trigger (2006) points out that in the early 20th century Boas characterized the ‘ethnographic culture’ as a basic unit of study and diffusion and the major force behind cultural change. Trigger mentions Boas’ advocacy of cultural relativism and his strong opposition to racism as the basis for his idea that Indians were capable of change. Trigger mentions other important developments in American archaeology during the late 19th and early 20th century, including the work of G. P. Thruston, who defined in 1890 a prehistoric Stone Grave ‘race’ in Tennessee, which he thought constituted the 12 remains of a single tribe or a group of related tribes. The term culture was first applied to groups of sites containing distinctive artifact assemblages, and by 1902 William C. Mills had distinguished the Fort Ancient and Hopewell cultures (p. 279). Around the middle of the 20th century, Alfred Kroeber (1948) defined the term ‘culture’ as ‘the mass of learned and transmitted motor reactions, habits, techniques, ideas, and values—and the behavior they induce… Culture is the special and exclusive product of men, and is their distinctive quality in the cosmos… given a culture, the human beings that come under its influence behave and operate quite differently from the way they would behave under another culture’ (p. 8). Kroeber also thought that culture was ‘a tremendous influence on human behavior. [Culture] is always first of all the product of men in groups: a set of ideas, attitudes, and habits—“rules” if one will—evolved by men to help them in their conduct of life’ (p. 10). These ideas led Kroeber to characterize culture as something ‘which the human species has and other social species lack. This would include speech, knowledge, beliefs, customs, arts and technologies, ideals, and rules. That, in short, is what we learn from other men, from our elders or the past, plus what we may add to it’ (p. 253). Kroeber saw receptivity or openness as a general characteristic of culture. He thought that today’s culture is always received from yesterday; this is what tradition or transmission means. He saw this process as ‘a passing or sending along, a “handing-through” from one generation to another’ (p. 256). Kroeber wrote in The Nature of Culture (1952) that ‘cultures, societies, individuals, and events, respectively, represent roughly the characteristic subject matters of anthropology, sociology, psychology, and history’ (p. 104). The anthropologist deals with that aspect of human behavior known as ‘culture’. Kroeber also mentioned the following 13 characteristics of culture: first, culture is not transmitted or continued by the genetic mechanism of heredity; (2) culture is supra-personal and anonymous; (3) it falls into patterns, or regularities of form, style and significance; (4) it expresses values, which may be overtly formulated or implicitly felt by the society carrying the culture (p. 104). In the book A History of American Archaeology, Gordon Willey and Jeremy Sabloff (1980) call the period of time in which Kroeber was active (1940-1960) the ClassificatoryHistorical Period. In the latter part of this period, according to Willey and Sabloff, several authors attempted to place archaeological cultures in their appropriate natural environmental settings. This can be seen as a reaction to the strong anti-environmentalist tone of American anthropology followed by Boas and others, who had proscribed environment as a possible explanation for the development of culture. Willey and Sabloff hold that during this period archaeological research went beyond the simplistic treatments of the environment that had been current, thanks to the belief that a culture’s environmental context should be studied as thoroughly as possible to reconstruct an appropriate prehistoric environmental setting, which in turn would generate the appropriate functional interpretations. Writing in the 1950s, Robert Redfield (1989a [1956]) recounts how, in his view, the concept of ‘a culture’ arose out of the anthropology which relied on studies of isolated or tribal people. Each culture came to be conceived as an independent, autonomous, and selfsufficient system that did not need to be maintained ‘by a complementary, reciprocal, subordinate, or other indispensable connection with a second system’ (p. 40). Redfield saw these cultural units as systems because they had their own mutually adjusted and interdependent parts. They were autonomous because they did not require another system 14 to continue functioning. Redfield also thought that culture was maintained by the communication of a heritage through the generations among the local communities. The culture of a peasant community, however, is not autonomous, but rather ‘an aspect or dimension of the civilization of which it is a part’ (p. 40). Redfield focused his attention on the peasant village, in which he saw ‘the long course of interaction between that community and centers of civilization’. The peasant culture had an evident history. Redfield thought anthropologists had to study that history, which went beyond the local sphere. It was the ‘history of the civilization of which the village culture is one local expression’ (p. 41). In a later work, Redfield (1989b [1960]) describes culture as a ‘stable ethos and world view… a value system, a group personality’ (p. 106). Gordon Childe discussed the culture concept from an archaeological perspective in his book Man Makes Himself (1956), contemporaneous with Redfield’s writings. Childe characterized archaeological research in the following way: ‘The archaeologist collects, classifies, and compares the tools and weapons of our ancestors and forerunners, examines the houses they built, the fields they tilled, the food they ate (or rather discarded). These are the tools and instruments of production, characteristic of economic systems’ (p. 31). For Childe, the ancient relics and monuments were evidence of the contemporary knowledge or science existing when they were fashioned. Childe saw culture as ‘the equipment which men make for themselves’ (p. 47), and archaeology as the discipline that studied progress in culture. The archaeologist’s documents were the tools, weapons, and huts that people of the past made to provide food and shelter for themselves. These archaeological artifacts and features illustrate improving technical skill, increasing knowledge, and advancing 15 organization for securing a livelihood. For Childe, a finished tool was a good gauge of the manual dexterity of its maker, as well as a measure of the scientific knowledge of the period in question. Childe was influenced by a Marxist view of culture, as we see in his mention of ‘tools and instruments of production’ and ‘economic systems’ in the paragraph above. Marx himself dedicated a good deal of attention to the culture concept in his writings, according to Thomas Patterson (2009). In Patterson’s opinion, Marx saw social consciousness—that is, culture—as intertwined with praxis and social relations, as they were manifested in particular societies. In his analysis of Marx’s ideas about culture, Patterson found correspondences between culture, on the one hand, and the forms of production and social relations, on the other. Marx also saw reciprocal interactions between the cultural complex, mode of production and social relations, the latter always permeated by power. For Marx, culture was ‘the expression of life as it is shaped by historically specific forms of production and ensembles of social relations’ (p. 105). Marx thought that culture involved both objectification (the process of rendering human needs into material objects that satisfy needs) and materialization (the embodiment within those objects of social relations). To sum up, ‘culture is bound up with an existing state of affairs and is a condition which makes it possible to change that state of affairs’ (p. 105). The next decade after Redfield and Childe’s publications cited above saw momentous changes in archaeological theory. One of the leading figures involved in this process was Lewis R. Binford (1962), who saw culture as ‘the extra-somatic means of adaptation for the human organism’ (p. 218). This definition, based in part on the work of 16 Leslie A. White,3 held that the subsystems within the broader cultural system may be extrasomatic or not, depending on a biological process for modification or structural definition. Cultural systems are a means of adaptation for the human organism to the total (physical and social) environment. Within this framework, Binford thought that technology was closely related to the nature of the environment, as it encompassed the tools and social relationships that articulate the organism with the physical environment. Writing a little over a decade after Binford, David L. Clarke (1978) made an important contribution to the definition of culture from an archaeological perspective. In Clarke’s view, human societies consist of corporate groups of people, and their culture systems are formed by the relationships that are implicit in the repeated patterns of activities, artifacts, and beliefs. Clarke defined the basic attributes of such culture systems as information controlling and regulating the expressions of cultural tradition. He saw culture as an information system, ‘wherein the messages are accumulated survival information plus miscellaneous and random noise peculiar to each system and its past trajectory’ (p. 86). One of the most influential authors to propose a definition of culture was Marvin Harris (1927-2001), working within the framework of cultural materialism (1980). Writing about this theoretical approach, Buzney and Marcoux (2022:1) consider cultural materialism an expansion of Marxist theory that explains cultural similarities and differences within a societal framework consisting of three distinct levels: (1) 3 Leslie A. White (1900-1975) firmly supported cultural evolution, following the ideas of 19th-century writers Lewis H. Morgan and Edward Tylor. For White, cultural evolution was generated by technological changes, particularly regarding the increased harnessing of energy by humans. White’s evolutionary views put him in conflict with the anti-evolutionary theories of Boas discussed earlier (Britannica 2022). 17 infrastructure, (2) structure, and (3) superstructure. In this scheme, infrastructure consists of material realities such as technological, economic and reproductive (demographic) factors that shape and influence the other two aspects of culture. The structure aspect of culture consists of organizational aspects such as domestic and kinship systems and political economy. Lastly, the superstructure aspect consists of ideological and symbolic elements of society such as religion and belief systems. According to Harris (1980), the word ‘culture’ usually means for anthropologists ‘the total socially acquired life-style of a group of people including patterned, repetitive ways of thinking, feeling, and acting’ (p. 106). Harris holds that in some cases the meaning of culture is restricted exclusively to the mental rules for acting and speaking shared by the members of a given social or ethnic group, that is to say ‘a group of people who share a common habitat and who are dependent on each other for their survival and well-being’ (p. 106). For Harris, anthropologists who compare one culture with another have to collect and organize cultural data pertaining to cross-culturally recurrent aspects or parts of the social and cultural whole. The structure of these recurrent parts is called the ‘universal pattern’ (p. 116). All over the world, human societies must have cultural strategies or behavior (and thoughts) related to making a living from the environment. This includes biological reproduction, the organization of exchange (including goods and labor), daily life in domestic groups and larger communities, and the ‘creative, expressive… aesthetic, moral, and intellectual aspects of human life… the universal pattern consists of language, material traits, art, knowledge, society, property, government, and war’ (p. 116). The 18 universal pattern proposed by Harris consists of the three major divisions mentioned above (infrastructure, structure, and superstructure), as explained in Table 1. Table 1. The etic and behavioral components of the universal pattern (after Harris 1980:117). INFRASTRUCTURE Mode of production. The technology and the practices employed for expanding or limiting basic subsistence production (especially the production of food and other forms of energy), considering the interaction between technology and habitat. Technology of subsistence Techno-environmental relationships Ecosystems Work patterns Mode of reproduction. The technology and the practices employed for expanding, limiting, and maintaining population size. Demography Mating patterns Fertility, natality, mortality Nurturance of infants Medical control of demographic patterns Contraception, abortion, infanticide STRUCTURE 19 Domestic economy. The organization of reproduction and basic production, exchange, and consumption within different domestic settings. Family structure Domestic division of labor Domestic socialization, enculturation, education Age and sex roles Domestic discipline hierarchies, sanctions Political economy. The organization of reproduction, production, exchange, and consumption within and between social groups (bands, chiefdoms, states, and empires). Political organization, factions, clubs, associations, corporations Division of labor, taxation, tribute Political socialization, enculturation, education Class, state, urban, rural hierarchies Discipline, police, military control War SUPERSTRUCTURE Behavioral superstructure. Art, religion, music, dance, literature, advertising, etcetera. Harris’s research strategy of cultural materialism regards material factors as the causes of sociocultural differences and similarities. These material factors consist of the entire set of etic and behavioral components of the universal pattern, the etic and behavioral infrastructure. According to Harris, the modes of production and reproduction usually determine structure, superstructure, ‘and all the emic and mental components of 20 sociocultural systems’ (p. 118). However, cultural materialism does not exclude the view that the other components of the universal pattern (structure, superstructure, and emic and mental factors) influence the infrastructure. But cultural materialism does give priority to the principle of ‘infrastructural determinism to make sure that the influence exerted by the behavioral and etic infrastructure is not neglected’ (p. 119). For Harris, infrastructure is the main link between culture and nature; between the ecological, chemical, and physical restraints to human action, and the sociocultural practices that overcome or modify those restraints. Harris believed the search for the beginnings of the causal chains affecting sociocultural evolution should consider the complex of energy-expanding body activities affecting the balance between the size of each human population, the amount of energy devoted to production, and the supply of lifesustaining resources. This balance is indispensable to the survival of the individuals and groups who are its beneficiaries. Few archaeologists have contributed directly to a ‘working definition’ of the culture concept. One of them is Patty J. Watson (1995), who wrote a seminal work about the relationship between archaeology and general anthropology. Citing Redfield, Watson regards culture as ‘an organized body of conventional understandings manifest in art and artifacts which, persisting through tradition, characterizes a human group’ (p. 683). Watson points out that Redfield specifically mentioned manifestations of culture (art and artifacts) and invoked duration through time, two characteristics that are important to archaeologists. Watson also mentioned that anthropology had been traditionally regarded as an academic discipline made up of four sub-fields: (1) social anthropology or ethnology; (2) archaeology; (3) physical anthropology; and (4) linguistics. Meanwhile, Philip Phillips 21 (1955) emphasized the close ties between archaeology and the broader field of anthropology with the phrase ‘American archaeology is anthropology, or it is nothing’. However, Watson (1995) noted that the anthropological world was not as well integrated as one could believe. By the early 1980s some North American departments of archaeology completely separated from anthropology, while calls for separation were voiced by several archaeologists in England and northwestern Europe, with many authors launching a fullscale assault on the notion of ‘archaeology as anthropology’. In Watson’s opinion, during the same period the culture concept, if not culture itself, was under attack within American sociocultural anthropology. At the turn of the 20th century, the term ‘culture’ was applied to groups of archaeological sites containing distinctive artifact assemblages. Most archaeologists working in the New World between 1930 and 1940 paid no attention to human behavior, functional interpretation, or ecology. ‘There was no interest in culture per se, although widely used classificatory units (foci, aspects, phases) were implicitly understood to be cultural units, possibly reflecting ancient tribes or groups of related tribes’ (p. 684). During the mid-20th century, archaeological cultures were thought to be conservative, changing slowly if at all in response to diffusion or migration of human groups. The situation would start to change after Walter W. Taylor wrote A Study of Archaeology (1948), regarded by Watson (1995) as a scathing critique of Americanist archaeology that promoted a very different view of culture. Taylor’s arguments included a holistic view of culture in which cultural phenomena were distinguished from natural phenomena, both organic and inorganic. Taylor saw cultural phenomena as more than the 22 sum of their parts, they were in a realm of their own, a realm created and maintained solely by human activity. According to Watson (1995), culture was a mental phenomenon for Taylor. He thought that culture consisted of the contents of minds, not of material objects or observable behavior. Therefore, a cultural heritage was made up of mental constructs, not of material culture. Taylor regarded the mind as the locus of culture, while artifacts and architecture were the results of behavior, which itself derived from mental activity. This rendered culture as unobservable and non-material. Almost exactly 20 years after the publication of Taylor’s book, Binford’s article ‘Archaeology as Anthropology’ (1962) heralded the advent of processual archaeology. Like Taylor, Binford and the ‘New Archaeologists’ were expanding the goals of anthropological archaeology beyond the limits of typology and stratigraphy. Watson (1995) mentions an important development linked to this new perception of archaeology, namely Binford’s attempt to understand the morphological variation in Middle Paleolithic (Mousterian) assemblages in France. This interest led to Binford’s pioneering research into ethnography with archaeological orientation. Thanks to Binford’s influence, ethnoarchaeology became a standard research focus during the 1970s and 1980s, and is now an established, productive sub-discipline. Meanwhile, Watson notes that in the same time frame discussed above, anthropological archaeology received a strong reinforcement from British and European scholars, Ian Hodder being the most influential among these. Like Binford, Hodder was deeply committed to ethnoarchaeology as an essential archaeological technique, although the focus of ethnographic observations differed between one author and the other. 23 After this overview of the culture concept in anthropology and archaeology, in the next section I address some of the current debates and perspectives in the literature about material culture. Material Culture: Debates and Perspectives According to Hicks (2010), the term ‘material culture’ emerged in the twentieth century in archaeology and socio-cultural anthropology, and especially in the place of intersection between the two disciplines: anthropological archaeology. This field of study has developed to include studies in architecture, cultural landscapes, and historical archaeology, among others. During the 1990s a group of British archaeologists and anthropologists at University College London developed an original model for material culture studies, grounded in anthropology but with an interdisciplinary outlook. Hicks mentions that there are many examples of material culture work, ranging ‘from the physical examination and scientific analysis of objects in laboratories and museums, to the material engagements of archaeological and anthropological fieldwork’ (p. 26). In Hicks’ opinion (2010), the different varieties of material culture studies that originated in the 1980s built upon the concept of material culture as an object of enquiry for archaeologists and anthropologists, which in turn developed from museum-based studies of technology and ‘primitive art’ during the late nineteenth century. According to Hicks (2010), material culture studies have been used to solve many specific, long-standing archaeological and anthropological problems pertaining to the relationships between the social-cultural and the material realms of existence. The contemporary value of material culture studies must be considered in the context of the continued relevance of these problems, in the process of relating the human and non-human worlds. 24 The interaction between humans and things is the central concern of Hodder’s book Entangled: An Archaeology of the Relationships between Humans and Things (2012). Here we find a new way of seeing and understanding material culture and its multiple relationships with humans. In Hodder’s view, things (human-made artifacts) are not isolated, because they depend on humans. Many relationships between things are constructed by human purpose, for example the walls of a house need a roof to provide shelter for humans, just like a bath needs a plug, and a sail needs a mast. In this way material things fit into each other. In Hodder’s opinion, a thing is relevant and useful not just because of the object itself, but also because of the knowledge involved in recognizing an object for what it is and how it can be used by humans. Hodder makes the somewhat surprising claim that ‘things are not inert. The notion that things are stable and fixed, at least inanimate material things, is widely assumed’ (p. 3). Things are durable, and this quality—their ‘objectivity’— makes them relatively independent from the people who produce and use them. From this perspective, it could be said that things have the function of stabilizing human life. This lack of inertness is linked to the lack of isolation. Things fall apart because of chemical or biological processes or the forces of gravity. Things move because they have been given velocity by something else, like Earth’s force of gravity that pulls objects towards it. Artifacts are things made by humans. They are not isolated, but in constant need of human attention and care. Any archaeologist knows that things endure over different temporalities, although this is not how they appear to us at first glance. Indeed, many objects and materials can endure over time spans much greater than individual human experience. The temporalities 25 we observe in nature differ radically, like the geological forces that produce mountain ranges, the flows of ice that shape valley systems, the gradual disintegration of a stone wall or the decay of a Paleolithic handaxe (Figure 3). Hodder’s mention of handaxes is relevant to the present discussion, as I explain below. Figure 3. Handaxes are among the most well-known tools of the Paleolithic (Acheulean period, ca. 1.7 million - 1.5 million years BP) (courtesy of the British Museum). According to Derek Roe (1980), among the most well-known Paleolithic tools are the handaxes of the Acheulean period (ca. 1.7 million - 1.5 million years BP). Roe writes that this period includes a long phase dominated in many parts of the Old World by 26 handaxe industries. Handaxes are large bifacial cutting tools and ‘visually rather striking, although they were only one element of the lithic industries in which they feature’ (p. 72). Tim Ingold (2013) calls the Paleolithic handaxe ‘one of the strangest enigmas of prehistory’ (p. 33). A handaxe is quite beautiful, a product of sophisticated craftsmanship and no obvious practical use at all. These tools have a size and shape that fits perfectly into the palm of the user. They were usually crafted from a flint nodule with the shape of a biface (i.e. two convex faces) which meet around the edge. The handaxes usually bear the scars of the technique by which they were made, by removing flakes from an original core. This technique exploited the tendency of flint to break off in slivers when struck at an oblique angle near a protruding edge. The artifact’s edge is surprisingly sharp and has been trimmed by indirect pressure, using a punch of softer and less brittle material such as wood or antler. One may wonder if we can use an example from so far back in time to talk about more recent processes of interaction between people and things. The answer is yes, according to Matt Rossano (2009). In his study of the ‘archaeology of consciousness’, Rossano holds that the compelling art, artifacts, and grave goods from the Upper Paleolithic leave little doubt that people’s conscious experience was as rich and full back then as our own today. However, human consciousness did not arrive fully formed at the outset of the Upper Paleolithic period. Rossano explored the evolving consciousness of the Lower and Middle Paleolithic using two lines of evidence in the archaeological record: (1) skill development in tool manufacture requiring conscious deliberate practice, and (2) the control and use of fire and the consciousness-altering rituals associated with fire. Rossano argues that toolmaking is a good indicator of consciousness, since it represents a particular 27 skill or form of expertise, and then asks: ‘Could this skill have been acquired without conscious awareness?’ (p. 25). Rossano answers the above question by pointing out that conscious awareness must be involved when the sensory patterns that control motor responses are spatially or temporarily extended, or when mental or motor operations must be combined in novel ways. This requires a process known as deliberate practice, involving a level of conscious awareness that is very rare, if not nonexistent, among nonhuman animals. Because the Acheulean handaxe is not an easy tool to make, Rossano holds that many months of concerted effort would be required for someone to reach the skill level of a late Acheulean stone knapper. Because this skill required both physical strength and fine motor control, Rossano points out that only members of the genus Homo ever mastered the complex technique of hand-axe manufacture. In fact, evidence from contemporary experimental stone knappers suggests that this skill could only have been acquired with deliberate practice. Among the few traditional societies where stone knapping is still present, years of apprenticeship are required for skill development. In summary, Rossano holds that fully human consciousness did not materialize suddenly, or fully formed in the Upper Paleolithic. He mentions evidence from the Middle Paleolithic and earlier that provides a sketchy but valuable prehistory of human consciousness, which evolved ‘along a number of separate but interrelated pathways—each contributing distinct, if somewhat overlapping, aspects to the full spectrum of our subjective awareness’ (pp. 34-35). Returning to Hodder (2012), we learn that our biological essence, just like our technology, society and culture, our psychology and cognition, all flow from the past. 28 Humans depend on an apparent durability of things, and yet at other scales things are always changing and moving. Another important point made by Hodder about the fragments of matter that surround us is that some things are so omni-present that we stop seeing them, they become background ‘noise’. We also tend to forget things, because we take things for granted, often not focusing on them. We fail to see that things are connected to and dependent on each other. We do not recognize that they are not inert, and we forget they have temporalities different from ours, ‘until those temporalities intrude in on us, causing us to take action. There is a spatial and temporal forgetting of the unstable connections of things’ (p. 6). Hodder poses the rhetorical question ‘What is a thing?’ and answers it with these words: ‘A thing is an entity that has presence… it has a configuration that endures, however briefly… We are more likely to use the word object for things that are relatively stable in form… Anything can be an object of thought’ (p. 7). For Hodder, the term ‘object’ suggests an ‘objectifying approach’ in which matter is ‘analyzed, codified, and caught in disciplinary discourse’ (p. 8). Ultimately, the approach followed by Hodder is centered on the multiple relationships between human beings and things. Just like all living things depend on sunlight, air, water, soil and minerals, all sentient beings depend on things to bring their sentience into being. We humans are particularly dependent because our nervous systems need activation by cultural and environmental cues. People’s dependence on things is so extreme that humans would never have evolved without things. Hodder is interested in how the human dependence on things leads to an entanglement between people and objects ‘that has implications for the ways in which we have evolved and for the ways in which we live in society today’ (p. 10). 29 Hodder (2012) examines the relationships between humans and things from the perspective of things. This is a shift from the idea of things as items that people make, use, discard, represent with and so on. In the traditional approaches to things, the human and the social always come first. Archaeologists can know objects from the past in several different ways. Some use cross-cultural comparison of material data, while others opt for contextualized interpretations of local meanings, while others would argue that the phenomenological experiences of past actors can be reconstructed. From the point of view of the things themselves, however, those different perspectives may create different links with other things and humans. An archaeologist taking an ‘objectivist’ or ‘positivist’ stance will often focus on measurement and quantification, while a more hermeneutic perspective will show the thing in detailed relation to the objects with which it was found and into localized cultural codes and practices. In conclusion, Hodder argues that from the thing’s perspective, the different epistemologies result in being embedded in different collections of things. In the final analysis, the fragments of matter we call things (or objects) can only be known by humans through their character as material entities, but they have the power to gather people and other things into heterogeneous mixes. So we make things, but in many ways things make us because all the objects are connected to other things and they have ‘lives’ that follow their own paths. With the foregoing concepts in mind, Hodder states that people depend on things. He uses the word ‘thing’ primarily to refer to physical entities made or used by humans. It has become a common approach in archaeology, anthropology and the social sciences to recognize a ‘return to things’ over recent years, in contrast to the earlier focus on 30 representation, and to the time-honored scholarly tradition that separated subject from object, mind from matter. Most archaeologists would probably agree that humans and their social life depend on things, as technologies, as tools to procure food, to keep us warm, to forge social relations in exchange, to worship. Humans have evolved with certain physical and cognitive capacities because of a strong dependence on things. Hodder distinguishes two forms of dependence. The first holds that the human use of things is enabling. By using things humans can live, socialize, eat, and think. Hodder uses the term dependence in the sense of ‘reliance on’, but the word also has another meaning. The dependence that Hodder explores involves both reliance and contingency on the things relied upon. Dependence may lead to another situation that Hodder calls ‘dependency’, and explains it thus: ‘Humans become involved in various dependencies that limit their abilities to develop, as societies or as individuals… Humans have physical, economic, social, psychological dependencies on things… The dependencies are not inherent in the things themselves but in the interactions between humans and things’ (p. 18). Our dependence on things may involve trying to break free from them as much as it involves identifying with them. We need things, but we also need to be separate from things. At the most basic level, we have a need to identify with and simultaneously be distinct from things. Through history, the exchange of strategic resources has been an example of the simultaneous movement towards and away from things. When a thing is given away, the giver may gain a sense of self and may gain social esteem by the generosity. The person receiving may gain prestige also, both from the thing itself and from the alliances implicit in the gift. But it may be difficult to separate oneself from a thing given away. In some 31 ‘traditional’ societies, for example in Melanesia, giving a thing involves giving a part of oneself, so the reason that a gift must be repaid is that it contains the spirit or essence of the donor. The structuring and ordering of societies, and of individuals in those societies, results from an identification with things. Therefore, all societies rely on the ownership of things because dominance, power and social status all depend on things like food, land, ritual spaces, ancestors, money. All societies have relations of inequality that are based at least in part on things. According to Hodder, society is created and sustained through the movement of people in production, consumption, distribution, and disposal of things. Hodder goes as far as to say that if it wasn’t for things there would be no society. Hodder holds that ‘in material culture and materiality studies there is less focus on human beings, and more on how things come to have person-like qualities, how they act, have agency, personalities, spirits, powers. The emphasis remains on the constitution of self and identity, but the focus shifts to how things act in the world’ (p. 30). Hodder has studied how things appear to have agency. Obviously not the primary agency of conscious human intentionality, but a secondary agency given to things by humans. Spiritual and other forms of presence need things to exist and project themselves. The foregoing assumptions lead Hodder to say that ‘materiality includes the proposition that things create people as much as people create things’ (p. 32). The individual person and the whole of society depend on things. Things are always perceived as relational, contextually embedded within specific networks and social contexts. Materials and things are perceived as actively engaged in the social process, and as going through social biographies. Self and society cannot be separated from things or studied independently of 32 materials and the world of objects. We humans are so thoroughly dependent on things that it is difficult to imagine people even existing without them. In fact, Hodder holds that we evolved as we are, with agile fingers and complex brains, thanks to the niches that manufactured things provided for us. Another important point made by Hodder is that things depend on other things. Social theorists have made things more and more in their own image, giving them agency, power, and meaning. We have even used the word ‘materiality’ to refer not to material items themselves but to the ways in which people construe materials. We are used to discussions of how human beings depend on each other, but we are less used to think about dependence between things. According to Hodder, we need to understand how things depend on each other before we can explore how they depend on us. Things are connected to and flow into other things, always transforming and being transformed, so in our everyday existence there is a web of functional relationships in which things are encountered in their interdependent functions and in terms of their relevance to what we are doing. According to Hodder, even the earliest examples of cultural actions, such as making a fire, involved an assemblage of objects from fire-making tools to the pit in which the fire was made, to the wood or other fuel, and thus the containers or tools used to cut or collect fuel, and so on (Figure 4). Making a fire involved social units that participated in receiving warmth, protection, and cooked food from the hearth. The energy from the fire brought humans and things together ‘in the projects of keeping warm, gaining energy, getting light, cooking food, forming social alliances and so on. Keeping the fire going must itself have involved duties and obligations’ (p. 33 44). Figure 4. Many cultural actions, such as making a fire, involved an assemblage of objects and features: fire-making tools; the pit in which the fire was made; the wood or other fuel; the containers or tools used to cut or collect fuel, and so on (adapted from Hodder 2012: Figure 3.1). Things tend to get together, and form assemblages linked to specific production activities, such as making salt with traditional technologies (Williams 2021), making and using fishing and hunting gear (Williams 2014), or cooking at home, be it in a modern kitchen, or in a household from the distant past (Figure 5). The examples mentioned above show how, in Hodder’s view, things are connected to each other forming artifactual totalities, technical systems that only work in relation to some goal. As stated above, things are not isolated or inert, they are involved in complex flows of matter, energy, and information. Things ‘need each other, depend on the presence and timing of each other. They are chained together. Humans are involved in these chains from the start’ (p. 59). Beyond ‘thing-thing dependence’, Hodder’s narrative revolves around the idea that things depend on the people who make and use them, repair them, and discard them. This includes ‘domesticated animals and plants as things made by humans’ (p. 64). 34 However, things are not inactive, they have a primary agency, not because they have intentionality but because they ‘have lives and interactions of their own. As they grow, transform, or fall apart they have a direct impact on human lives’ (p. 68). Figure 5. This illustration from the 16th - century Codex Mendoza shows the cooking assemblage usually found in an Aztec household. The young girl is grinding maize dough on the metate or grindstone. The molcajete or mortar is in front of the girl; below is the comal or griddle sitting on top of three hearth stones, and a clay pot with lime water (for processing maize) is at the bottom, near two tortillas (adapted from Ross 1984: p. 82). The idea of things depending on other things as well as on humans is expressed in the concept of entanglement, defined by Hodder as ‘four sets of dependences and dependencies’ (p. 88): entanglement between humans (H) and things (T), as defined by Hodder, can be summarized like this: (HT) + (TT) + (TH) + (HH) (Figure 6). For Hodder, the defining aspect of entanglement with things is that human beings get caught in a double bind, since we depend on things that depend on us. This suggests a 35 dialectic relationship ‘between dependence, often productive and enabling, and dependency, often constraining and limiting. Humans and things, humans and humans, things and things depend on each other, they rely on each other, produce each other’ (p. 88). Figure 6. Entanglement between humans and things, as defined by Hodder, may involve four sets of relationships: (Human Thing) + (Thing Thing) + (Thing Human) + (Human Human). Drawing by Teddy Williams (artwork after Jean-Michel Basquiat; Buchhart 2019). Archaeologists often find examples of entanglement between humans (or human remains) and things that persist for thousands of years. Such is the case of many shafttombs from the West-Mexican Teuchitlán tradition (ca. 300 BC-AD 400) (Figure 7). The things deposited as offerings in the tomb are an example of symbolic elements and precious commodities that were meant to last forever in a sacred context. 36 Figure 7. Artistic reconstruction of a shaft-tomb from the West-Mexican Teuchitlán tradition (ca. 300 BC-AD 400). The things deposited as offerings in the tomb are an example of entanglement of symbolic elements and precious commodities that are meant to last forever—together with the tomb’s human occupants—in a sacred context (after Pickering 2016). 37 Tim Ingold (2013) has written about how humans make and use things in a process he calls ‘bringing things back to life’. He explains this by drawing two lines (Figure 8); each line is a path of movement, one of them stands for the flow of consciousness, saturated by light, sound and feeling, the other stands for the flow of materials as they circulate, mix and meld’. Figure 8. Diagram showing two lines representing ‘the flow of consciousness and materials’, with ‘image’, and ‘object’ linked by a double arrow (after Ingold 2013: Figure 2.3). On the side of consciousness in Ingold’s diagram we see an image, while the side of materials shows an object. The two blobs are connected by a double-ended arrow. This arrow is notional rather than real and depicts some kind of connection between image and object. Ingold’s diagram sums up the aim of his work: ‘to switch our perspective from the endless shuttling back and forth from image to object and 38 from object to image, that is such a pronounced feature of academic writing in the fields of anthropology, archaeology, art and architecture, to the material flows and currents of sensory awareness in which images and objects reciprocally take shape’ (p. 20). Ingold (2013) holds that apparently there are two sides to materiality. On one side is the raw physicality of the world’s ‘material character’, while the other side pertains to the socially and historically situated agency of human beings who project design and meaning upon it, in the transformation of raw materials into finished artifacts. Addressing a culture-nature dichotomy in the intrinsic essence of artifacts, Ingold argues that ‘culture furnishes the forms, nature the materials; in the superimposition of the one upon the other human beings create the artefacts with which, to an ever-increasing extent, they surround themselves’ (p. 38). Discussion and Conclusions In this final section I offer some comments and thoughts about the main ideas expressed in the previous pages. I examine numerous authors who have discussed, extended, or argued against the topics touched upon in the foregoing part of this chapter. Writing about the role of material-culture studies in academic discourse, Skibo and Schiffer (2008) affirm that the study of the world manufactured by humans, whether we call it artifacts, material culture, or technology, has grown exponentially across the academy. Archaeologists have for centuries led the way, and today they offer other scholars many programs and conceptual frameworks for engaging the things, ordinary and extraordinary, of everyday life. Be that as it may, however, archaeology still relies on 39 anthropological theory for its powers of interpretation. Kent Flannery (1980), for instance, holds that there is no such thing as ‘archaeological theory’; there’s only anthropological theory. Archaeologists have their own methodology, and ethnologists have theirs; but when it comes to theory, we all should sound like anthropologists. Schiffer (1992) wrote about human behavior and artifacts, stating that ‘throughout the existence of our species, human societies have been characterized by an utter dependence on artifacts. Artifacts first played a role in the food quest, with wooden spears for hunting and flakes of chipped stone for butchering game’ (p. 1). Tools made of stone, bone, shell, and other nonperishable materials are almost all that remains of past human societies. As a result of this situation, archaeologists are the only social and behavioral scientists who have developed an extensive array of concepts and principles for handling artifacts. Indeed, some archaeologists go so far as to define archaeology as ‘the study of human behavior and material culture (artifacts) in all times and all places’ (p. 1). In view of the central role played by artifacts in our discipline, it should come as no surprise that archaeologists today also investigate living societies to discern patterns of behavior and material culture that can be used in studying the past and present. Schiffer (1992) continues his discussion about human behavior as seen from an archaeological perspective with the obvious assertion that when studying ancient societies, archaeologists cannot observe human behavior directly, so it must be inferred from the material traces that survive in the ground. Other social sciences lack this epistemological limitation, yet seldom is actual behavior observed. Instead, behavior is analyzed through questionnaires, interviews, government statistics, and experiments that furnish highly indirect indicators of behavior. These sources of information, according to Schiffer, are a 40 disadvantage for theory-builders, since the actual data collected often bear only the most tenuous relationship to what people really do in everyday life. This situation leads Schiffer to say that, to build a science of behavioral change, one must stress that the behaviors to be explained really did occur. And so, one needs to approximate, as closely as possible, observations of actual behavior in natural settings. In this regard, archaeology has an advantage over most other social sciences: the material record studied by archaeologists encodes what people actually did as opposed to what they thought or said they did. Meanwhile, Hodder (1986) holds that material culture can influence the society and behavior which produced it and offers the following example: town and house architecture clearly channels and acts upon human behavior. But material culture cannot of itself do anything: if it does ‘act back’ on society it must do so within the frameworks of meaning established by social practice through time. The way in which material culture acts on people is social; ‘the action can only exist within a social framework of beliefs, concepts, and dispositions’ (p. 8). According to Christopher Witmore (2014), archaeology has changed its definition as the study of the human past through its material remains in favor of a more befitting selfdefinition as the discipline of things. For archaeologists, explaining how things gather and form assemblages is important because this endeavor helps to demonstrate ‘how taking things to be inanimate objects settled into a separate district from intentional human subjects is a modernist charade’ (pp. 206-207). We saw in previous pages that, according to Hodder (2012), ‘the things of the world have the function of stabilizing human life’ (p. 3). Such stabilizing effect could perhaps be summarized with the word ‘order’, and its antithesis ‘chaos’. In this respect, Jordan 41 Peterson (2018) writes from the perspective of clinical psychology that order is where the people around us act according to well-understood social norms and remain predictable and cooperative. It’s the world of social structure, known territory, and familiarity. Chaos, by contrast, is when something unexpected happens. Chaos is the new and unpredictable suddenly emerging amid the commonplace and familiar. Material objects are constantly reinforcing this dialectical interaction. In previous pages we touched upon the major contributions to the formation of the culture concept as known today. One of the earliest examples in the anthropological literature pertains to Ruth Benedict (1934), who had this to say about the individual and ‘the pattern of culture’: Large corporate behavior… is… the behavior of individuals. It is the world with which each person is severally presented, the world from which he must make his individual life. Accounts of any civilization… must necessarily throw into relief the group standards and describe individual behavior as it exemplifies the motivations of culture… [This is] misleading… only when this necessity is read off as implying that he is submerged in an overpowering ocean… In reality, society and the individual are not antagonists. His culture provides the raw material of which the individual makes his life (pp. 251-252). The dichotomy between the individual and the collective aspect of behavior in society was explored by Susan Gillespie (2000), who wrote that social science theories have tended to cluster around two opposed extremes, ‘holism’ and ‘individualism’. Holistic theories regard society as an entity that exists beyond the individuals who compose it. Society is seen ‘as a self-regulating system that constrains or determines individual behaviors and beliefs, 42 treating individuals as epiphenomena and downplaying their role in social change’ (p. 1). As a direct reaction to the emphasis in holism and the collective behavior of society, numerous theories akin to ‘methodological individualism’ were developed around the 1950s. This theoretical framework tried to explain all social phenomena based on individuals and their actions. Later, a new class of theories emerged to bridge the gap between individualism and holism, examining the relationships that link society and its members. These theories were characterized with terms like agency, action, practice, and praxis, they have been an important component of post-processual archaeology since the 1980s. We saw in previous pages how Marx developed a theory of culture that presupposed close correlations between culture, on the one hand, and the forms of production and social relations, on the other. These relations were immersed in a process of conflicting power relations and social inequality. According to Eric Wolf (1999), many anthropologists have adopted ‘a notion of “culture” as a self-generating and self-propelling mental apparatus of norms and rules for behavior, the discipline has tended to disregard the role of power in how culture is built up, maintained, modified, dismantled, or destroyed… anthropology has emphasized culture and discontinued power, while “culture” was long discounted among the other social sciences’ (p. 19). Wolf mentions that anthropologists have understood ‘cultures’ as complexes of distinctive properties, including different worldviews, but without paying attention to how these views formulated power and endorsed its effects (p. 21). In conclusion, I go back to the writings of Hicks and Beaudry (2010), who firmly belief in the importance of the study of material things in the humanities and social 43 sciences, with observations not only of the effects of things, but also of things as the effects of material practices. For Hicks and Beaudry material culture does not represent a straightforward object of enquiry, simply requiring a new terminology for interpretation or abstract theorization. They also say that the critique of any a priori distinction between subject and object must also encompass the academic researchers and their object of enquiry. In many disciplines, ‘knowledge is emergent and contingent upon material practice… This… must be the point of departure for any interdisciplinary discussion of material culture’ (p. 20). From the time of our earliest hominid ancestors, things (artifacts) have been indispensable for making a living. Archaeology relies on artifacts and assemblages and their contexts for reconstructing the past, but archaeologists must also look to the present to understand the complex relationships between humans and things. Only in this way can archaeology contribute to solving the challenges of the present and the future. Cultural Ecology After dealing with material culture, we now turn to cultural ecology, the study of the ways in which people adapt to their environment by means of behavior, as well as their knowledge (and use) of specific natural environments and processes. Cultural ecology studies many aspects of culture and the environment, including how humans can solve their subsistence problems, how groups of people understand their environment, and how they share with others their knowledge of the natural settings, resources, and landscapes (Sutton and Anderson 2004). 44 Figure 9. Diagram illustrating the ‘web of life’. This is one of the best ways to understand the interactions between humans and nature (after Moran 2017: Figure 4.1). For Emilio F. Moran (2017), one of the best ways to understand the interactions between humans and nature is the ‘web of life’ (Figure 9). The web of life teaches several fundamental lessons: (1) we are all interrelated; (2) all beings eat and are eaten; (3) all parts of the web depend on each other to be able to exist; and (4) we all have a role to play in the existence and sustainability of this intricate web of life. Moran (2017) holds that people, plants and animals interact with the physical world. As a result of these interactions food chains are produced, and the accumulated energy harnessed by plants is consumed by herbivores, who are eaten by carnivores, who in turn are recycled by scavengers. Food chains do not exist in isolation but are interconnected forming ‘food webs’. People occupy a position near the top of the food chain, and we are commonly thought of as the 'top carnivore' or apex predator. 45 Kirk French and Nancy Gonlin (2016) hold that cultural ecology can explain human adaptation and cultural evolution in both contemporary and ancient societies. Starting around the early 1960s, the combined study of culture and ecology created the background for a paradigm shift in North American archaeology (Willey and Sabloff 1980). This new perspective was pioneered by Julian Steward and was embraced by numerous researchers who were not satisfied with simply documenting chronology and culture areas. They were seeking an explanatory framework that combined ecological and cultural data. Steward devoted much of his energy to the study of the environmental adaptations of specific societies. Kroeber (1948) had suggested that cultures in analogous environments would have similar responses to environmental challenges, but Steward (1955) did not believe that all cultures followed the same universal development. Rather, he proposed that cultures evolved in different ways, depending on their ecological environment. Steward called his theory ‘multilinear evolution’. The approach he crafted for studying this kind of evolution involved an area of study he called cultural ecology—the analysis of cultural adaptations formulated by people to meet the challenges and opportunities created by their environments (French and Gonlin 2016). However, cultural ecology has not lacked critics. David Webster (2016), for instance, says that many authors have objected to the way in which some followers of the cultural-ecological paradigm assume that all parts of culture are equally adaptive, or that they are well adapted at any given time. Another critique is that the evolutionary approach of cultural ecology relied on outmoded conceptions of unilineal evolution. In fact, Steward himself took pains to emphasize multilinear models, as we will see later. 46 In the first half of the 20th century in Mexico and the United States, several scholars adopted a viewpoint that regarded civilization and state-level societies in Mesoamerica as phenomena that originated from the need to develop a centralized government, or political control, that regulated production systems, especially irrigation for agriculture. Pedro Armillas, for example, proposed that the development of religious symbolism, the construction of great pyramids, and the growth of ceremonial centers in Mesoamerica, could all be explained as the result of the introduction of intensive farming techniques, such as chinampas (lakeshore raised fields), terraces and irrigation canals (Armillas 1991 [1948]). All these features made it possible to produce a surplus that might have been applied to sustain expensive ritual practices and would have created a social base for the development of such practices. Armillas thought that it would be difficult to support any other explanation (p. 146). Around the same time Armillas was working in the Valley of Mexico, Gordon Willey was involved in the Viru Valley Project of Peru (Willey and Sabloff 1980). Willey recognized that settlement archaeology relies intimately on the study of landscape, ecology, and site recording, but it was the concept of culture that allowed him to make an archaeological interpretation of settlement patterns. William T. Sanders is probably the name that most often comes to mind when discussing cultural ecology, especially in Mesoamerica (Sanders 1981 [1962]; Sanders and Price 1968; Sanders et al. 1979, etcetera). According to French and Gonlin (2016), Sanders was influenced by Willey’s settlement pattern and cultural ecology studies. This is evident in the archaeological projects directed by Sanders in the Basin of Mexico, Highland Guatemala, and northern Honduras. 47 Following Armillas’ perspectives mentioned earlier, Ángel Palerm (1981 [1955]) regarded the Basin of Mexico as the best place to study ancient irrigation techniques, because the development of civilization in this arid valley was a true product of human effort and ingenuity. Palerm highlighted the implications of this process for the evolution of complex social formations, concluding that large-scale irrigation in the Valley of Mexico was not the result of many initiatives undertaken by small groups, but rather an enterprise on a grand scale, with proper planning in which a huge number of people worked under a centralized and authoritarian political system. Another contribution to this argument comes from Eric Wolf (1959), who cited the work of several scholars who believed that irrigation farming created the need for more efficient organization in the construction and maintenance of large-scale works like dams, dikes, and canals, and in the supervision of workers who built and repaired these often-monumental works. Irrigation farming also produced the food surpluses that sustained both the laborers and the new organizers of production. However, Wolf also stated that other scholars favored the opposite view, believing that the new patterns of organization came first and made the new productive enterprises possible.4 Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, British archaeology did not lag in experimenting new ways to understand human adaptation to multiple environments in prehistory (Bahn 1996). The work of Sir Grahame Clark (1977) is especially worthy of mention in this regard (Fagan 2001). Glyn Daniel (1990:167) gives credit to Clark’s approach in stressing the importance of ecofacts (non-artifactual material remains with cultural relevance) in the process of archaeological interpretation. Daniel recounts how 4 For more information about this topic, see Williams 2022a: Chapter IV. 48 Clark began his excavations at Star Carr in Yorkshire (northern England) in 1949. This was one ‘of the most interesting Mesolithic settlement sites; its publication in 1954 was a model of interdisciplinary archaeological scholarship’ (Daniel 1990:201). Figure 10. Grahame Clark’s diagram articulating habitat, economy, and biome, taken from his 1939 book Archaeology and Society (after Fagan 2001: Figure 5.3). Before undertaking his excavations at Star Carr, Clark had written one of his more important books: Archaeology and Society, published in 1939. According to Fagan (2001), the stimulus for writing this book came from Clark’s frustration at the conservatism of many of the archaeologists at the time, and the elusiveness of sites with organic remains. He thought it was imperative to study wetland sites and pay close attention to environmental change. The results of this approach are summarized in Clark’s diagram articulating habitat, economy, and biome (Figure 10). 49 Clark’s emphasis on subsistence and economy is evident in his ground-breaking book Prehistoric Europe: The Economic Basis (1952). Daniel (1990) stated that this book had a pioneering role in turning prehistory towards the study of the life and economy of early humans. Clark’s work with the archaeological cultures he called ‘Mesolithic hunterfishers’ is especially important to understand his contributions to the emerging field of cultural ecology in archaeology. In Clark’s (1977) opinion, ‘the transition from Late-glacial to early Neothermal times was marked by environmental changes which… were notably more accentuated near the borders of the old ice-sheets than further south’ (p. 111). When the ice cover began to retreat (over ten thousand years ago), new territories were opened for human settlement in the northern parts of the British Isles and Scandinavia. The area’s abundant bogs, lakes and rivers provided favorable conditions for the preservation of organic remains, so we know a good deal about the resources, subsistence strategies and technology of the people who occupied the land between ca. 8000 and 5600 BC. According to Clark (1977), red and roe deer were important for subsistence, as well as wild pigs. Aquatic birds were hunted, and fishers caught pike and smaller fresh-water fish. Our knowledge is limited about settlement patterns at the time, but we know that the site of Star Carr, dating from the middle of the eight millennium BC, was occupied mainly during the winter, when red deer (the main food source) were available in the area. When deer moved to upland pastures in the summer their predators (including humans) may have done the same. Bahn (1995:203) highlights Clark’s contributions to the development of modern archaeology and gives him credit for developing a more rounded view, linking archaeology to environmental studies and ethnology. From the 1930s Clark followed an essentially 50 economic approach to prehistory, insisting that the goal of archaeology was not to classify artifacts in museums but to understand how people lived in the past on a world scale. He saw prehistoric societies as operating in an ecological context but also as having different components such as economy, social organization, and religious beliefs. Clark pioneered the use of scientific techniques like pollen analysis, most notably at Star Carr in the early 1950s. Clark’s contributions to archaeological theory and practice are still relevant to us, especially his ideas about the interaction between humans and their natural (and social) environments. In recent years archaeologists, historians, and other scholars have built upon the foundations of Clark’s work, as we will see later in this chapter. The concept and theory of cultural ecology has been important for the development of socio-cultural anthropology and archaeology in Mexico in recent years. Brigitte Boehm (1938-2005) devoted most of her career to conducting ethnographic field work and ethnohistorical research following the perspectives of cultural ecology and environmental history. Boehm (2005) highlighted the role of Steward’s work—in particular his book Theory of Culture Change—in the development of her own research and of Mexican anthropology in general. Boehm contrasted Steward’s original contributions with the later applications of his ideas, in the context of environmental history, as well as Mexican archaeology, ethnohistory and social anthropology in general. In discussing the theoretical models that emerged in Mexico during the 20th century, Boehm mentions the experiences and paradigms of Mexican anthropology, some inherited from the colonial period and others (such as Marxist postulates) introduced by European thinkers around the 1040s and 1950s, who sought new ways to understand the systemic relationship between nature and society. 51 I will discuss these developments in the following pages, but first I will present a short historical review of the earliest precursors of the study of the natural world (and, later, of human interaction with nature). I start with the earliest known example of someone who turned his eyes to the natural world with a systematic curiosity and a scientific mind. This was Greek philosopher and scientist Aristotle (384-322 BC), who has been called ‘one of the greatest intellectual figures of Western history’ (Britannica 2022). Early Studies of Human-Nature Interaction Aristotle was the author ‘of a philosophical and scientific system that became the framework and vehicle for both Christian Scholasticism and medieval Islamic philosophy’. Despite the passage of time, Aristotelian concepts have ‘remained embedded in Western thinking’ to this day (Britannica 2022). Rebecca Stott (2012) recounts how Aristotle would ask the fishermen of Mytilene5 to collect fish for him and would pay well for unusual specimens. Aristotle was collecting the names of all the animals on Earth, he wanted to describe every single living thing, every fish and bird. He intended to discover the secrets of nature’s patterns. To understand Aristotle’s true genius, we must bear in mind that he did not inherit a tradition of natural philosophy; he had no mentors or teachers (Stott 2012). Aristotle was probably the first person to collect animal specimens with a ‘scientific’ purpose, and the first to describe and record different species. Back then few people would think those things worth doing. Aristotle was the first to believe that by looking long and hard enough at his samples of birds, bees, butterflies, and fish, nature would reveal itself (Stott 2012). 5 Modern Greek Mitilini, chief town of the island of Lesbos, in the North Aegean (Britannica 2022). 52 Aristotle was among the first thinkers to understand the principle of change at the heart of nature. He refused to follow supernatural or mythical explanations of natural phenomena; he understood that species are continuous and gradated. But he did not believe that species had evolved from earlier forms. In Aristotle’s world, all species were fixed within a world of unlimited duration, and they were eternally unchangeable (Stott 2012). Aristotle’s teachings were instrumental in the development of the Western scientific tradition that coalesced long after his death. Sir Isaac Newton (1643-1727) is a good example of this situation. In the early stages of Newton’s career as a scholar, he was more of an ‘alchemist’ than a ‘scientist’ in the modern sense of the word (Christianson 1984). Although Western alchemy had oriental roots, it was largely shaped by the Greek intellectual tradition. According to Christianson (1984), it was Aristotle’s beliefs about the constitution and unity of matter that gave hope to ancient and medieval alchemists alike, and those beliefs survived until the time of Isaac Newton. Aristotle believed that all things in nature were composed of a combination of four basic elements: earth, water, air, and fire. These elements were thought to follow certain inexorable patterns of movement (Christianson 1984). These ideas certainly influenced Newton, who was a student at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he would join the ranks of the professoriate. By 1666 Newton extended his writings on many of the subjects he had previously addressed, but he also explored several new topics, including what we would today call chemistry. We do not know the exact point in time at which Newton made the transition from collecting alchemical data to that of an active experimentalist; Christianson (1984) says it probably occurred between 1667 and 1669. 53 In 1687 Newton published his book Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, which in Stephen Hawking’s opinion (1996:7) is ‘probably the most important single work ever published in the physical sciences’. Newton proposed in this work a theory of how bodies move in space and time, and also developed the complicated mathematical calculations needed to analyze those motions. In addition, Newton postulated a law of universal gravitation according to which each object in the universe was attracted toward every other object by a force that was stronger according to the objects’ mass and the distance to each other. It was the same force that caused objects to fall to the ground (Hawking 1996). In Hawking’s opinion, the main difference between the ideas of Aristotle and those of Galileo and Newton is that Aristotle believed in a preferred state of rest, which any object would show unless driven by some external force or impulse. Aristotle thought that the Earth was at rest, but it follows from Newton’s laws that there is no unique standard of rest in the known universe. Some eight decades after Newton’s death in 1727 (at the age of 84), another great English scientist was born. Charles Darwin, undoubtedly one of the greatest authors in the natural sciences, was born in Shrewsbury, Shropshire, England, on February 12, 1809 (Clark 1984). As member of a wealthy family of the pre-Victorian middle class, Darwin had no need to struggle to make a living. He devoted his energies and talents to observing and analyzing the natural environment, first in his immediate surroundings, later in the most remote corners of the world. His insights would forever change our view of the world and our place in it. Darwin’s destiny (and curiosity) took him on a five-year voyage aboard the HMS Beagle, a voyage that awakened his innate scientific instincts. As he was later to write, ‘I 54 worked to the utmost during the voyage from the mere pleasure of investigation, [and] from my strong desire to add a few facts to the great mass of facts in natural science. But I was also ambitious to take a fair place among scientific men’ (cited in Clark 1984:4). Based in part on his observations as a member of the far-reaching Beagle expedition (sailing from England to South America, the Galapagos Islands, Australia, and South Africa), Darwin published his ideas about the evolution of species in 1859, in the book On the Origin of Species, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for life (Darwin 1910 [1859]). In Clark’s (1984) opinion, it is impossible to appreciate the way in which Darwin changed our view of the universe, and of our own place in it, without understanding the basically different outlook in the 1830s. The belief on which the prevailing worldview rested was that the biblical story of the Creation was history rather than symbolic mythology. All living things were seen as part a pyramid of immutable species, at the top of which humans stood as the pinnacles of creation. Darwin’s (1910) account of his discoveries while on the Beagle and of their implications for science is fascinating: I was much struck with certain facts in the distribution of the inhabitants of south America, and in the geological relations of the present to the past inhabitants of that continent. These facts seemed to me to throw some light on the origin of species— that mystery of mysteries… On my return home, it occurred to me, in 1837, that something might perhaps be made out on this question by patiently accumulating and reflecting on all sorts of facts which could possibly have any bearing on it… (p. ii). 55 Darwin’s unique contribution to science, and to our view of the world, is encapsulated in the following passage: ‘Considering the Origin of Species, it is quite conceivable that a naturalist, reflecting on the mutual affinities of organic beings, on their embryological relations, their geographical distribution, geological succession, and other such facts, might come to the conclusion that each species had not been independently created, but had descended, like varieties, from other species’ (p. 12). After much debate and anxious soul-searching, Darwin’s ideas on the evolution of species were finally accepted by the scientific establishment (Clark 1984). In Darwin’s lifetime the theory of evolution by natural selection was further bolstered by other scientists, notably Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913). Wallace has been described as a ‘humanist, naturalist, geographer, and social critic’ whose ‘formulation of the theory of evolution… predated Darwin’s published contributions’ on the subject (Britannica 2022b). After this brief historical review of some of the most important views on the relationship between humankind and the natural world, we now turn in the next section to the main topic of this essay: the role of cultural ecology in Mesoamerican archaeology. Cultural Ecology in Mesoamerican Archaeology Around the middle of the 20th century the stage was set for the arrival of new ideas about the origins of civilization, based on new perspectives on the cultural adaptations to the natural environment. Australian archaeologist V. Gordon Childe (1892–1957) is one of the most important authors to tackle this issue during this period. Grahame Clark (1982) thought that Childe was one of the great prehistorians of the world. More perhaps than any other author Childe showed how by using the data of archaeology and the 56 natural sciences it was possible to gain a new view of early human history. The general works in which Childe presented new and often vast perspectives are in many cases classics worthy of constant re-reading and will likely retain their value for the foreseeable future. Childe’s work is relevant to the present discussion because he was one of the first archaeologists to emphasize the relationship between culture (or economy) and the environment, as seen in the elements of the infrastructure (i.e., irrigation works, roads, large population centers, etcetera) that were instrumental for the development of what he called ‘the urban revolution in Mesopotamia’ (1982 [1942]). In Childe’s words, ‘metallurgy, the wheel, the ox-cart, the pack-ass, and the sailing ship provided the foundation for a new economic organization’ (p. 97). Without a structured economy, the items mentioned above would be mere ‘luxuries, the new crafts would not function, the new devices would be just conveniences’ (p. 97). Childe wrote about the ecological and cultural background for the rise of civilization in Mesopotamia. He described a relatively small tract of land, the TigrisEuphrates delta, where the landscape consisted of vast swamps, the waters teemed with fish, and the reed brakes housed many bird species and many animals, like wild pigs and others. In addition to all the resources available there, the abundant wild date palms offered a plentiful crop. Eventually the flood waters were controlled and canalized, the swamps drained, and the fertile land cultivated. After many generations, farmers in this region could produce a surplus above their household requirements (pp. 97-98). In due course the surplus produced by the new farming economy was concentrated in the hands of a relatively small social group (p. 107). In 57 Childe’s opinion, such concentration was necessary for the accumulation of food reserves, the basis for a new way of life: civilized society dwelling in small villages and towns, and eventually in large cities that became the seats of sprawling empires. Barbara McNairn (1980) examined Childe’s ideas about the origin of complex societies, and of culture in general, pointing out that Childe followed a Marxist viewpoint in his writings: ‘Marxism… must be considered as a major intellectual force in Childe’s thought’ (p. 150). It follows that his theories about the emergence of civilization and the state can be seen in this light. However, Childe (1982 [1942], 1981 [1956]) always followed his own individual interpretation of Marxism; he ‘never adhered to popular or orthodox conceptions but took from Marx what would best serve his archaeological purpose. For Childe, Marxism could serve archaeology, he did not try to subserve the discipline to a political, to an “outsider” philosophy’ (p. 166). Childe did not remain within the confines of any particular theoretical system like Marxism, diffusionism or functionalism. Rather he attempted to synthetize these systems in a comprehensive approach to prehistory which would apply to all levels of socio-cultural phenomena. Although Childe virtually ignored the New World in his writings about cultural evolution, his ideas had a great impact on Americanist studies, and were further developed by several authors, Steward (1955) among them (although Steward was critical of Childe’s effort to find ‘universal laws of culture change’). I already mentioned Steward’s book Theory of Culture Change. This work is important because it opened a whole new area of interest in anthropological archaeology in the New World, following the lead of numerous European scholars, primarily from Scandinavia and Britain (Willey and Sabloff 1980: 149). Writing about the 1940-1960 period, Willey and Sabloff (1980) thought that the idea of the 58 environment as a determinative force in the rise and growth of cultures influenced American archaeology in the direction of cultural evolution. Environmental determinism and cultural evolution had been present in American anthropological thinking from the turn of the 20th century, while in the mid-century the main emphasis was in the study of the complex cultures of the New World, with Steward as the principal figure in the environmental-evolutionary trend. According to Leslie White (1957), ‘Steward was reared in the atomistic, ideographic tradition of the Boas school which… rejected sweeping generalizations and philosophic systems… Steward has… done much to remove the stigma placed upon the concept—and even the word—evolution by… Boas’ (p. 542). What follows is a discussion of Steward’s Theory of Culture Change. Steward states that his purpose in writing this book was to develop a methodology for finding regularities of form, function, and process among cultures and societies in different cultural areas of the world. Steward thought that anthropology had followed a historical and comparative approach to culture, and its task had been ‘to describe the varieties of culture found throughout the world and to explain their development’ (p. 3). Steward was critical of unilinear evolution, and its claim that all societies would pass through similar developmental stages. He also berated the cultural relativists, who saw cultural development as essentially divergent, and their attention upon features that distinguished societies from one another. The position of multilinear evolution, in contrast, assumed that certain basic types of culture may develop in similar ways under similar conditions, but that few concrete aspects of culture would appear among all groups of people in a regular sequence. For Steward, cultural development was not only ‘a matter of 59 increasing complexity but also as one of the emergence of successive levels of sociocultural integration’ (p. 5). Steward held that the concept of ‘cultural type’ was based on two frames of reference: cultural features derived from synchronic, functional, and ecological factors, and other features represented by a particular diachronic or developmental level. This meant that cross-cultural regularities were conceived as recurrent constellations of basic features, what he called ‘the cultural core’. These features had similar functional interrelationships derived from local ecological adaptations and similar levels of socio-cultural integration (p. 6). The concept of culture type, however, faced a problem: the fact that forms, patterns, or structures differed greatly. But similar functions may be served by different forms while similar forms mat serve varied functions, so Steward introduced the concept of formfunction (p. 6). Steward analyzed several culture types, presented according to their level of sociocultural integration. The lowest level was that of the Shoshonean Indians of the Great Basin. This ethnic group exemplified a society of hunter-gatherers, which functioned on a family basis, with the individual or nuclear family at the center of nearly all cultural activities. Among some hunter-gatherer societies, such as patrilineal hunting bands, special cultural-ecological adaptations led to slightly higher levels of sociocultural integration in several parts of the world. Many ‘primitive people’ were divided into several non-localized clans which functioned as interdependent parts of villages or tribes. These represented a higher level of sociocultural integration than localized lineages, and they probably developed from such lineages in different parts of the world. 60 Steward noted that complex civilizations developed based on irrigation agriculture in several regions of the ancient world: Egypt, Mesopotamia, China, Mesoamerica, and the Central Andes. In his opinion, in each of these areas similar cultural and ecological adaptations entailed a similar historical progression, beginning with a simple village organization and finally reaching a higher level of integration in militaristic empires. To understand how these cultures were transformed from simple to complex socio-political configurations, Steward followed the approach of cultural evolution, which he defined as a quest for cultural regularities or laws. Unilinear evolution from its origins in the nineteenth century, dealt with particular cultures, placing them in stages of a universal sequence. Instead of unilinear models, Steward adopted multilinear evolution, which he defined as a methodology based on the idea that there are significant regularities in cultural change. He was concerned with the determination of cultural laws, using empirical rather than deductive methods. In short, multilinear evolution studies included historical reconstruction, but one should not expect that historical data can be classified in universal stages. Steward held that multilinear evolution had no a priori scheme or laws. It recognized that the cultural traditions of different areas could be wholly or partly distinctive. This posed the question of ‘whether any genuine or meaningful similarities between certain cultures exist and whether these lend themselves to formulation’ (p. 19). Cultural evolution could be regarded either as a special type of historical reconstruction, or as a particular methodology or approach. The historical reconstructions of the ‘unilinear evolutionists’ of the nineteenth century are characterized by the assumption that all cultures pass through several parallel 61 sequences. This assumption disagrees with the twentieth-century cultural relativists, who regarded cultural development as essentially divergent, except that diffusion tended to level differences, in Steward’s opinion (p. 27). For those interested in cultural laws, regularities, or formulations, the answer was, according to Steward, in the analysis and comparison of limited similarities and parallels, that is, in multilinear evolution. He thought that unilinear evolution had been discredited, although it did provide ‘limited insights concerning the particular cultures analyzed in detail by the nineteenth-century students of culture’ (p. 29). In his view, the best course of investigation would probably be the search for laws to formulate the interrelationships of phenomena which may be cross-cultural but are not necessarily universal. Steward developed the concept and method of cultural ecology ‘as an heuristic device for understanding the effect of environment upon culture’ (p. 30); he thought that the principal meaning of ecology was human adaptation to the natural environment, pointing out that since the time of Darwin, environment had been conceived as ‘the total web of life wherein all plant and animal species interact with one another and with physical features in a particular unit of territory’ (p. 30). Steward said that the concept of ecology had been extended to include human beings, since they are part of the web of life. However, humans enter the ecological scene not merely as another organism in terms of their physical characteristics, because humans ‘introduce the super-organic factor of culture, which also affects and is affected by the total web of life… The interaction of 62 physical, biological, and cultural features within a locale or unit of territory is usually the ultimate objective of study’ (p. 31). According to the holistic view followed by Steward, all aspects of culture were functionally interdependent upon one another. The degree and kind of interdependency, however, were not the same with all features. In his view, the concept of cultural core was the constellation of features which are most closely related to subsistence activities and economic strategies. The cultural core included many social, political, and religious patterns that are closely connected with these arrangements. In short, cultural ecology paid special attention to those features most closely involved in the utilization of the environment in culturally prescribed ways. Steward saw the concept of environmental adaptation as underlying all cultural ecology but thought that the researcher had to consider the complexity and level of the culture under discussion; this could be a community of huntergatherers who subsist independently by their own efforts, or it could be an outpost of a wealthy state exploiting mineral resources. In more developed societies, the nature of the culture core would be determined by a complex technology and by productive strategies with a long cultural history. In discussing the concept of culture area in aboriginal America, Steward remarked that this idea (as well as the culture-type concept) had played an important role in the thinking of American anthropologists, since they had generally classified data on aboriginal cultures following area categories. A culture area was defined as a geographical delimitation of peoples sharing certain features, 63 although there was no objective means for weighing the importance of local differences and for deciding which categories of elements were of greatest importance. These areas were presumed to have acquired their shared traits through diffusion, and their limits were defined ‘by the similarity of societies to one center rather than to another and different center. This implies that diffusion had been going on for a long time, which brings us to the problem of historical depth in relation to taxonomy’ (p. 82). In the context of Mesoamerican studies, cultural ecology has had a great influence on the development of theories seeking to explain the development of complex societies in the pre-Hispanic past. Steward explained this link between culture, nature, and history with the following words: ‘Any reconstruction of the history of a particular culture implies… that certain causes produced certain effects. Insights into causes are deeper when the interrelationships of historical phenomena are analyzed functionally’ (p. 181). He further held that most American anthropologists explained similarities between the early civilizations of the New World as a case of single origin and diffusion, at the same time stressing the differences between the civilizations of the Old and New Worlds. Steward paid a great deal of attention to the development of early agricultural civilizations in several key areas of the world: Mesoamerica, Northern Peru, Mesopotamia, Egypt, and China. He chose these areas because they were the cradles of civilization and because their exploitation by a pre-iron technology seemed to have ‘entailed similar solutions to similar problems and consequently to have caused similar developmental sequences. The environments are arid or 64 semiarid, which… did not impose great difficulties and thereby stimulated cultural development’ (p. 185). In Steward’s scheme of cultural evolution, there was an era of regional development and florescence (such as the Classic period in Mesoamerican archaeology, ca. AD 200-900). This era was characterized by the emergence and florescence of regionally distinctive cultures. Infrastructure works such as irrigation systems grew in size, thus releasing a larger portion of the population to develop arts and crafts and to devote more time to intellectual interests. State-level societies arose in this period, while interstate competition and state expansion seem to have led to militarism. Eventually, ‘a class-structured society… became fully established’ (p. 194). Focusing on Mesoamerica, Steward highlighted the evolving native technology, primarily improvements on agriculture, like large-scale irrigation systems (including raised fields or chinampas and terracing). In his opinion, irrigation fostered the development of distinctive social features: (1) theocratic states that controlled all settlements of a valley or other natural regions; (2) large mounds and temples; (3) a priestly hierarchy that worshipped gods of rain and water and elements of nature such as the jaguar, serpent, and quetzal bird; (4) a highly- stratified military component; and (5) long-distance trade. Intellectual and esthetic traits included phonetic writing, mathematics, astronomy, and ‘the finest art of all eras’ (p. 195). According to Steward, in arid and semiarid regions, agriculture was carried on by means of flood-plain and irrigation farming. With the development of irrigation works, population would increase until the limits of water were reached. 65 Social or political controls became necessary to manage irrigation and other communal projects. We know that early societies were highly religious, so individuals with supernatural powers like lineage heads, shamans, or special priests may have formed a theocratic ruling class, which first governed communities with multiple house clusters, and later multi-community states. The surplus created by farming released considerable labor from subsistence activities, and new technologies were developed. When these societies reached the limits of agricultural productivity (dependent on the local water supply), population pressures developed within each state and polities began to compete with one another for resources and products. Empire-building was based on conquest and dominant states exacted goods and services from other states by subordinating the rulers of those states. In Steward’s view, subsistence activities in the most densely populated areas depended on ‘an orderly interrelationship of environment, subsistence patterns, social groupings, occupational specialization, and overall political, religious, and perhaps military integrating factors’. These interrelated institutions had limited variability, ‘for they must be adapted to the requirements of subsistence patterns established in particular environments… they involved a cultural ecology’ (pp. 208-209). The book Theory of Culture Change had an important impact on Mesoamerican archaeology soon after its publication in 1955. William Sanders (1981 [1962], 1965) was one of the first archaeologists to incorporate the theory of cultural ecology in his research in the Teotihuacan Valley in the early 1960s. Sanders (1981 [1962]) defined cultural ecology 66 as ‘the study of the interaction of cultural processes with the physical environment’, and stated his theoretical position with the following ideas: (1) Each environment offered a different set of challenges to human occupation, therefore we may expect a different set of alternate cultural responses; (2) in their response to such challenges, humans tend to take the path of greatest efficiency in the exploitation of the environment; and, (3) the environment should be regarded as an active, integrated part of the cultural system, rather than a passive factor outside of the cultural framework. Sanders used the foregoing ideas as a basis for explaining the origin and nature of Mesoamerican urbanism. Sanders held that pre-Hispanic urbanism had been identified in the Central Plateau of Mexico, within ‘a small, compact, centrally located zone… [called] the Nuclear Area because of its cultural dominance in the history of Mesoamerica’ (p. 38). This area included the Basin of Mexico, located in the region Sanders called the ‘Central Mexican Symbiotic Region’, in which, according to Sanders (1965), the two pan-Mesoamerican empires, Aztec and Toltec, had their capitals, while earlier Teotihuacan may have been the center of a third, similar (earlier) state. The urban tradition described above depended on ecological conditions that were optimal for the development of an intensive system of agriculture. This included such ‘techniques of soil and water conservation as permanent irrigation, chinampas, flood water irrigation… terracing, and fertilization’ (p. 39). The application of these farming practices resulted in an extremely dense population. In Sanders’ opinion, only two settlements in the nuclear area achieved the status of true cities: Tenochtitlan and Teotihuacan. Sanders (1965) summarized his thoughts about cultural adaptation to the natural environment with the following words: ‘The culture of a given people can be considered essentially as a complex of adaptive techniques to the problems of survival in a 67 particular geographical region... cultural evolution... is a superorganic process that [grows] out of organic evolution... and population density is a measure of such success in a given area at any point in time’ (p. 192). Sanders and Price (1968) elaborated the arguments presented above by stating that irrigation canals taking water to the farming plots had to be cleaned periodically by a communal work force, which had to be planned and organized. This operation would be more efficient with the presence of a state-level political structure. In areas where farmers faced adverse conditions, such as scarce water or farmland, the ensuing conflicts over access to agricultural land would require a formal authority—i.e., a state—to avoid the escalation of conflicts over land or water. Sanders and Price (1968) pointed out that the term ‘ecology’ as used in cultural anthropology refers to three levels of relationship between people and their environment: (1) a human community’s relationship to its inorganic environment; (2) the relationship to the plants and animals (both wild and domestic) that humans depend on; and (3) the mutual relationships between human beings within an organized local community and between several human communities. For Sanders and Price, ‘the last level of analysis pertains solely to human ecology. Since human behavior is… cultural behavior, we refer to the use of ecology in cultural anthropology as cultural ecology’ (p. 70). According to Sanders and Price, from the perspective of cultural ecology, the culture of a given people is a subsystem in interaction with other subsystems. The key to understanding the processes of development of the cultural subsystem lies in this interactive relationship. The total network of relationships between subsystems is called ‘ecological system’ or ‘ecosystem’. It includes three subsystems: culture, biota, and physical environment (p. 71). 68 Two decades after Sanders’ writings cited above, the ‘Asiatic mode of production’ was still being offered as explanation for the origins of complex societies in Mesoamerica by Angel Palerm and others.6 Boehm (1985) went so far as to call this theoretical construct ‘the greatest contribution to our knowledge of pre-Hispanic Mexico’ (p. 238). Boehm explained the role of the ‘Asiatic mode of production’ in the emergence of Mesoamerican civilization thus: ‘From its origins, social stratification in the Valley of Mexico was due to differential access to certain strategic resources… which… required extended and constant human toil to exploit them. The appropriation and control of labor by the dominant class was exercised through state institutions like politics and religion’ (p. 243). The proponents of the aquatic mode of production did not limit their ideas to the Basin of Mexico. Sanders and Nichols (1988) proposed that in the Valley of Oaxaca the process of state formation had been part of a coercive situation whereby egalitarian farmers were exposed to ecological and social pressures because of scarcity of land and water. This situation ended up producing the gradual changes that transformed tribal societies into states with a peasant economy. These ideas were met with strong criticism from several authors. George Cowgill (1988), for instance, held that the materialist approach espoused by Sanders and his followers dealt with a limited view of reality, since ideational factors are too important to be ignored. Cowgill held that ideology, religion, beliefs, and values, as well as socially induced emotions and perceptions of reality conditioned by culture are not independent from geological, climatic, or biological factors, neither are they determined by purely material circumstances. 6 Angel Palerm (1980) was one of the proponents of the Asiatic mode of production in Mexican archaeology. This concept was based on the writings of Karl Wittfogel (1957), who considered irrigation as the main (if not the only) force behind social evolution culminating with the origin of the state in the ancient world. 69 Kent Flannery (1988) also expressed doubts about the merits of Sanders’ materialist approach. Flannery thought that Sanders was too obstinate in his theory of land and water as the main variables in the processes that led to civilization, and demographic pressure as the constant factor behind the origins of complex societies. According to Flannery, cultural ecology, so popular in American anthropology during the 1950s and 1960s, was no longer the main explanation twenty years later. Flannery thought that the key to understanding early urban civilizations was not the relationship between people and land, but between people and people, including political maneuvers, communal enterprises, war and defense, the justification of inequality by a state cult, and the exaction of tribute, among many other phenomena that ultimately led to the formation of states (p. 58). Flannery (1972) held that some human societies evolved to levels of greater sociopolitical complexity than others, but few attempts to explain this process have been successful. In Flannery’s opinion, complex societies are not ‘amenable to the simple kinds of structural, functional, or culturological analyses which anthropologists have traditionally carried out. The limited success of socalled "ecological approaches" to complex societies’ has encountered criticism from humanist scholars. Flannery sums up his arguments thus: ‘There is a widespread belief among [many] archaeologists and ethnologists that ecological approaches are... inadequate for the study of civilizations’ (p. 400). Flannery is not alone in his critical stance on the ‘Asiatic mode of production’. This notion has been called into question by recent research in Mexico and other parts of the world. Studies in the Lake Titicaca (Bolivia) area, for instance, have produced data that do not support Sanders’ ‘hydraulic hypothesis’, suggesting instead that complex irrigation systems were built and maintained by village-level societies, not urban-dwellers, and that 70 complex polities actually developed before complex agricultural systems (Stanish 1994). Among the Olmecs of the Formative period, for instance, it was excessive humidity, rather than the need for irrigation, that led to complex societies (Carneiro 2011). In the Valley of Oaxaca, meanwhile, states relied on quite basic irrigation techniques that did not require state supervision (Feinman 2006). A final example comes from the island of Bali in Indonesia, where Karl Wittfogel (1957), echoing Karl Marx, suggested that it presented an example of the ‘Asiatic mode of production’. Despite decades of research in Bali, scholars have been unable to prove that irrigation there is centrally organized. In fact, signs indicate that it remains in the hands of local farmers, not the ruling state. Agriculture seems to be managed by a series of ‘water temples’ that function as regulators of the agricultural ecosystem (Lansing 1987:328). The negative critiques of cultural ecology as explanator for cultural evolution cited above may or not be warranted; the issue is still open to debate. But we should bear in mind that cultural ecology goes beyond the study of complex societies in ancient times, as I will show below. A case in point is Roy A. Rappaport’s (1984) work among the Tsembaga people of New Guinea, where he explored the function of ritual in the context of human ecology. Another example mentioned below is ceramic ecology as a research tool in the study of human-environment interaction among potters in Mesoamerica. Rappaport's book Pigs for the Ancestors (1984) presents an ethnographic analysis of the role of ritual within human ecology. This study is based on the Tsembaga, a group of slash-and-burn horticulturists, as well as hunter-gatherers and pig farmers, who live in the Bismark Mountains of New Guinea. The main concern of this study is the way in which ritual affects the relationships between a human group and its environment. Rappaport's 71 goal was to observe the role of ritual in the adaptation of social groups to their environment. His interest focuses on the way in which ritual mediates critical relationships between the human group studied and external entities. Among the Tsembaga, the following is achieved by means of ritual: (1) relations between people, pigs and orchards are regulated; (2) the slaughter of pigs and the distribution and consumption of their meat are regulated, increasing the value of pork in the diet; (3) the consumption of wild animals is managed in a way that increases their value to the population as a whole; (4) an even distribution of people over the territory is fostered, as well as the redistribution of land among territorial groups; (5) the frequency of war is regulated, the severity of conflicts between groups is mitigated; and, (6) the exchange of goods and people between local groups is facilitated. According to Rappaport, Tsembaga agriculture is based on the cultivation of nonpermanent orchards, which are moved from place to place within the secondary forest, and these forestry practices ensure the maintenance of trees that produce useful materials. Pig farming is one of the most important economic activities, and the ritual practices of the Tsembaga are closely related to this activity. Most ritually important occasions are marked by the slaughter of pigs and the consumption of their meat. Aside from providing food for their owners, pigs make at least two other contributions to livelihoods: they feed on roots that humans can't effectively obtain, while clearing weeds and softening the soil, making the task of sowing much easier. Second, pigs eat garbage and human feces, contributing to the disposal of waste material. In the same way that the Tsembaga form part of a network of relationships with non-human components of their immediate environment, they also participate in 72 relationships with other local populations like them, but outside their territory. Friendly relations are based on the exchange of women (by marriage) and goods (in trade networks). On the other hand, hostile relationships involve ritually sanctioned long periods of mutual avoidance, punctuated by armed conflict. The kaiko is a ritual cycle that lasts the whole year in the Tsembaga calendar. The kaiko provides an efficient way to eliminate surplus animals (pigs), and a way to limit the calories invested in obtaining animal protein. Aside from eliminating pigs that have become ‘parasites’ of humans, mass-scale pig slaughter is one way to prevent the earth from being overrun by these animals. According to Rappaport, all these features of the kaiko are ecologically beneficial because they aid in the dispersion of the population, the movement of goods, food, and people, as well as fostering social and political relations at the local and extra-local levels. Preparations for the kaiko among the Tsembaga begin with the planting of stakes at the boundaries of their territory. The rituals associated with planting the stakes can be seen as cyclical ratifications of mutual aid agreements between members of various local populations. The exchange system in which the kaiko is immersed serves to integrate all or many of the groups of a region. But ritual cycles represent more than just a way of elaborating the relationships that arise from economic interdependence, or of formalizing economic interdependence in ceremonial exchanges. Rappaport considers the ritual cycle of the Tsembaga as a complex homeostatic mechanism, which works to maintain the values of certain variables within ranges that allow the perpetuation of a system over indefinite periods of time. 73 The Tsembaga practice extensive slash-and-burn agriculture, growing taro, yams, sweet potatoes, cassava, sugarcane, and various other plants, in small gardens cleared and fertilized by the slash-and-burn method. This mode of production allows the Tsembaga to satisfy their caloric needs with a relatively small investment of time, roughly 380 hours a year per farmer involved in the agricultural process. However, there are some environmental constraints that we should consider to understand the ecosystem of tropical slash-and-burn agriculture. The main problem has to do with forest regeneration, as the productivity of these orchards declines rapidly after two or three years of use, and more land must be cleared to avoid a drastic reduction in labor efficiency and productivity. Because of this, farmers using this mode of production need a considerable amount of forest per capita, even though in any year no more than 5% of their total territory is under production. Tropical forest ecosystems produce an enormous amount of plant biomass, but the animals that inhabit this ecological environment are small, furtive, and arboreal. As human population density increases, wild animals quickly become scarce and very difficult to obtain. The Tsembaga, like almost every other human group, value animal protein very highly, especially in the form of fatty meat. They have depleted the wild animals in their territory but have compensated for this by raising domestic pigs. The Tsembaga let their pig population increase for several years, killing them only on ceremonial occasions. When the effort required to care for the pigs becomes excessive, a feast is held to cull them, resulting in a huge drop in the pig population. This festival is probably related to the cycle of reforestation in the gardens, as well as the regulation of war and peace between the Tsembaga and their neighbors. 74 According to Rappaport, to deal with the relationship between ‘natural law’ and ‘cultural meanings’ and their interaction with the affairs of human groups, it is necessary to consider an ‘operational model’ and a ‘cognitive model’. The first consists of a description of the ecological system through empirical observations (like weighing, measuring, and counting). The cognitive model, on the other hand, describes a people's knowledge and beliefs about their environment. All ecosystems are characterized by the exchange of matter, energy, and information between their components. Most ecological studies look at the transfer of matter or energy but neglect the information exchanges that regulate such transfers. The book Pigs for the Ancestors has the merit of considering information exchanges, as well as both the emic and ethic aspects of human-environment relations, from a systemic and processual perspective. Ceramic ecology is another example of the cultural-ecological approach used in archaeology and sociocultural anthropology. Ceramic ecology has been established as an analytical approach to ceramic materials with contextual, multi- and interdisciplinary perspectives through which researchers seek to place physical and scientific data in an ecological and sociocultural framework by relating the technological properties of raw materials to the manufacture, distribution, and use of ceramic products within social contexts (Kolb 1988:viii). Ceramic ecology perceives cultural systems holistically, considering such factors as the ceramic complex (i.e., all materials and processes involved in the production and use of ceramics), the biological environment, the physical environment, human biology, and culture (Figure 11). Frederick R. Matson (1912-2007) was an early proponent of the ceramic ecology approach. Matson was a ceramic engineer, ethnographer, and archaeologist specialized in 75 archaeometry. His ground-breaking edited volume (1965) entitled Ceramics and Man pursued a ‘cross-fertilization’ that examined the social processes and factors involved in ceramic studies. Figure 11. Diagram of ceramic ecology, incorporating the ceramic complex, the biological environment, the physical environment, human biology, and culture (after Kolb 1989: Figure 3). Matson’s volume presents a critical and constructive revision of the kinds of contributions usually made by ceramic analysis to archaeological and ethnographic research. Matson’s proposal involved linking ceramic objects with the people who made and used them (Kolb 1988:vi-vii; Matson 1965). In 1951, Matson commented on ceramic studies in contemporary archaeological reports. He stated that while most of the studies provided good descriptions, he wondered how many readers would take the time to read or try to visualize ceramic objects once they had been described at the cost of so much time and diligent labor. In his opinion, it would be more productive to spend less time on ceramic descriptions in terms of 76 physical measurements and consider the variations in the wares linked to the problems faced by the potters in their manufacturing processes (Matson 1951:106). Matson further encouraged researchers to undertake careful examinations of the ethnographic literature and implement ethnographic research designs with an archaeological orientation (i.e., ethnoarchaeology) to shed light on the technical aspects of ceramics and pottery. The lack of common ground between ceramic studies and the analysis of socioeconomic patterns was a preoccupation that began to emerge in the late 1950s, and ecological paradigms offered a productive way to address these variables (Arnold 1985; Kolb 1989:281). Kolb (1989), meanwhile, presented a model that helps to gain a clear grasp of what he calls ‘holistic ceramic ecology’. This model of ceramic production centers on a ceramic complex that consists of a cultural system and an environmental system, each one with subsystems necessary for the operation of the complex as a whole. The cultural system includes the following subsystems: economic, social, religious, psychological and, of course, the ceramic production subsystem itself. The environmental system consists of physical, biological, and environmental-cultural subsystems. These systems and their respective subsystems are mutually linked by feedback mechanisms. According to Kolb (1989), the key component of the ceramic complex is the ceramic production subsystem, which contains the main variables that affect the production of a clay object: from raw material procurement to the use and discard of the vessel at the end of its functional life. Kolb (2018) defined ceramic ecology as a ‘methodological and mid-range theoretical approach’ (p. 1), looking for ‘a better understanding of the peoples who made and used pottery’. Ceramic ecology ‘seeks to redefine our comprehension about the 77 significance of these materials in human societies… [and] seeks to evaluate data derived from the application of physiochemical methods and other techniques borrowed from the physical sciences within ecological and sociocultural frames of reference’ (p. 1). Ceramic ecology’s holistic approach seeks ‘to relate environmental parameters, raw materials, technological choices and abilities, and sociocultural variables to procurement of resources (clay, temper, and fuels), the manufacture, decoration, distribution, and use of pottery vessels and other ceramic artifacts’ (p. 1). Hence, ceramic ecology spans the whole life cycle of ceramic products, from fabrication through ultimate use, diffusion, and discard. Prudence Rice (2015) has said that ‘the ceramic ecology approach has been criticized along the same lines that cultural ecology was critiqued decades ago, as narrow determinism or possibilism’ (p. 210). But the theory behind ceramic ecology does not hold that the physical environment controls or limits pottery-making. Instead, this theoretical approach establishes some of the circumstances within which potters’ decisions may be supported or constrained as they practice their technologies. In this scheme, the environment has an underlying role in vessel function with respect to the kinds of foods consumed and their preparation, among many other factors. I have conducted research in West Mexico for over 30 years, following the perspectives of ethnoarchaeology and ceramic ecology (Williams 2017). My initial fieldwork was carried out in 1990 in Teponahuasco, a pottery-making town in Jalisco (Figure 12). In this town, potters work mainly in the dry season (October to June), dedicating the rest of the year to farming (Williams 1992). In 1992 I moved to the Tarascan community of Huáncito, Michoacán, where I worked in several potting households (Williams 2018), studying the consumption of fuel in the kilns (Figure 13) and kitchens 78 (Figure 14), the procurement of clay (Figure 15), and other materials used in pottery making. I also considered in my research other Tarascan towns, like Zipiajo, Michoacán (Figure 16), where potters fire their wares in the open, without using kilns (Williams 2017). Figure 12. Potters in Teponahuasco, Jalisco, selling their wares in the town’s churchyard during the dry season (author’s photo, 1990). 79 Figure 13. In the Tarascan community of Huáncito, Michoacán, potting households use firewood as fuel in the kilns (author’s photo, 2014). Conclusions In this section I presented a summary overview of cultural ecology in Mesoamerica and other areas of the world. I included background information about the first authors to describe humankind’s relationship to the natural world. After discussing several examples of the theories around the cultural ecological paradigm, I described ceramic ecology as a recent approach that seeks to understand ceramics as a product of cultural and natural processes. 80 Figure 14. Cooking in Huáncito relies on firewood as fuel, following an age-old tradition (author’s photo, 2005). Robert M. Netting (1986) wrote that cultural anthropologists had borrowed the term ‘ecology’ from the biologists and ‘bent it to their own particular uses. They began with humanity, examining the environment as people were affected by it, used it, sought to understand it, and modified it’ (p.1). Human interaction with nature has certainly been one of anthropology’s most enduring concerns, and it may have formed one of the earliest intellectual exercises, as I discussed above. Anthropologists have always been aware that all humans are grounded to their local and regional environment. Cultural anthropology emphasized the particularity and uniqueness of its object of study: human culture and its role in adapting to a natural environment. 81 Figure 15. Potter in Huáncito excavating the clay used in pottery making (author’s photo, 1992). For many anthropologists, culture was a set of patterns inside people’s heads, that could be investigated quite apart from their specific natural environment. Netting (1986) thought that the natural and the social sciences had become specialized and isolated from each other. Anthropologists distinguished between physical and cultural studies, and seldom related their findings in any consistent way to environmental factors. With detailed, firsthand information on little-known peoples, anthropologists could discard expansive 82 generalizations. A prime example of this situation was the theory of environmental determinism, which regarded specific cultural traits as arising from environmental causes. Figure 16. In the Tarascan town of Zipiajo, Michoacán, potters fire their wares in the open, without using kilns (author’s photo, 1995). But most anthropologists did not accept simple, mechanistic explanations of culture. When they made comparisons between societies in generally similar habitats or adjacent regions, anthropologists emphasized the complexity of the relationship between the environment and the numerous technical and social devices for exploiting it. According to Eric Wolf (1999), Marvin Harris (1980) called his explanatory strategy, centered on the notion of cultural ecology, ‘the principle of infrastructural determinism’. In Wolf’s view, ‘this principle joins Marx with Malthus and accords priority in explanation to observable behaviors in both production and reproduction… [which] can 83 only be changed by altering the balance between culture and nature, and this can only be done by expenditure of energy’ (p. 58). Such environmental determinism has been called into question by many authors in recent years, as we saw above (see discussion in Williams and López 2009). For Emilio F. Moran (2017), cultural ecology includes the study of ‘human agency and the state of the Earth’. Moran points out that in the last decades Earth has continued to be treated with little thought for the future. He warns that more and more plant and animal species are going extinct, while wetlands and other natural habitats are disappearing. Moran also warns that ‘unprecedented levels of carbon dioxide threaten our climate system, coral reefs, and the Antarctic ice sheets. Our closest ape relatives are finding less and less of their habitat left standing to ensure their survival. The story goes on, giving cause for considerable alarm… Without effective action to ensure the sustainability of the world’s ecological systems, our days in the planet may be counted’ (p. 1). There are many examples of ecological destruction in the Anthropocene, not just in Mexico but worldwide, from the Aral Sea, which once was the world’s fourth-largest lake but now is completely dry (Hoskins 2014), to the disappearing lakes of the Middle East, China, and West Africa (Purvis and Trif 2016), extreme drought in North America (ChoiSchagrin 2022), and the recent massive fires in the Amazon Basin (Watts 2019). But I would like to end this section on a more optimistic note. History teaches us that humankind has faced serious challenges from prehistory to the present, and yet somehow, we have always managed to survive. History will carry on, and new challenges will no doubt arise in the future. The main lesson that we can take away from this story is that humankind has persevered no matter what. And one can only hope that we will continue to do so in the foreseeable future. Cultural ecology is certainly an invaluable tool for understanding our 84 world, and for coping with the challenges humankind faces now and will probably face in the future. Ethnoarchaeology and Ethnohistory In this section, I explore the relationship between archaeology and anthropology over time, and the role of ethnoarchaeology as a possible bridge between these two disciplines, as well as an indispensable tool for archaeological interpretation (see Williams 2005 and 2017 for previous versions). I also discuss the role of ethnohistory and other disciplines from the social sciences and humanities, which offer crucial perspectives for archaeological interpretation. Ethnoarchaeology I have conducted ethnoarchaeological and ethnohistorical research in Michoacán since 1990. My fieldwork has been primarily focused on the manufacture, use and discard of pottery among the Tarascans of Michoacán (Williams 2002, 2004a, 2004b, 2017, 2018a, 2019); salt production and exchange in Mesoamerica (Williams 1999, 2015, 2018b), and the aquatic lifeway in Michoacán and other areas (Williams 2009, 2014a, 2014b, 2014c, 2022). In these investigations I explore the natural settings, production sites, techniques, artifacts, cultural landscapes, traditional knowledge, and other features linked to human subsistence in traditional (i.e., non-urban) contexts. In the present book I expand my exploration of the indigenous pottery traditions of Mesoamerica, from the earliest examples of cultural development in this area to the present. By means of ethnographic analogy, this study seeks to shed light on ancient and modern 85 ceramic production, and on the theory, method, and practice of ethnoarchaeology, undoubtedly one of the most important aspects of archaeological research in Mexico today. More than half a century has passed since Philip Phillips (1955) coined his famous dictum ‘archaeology is anthropology or it is nothing’. According to Phillips, American archaeology had a close relationship with general anthropology due to its dependence in matters of theory. Phillips also thought that cultural anthropology observes the behavior of human groups in two dimensions: social and cultural, but that it is also interested in symbolic behavior (language, art, myths, and so on) and material culture (artifacts, technology, etcetera). Archaeology, on the other hand, is primarily concerned with the material consequences of human behavior, and refers to collective behavior only occasionally through inferences; for instance, the interpretation of funerary customs, house plans, settlement patterns, roads, irrigation systems, and similar phenomena. Seen in this light, it seems as though the raw materials of the two disciplines are not so different after all. In recent years the relationship between archaeology and socio-cultural anthropology has been less harmonious. There has been a lack of dialogue between the disciplines, and it appears that each one has decided to go its separate way. On the one hand, the postmodernists see the scientific, materialist, and evolutionary approaches of archaeology as enemies of anthropology (Kelly 2002:14), while on the other, the so-called ‘official Mexican archaeology’ has devoted itself largely to the reconstruction of archaeological sites as a strategy to promote tourism and nationalism, while losing sight almost entirely of archaeology’s anthropological perspectives. In Latin America, the cases of Mexico and Peru are usually mentioned as examples of how archaeological symbols and 86 pre-Hispanic elements have been used to promote an almost mystical sense surrounding the history of each nation-state. In this way, the members of official Mexican archaeology –in other words, the archaeological establishment– have been strongly supported by a state striving to legitimize its claim to political power and national pride (Benavides 2001; Gándara 1992). This situation became especially evident in the case of the Templo Mayor project in Mexico City (begun in 1978), where archaeologists were subordinated (or coopted) by the ideology of the all-powerful Mexican state (Vázquez 1996). It is obvious that this situation is not the best scenario for a scientific archaeology with anthropological goals. To better understand the complex relationship between archaeology and anthropology, and the role of ethnoarchaeology within the political and scientific context described above, it is convenient to review the theoretical developments that have marked this relationship over many decades. We saw earlier that Willey and Sabloff (1980) defined several periods of development in the archaeology in the New World, including the ‘Classificatory-Historical’ period, which they divided into two stages: early (1914-1940), and late (1940-1960). According to Willey and Sabloff, the main theme during the early stage of this period was a preoccupation with determining chronologies, while stratigraphic excavation emerged as the main way to achieve this. The first archaeological studies to employ the stratigraphic method in Mesoamerica were conducted by Manuel Gamio in the Basin of Mexico. Before Gamio’s work, artifact classifications had been conducted with the sole goal of describing materials found in archaeological excavations, but now those excavations began to be seen as a means to outline cultural manifestations in chronological and spatial contexts. In other words, the main goal of American archaeology during this time frame was still the elaboration of a 87 historical-cultural synthesis of several regions of the New World based on ceramic sequences and the distribution of ceramic types and other cultural materials (Willey and Sabloff 1980:83). Discussing Mesoamerican archaeology in the 1940s, Eric Wolf (1976) mentions that in those years the discipline seemed to be firmly in the grasp of piramidiotas and tepalcateros; that is, researchers involved almost exclusively in reconstructing pyramids to make archaeological sites more appealing to tourists and bolster Mexican nationalism, and in examining potsherds (tepalcates). But new influences were already being felt in Mesoamerican archaeology at that time. The most notable changes were the pioneering attempts in the 1930s to combine the methods and perspectives of archaeology with those of historical geography, history, and ethnology, in efforts to shed new light on the origins and growth of civilization. As discussed earlier, the work of Gordon Childe was of paramount importance in this process. Writing around the same time as Childe, but on the other side of the Atlantic, illiam Duncan Strong (1936) made an important contribution to the theoretical development of archaeology, as he explored its links not only with history, but also with anthropology. Strong sustained that archaeological research could change or confirm concepts derived from historical and ethnological data. Ethnological and archaeological approaches, when applied in a combined manner, could thus offer possibilities never explored before. He also thought that the interrelationship in time and space of biological and cultural development was the backbone of all anthropological research. Anthropology as a science was not concerned with the study of culture as an isolated phenomenon but, rather, in connection with the bearers of that culture, whether extant or extinct. However, anthropology was not a 88 merely cultural discipline for Strong; it was a broad historical science preoccupied with the relationship between cultural and biological factors over time and space (Strong 1936). In those days, both ethnology and archaeology were merely descriptive endeavors. In the case of ethnology, it was not until the results of research were used for generalizing or historical purposes that sociology or anthropology became involved; while in that of archaeology, it acquired historicity through its relationship with documentary history and as part of anthropology. Most aspects of prehistory could never be perceived completely by someone who was not widely familiarized with the main results and techniques of ethnology and physical anthropology (Strong 1936:364). One of the strongest criticisms raised against archaeologists working in Mesoamerica during the 1930s (and before) was penned by Clyde Kluckholn in 1940. Kluckholn believed that many researchers in this field were nothing but ‘reformed antiquarians’ with an obsession for details and an unjustified proliferation of trivialities, who produced studies in which the categories of ‘methodology’ and ‘theory’ were almost completely ignored (Kluckholn 1977:42-44). In this vein, Julian Steward (1942:339) argued that ethnology usually ignored the results of archaeological investigations, while archaeology itself was focused on excavation techniques and methods for describing and classifying the physical properties of artifacts. Archaeology was considered a ‘natural’ or ‘Earth’ science, more than a cultural one. Steward expressed his disagreement with the lack of interaction or dialogue between archaeology and anthropology, stating that people often forgot that the problems of cultural origins and change require more than just ceramic sequences or trait lists. Inasmuch as archaeology could deal with specific problems of given peoples by tracking cultural changes like migrations and other events into the prehistoric 89 and protohistoric periods, it could make valuable contributions to the general problem of understanding cultural change. Archaeological data could be handled directly for theoretical ends; there was no need for taxonomy (Steward 1942). The ‘direct-historical’ approach proposed by Steward (1942) was based on the assumption of continuity between the human groups mentioned by history and the more ancient ones studied by archaeology. This author suggested combining data derived from ethnography with the information contained in historical documents as a strategy for solving many problems of analysis. In fact, he wrote, if one took cultural history as one’s research problem, and the peoples of the early historical period as the starting point, the difference between strictly archaeological and strictly ethnographic interests would disappear (Steward 1942). This direct-historical approach would serve to remind both archaeologists and ethnologists that the two disciplines shared not just the general problem of how culture had developed, but also a concern for a great many specific problems. Turning now to the second stage of the Classificatory-Historical period (19401960), we find that ethnology and social anthropology were regarded as the true source of theoretical developments and knowledge, while archaeology was largely relegated to the periphery (Willey and Sabloff 1980). New trends in this sub-period involved the study of context and function, while an interest in cultural processes was already visible. From the perspective of these new ‘contextual-functional’ approaches, pre-Hispanic artifacts were to be understood as material remains of social and cultural behavior. The study of settlement patterns also acquired new importance as the study of the ways in which humans were distributed across the landscape. This kind of research offered important clues for our understanding of economic adaptations and sociopolitical organization. Finally, the 90 relationship between culture and environment became significant with the development of the sub-field of cultural ecology (Willey and Sabloff 1980). At the end of the 1940s, the discussion of whether archaeology was closer to history than to anthropology was still going on. In 1948, Walter W. Taylor stated that although New World archaeology had been designated as a branch of anthropology, and archaeology’s goals were linked to those of cultural anthropology, archaeologists seemed to be consciously moving toward history, toward the recreation of the aboriginal past of the Americas (Taylor 1948). Taylor thought that archaeology was linked to history in many ways, because both disciplines were dealing with the past and with sequential time, and their interests revolved around the human being as a cultural entity. For Taylor, then, archaeology was ‘one of the so-called historical disciplines’ (1948:42). He went on to define the relationship between archaeology and cultural anthropology by stating that when archaeologists gather their information, construct their cultural contexts, and make comparative studies of the nature and functioning of culture in its formal, functional or developmental aspects, they are actually ‘doing’ cultural anthropology, and can be considered anthropologists that deal with archaeological materials (Taylor 1948:43). Another viewpoint held by Taylor, however, suggested that archaeology was not really a part of either history or anthropology, but an autonomous discipline; a method and cluster of specialized techniques used to gather cultural information (Taylor 1948:43-44). He used the phrase ‘conjunctive approach’ to refer to archaeology’s interdisciplinary character; a genuinely innovative proposal at that time. And Taylor really was ahead of his time, especially considering that his book A Study of Archaeology was not published until 10 years after he wrote it. 91 A decade after Taylor’s work cited above was published, a book by Willey and Phillips made its appearance. This volume was entitled Method and Theory in American Archaeology (1958) and can be considered as illustrative of the cultural-historical approach. For Willey and Phillips, the phrase ‘cultural-historical integration’ covers practically everything that archaeologists do to organize their primary data: typology, taxonomy, formulating ‘archaeological units’, and examining the relationships between those units and the functional and environmental contexts. No less important for archaeologists is the task of determining the internal dimensions and external relationships of archaeological units in space and time. For Willey and Phillips, cultural-historical integration was comparable to ethnography, but added the temporal dimension. At this level of analysis, one was not just asking what had happened in a given ancient culture, but also how –even why– it had come about. In other words, it no longer sufficed to investigate cultural and historical processes without regarding the causes of cultural change, which were always human groups and, therefore, fell within the social sphere (Willey and Phillips 1958). Moving forward in time, we find the arrival of the book An Introduction to American Archaeology in 1966, a monumental two-volume work written by Willey in which he brings pre-Hispanic cultural history up to date for the New World as a whole. This is a very important and substantial contribution, in which Willey faithfully follows the cultural-historical tradition. This is evident in the Introduction, where he writes that the intention of his book is to do history –an introduction to pre-Hispanic American cultural history– and its plan is to trace the histories of the main cultural traditions of the Americas. Each cultural tradition analyzed is characterized by a defined pattern of subsistence practices and technological and ecological adaptation. In every case, important cultural 92 traditions were likely to have shared a well-defined ideology or worldview, but Willey was not trying to classify cultures according to functional principles or principles of development; rather, he was describing cultures and tracing their respective histories. As defined by Willey in this book, the cultural-historical spheres or reference frameworks for most archaeological discourse in the Americas are the desert culture, the Pleistocene biggame hunters, the Archaic cultural tradition, the Southwestern United States, and Mesoamerican culture. This book is organized around the concepts of important cultural traditions and the general chronological discourse of history (Willey 1966). These ideas and approaches, however, were soon to be attacked by scholars seeking a more ambitious role for archaeology within the social sciences; something that would go beyond simple classifications of objects and speculative descriptions of phenomena to address the dynamic aspects of culture —in other words, social processes. These critical opinions began to appear in the 1960s, but even earlier works, such as Taylor’s 1948 study (see above), had already envisioned these new tendencies. In the late 1960s, Kent Flannery published a review of Willey’s An Introduction to American Archaeology. Although Flannery acknowledges this book’s importance and its great contribution to our knowledge of the pre-Hispanic world, he nonetheless expresses some doubts and critical viewpoints regarding the general approach followed by Willey. According to Flannery (1967 [1974]) when ethnography was almost exclusively involved in gathering such artifacts as Indian lances, baskets and headdresses, archaeology consisted in little more than the simple gathering of potsherds, stones, bones, and similar objects; but once ethnography broadened its attention to include aspects such as the structure of communities, archaeology responded by conducting studies of pre-Hispanic settlement patterns. When the concept of cultural 93 ecology came on the scene, archaeologists began to show a great deal of interest in evolutionary sequences and the classification of ‘stages’ in the development of humankind. One of the key debates in New World archaeology at the time of Flannery’s writing (late 1960s) was whether this discipline should become involved in the study of cultural history, or of cultural process. The followers of the first approach had attempted to construct grand synoptic tables showing variation over many centuries, while also trying to discover ‘the Indian behind the potsherd’ by reconstructing the ‘shared ideas’ that served as a model for the person who had crafted the artifact (Flannery 1967 [1974]). Several decades have gone by since Flannery’s writings, but his ideas on this topic are still quite relevant. Flannery thought that although the ‘processual school’ of archaeology acknowledged the usefulness of the cultural-historical approach for classification, the latter was incapable of explaining situations of cultural change. Followers of the processual approach believe that human behavior is an ‘articulation’ between a great number of systems, each one of which includes cultural and other kinds of phenomena. The strategy followed by the processual school consisted in isolating each system and then studying it as an independent variable, with the goal of reconstructing the whole pattern of articulation, together with all the related systems. Explanation was the real goal, more than simple descriptions of the variations in human behavior in prehistory (Flannery 1967 [1974]). Flannery’s concerns outlined above were anticipated in an earlier, and influential, article by Lewis Binford, entitled “Archaeology as Anthropology” (1962). There, Binford pointed out that archaeologists had not made any significant contributions to explanation in the field of anthropology, because they were not conceiving archaeological facts in a 94 systemic framework but, rather, had adopted either a particularistic perspective in which ‘explanation’ was offered in terms of specific events, such as migrations between regions, or were talking vaguely of ‘influence’ or ‘stimuli’ between different cultures. Binford (1962), in contrast, held that explanations of the differences and similarities between archaeological complexes should be offered in terms of our current knowledge of the structural and functional characteristics of cultural systems. These new ideas and approaches gave rise to what came to be known as the ‘New Archaeology’ (Willey and Sabloff 1980), the product of an anthropological perspective developed (primarily in the 1960s and 1970s) by archaeologists who had studied with social anthropologists and with other archaeologists. Their main concerns were to identify cultural processes and propose ‘laws of cultural dynamics’. Another idea related to this approach was that archaeology, in revealing and explaining cultural processes, was relevant not only to the study of anthropology, but also to the rest of the modern world. The perspectives of processual archaeology can be summarized as follows: (1) a predominantly evolutionist viewpoint; (2) general systems theory with a systemic viewpoint regarding culture and society; and (3) the application of deductive reasoning. The evolutionist posture adopted by most adepts of the ‘New Archaeology’ assumed that the techno-economic sphere of culture was the main determining element of change, while the social and ideological spheres modified in a secondary way (Willey and Sabloff 1980). For Binford, one of the main proponents of the processual school of American archaeology, the challenges for archaeologists consisted in how to link archaeological remains with our ideas about the past, how to use the empirical world of archaeological phenomena to generate ideas about the past, and at the same time use those empirical 95 experiences to evaluate the ideas so produced (Binford 1981). Archaeological theory is involved with the sphere of the events and conditions of the past, as well as with explaining why certain events and systems existed in antiquity. Archaeology’s area of interest is in cultural systems, their variations, and the way in which they could pass from one state to another. However, it is important to bear in mind that our entire knowledge of the dynamic aspect of the past can only be inferred by linking past events with recent ones based on several general principles. In short, we need to know the past by means of inference obtained through our knowledge of how the modern world functions, and we must be able to justify the assumption that these principles are relevant. All our interpretations depend on a general knowledge, as precise and unambiguous as possible, of the relationship between the dynamic (i.e., ethnographic) and static (i.e., archaeological) aspects of culture (Binford 1981). In the foregoing ideas expressed by Binford we see the need to conduct anthropological research outside the archaeological record to obtain elements for analysis and comparison, primarily through ethnographic analogy. A later work by this author (1983) reinforces this dynamic relationship between the present (ethnographic data) and the past (the archaeological record). Binford wrote that the archaeological record is a contemporary phenomenon, and the observations we make about it are not ‘historical statements’. We certainly need sites that preserve objects from the past, but we also need the theoretical tools to give meaning to those objects when we find them. Their accurate identification and the recognition of their contexts in antiquity depend on a type of research that cannot be conducted with the archaeological record itself. If we aspire to understand the relationship between statics and dynamics, we must be able to see both aspects 96 simultaneously, and the only place where we can see the dynamic aspect of culture is in the modern world, in the ‘right here’ and the ‘right now’ (Binford 1983:23). Figure 17. The interpretation of the archaeological record can be aided by ethnographic analogy, which lets us formulate a middle-range theory or ‘bridging argument’ to go from observation to interpretation of social phenomena (after Brodie et al. 2011). What Binford was looking for was a precise medium of identification, accompanied by effective instruments for measuring the specific properties of ancient cultural systems. In other words, he sought ‘Rosetta stones’ that would enable us to translate the observations of the static contexts into statements about the dynamic qualities of human behavior. To accomplish this, he proposed the utilization of a new paradigm, one that would allow him to produce a ‘middle-range theory’ (Binford 1981:25), a concept that comes to us from sociology (Brodie et al. 2011) (Figure 17). Michael Shott (1998) says that Robert Merton, first to use middle range theory in sociological research, understood the importance of general theory, but considered that it was equally important to develop the capacity to test this with empirical data. However, to test a general theory on the basis of empirical 97 observations, scholars required an immediate corpus of theory that was itself directly verifiable. This is what Merton (1948 [2007]) called middle-range theory, defining it as theories located between lesser, but necessary, working hypotheses that become abundant during research, and the systematic efforts to develop a unified theory to explain all the uniformities observed in social behavior, as well as social organization and social change (Shott 1998). Middle-range theory is thus a bridge between observation and paradigm, ontology and philosophy, a theory of substantive phenomena, of human behavior in its cultural and social context. However, it is only a link in a long chain of inferences that run from general theory to observation, and it must always be susceptible to verification (Shott 1998:303). In its original context within sociology, middle-range theory was proposed as a basis for developing theories about the causes of human social behavior and, potentially, a way to offset a disturbing trend in social science research; namely, the division between, on the one hand, theories with a highlevel of abstraction but characterized by instability and, on the other, low-level empirical studies devoid of theory. According to the original proposal, studies using middle-range theory would be distinguished by having an empirical basis complemented by a hierarchy of propositions that existed at a mid-level of abstraction and, therefore, provided a crucial link between the gathering of information in the field and the use of high-level theories (Raab and Goodyear 1984:265). Studies carried out among present-day populations –whether in the field of experimental archaeology or ethnoarchaeology– would be important sources of middlerange theory; in fact, this belief inspired the ethnoarchaeological studies undertaken by Binford and others. It is fair to say that Binford defined the role of middle-range theory in archaeology on the basis of his own ethnoarchaeological studies (Shott 1998:305). 98 Figure 18. Michael Schiffer’s flow model for viewing the life-cycle of durable elements in the archaeological record (adapted from Schiffer 1995: Figure 2.1). We owe to Schiffer (1995) the creation of a “flow model” that describes the trajectory followed by most durable elements from manufacture to discard or recycling. This theoretical model has been invaluable for archaeologists trying to understand the relationship between people and material culture (Figure 18). The activities in which a durable element participates during its life, or systemic context, may be divided into five processes: procurement, manufacture, use, maintenance, and discard. Not all elements follow a unilineal path through a system, as some items are rerouted at strategic points to phases through which they have already passed. This is known as reuse, which has two varieties: recycling (for example, precious metals and gems are usually recycled) and lateral cycling (after the termination of an element’s use-life in one set of activities it is reincorporated into another) (Schiffer 1995: 27). 99 Up to this point, I have presented a brief diachronic panorama of some aspects of the development of the discipline of archaeology; in particular, its relationship to anthropology and other social sciences, such as history. In the following pages, I discuss the role of ethnoarchaeology as a link, or conceptual bridge, between anthropology and archaeology, in a context of a growing lack of communication between the two disciplines and a lack of common interests among their practitioners. In recent years, several distinguished archaeologists have sought to achieve the separation of archaeology from anthropology departments. Indeed, Binford, one of the main proponents of ‘anthropological archaeology’, stated that socio-cultural anthropology had become irrelevant for archaeology (Society for American Archaeology 2001:9). The desire to set archaeology apart from anthropology in the academic environment has been motivated to a great degree by certain ‘irreconcilable differences’ between archaeologists and the followers of a postmodern philosophy, who see archaeology’s scientific, materialist and evolutionary approaches as mortal enemies of anthropology (Kelly 2002:13-14). The recent proposals by some archaeologists to abandon anthropology and open their own departments specialized in archaeological research is worrying, because such a move would affect all anthropological disciplines, including archaeology itself. According to Phil Octetes (2015), the reasons given for a ‘divorce’ between archaeology and general anthropology are ‘deeply-rooted in the way the sub-fields have emerged, the way they are taught and perhaps more importantly where each sees its future… [many anthropology] departments have… fractured into small groups of individuals who socialized based on their sub-field… Cultural anthropologists and archaeologists rarely seem to mix outside the committee room’ (2015:1). It could be said that ‘the breakdown in the marriage of 100 anthropology’s largest sub-fields… partly… relates to how each has evolved over time, with these changes increasingly leading cultural anthropology and archaeology in different directions as distinct disciplines… Cultural anthropology… has become increasingly sociological’. It is true that ‘very few cultural anthropologists are now involved in ethnography (seen by many as too closely related to the colonial past to be useful for modern academic study), even though ethnography is at the root of this sub-field’s development’ (Octetes 2015:1-4). Although both archaeologists and sociocultural anthropologists have become more specialized in some of our research techniques, it is an error to think that we no longer have anything to say to each other (Lees 2002:11). In fact, archaeology has long been one of the more integrating areas of anthropology, since archaeologists must use linguistics to understand the movements of ancient peoples, biological anthropology to examine human remains, and cultural anthropology to make interpretations of the archaeological record. Despite the reasons cited above for integrating archaeology with anthropology, some archaeologists have suggested that their field never fit particularly well within general anthropology since its founding as an academic discipline (Gillespie 2004). Though archaeologists have been able to sustain a relationship with anthropology for many years, this has been thanks to a conscious choice on their part. Susan Gillespie says that in order to continue within anthropology –a discipline in a constant state of evolution– archaeologists must be more diligent in their attempts to promote the interdisciplinary aspects of their research, though this may entail reforming academic structures and institutions to bring them closer to archaeology from the perspective of research, practice and education (Gillespie 2004:13-16). 101 Gillespie et al. (2003) have made an important contribution to the debates surrounding the relationship between archaeology and anthropology. According to them, the phrase ‘archaeology is anthropology’ has most often held the meaning of ‘archaeology as a sub-field or specialty, one part of the multi-sub-field discipline of anthropology… However, the relationship has also historically been treated as archaeology trying to be something it cannot or should not be, another discipline with different objectives and methods or… in a wholly dependent and inferior relationship with anthropology’. In the opinion of Gillespie and her co-authors, ‘the discipline of anthropology has… moved away from its founding principles, particularly the importance of recognizing the entirety of human diversity, cross-cultural generalizations, long-term processes, and the role of materiality. But a truly holistic anthropology is inclusive and integrates scholarship across the sub-disciplines’ (Gillespie et al. 2003:155-165). Archaeology has an obvious association with history, since both sciences deal with humankind’s past. The goal of studying the past based on cultural and social manifestations is to construct a narrative of what happened in that past and explain the events and processes that shaped it. The differences between archaeology and history are mainly of method, more than any philosophical perspective. Archaeology is also linked with anthropology, which is a generalizing and comparative discipline that has the ulterior motive of explaining the ways in which social and cultural phenomena are generated, as well as their functioning and changes, to understand the broader processes of history (Willey and Sabloff 1980:1). The ideas expressed above, however, have met with skepticism in some quarters, especially among people who see archaeology as an independent science with its own 102 paradigms, goals and methodology. One of these skeptics is Karl Butzer (1982). Although he mentions that archaeology and cultural anthropology have a symbiotic relationship because archaeology depends on the stimuli and models based on social, biological and evolutionary anthropology, he also states that archaeology equally depends on geology, biology and geography. While archaeology is a complex social science in its own right, it depends to a great extent on empirical methods and models adopted from the natural sciences, and can be regarded as a social science only by virtue of its goals (Butzer 1982:11). Butzer further says that context represents a traditional preoccupation of archaeology, and that context is determined by the application of concepts adapted from cultural anthropology, human geography and biological ecology (Butzer 1982:12). This interest in archaeological context is precisely what differentiates this field as a scientific discipline. Butzer has called for a contextual archaeology, more than an anthropological archaeology; one founded upon an approach that transcends the traditional focus on isolated artifacts and sites to arrive at a realistic appreciation of the environmental matrix and its potential spatial, economic and social interactions with subsistence and settlement systems. He thinks that this contextual approach depends largely on archaeobotany, archaeozoology, geoarchaeology and spatial archaeology. Contextual archaeology complements traditional concerns about socioeconomic analysis and the interpretation of artifacts and their distributional patterns by providing new spatial, hierarchical and ecological dimensions (Butzer 1982:12). Following Butzer’s lead, David Clarke (1978:11) contradicted the dictum expressed by Phillips at the outset of this section, by stating that ‘Archaeology is archaeology is 103 archaeology’. For Clarke, archaeology is a discipline in its own right; one that deals with archaeological data that it clusters in entities that reveal certain processes, and that are studied according to archaeological goals, concepts and procedures. Although one may acknowledge that these entities and processes once had a historical and social nature, given the characteristics of the archaeological record there is no easy way to equate the precepts of our discipline with events from the past (Clarke 1978:11). Archaeology’s claim to its own identity, independent from other social disciplines like anthropology, should not be seen as a subversive movement, much less a capricious desire that has emerged for no apparent reason. In view of the high degree of specialization and intellectual development of cultural anthropology over the last 25 years or so, several anthropology departments around the world have been fragmented, generating ferocious academic wars. This has caused archaeologists to reaffirm their own professional position and their own academic discipline. But this movement toward autonomy should not be understood as an attack against anthropology or any other discipline, only as a reaction to archaeologists’ need to establish their own curriculum, professional standards, research criteria and priorities, as well as the standards of their professional practice and education (Wiseman 2002:8-9). The foregoing discussion has highlighted several aspects of the relationship between sociocultural anthropology and archaeology; a complex and mutually enriching relationship, to be sure, but one by no means free of conflicts. It seems that despite the good intentions of many scholars, the divisions between the two disciplines became insurmountable. Sociocultural anthropology appears to have forgotten about the past and turned its back on thousands of years of human evolution to dedicate itself to the study of 104 recent social phenomena, often examined outside their historical context. This is certainly occurring in Mexico, as well as in other countries. In the opinion of Guillermo de la Peña, structural-functionalist anthropology in Mexico was responsible for a series of community and regional studies in which the interaction of anthropological disciplines took place solely with sociology; an interdisciplinary approach that almost resulted in the disappearance of Mexico’s ethnological traditions. What we witnessed in that period was a preponderance of the sociological paradigm, and a sort of resistance toward communication with other disciplines, even within the anthropological sciences (de La Peña 1995:88). De la Peña asks, ‘What happened to the founding principle of Mexican anthropology?’, and upon analyzing the interdisciplinary nature of anthropological sciences that interacted with each other, and the capacity for dialogue with other scientific disciplines, he concludes with this statement: “Unfortunately, the experience has been a divergent one, rather than one of interaction and mutual understanding” (de la Peña 1995:90). Given this state of affairs, one might think that all is lost, that there is nothing we can do to save the relationship between sociocultural anthropology and archaeology, and so avoid what appears to be an inevitable break-up and divorce. However, the search for new analytical methods has not ceased, and archaeologists, conscious of the need for a scientific and humanist framework for their research, have recently turned once again toward anthropology, this time with renewed eyes. Ethnoarchaeology has emerged as part of this new way of seeing things, a novel kind of ethnographic research performed by archaeologists who seek to solve problems of archaeological interpretation by linking material remains with the behavior that gave rise to them (Thompson 1991:231). In view of ethnography’s recent discrediting, and the growing lack of interest among anthropologists 105 in the issues that interest archaeologists most deeply –primarily those related to material culture– scholars interested in past cultures are being forced to go out to the field to gather their own ethnographic information. This situation has been acknowledged by Manuel Gándara, who thinks that ‘ethnoarchaeology is without doubt one of the most interesting developments in our discipline in recent years… Ethnoarchaeology rescued and perfected ethnographic working procedures that had been virtually abandoned by ethnologists… Today… it is fashionable to focus on symbolic aspects… forgetting… aspects such as the size of the group under study… its technological repertoire, etcetera’ (Gándara 1990:45). Gándara holds that the archaeologist’s life-long preoccupation with material culture has stimulated new ways of ethnographic recording by paying attention to such features as processes of resource procurement, preparation and manufacture, as well as the discard or storage of products and tools. Ethnoarchaeology should not be seen as a science distinct from archaeology, but as one of the heuristic techniques that help us generate and evaluate inferences about the past. Ethnographic analogy is a procedure that aids in the production of knowledge. It is not a substitute for empirical work, but a valuable research tool. Ethnographic analogy is essential for archaeological theory. Since there is a significant relationship between human activity and the material contexts of that activity, analogy is indispensable for archaeological inference at its most profound level (Gándara 1990:46, 76). Although much archaeological research can be carried out without referring to ethnographic data, there are many situations in which ethnographic knowledge is indispensable to a full understanding of archaeological information. Those archaeologists who seek ethnographic information related to the material sphere of culture have long been 106 disappointed by a lack of attention from ethnographers in this regard (though more ethnographic studies about material culture have been made than are usually recognized) (Thompson 1991:231-232). The interest in using ethnographic data for analyzing archaeological contexts is really not so new. Over half a century ago, David Clarke mentioned that the ethnographic approach was a tool with a rich potential for deciphering information enclosed in archaeological data. Clarke felt it was unfortunate that anthropologists rarely analyzed the material culture of the human groups they studied in a way that could be really useful to archaeologists. This critical view is unfortunately still valid, and in Clarke’s opinion, the fact that modern anthropology has distanced itself from ethnology and ethnography has led archaeologists to take on many of the tasks and problems that once pertained to ethnologists; thus giving rise to ethnoarchaeology (Clarke 1978:12, 370). David and Kramer (2001) see ethnoarchaeology as a combination of archaeological and ethnographic approaches that may involve the systematic study of a single aspect of material culture, the in-depth study of significant parts of a living culture, or even an entire culture. The central concepts for ethnographic research by archaeologists were defined by Susan Kent (1987, cited by David and Kramer 2001:9), who recognized four different analytical categories: (1) Anthropological archaeology, the approach that uses the different sub-areas of anthropology to generate a description as complete as possible of an archaeological group and whose goals are often of a cultural-historical nature; (2) Archaeological ethnography, in which ethnographic material is potentially useful as an aid for analogies to make archaeological interpretations; (3) Ethnoarchaeology, which consists in formulating and testing methods, hypotheses, models and theories with an archaeological 107 orientation, based on ethnographic data; and, (4) Ethnographic analogy, the observation of human groups from the historical period used to identify patterns in the archaeological record based on archaeological, ethnographic or other kinds of data. I have pointed out that material culture is the main subject of study of both archaeology and ethnoarchaeology, because artifacts are the medium through which we can come to know (through inference) past cultures (Schiffer 1988:469). Archaeology’s irreducible core is the identification and explanation of the relationships between human behavior and material culture. Thanks to their formal, spatial, quantitative and relational properties, artifacts in archaeological context may function as evidence of past cultural phenomena. Therefore, by understanding material culture we can gain important perspectives regarding the way in which societies (both ancient and modern) functioned and changed (Schiffer 1988:469). However, in the anthropological literature there is a dearth of information of a material, descriptive nature that would be useful for making comparisons of this kind, and studies of material culture from a theoretical perspective are equally few and far between. The important works that have come to us from scholars like Boas, Kroeber, Wissler, Haddon and many others who collected thousands of ethnographic objects and wrote countless pages about them, usually lack the information we need to reconstruct the raw materials required for the ethnological study of technical processes, and to build an operational sequence or chaine opératoire; that is, a series of operations that transform some raw material from its natural condition to a fabricated state (Lemonnier 1986; see also Leroi-Gourhan 1945). 108 In view of this oft-cited lack of information in the anthropological literature on the matters of greatest interest to archaeology, the challenge for archaeologists is to bridge this gap by doing our own ethnographic research to address precisely the issues we deem most relevant; i.e. the production, use and discard of artifacts, the use and functions of domestic space, subsistence activities and their material traces, and human impacts on the landscape, among others. This information can then be used to decipher the archaeological record, something only archaeologists can do. One of the main goals of ethnoarchaeology is to provide ethnographic models for archaeological interpretation. This is of the utmost importance, for archaeology is the only social science where one cannot observe directly the object of study: the cultural behavior in the distant past. If we are to arrive at a plausible interpretation of the archaeological record, we should bear in mind the various terms found in the archaeological literature, such as ‘bridging arguments’ (Wylie 2002); ‘middle-range theory’ (Binford 1983); ‘mediating theories’ (Bate 1998); and ‘formation theory’ (Shott 1998). These terms refer to an approach whereby ethnographic fieldwork helps the archaeologist to relate a cluster of activities and cultural behaviors with a particular assemblage and other diagnostic features of material culture and cultural landscapes that can aid in the interpretation of the archaeological record through analogy. The critical role of the ethnoarchaeological approach is further underscored by Grahame Clark’s (1939) dictum: ‘Material culture has meaning only in relation to society’. One last word about the role of ethnoarchaeology as a tool to understand the human past has to do with the nature of scientific research and the philosophical implications of theory-building in scientific endeavors, including archaeology. Imre Lakatos (2016 [1970]) 109 wrote some 50 years ago that science consists of long periods of ‘normal science’, paradigm-based research, where the researcher tries to force nature to fit the paradigm. When nature refuses to comply, this is not regarded as a refutation, but rather as an anomaly. It casts doubt, not on the ruling paradigm, but on the ingenuity of the scientists. It is only in extraordinary cases that refutations occur. Bruce Trigger (2006) has stated the following thoughts regarding the role of hypotheses in archaeology: ‘It is a fundamental tenet of science that nothing is significant by itself but only in relation to hypotheses; hence only theories can explain phenomena… Scientists must search for order, most often in the form of systemic properties, that facilitates the construction of explanations’ (p. 27). The goal pursued by many scientists ‘is to discover mechanisms that account for how things work and have come to be as they find them… A scientific viewpoint treats the idea of absolute, unchanging truth as a dangerous and absurd illusion… scientists… acknowledge that they are unable to transcend the limitations of their data and what they are capable of perceiving at any particular point in time’ (p. 27). Therefore, investigators should ‘expect that in due course every scientific theory will be altered and probably become outmoded’ (p. 27). An important point about inference in archaeology was made by Binford (1983), who held that each new archaeological study ‘results in the generation of more facts… but they are all statements about the archaeological record alone. In the absence of robust methods for inference, all that can be accomplished is the gathering of more and more facts, whose significance in terms of past behavior is unknown’ (p. 76). Only on rare occasions have archaeologists achieved established methods for justifying the inferences advanced during their research. One such method would be middle-range research, often based on 110 ethnographic observations. Binford thought that ‘studies of the archaeological record provide the stimulus for research in the modern world which, in turn… can render our archaeological observations into accurate statements about the past’ (p. 76). In conclusion, Binford wrote that ‘in order to make inferences archaeology needs to develop middle-range theory… divorced from the theories about past behavior which we seek to evaluate. Archaeology, in general, has failed to realize that in order to refute or support theories it requires a strong body of inferential techniques, warranted independently of its theories about past dynamics’ (p. 213). A serious problem facing social anthropology (as opposed to archaeology) is its increasing separation from history and from evolutionary and historical perspectives, as it moves towards an ahistorical stance. This is one of the anti-scientific postures of postmodernism in anthropology and has become one of its most absurd manifestations in recent years (see Hodder 1989 for an example of this situation). General anthropology has traditionally been divided into four branches devoted to the study of humankind: social or cultural anthropology, anthropological linguistics, physical anthropology, and archaeology. Anthropology’s approach, in particular, is characterized by a global, comparative and multidimensional perspective (Harris 1980:5). However, as we have pointed out, in recent years there has been a lack of dialogue among these disciplines, and each one seems to be pursuing its own interests. Because of this, many people now seem to think that the division of anthropology into four areas is a ‘myth’ (Borofsky 2002). But archaeology is also in part responsible for this lack of communication among the several branches of anthropology. It is true that some sociocultural anthropologists have 111 been less than eager to get closer to archaeology, but this may be because archaeologists are becoming ultra-specialized, and their writings are hard to understand for people outside our field. Indeed, Wolf’s critical comments (1976) about archaeologists being absorbed in the analysis of material remains (pyramids and potsherds) with only the flimsiest of theoretical frameworks to link them to the universe of anthropology or history have taken on new meaning. Ignacio Bernal also chastised his colleagues, calling some of them ‘archaeological animists’ who simply lost sight of the people who created past cultures and described them in terms of ceramic or lithic types: ‘the three-legged pot and the projectile point occupy center stage while their creators are ignored’ (Bernal 1981:10). Phil Weigand also voiced strong criticism of the pottery-centered works of his colleagues, mainly in Western Mexico, who, he said, ignored other aspects of archaeology such as architecture, and lacked a balanced approach to the study of the past (Weigand 1995). In addition to this focus on pottery to the exclusion of other important aspects of ancient cultures, another problem that Mexican archaeologists face involves ‘official Mexican archaeology’ and its penchant for reconstructing archaeological sites to foster tourism and nationalism at the expense of a truly scientific archaeology. This approach has contributed to archaeology being relegated to a secondary position by many scholars in other fields. There is a long tradition in Mexican archaeology of restoring ancient monuments and creating museums with the aim of reaffirming the country’s national identity. This has been criticized by Gándara (1992), among many others, who see a need in Mexico for a kind of archaeology that has clearly-defined scientific goals, as well as an integration of theory with practice. However, in spite of all the criticisms we have been discussing here, it 112 is important to mention that Mexico is not lacking in good examples of high-level archaeological research. The culture-history approach was virtually the only one used by Latin American archaeologists until the 1970s and is still the dominant paradigm of archaeological research in this region. However, it would be unfair to characterize the current theoretical landscape in this part of the world in these terms, for many new developments and theoretical innovations have informed Latin American archaeology in recent years, making for a more flexible and dynamic discipline, with research heading in many different directions. Ethnoarchaeology is among the most important recent developments (for an example see Politis and Jaimes 2005), though it must be said that despite the great cultural richness and diversity in many parts of our continent, relatively few ethnoarchaeological studies have taken place here. Opportunities for this kind of research are indeed great in this huge region (Politis 2003). Likewise, examples of Mexican archaeologists who are doing ethnoarchaeology are few, but most are of excellent quality: García and Aguirre (1994), Fournier (2007), Sugiura et al. (1998), and of course, the late Phil C. Weigand (2001), who set the course for anthropological archaeology primarily in West Mexico. Weigand showed us that ethnoarchaeology can be a true interdisciplinary bridge; that is to say, ‘archaeology as anthropology’. Ethnohistory In addition to ethnoarchaeology, ethnohistory offers an important perspective for the present study. Here, ethnohistory is understood to include oral history, since we conducted interviews with many local informants during fieldwork (Williams 2014a, 2014b, 2014c, 2022a). Both historians and anthropologists have long used oral history to obtain 113 information that is crucial for understanding many aspects of daily life, particularly those which have subsisted over long periods of time (García Sánchez 2005). Doing oral history, according to Donald A. Ritchie (2003), is ‘using interviews to uncover the past and preserve it for the future’ (p. 1). For Valery Raleigh-Yow (2005), when using in-depth interviews, we ‘are interested in how the respondents interpret experience and how we, the questioners, interject ourselves into this process’ (p. 1). Ethnographic writing ‘is not cultural reportage, but cultural construction, and always a construction of self as well as of the other’ (p. 1). Ethnohistory is a branch of anthropology that studies non-European cultures (particularly indigenous ones) from any period (especially the pre-Hispanic period and the 16th century) using written sources, though it also permits the use of such auxiliary sources of information as oral tradition, archaeological data, and linguistic evidence, with the aim of presenting a complete history that takes into account the cultural and social systems of the peoples under study (Wright 1994:380). Phil Weigand’s (1994) view of the role of ethnohistory in anthropological research, particularly in Western Mexico, is pertinent to the present study. According to Weigand, the word ‘ethnohistory’ is usually defined in a simple way as the writing of a comprehensive history dealing with an ethnos, such as the Huichol or Purépecha. This history usually strives to include a combination of historical sources, oral histories, historical mythologies, and anthropological data. This history is frequently written from within the ethnic group we are dealing with, from their perspective, or at least including their point of view. One of the main goals of this approach consists in giving a ‘people 114 without history’ (following Eric Wolf 1982) a history that is more in keeping with their own perception of time and reality. Using the techniques of ethnology –in the earliest sense of the word– as well as archaeology and history (both documentary and oral), a cultural and social history of an area is defined and outlined for the first time, and later explored in detail. In this way, the approach becomes regional and often acquires a multi-ethnic character by analyzing interethnic and multicultural dynamics through time in the context of extant political and economic structures. Ethnohistorical research requires a multidisciplinary approach in which several disciplines come together to offer a more holistic view of a society, a landscape, or human nature (Weigand 1994). The indispensable role of ethnohistory in Mesoamerican studies has been further underscored by Kenneth Hirth (2016), who used an ethnohistorical approach to examine the structure of the Aztec economic world based primarily on early colonial written sources. A small amount of archaeological information was also used, but only as supplemental data. Hirth’s goal was to focus on 16th-century sources to construct a plausible model of Aztec economic structure. In essence, he set out to exploit the historic sources ‘with the goal of developing as complete and comprehensive model of pre-Hispanic economic behavior as realistically as possible… The focus on historic sources has made it possible to produce… an archaeologically informed model of Nahua [i.e. Aztec] economy that can be directly evaluated in future research using the direct historical approach’ (p. xiv). Another example of ethnohistorical research in Mesoamerica comes from Frances Berdan (2014), who presents a vivid portrait of the landscapes and lifeways that existed before the Spanish Conquest. Berdan holds that thanks to written sources and 115 archaeological fieldwork we know that there were many natural environments in the Aztec realm of central Mexico, including swamps, lakes, forests, and high mountains that ‘provided varied natural resources and offered different potentials for human use. Natural resources were highly localized. The lakes and swampy marshlands yielded abundant plants and animals… including reeds, tuberous plants, algae, insects and insect eggs, frogs, salamanders, turtles, several species of fish and their eggs’ (p. 52). No less important were ‘small crustaceans, and vast numbers of waterfowl and their eggs’ that people used to take from the lakes and marshes (p. 52). If we add to this long list of aquatic resources the numerous farming techniques of the Aztecs, such as agricultural terraces, aqueducts (pp. 78-79) and lakeside planting fields called chinampas (pp. 79-81) –amply described by ethnohistorical sources and studied by archaeology– we will understand the considerable importance of these and other aquatic adaptations for the survival of the Aztecs and most other peoples of the Mesoamerican ecumene, as I explain elsewhere (Williams 2022). For Boehm (2000:121), one of the defining features of anthropology is its interdisciplinary perspective, which includes numerous methods and techniques that complement anthropology’s holistic goals: to know the totality of human experience. To accomplish this goal, anthropology is divided into several subdisciplines, ethnohistory salient among them. Ethnohistory and history are in turn aided by social anthropology, ethnology, statistics, geography, economy, and archaeology, among others. This interdisciplinary feedback is expressed in an ontological sphere, whereby each discipline’s instrumental and theoretical outlook is contrasted to other disciplines. The challenge for scholars is to make these disciplines converge and thrive in a fruitful mutual relationship. 116 Boehm holds that through history anthropology has followed the same trend as most sciences toward specialization and isolation, following institutional tendencies throughout the world. In Mexico we still have academic departments and research centers that combine several branches of anthropology, some in geographical contexts that foster interdisciplinary convergence. But we also see in Mexico some specialized and isolated spaces where teaching and investigation do not attempt to involve information based on other approaches, nor is there a proclivity to use different theoretical tools to examine sociocultural phenomena. Juan Pedro Viqueira's (1995) ideas on ethnohistory are also relevant to this research. According to this author, ethnohistory ‘is nothing more than the meeting space between history and anthropology’, which does not have ‘a field of study of its own, other than anthropology, nor working methods or peculiarities that distinguish it from history or anthropology… its originality lies in the use of heuristic and hermeneutic tools from historical and anthropological disciplines’ to study the societies of the past, ‘whose contents and cultural forms are distant from our own’ (p. 522). Weigand and García de Weigand (1996) wrote a ground-breaking ethnohistorical study of the rebellion of indigenous societies of Nueva Galicia (present-day Jalisco and surrounding regions) against the Spanish colonial administration in the early sixteenth century. Weigand and García de Weigand describe the rebellion of Nueva Galicia as ‘one of the key events that marked the Spanish conquest of the old Mesoamerican world and the start of the European colonial order. For West Mexico this was the main watershed event between the indigenous period… and the real consolidation of the nuclear areas within this vast region’ by the Spanish invaders (p. 9). Formal histories of the rebellion, according to 117 our authors, have usually been written in narrative form, almost solely from the perspective of the Spaniards. These historical accounts focus on the resistance of the Caxcan native communities to the Spanish military incursion, excluding almost completely the rest of Nueva Galicia. The emphasis is on the Mixtón war, the final chapter of the insurrection, and the native leaders are mentioned just as obstacles to the advance of Spanish hegemony in the region. According to Weigand and García de Weigand, most indigenous societies of West Mexico are depicted in the colonial narratives as lacking in historical depth, something our authors set out to put right in their study. Their goal was to examine the indigenous antecedents of the rebellion, contextualizing it as far as possible within an archaeological and ethnohistorical context, as well as carrying out a critical review of the extant historical sources. In their reinterpretation of the documentary sources, the Weigands offered new perspectives on the events that would be known as the Rebellion of Nueva Galicia. Their goal was far more ambitious than just producing another repetitious account of information. They set out to explain the rebellion from the perspective of the indigenous West Mexican societies, including a synthesis of how these groups evolved during the preEuropean period, avoiding the usual ‘normative’ viewpoint that ignores the original history of the peoples who bore the brunt of Spanish imperialism in this part of Mesoamerica. Last but not least, another important perspective for my research has been that of oral history, through interviews with informants (Williams 2014a, 2015). Both history and anthropology have used oral history for a long time to obtain essential information for the study of many aspects of the daily life of societies, especially those that remain over time with long duration (García Sánchez 2005). For Donald A. Ritchie (2003), doing oral history means ‘using interviews to uncover the past and preserve it for the future’, while Valerie 118 Raleigh Yow (2005) holds that ‘many of us who use the in-depth interview are interested in how the respondents interpret experience and how we, the questioners, interject ourselves into this process… ethnographic writing is not cultural reportage, but cultural construction, and always a construction of self as well as of the other’ (p. 1). In writing the present book I brought together as many aspects of archaeology, ethnohistory, and sociocultural anthropology as possible. Following the example of Boehm (2000), Weigand (1994), Rojas Rabiela (1998), Jeffrey Parsons (2019), and others, I used a holistic approach in which ‘the whole is greater than the sum of its parts’. Final Remarks We saw in the first section of this chapter that researchers interested on the modern and contemporary world are using archaeological methods, as part of a broader current of cross‐ disciplinary interest in the material dimensions of the world. The debates and perspectives appear to be developing into a broader ‘material turn’ in the humanities and social sciences (Hicks and Beaudry 2010). According to Hicks and Beaudry (2010), since the late 1980s we have seen a fast‐ growing literature in ‘material culture studies’ in which archaeology and anthropology play a central role. In this literature we see a dissatisfaction with purely ‘culturalist’ studies of material culture, which served simply to reduce things to meanings or to social relations. Many historians have followed an intellectual tradition that includes different forms of material histories, from Marx's ‘materialist conception of history’ to the historical materialism of Fernand Braudel. These approaches share an understanding of objects as ‘alternative sources’ that can complement documentary materials in answering several 119 questions posed by economic and social historians. Geographers have also been interested in things in their efforts to understand the constitution of lived space, while sociologists have focused on the involvement of objects in social relations. The studies collected by Hicks and Beaudry (2010) offer many insights for the analysis of material culture, including ontological politics, debates over material agency, and the implications of moving beyond analogies for material culture based on literary and textual sources. Hicks and Beaudry also warn about the risks of reducing materials to anthropocentric accounts of the social dimension. Hicks and Beaudry (2010) firmly believe in the importance of the study of material things in the humanities and social sciences, with an emphasis not only on the effects of things on people, but also of things as the effects of material practices. Material culture is not a straightforward object of enquiry for Hicks and Beaudry, simply requiring new vocabularies for interpretation or abstract concepts and theories. Instead, they are critical of any a priori distinction between subject and object, which must also encompass the academic researcher and their object of study. Lastly, Hicks and Beaudry regard knowledge as emergent and contingent upon material practice, and this idea must be the point of departure for any interdisciplinary discussion of material culture. The collective volume edited by Hicks and Beaudry (2010) includes many original contributions to material culture studies. Dan Hicks’ (2010) chapter is titled ‘The MaterialCulture Turn: Event and Effect’. Here Hicks discusses the concept of material culture, pointing out that the term ‘material culture studies’ emerged during the twentieth century in archaeology and socio-cultural anthropology, and especially in the place of intersection between the two disciplines: anthropological archaeology. Hick mentions that 120 the field of material culture has developed to include studies in architecture, landscape, historical archaeology, and the ‘decorative arts’. Hicks recounts that during the 1980s a group of British archaeologists and anthropologists at University College London developed an original model for material culture studies, grounded in anthropology but with a strongly interdisciplinary outlook (Schiffer 2017; Miller 1985). The range and scope of material-culture studies is best exemplified by the chapters included in Hicks and Beaudry’s volume. Here I mention the most salient contributions (in order of appearance). After the introduction and Hicks’ contribution, the first chapter I found of special interest for my own work is that of Ann Brower Stahl (2010), titled ‘Material Histories’. Stahl holds that the study of history should be enhanced by incorporating material evidence, because human life comprises not just matter, but also ideas consisting of ‘bundles’ or ‘gatherings’ of people, things, and thoughts. The next chapter that caught my attention is by John Law (2010). It is called ‘The Materials of STS’ and deals with studies of science, technology, and society. Law says that in this approach materiality is understood as a relational effect that depends on a relation between the object which is detected and the person who does the detecting. Matter that does not make a difference is not regarded as matter since there is no relation of difference and detection. Materiality cannot be extricated from the enactment of relations or, more generally, the practices that do these relations. To understand the relevance of the material realm, we need to look at practices, and to see how they operate relationally. Law holds that human relations and the matters that they produce may shift in shape. If the observer assumes too much about their form, they may not be able to detect the character of that shape-shifting, 121 and so will miss the ways in which real things get materialized. Both practices and materials are patterned (for instance, culturally), and they keep being re-done. Material culture can be interpreted through the lens of human agency, according to Andrew Pickering (2010), who holds that, because instruments and machines are always present in science, one could think that the study of science would always have centered on a discourse of materiality, but that was not the case for most of the twentieth century. Historians, philosophers, and sociologists have discussed science as a field of knowledge, in which theory (rather than empirical knowledge) was always at the center of attention. The focus was on the ‘great men’ of the Scientific Revolution. Positivism tended to take the empirical dimension of science for granted, while matter (nature, machines, instruments) was seen as the stuff of the natural sciences and engineering. Knowledge belongs to humans, so it is the subject matter of the humanities and social sciences. The ‘discovery’ of matter caused a shift from an obsession with knowledge to a sustained interest in practice, in what scientists do, and with questions of what knowledge production looks like. The next chapter in the volume under discussion is by Michael Dietler (2010), who sees consumption as a material and social practice involving the utilization of objects, commodities, or services, as opposed to their production or distribution. Archaeologists have always studied the patterns generated by consumption, rather than production or exchange (which are generally difficult to visualize in the archaeological record). This is because consumption is what ultimately determines the location and condition of most of the objects excavated by archaeologists. Archaeological treatment of the process of consumption has been largely implicit until recently. Consumption has been regarded as a transparent epiphenomenon, rather than as a significant domain of agentive social action. 122 The last contribution in the material culture volume discussed here is Howard Morphy’s ‘Art as Action, Art as Evidence’. Morphy (2010) holds that art historians and anthropologists have recently questioned the category of ‘art’, replacing it with more general terms, such as ‘visual culture’ or ‘image’, yet the same kinds of material culture objects remain as the subject of analysis. Morphy makes a strong defense of the idea of ‘art’ but at the same time recognizes its complexity and the fact that art is a somewhat ‘fuzzy’ concept. Morphy uses a concept of family resemblance and sees art objects as forming polythetic sets. The category is immensely diverse, including objects that have little in common with each other and require very different methods of analysis. However, at the core of this concept of art there is a set of features or themes around which the idea of art coalesces. Morphy says that art should be studied because it is often produced in durable and recordable form. Art can be analyzed from different perspectives and can become part of the process of interaction between researcher and producer. Works of art can be interpreted within their cultural contexts. Many works of art live beyond the moment of their making and hence become part of the record of human action. According to Morphy, the relation between art history and archaeology has been continuous—and contentious—from the early days of both disciplines, the contention being in the same dialectic between a concept of ‘fine art’ and a cross-cultural concept of art that has been pursued by art history and anthropology. This has resulted in a neglect of art as a research resource for anthropologists and archaeologists, while in the case of art history it underlies the discomfort with the category of art for the analysis of images. Morphy points out that non-Western art has been ignored in art history and anthropology because ‘of definitional issues concerning what kind of thing art is’ (p. 266). 123 Obviously, material objects and the people who produce and use them do not exist in a vacuum. Culture and nature are interconnected in myriad ways, and understanding these connections is a challenge that humankind has tried to tackle from time immemorial, as we saw earlier in this chapter. Sutton and Anderson (2004) hold that, although biological evolution and natural selection are the forces that shape all living things, culture began to influence human development in the distant past, changing the relationship between humans and their environment from a strictly biological process to a mixture of biology and culture. Over the millennia, culture has become more complex and influential in human life, while the role of biology has diminished. Although people still need to provide for their own nutrition, have physical limits to their physiological adaptations, and are still subject to the rules of biological evolution, in the modern world biology plays only a minor role in human adaptation, and now most of the problems posed by the environment are solved through the mechanism of culture. Sutton and Anderson believe that much cultural-ecological research has centered on diet and subsistence. Subsistence is more than just a list of foods, however. It is a complex system that includes resources, technology, social and political organizations, settlement patterns, and all the other aspects of making a living. Subsistence is a vastly complex aspect of human behavior closely related to culture. Because many studies of subsistence have focused on food, much of human behavior has been excluded from many ecological studies. Once we go beyond the emphasis on food, however, we can look at the influence that other behaviors have on the adaptations of human cultures. The field of cultural ecology focuses on discovering those cultural adaptations. 124 In her discussion of cultural ecology, Boehm (2005) follows a political perspective in which the mode of production—as understood by Marxist theory—pertains to relationships through history between humans and the natural environment, as well as relationships between people in the process of gaining their subsistence. The mode of production is a total social process seen from an economic viewpoint. Boehm holds that historical analysis must start with the social relations of people working within nature; this view is similar to the ‘cultural system’ proposed by Steward as a functionally structured whole. According to Steward’s methodology, researchers should first address the ‘culture core’, the basic features used by people to adapt to a given environment. This apparently coincides with Marx’s postulates, and with the total or holistic conception of society, culture, or cultural system, which encompasses all social tasks involved in the entire work cycle starting with appropriation of goods from nature, to transformation, and finally consumption. As we saw earlier, cultural ecology is relevant to the present study because of the ecological approach used by several authors to study ceramic production. Salient among these authors, Arnold (1985) tells us that the idea of writing Ceramic Theory and Cultural Process, his world-wide study of ceramic production and use from an ecological perspective, came from a frustration with the existing published ethnographic accounts of ceramics. During his decades-long field work in Mexico, Peru and Guatemala, Arnold discovered several similarities between pottery-making communities and common patterns in the ecology, production, and organization of the potter’s craft in these areas. At the same time, Arnold was frustrated by the lack of generalizations and theory about the massive 125 literature on ethnographic ceramics. Virtually no attempt had been made to synthesize this literature and apply it to archaeology. Another problem encountered by Arnold was that the paradigms used in the collection of these ethnographic data had very little relevance to archaeology. He concluded that more research was needed on ethnographic ceramics using new paradigms and set out to produce a synthesis of much of the ethnographic literature on ceramics. He presents a set of generalizations described as ‘feedback mechanisms’ which stimulate or prevent ceramic production in different cultural-ecological contexts. He explains each mechanism and shows why, in his opinion, such relationships exist. Arnold summarizes the main thesis of his book thus: ‘There are certain universal processes involving ceramics that are tied to ecological… [and] cultural factors. These processes occur in societies around the world and can provide a solid empirical… base for interpreting ancient ceramics’ (pp. ix-x). After a quarter century of the original publication of Ceramic Theory and Cultural Process, Arnold (2011) remarked about the impact of his book on the field of anthropological and ecological studies of ceramic production. Arnold says that recent ethnoarchaeological research on ceramics has demonstrated the validity of many of the points that he made in his book. Another positive point is that recent theories of craft production have become more closely aligned with ethnoarchaeological data, particularly that of ethnographic ceramic production. Undoubtedly, Ceramic Theory and Cultural Process played an important role in this process (see discussion in Williams 2017: Chapter III). Ethnoarchaeology is an indispensable research strategy for understanding the role 126 of material culture in human life through time, as we saw earlier in this chapter. This fact is evident in Daniel Miller’s book Artefacts as Categories (1985). Here Miller sees material culture as including prehistoric and contemporary materials freely interchanged. His experience as an archaeologist working with prehistoric pottery led to the belief that such studies could contribute towards more general anthropological goals. Miller believes that material culture is a neglected source of evidence in the social sciences, while the goal of archaeology is to use the assemblages of artifacts to understand past societies. It follows that ‘material culture studies might assist in this highly problematic task of translating objects into peoples’ (p. ix). Because artifacts are objects created and interpreted by people, they embody the organizational principles of human categorization processes. The artefactual universe is one of the main products of social action. Miller sees the study of material culture as cutting across disciplinary boundaries, but archaeology is one of its original foundations, and the material world provides a prime source of evidence for social relations. Miller’s (1985) study is based on a micro-analysis of the pottery from a rural village in central India, including the details of rim form, body angularity and decorative technique, following the usual approach of many archaeological analyses. The main goal of the study is to reveal the richness of information about social relations which these typically archaeological procedures can discover when applied to contemporary as well as ancient artifacts. Miller addressed primarily two issues in his study: (1) how to understand the variability represented by a ceramic corpus in terms of the social relations which constitute its context, and (2) how to answer this question through examining the nature of objects as categories. Miller analyzed pottery production as part of a system of categorization and 127 explored the implications for concepts such as ‘style’. For Miller, pots are not ‘facts’ explicable in terms of general laws. Pottery is a ‘construct’, a ‘part of the creation of a cultural environment in which to live out practical pursuits and interests… a way of interpreting the world by representing the world. [Pottery] manufacture creates a “text”, which is subject to reinterpretation according to the differences in perspectives of individuals and groups in the society, and the different contexts in which interpretation occurs’ (p. 13). Hodder (1982) conducted a series of ethnoarchaeological studies of material culture in Kenya, Zambia, and Sudan, with the main goal of finding out what material cultures represented and what they were related to in a contemporary setting. This would enable him to shed light on the analysis and interpretation of cultures in prehistoric contexts. Hodder set out to determine how ethnic groups identify themselves in material culture, what spatial patterning results from this process, and what happens at material culture boundaries. Hodder concluded that perceived ‘cultural areas’ do not always coincide with ethnic units. In Hodder’s opinion, processual and behavioral archaeology had reinforced the notion that areas of cultural similarity reflected a high level of social interaction, but this idea had to be tested in ethnographic contexts. The title of Hodder’s book Symbols in Action has a double meaning: the word ‘symbols’ refers to an object or situation which has a direct, primary, or literal meaning, and at the same time an indirect or figurative meaning. The word ‘action’ also has a double meaning, the first is akin to ‘action archaeology’, or ethnographic studies undertaken for archaeological purposes. The second meaning of the word ‘action’ concerns the viewpoint that symbols do not simply ‘reflect’ something but 128 play an active role in forming and giving meaning to social behavior. I will address these issues in the forthcoming chapters. Both Miller (1985) and Hodder (1982) use ethnographic data for archaeological interpretation, in a way that is different from Binford’s postulates discussed earlier. But all three authors coincide in the role of material culture as a means of reconstructing social practices, something echoed by Michael Shanks and Christopher Tilley (1992), among many other authors that I will discuss in forthcoming chapters. I have discussed the role of ethnoarchaeology as a bridge between archaeology and sociocultural anthropology (Williams 2005, 2017, 2022). In addition to anthropology, several of the social sciences and humanities are relevant for the archaeologist’s quest for cultural interpretation. By social sciences I mean any branch of academic study that deals with human behavior in its social and cultural aspects. The following disciplines are usually included within the social sciences: cultural (or social) anthropology, sociology, psychology, political science, and economics. Historiography may be regarded as a social science, while history is considered by many as one of the humanities (Greenfeld 2022). The contribution of sociology to archaeology, for instance, has to do with the development of middle-range theory, which Merton (1948 [2007]) defined as ‘theories that lie between the minor but necessary working hypotheses that evolve in abundance during day-to-day research and the all-inclusive systematic efforts to develop a unified theory that will explain all the observed uniformities of social behavior’ (p. 448). Psychology in its turn relates to archaeology through cognitive studies (Rossano 2009) and evolutionary psychology, the ‘science of human 129 behavior and evolution’ (Rossano 2003). Finally, history (including ethnohistory and oral history) has been indispensable to archaeology from the inception of the discipline to the present. Colin Renfrew (2003) holds that art history and art studies in general offer a parallel vision of artists and archaeologists, exploring two approaches towards the comprehension of the modern material world. The first approach is archaeology, which studies the past by means of material evidence. The second is visual art, including artistic creations of the modern Western world. Renfrew sees the visual arts as ‘a vast… enormously effective research programme that looks critically at what we are and how we know what we are—at the foundations of knowledge and perception’ (p. 7). The reader will find many of these perspectives in the following sections of this book, with the ceramic traditions of Mesoamerica as the central topic of discussion, following a multidisciplinary approach in which culture and nature are seen from a holistic viewpoint. References Cited Armillas, Pedro 1981 Gardens on Swamps. In Ancient Mesoamerica: Selected Readings, edited by John A. Graham. Peek Publications, Palo Alto [First published in 1948]. Arnold, Dean E. 1985 Ceramic Theory and Cultural Process. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. 2011 Ceramic Theory and Cultural Process After 25 Years. Ethnoarchaeology 3, pp. 63– 98. Bahn, Paul G. (editor) 1996 The Cambridge Illustrated History of Archaeology. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Bate, Luis Felipe 1988 El proceso de investigación en arqueología. Grijalbo Mondadori, Barcelona. 130 Benavides, Hugo 2001 Returning to the Source: Social Archaeology as Latin American Philosophy. Latin American Antiquity 12(4):355-370. Benedict, Ruth 1934 Patterns of Culture. Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston and New York. Bernal, Ignacio 1981 A History of Mexican Archaeology: the Vanished Civilizations of Middle America. Thames and Hudson, London. Binford, Lewis R. 1962 Archaeology as Anthropology. American Antiquity 28(2), pp. 217-225. 1981 Bones: Ancient Men and Modern Myths. Academic Press, New York. 1983 In Pursuit of the Past: Decoding the Archaeological Record. Thames and Hudson, New York. Boas, Franz 1911 Curso de antropología general. Escuela de Altos Estudios, Sección de Ciencias Sociales, Políticas y Jurídicas. UNAM, Mexico City. Boehm, Brigitte 1985 El origen del Estado en el valle de México: marxismo, modo de producción asiático y materialismo ecológico en la investigación del México prehispánico, In Mesoamérica y el centro de México: una antología, edited by Jesús Monjarás, Rosa Brambila, and Emma Pérez Rocha. Colección Biblioteca del INAH, Mexico City. 2000 El péndulo interdisciplinario: arqueología, etnohistoria y anexas. Relaciones: Estudios de Historia y Sociedad XXI(82), pp. 121-155. 2005 Buscando hacer ciencia social: la antropología y la ecología cultural. Relaciones: Estudios de Historia y Sociedad 102(26), pp. 64-128. Borofsky, Robert 2002 The Four Subfields: Anthropologists as Mythmakers. American Anthropologist 104, 463-480. Britannica, Encyclopedia 2022a Aristotle, Greek Philosopher. Encyclopedia Britannica. Digital document, accessed on 12/07/2022. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Aristotle 131 2022b Alfred Russel Wallace: British Naturalist. Encyclopedia Britannica. Digital document, accessed on 14/07/2022. https://www.britannica.com/biography/AlfredRussel-Wallace 2022c Leslie A. White, American Anthropologist. Encyclopedia Britannica. Digital document, accessed 2/06/2022. https://www.britannica.com/biography/Leslie-AWhite Brodie, Roderick J., Michael Saren, and Jaqueline Pels 2011 Theorizing about the Service Dominant Logic: The Bridging Role of Middle Range Theory. Marketing Theory. DOI: 10.1177/1470593110393714. Buchhart, Dieter (editor) 2019 Jean-Michel Basquiat. Foundation Louis Vuitton, Editorial Gallimard, Paris. Butzer, Karl 1982 Archaeology as Human Ecology: Method and Theory for a Contextual Approach. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Buzney, Catherine, and Jon Marcoux 2022 Cultural Materialism. The University of Alabama, Department of Anthropology. Digital document, accessed 3/06/22. https://anthropology.ua.edu/theory/cultural-materialism/ Carneiro, Robert 2011 ¿Puede la teoría de la circunscripción arrojar luz sobre el origen de los sistemas políticos olmecas? In Mesoamérica, debates y perspectivas, edited by Eduardo Williams, Magdalena García, Manuel Gándara, and Phil Weigand. El Colegio de Michoacán, Zamora. Childe, V. Gordon 1951 Social Evolution. Watts & Co., London. 1981 Man Makes Himself. Moonraker Press, London. [First published in 1935]. 1982 What Happened in History. Penguin Books, Harmondsworth. [First published in 1942]. Choi-Schagrin, Winston 2022 Water Levels Have Fallen to Dire Low in Lake Mead. The New York Times. Electronic document, accessed on 13.09.2022. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/07/22/climate/lake-mead-levelpictures.html?searchResultPosition=4 Christianson, Gale E. 132 1984 In the Presence of the Creator: Isaac Newton & His Times. The Free Press, New York. Clark, Grahame 1939 Archaeology and Society. Methuen, London. 1977 World Prehistory in New Perspective (Third Edition). Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. 1982 Foreword to Gordon Childe’s book What Happened in History. Penguin Books, Harmondsworth. Clark, Ronald W. 1984 The Survival of Charles Darwin: A Biography of a Man and an Idea. Random House, New York. Clarke, David L. 1978 Analytical Archaeology (2nd edition). Methuen and Co., London. Cowgill, George 1988 Comments. Current Anthropology 29(1), pp. 54-55. Daniel, Glyn 1990 A Short History of Archaeology. Thames and Hudson, London. Darwin, Charles 1910 On the Origin of Species. Ward, Lock & Co. Limited, London. [First published in 1859]. David, Nicholas and Carol Kramer 2001 Ethnoarchaeology in Action. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. De la Peña, Guillermo 1995 Antropología social, etnología e interdisciplina. In Antropología e interdisciplina: homenaje a Pedro Carrasco, edited by Mario H. Ruz and J. Aréchiga, XXIII Mesa Redonda de la Sociedad Mexicana de Antropología, Mexico City. Dietler, Michael 2010 Consumption. In The Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies, edited by Dan Hicks and Mary C. Beaudry. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Earle, Timothy 1997 How Chiefs Come to Power: The Political Economy in Prehistory. Stanford University Press, Stanford. Fagan, Brian 133 2001 Grahame Clark: An Intellectual Biography of an Archaeologist. Westview Press, Boulder and Oxford. Feinman, Gary 2006 The Economic Underpinnings of Prehispanic Zapotec Civilization. In Agricultural Strategies, edited by Joyce Marcus and Charles Stanish. Cotsen Institute of Archaeology, UCLA, Los Angeles. Flannery, Kent V. 1972 The Cultural Evolution of Civilizations. Annual Reviews of Ecology and Systematics 3. Annual Reviews, Inc., Palo Alto. 1967 Culture History Versus Cultural Process: A Debate in American Archaeology. In New World Archaeology: Theoretical and Cultural Transformations. Readings from Scientific American, edited by Ezra B.W. Zubrow, M.C. Fritz and J.M. Fritz. W. H. Freeman and Company, San Francisco. [First published in 1974]. 1982 The Golden Marshalltown: A Parable for the Archaeology of the 1980s. American Anthropologist 84, pp. 265-278. 1988 Comments. Current Anthropology 29(1), p. 57. Fournier, Patricia 2007 Los ñañu del Valle del Mezquital: maguey, pulque y alfarería. Escuela Nacional de Antropología e Historia, Mexico City. French, Kirk D., and Nancy Gonlin 2016 Empirical Archaeology and Human Adaptation in Mesoamerica. In Human Adaptation in Ancient Mesoamerica: Empirical Approaches to Mesoamerican Archaeology, edited by Nancy Gonlin and Kirk D. French. University Press of Colorado, Boulder. Gamio, Manuel 1928 Las excavaciones del Pedregal de San Angel y la cultura arcaica del Valle de México. In Annals of the XX International Congress of Americanists II, Río de Janeiro. Gándara, Manuel 1990 La analogía etnográfica como heurística: lógica muestreal, dominios ontológicos e historicidad. In Etnoarqueología: primer Coloquio Bosch-Gimpera, edited by Yoko Sugiura and Maricarmen Serra. UNAM, Mexico City. 1992 La arqueología oficial mexicana: causas y efectos. Instituto Nacional de antropología e Historia, Mexico City. García Sánchez, Magdalena 134 2005 La etnografía como instrumento metodológico en la investigación histórica: el ejemplo del comercio de recursos lacustres entre el valle de Toluca y México. In Estado de México: experiencias metodológicas en la investigación histórica, edited by Guadalupe Zamudio and Gloria Camacho. Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México, Mexico. García Sánchez, Magdalena and Alberto Aguirre 1994 El modo de vida lacustre en la cuenca del Alto Lerma: un estudio etnoarqueológico. BA thesis, Escuela Nacional de Antropología e Historia, Mexico City. Gillespie, Susan D. 2001 Personhood, Agency, and Mortuary Ritual: A Case Study from the Ancient Maya. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 20, pp. 73-112. 2004 Training the Next Generation of Academic Archaeologists: The Impact of Academic Fragmentation on Students. SAA Archaeological Record 4(2), pp. 13-17. Gillespie, Susan, Rosemary A. Joyce, and Deborah L. Nichols 2003 Archaeology is Anthropology. Archaeological Papers of the American Anthropological Association 13(1), pp. 155-169. González Ruibal, Alfredo 2003 La experiencia del otro: una introducción a la etnoarqueología. Ediciones Akal, Madrid. Gould, Richard A., and Michael B. Schiffer (editors) 1981 Modern Material Culture: The Archaeology of Us. Academic Press, New York. Greenfeld, Liah 2022 Social Science. Encyclopedia Britannica. Electronic document accessed on 7/9/2022. https://www.britannica.com/topic/social-science Harris, Marvin 1980 Culture, People, Nature: An Introduction to General Anthropology. Harper and Row, New York. Hawking, Stephen 1996 The Illustrated A Brief History of Time: Updated and Expanded Edition. Bantam Books, New York. Hicks, Dan 2010 The Material-Cultural Turn: event and effect. In The Oxford Handbook of Material culture Studies, edited by Dan Hicks and Mary C. Beaudry. Oxford University Press, Oxford. 135 Hicks, Dan, and Mary C. Beaudry 2010 Introduction. Material Culture Studies: A Reactionary View. In The Oxford Handbook of Material culture Studies, edited by Dan Hicks and Mary C. Beaudry. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Hirth, Kenneth 2016 The Aztec Economic World: Merchants and Markets in Ancient Mesoamerica. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Hirth, Kenneth, and Joanne Pillsbury 2013 Merchants, Markets, and Exchange in the Pre-Columbian World. In Merchants, Markets, and Exchange in the Pre-Columbian World, edited by Kenneth Hirth and Joanne Pillsbury. Dumbarton Oaks, Washington. Hodder, Ian 1982 Symbols in Action: Ethnoarchaeological Studies of Material Culture. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. 1986 Reading the Past: Current Approaches to Interpretation in Archaeology. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. 1989 Post-Modernism, Post-Structuralism and Post-Processual Archaeology. In The Meaning of Things: Material Culture and Symbolic Expression, edited by Ian Hodder. One World Archaeology 6. Harper Collins, London. 2006 Çatalhöyük: The Leopard’s Tale. Thames and Hudson, London and New York. 2012 Entangled: An Archaeology of the Relationships between Humans and Things. Willey-Blackwell, Oxford. Hoskins, Tansy 2014 Cotton Production Linked to Images of the Dried-up Aral Sea Basin. The Guardian. Digital document, accessed on 30/8/2020. https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/sustainable-fashionblog/2014/oct/01/cotton-production-linked-to-images-of-the-dried-up-aral-sea-basin Ingold, Tim 2013 Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art, and Architecture. Routledge, London and New York. Joyce, Rosemary, and Joshua Pollard 2010 Archaeological Assemblages and Practices of Deposition. In The Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies, edited by Dan Hicks and Mary C. Beaudry. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Kelly, Robert L. 136 2002 Counterpoint: Archaeology is Anthropology. SAA Archaeological Record 2(3), pp. 13-14. Kluckhohn, Clyde 1977 The Conceptual Structure of Middle American Studies. In The Maya and their Neighbors: Essays on Middle American Anthropology and Archaeology, edited by Clearence Hay, R. L. Linton, S. K. Lothrop, H. L. Shapiro, and G. C. Vaillant. Dover Publications, New York. [First published in 1940]. Kolb, Charles C. 1988 Preface. In Ceramic ecology revisited 1987: the technology and socioeconomics of pottery, edited by C. Kolb. British Archaeological Reports 431, Oxford. 1989 Ceramic Ecology in Retrospect: A Critical Review of Methodology and Results. In Ceramic Ecology, 1988: Current Research on Ceramic Materials, edited by Charles C. Kolb. British Archaeological Reports 513, Oxford. 2018 Ceramic Ecology. In Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology, edited by Claire Smith. Springer, Berlin. Kroeber, Alfred L. 1948 Anthropology: Race, Language, Culture, Psychology, Prehistory. (Revised edition). Harcourt, Brace and Company, New York. 1952 The Nature of Culture. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago and London. Lakatos, Imre 2016 Falsification and the Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes. In The Methodology of Scientific Research Programmes: Philosophical Papers I, edited by John Worral and Gregory Currie. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. [First published in 1970]. Lansing, J. Stephen 1987 Balinese Water Temples and the Management of Irrigation. American Anthropologist 89(2), pp. 326-341. Law, John 2010 The Materials of STS. In The Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies, edited by Dan Hicks and Mary C. Beaudry. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Lees, Susan 2002 Counterpoint: Separation versus a Larger Vision. SAA Archaeological Record 2(3):11-12. Lemonnier, Pierre 1986 The Study of Material Culture Today: Toward an Anthropology of Technical Systems. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology 5:147-186. 137 Leroi-Gourhan, A. 1945 Evolution et techniques: milieu et techniques. Albin Michel, Paris. McNairn, Barbara 1980 The Method and Theory of V. Gordon Childe: Economic, Social, and Cultural Interpretations of Prehistory. Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh. Matson, Frederick R. 1951 Ceramic Technology as an Aid to cultural Interpretation: Techniques and Problems. In Essays on Archaeological Methods, edited by J. Griffin. Museum of Anthropology, Anthropological Papers 8, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. 1965 Ceramic Ecology: An Approach to the Study of the Early Cultures in the Near East. In Ceramics and Man, edited by Frederick R. Matson. Viking Fund Publications in Anthropology 41. Aldine Publishing Company, Chicago. Merton, Robert K. 2007 On Sociological Theories of the Middle Range. In Classical Sociological Theory, edited by C. Calhoun et al. Blackwell Publishing, Walden. [First published in 1949]. Miller, Daniel 1985 Artefacts as Categories: A Study of Ceramic Variability in Central India. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Moran, Emilio F. 2017 People and Nature: An Introduction to Human Ecological Relations (second edition). Wiley Blackwell, Chichester, UK. Morphy, Howard 2010 Art as Action, Art as Evidence. In The Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies, edited by Dan Hicks and Mary C. Beaudry. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Netting, Robert M. 1986 Cultural Ecology (second edition). Waveland Press, Inc., Waveland. Octetes, Phil 2015 Why Archaeology Needs a Divorce from Anthropology. University Affairs. Digital document, available at: http://www.universityaffairs.ca/opinion/in-my-opinion/why-archaeology-needs-a-divorcefrom-anthropology/ Oates, David and Joan Oates 1976 The Rise of Civilization. Elsevier-Phaidon, Oxford. Oxford English Dictionary 138 2003 Oxford English Dictionary, revised edition. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Palerm, Ángel 1980 Antropología y marxismo. Centro de Investigaciones Superiores del INAH and Editorial Nueva Imagen, Mexico City. 1981 The Agricultural Basis of Urban Civilization in Mesoamerica. In Ancient Mesoamerica: Selected Readings, edited by John A. Graham (second edition). Peek Publications, Palo Alto [First published in 1955]. Parsons, Jeffrey R. 2019 Remembering Archaeological Work in Mexico and Peru. Museum of Anthropology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Patterson, Thomas C. 2009 Karl Marx, Anthropologist. Berg, Oxford and New York. Peterson, Jordan B. 2018 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. Penguin Random House Canada, Toronto. Phillips, Philip 1955 American Archaeology and General Anthropological Theory. Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 11, pp. 246-250. Pickering, Andrew 2010 Material Culture and the Dance of Agency. In The Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies, edited by Dan Hicks and Mary C. Beaudry. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Pickering, Robert B. 2011 Peace Medals: Negotiating Power in Early America. Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa. 2016 Introduction. In West Mexico: Ritual and Identity, edited by Robert B. Pickering and Cheryl Smallwood-Roberts. Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa. Politis, Gustavo 2003 The Theoretical Landscape and the Methodological Development of Archaeology in Latin America. Latin American Antiquity 14(2), pp.115-142. Politis, Gustavo and Arturo Jaimes 2005 Patrones de descarte entre los hotï del Amazonas venezolano. In Etnoarqueología: el contexto dinámico de la cultura material a través del tiempo, edited by Eduardo Williams. El Colegio de Michoacán, Zamora. Powell, T.G.E. 1983 The Celts (new edition). Thames and Hudson, London. 139 Purvis, Katherine, and Catalin Trif 2016 The Lakes of the World are Disappearing. The Guardian, digital document, accessed on 30/8/2020. https://www.theguardian.com/global-development-professionalsnetwork/gallery/2016/dec/09/the-lakes-of-the-world-are-disappearing-in-pictures Raab, L. Mark and A. C. Goodyear 1984 Middle-Range Theory in Archaeology: A Critical Review of Origins and Applications. American Antiquity 49(2), pp. 255-268. Raleigh-Yow, Valerie 2005 Recording Oral History: A Guide to the Humanities and Social Sciences. Altamira Press, London and New York. Rappaport, Roy A. 1984 Pigs for the Ancestors: Ritual in the Ecology of a New Guinea People (second edition). Yale University Press, New Haven and London. Redfield, Robert 1989a The Little Community. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Midway Reprint. [First published in 1956]. 1989b Peasant Society and Culture. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Midway Reprint. [First published in 1960]. Renfrew, Colin 2003 Figuring It Out: The Parallel Visions of Artists and Archaeologists. Thames and Hudson, London and New York. Rice, Prudence M. 2015 Pottery Analysis: A Sourcebook (second edition). University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Ritchie, Donald A. 2003 Doing Oral History: A Practical Guide. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Roe, Derek 1980 The Handaxe Makers. In The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Archaeology, edited by Andrew Sherratt. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Rojas Rabiela, Teresa 1998 La cosecha del agua en la cuenca de México. Ciesas, México. Ross, Kurt 1984 Codex Mendoza: Aztec Manuscript. Regent Books and High Texts Ltd., London. Rossano, Matthew J. 140 2003 Evolutionary Psychology: The Science of Human Behavior and Evolution. Wiley & Sons, Inc., New York. 2009 The Archaeology of Consciousness. In Cognitive Archaeology and Human Evolution, edited by Sophie A. Debaune, F. L. Coolidge, and Thomas Wynn. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Sahagún, Bernardino 1979 Códice Florentino. Facsimile edition (three volumes). Secretaría de Gobernación, Mexico City. Sanders, William T. 1965 The Cultural Ecology of the Teotihuacán Valley. Preliminary Report of the Teotihuacan Valley Project, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Pennsylvania State University. Unpublished manuscript in author’s files. 1981 Cultural Ecology of Nuclear Mesoamerica. In Ancient Mesoamerica: Selected Readings, edited by John A. Graham. Peek Publications, Palo Alto [first published in 1962]. Sanders, William T., and Deborah L. Nichols 1988 Ecological Theory and Cultural Evolution in the Valley of Oaxaca. Current Anthropology 29(1), pp. 33-80. Sanders, William T., and Barbara J. Price 1968 Mesoamerica: The Evolution of a Civilization. Random House, New York. Sanders, William T., Jeffrey R. Parsons, and Robert S. Santley 1979 The Basin of Mexico: Ecological Processes in the Evolution of a Civilization. Academic Press, New York. Schiffer, Michael B. 1988 The Structure of Archaeological Theory. American Antiquity 53(3), pp. 461-485. 1992 Technological Perspectives on Behavioral Change. The University of Arizona Press, Tucson and London. 1995 Behavioral Archaeology: First Principles. University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City. 2017 Archaeology’s Footprints in the Modern World. The University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City. Shanks, Michael, and Christopher Tilley 1992 Re-Constructing Archaeology: Theory and Practice (second edition). Routledge, London and New York. Stahl, Ann Brower 141 2010 Material Histories. In The Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies, edited by Dan Hicks and Mary C. Beaudry. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Shott, Michael 1998 Status and Role of Formation Theory in Contemporary Archaeological Practice. Journal of Archaeological Research 6(4), pp. 299-329. Skibo, James M., and Michael B. Schiffer 2008 People and Things: A Behavioral Approach to Material Culture. Springer, New York. Stahl, Ann Brower 2010 Material Histories. In The Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies, edited by Dan Hicks and Mary C. Beaudry. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Stanish, Charles 1994 The Hydraulic Hypothesis Revisited: Lake Titicaca Basin Raised Fields in Theoretical Perspective. Latin American Antiquity 5(4), pp. 312-322. Steward, Julian H. 1942 The Direct Historical Approach to Archaeology. American Antiquity 7(4):337-343. 1955 Theory of Culture Change: The Methodology of Multilinear Evolution. University of Illinois Press, Urbana. Stott, Rebecca 2012 Darwin’s Ghosts: The Secret History of Evolution. Spiegel & Grau, New York. Street, Brian V. 2022d Sir Edward Burnett Tylor, British Anthropologist. Encyclopedia Britannica. Digital document, accessed on 11/04/2022. https://www.britannica.com/biography/EdwardBurnett-Tylor Strong, William Duncan 1936 Anthropological Theory and Archaeological Fact. In Essays in Anthropology Presented to A.L. Kroeber in Celebration of his Sixtieth Birthday, edited by R. H. Lowie. University of California Press, Berkeley. Sugiura, Yoko, Magdalena García and Alberto Aguirre 1998 La caza, la pesca y la recolección: etnoarqueología del modo de subsistencia lacustre en las ciénegas del alto Lerma. UNAM, Mexico City. Sutton, Mark Q., and E. N. Anderson 2004 Introduction to Cultural Ecology. Altamira Press, Walnut Creek and London. Taylor, Walter W. 1948 A Study of Archaeology. Center for Archaeological Investigations, Carbondale. 142 Thompson, Raymond H. 1991 The Archaeological Purpose of Ethnoarchaeology. In Ceramic Ethnoarchaeology, edited by W. Longacre. University of Arizona Press, Boulder. Trigger, Bruce G. 2006 A History of Archaeological Thought (Second Edition). Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Vázquez, Luis 1996 El leviatán arqueológico: antropología de una tradición científica en México. Research School CNWS, Leiden. Viqueira, Juan Pedro 1995 La etnohistoria: de la interdisciplinariedad a la inteligibilidad. In Antropología e interdisciplina: homenaje a Pedro Carrasco, edited by Mario Humberto Ruz and Julieta Aréchiga. XXIII Mesa Redonda de la Sociedad Mexicana de Antropología, Mexico City. Watson, Patty J. 1995 Archaeology, Anthropology, and the Culture Concept. American Anthropologist 97 (4), pp. 683-694. Watts, Jonathan 2019 Amazon Rainforest Fires: Global Leaders Urged to Divert Brazil from ‘Suicide’ Path. The Guardian, digital document accessed on 30/8/2020. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2019/aug/23/amazon-fires-global-leadersurged-divert-brazil-suicide-path Waugh, Daniel 2005 Material Culture/Objects. Center for History and New Media, George Mason University. Digital document, accessed on 27/04/2022. https://chnm.gmu.edu/worldhistorysources/unpacking/objectsguide.pdf Webster, David 2016 Two-Katun Archaeologist. In Human Adaptation in Ancient Mesoamerica: Empirical Approaches to Mesoamerican Archaeology, edited by Nancy Gonlin and Kirk D. French. University Press of Colorado, Boulder. Webster’s Dictionary 1898 Webster’s International Dictionary of the English Language. G & C Merriam Co., Springfield. Weigand, Phil C. 1994 El Consejo de Etnohistoria de El Colegio de Michoacán. Unpublished manuscript in author’s files. 143 1995 Introducción. In Arqueología del occidente y norte de México, edited by Eduardo Williams and P. C. Weigand. El Colegio de Michoacán, Zamora. 2001 La cerámica moderna de los huicholes: estudio etnoarqueológico. In Estudios cerámicos en el occidente y norte de México, edited by Eduardo Williams and P. C. Weigand. El Colegio de Michoacán, Zamora. Weigand, Phil C. and Acelia García de Weigand 1996 Tenamaxtli y Guaxicar: las raíces profundas de la Rebelión de Nueva Galicia. El Colegio de Michoacán and Secretaría de Cultura de Jalisco, Zamora and Guadalajara. White, Leslie A. 1957 Review of Steward’s Theory of Culture Change. American Anthropologist 59, pp. 540-542. Willey, Gordon R. 1966 An Introduction to American Archaeology: North and Middle America. Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs. Willey, Gordon R. and P. Phillips 1958 Method and Theory in American Archaeology. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Willey, Gordon, and Jeremy Sabloff 1980 A History of American Archaeology. W. H. Freeman and Co., San Francisco. Williams, Eduardo 1992a Pans, Pots, and People: Ceramic Ecology in West Mexico. PIA: Papers from the Institute of Archaeology 3, pp. 44-51. 1994 1995 1999 Ecología cerámica en Huáncito, Michoacán. In Arqueología del Occidente de México: nuevas aportaciones, edited by Eduardo Williams and Robert Novella. El Colegio de Michoacán, Zamora. The spatial organization of pottery production in Huancito, Michoacan, Mexico. Papers from the Institute of Archaeology, University College London 6, pp. 47-56. The ethnoarchaeology of salt production at Lake Cuitzeo, Michoacán, Mexico. Latin American Antiquity 10(4), pp. 400-414. 2002 Salt production in the coastal area of Michoacán, Mexico: an ethnoarchaeological study. Ancient Mesoamerica 13(2), pp. 237-253. 2003 La sal de la tierra: etnoarqueología de la producción salinera en el occidente de México. El Colegio de Michoacán and Secretaría de Cultura de Jalisco, Zamora and Guadalajara. 144 2005 Introducción. In Etnoarqueología: el contexto dinámico de la cultura material a través del tiempo, edited by Eduardo Williams. El Colegio de Michoacán, Zamora. 2009a The Exploitation of Aquatic Resources at Lake Cuitzeo, Michoacán, Mexico: An Ethnoarchaeological Study. Latin American Antiquity 20(4), pp. 607-627. 2009b Producción e intercambio de recursos estratégicos en la cuenca de Cuitzeo, Michoacán, durante el periodo Protohistórico. In Las sociedades complejas del Occidente de México en el mundo mesoamericano: homenaje al Dr. Phil C. Weigand, edited by Eduardo Williams, Lorenza López Mestas, and Rodrigo Esparza. El Colegio de Michoacán, Zamora. 2010 Salt Production and Trade in Ancient Mesoamerica. In Pre-Columbian Foodways: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Food, Culture, and Markets in Ancient Mesoamerica, edited by John E. Staller and Michael D. Carrasco. Springer Science and Business Media, New York. 2014a La gente del agua: etnoarqueología del modo de vida lacustre en Michoacán. El Colegio de Michoacán, Zamora. 2014b Water Folk: Reconstructing an Ancient Aquatic Lifeway in Michoacán, Western Mexico. British Archaeological Reports. BAR International Series 2617. Archaeopress, Oxford. 2014c Reconstructing an Ancient Aquatic Lifeway in the Lake Cuitzeo Basin, Michoacán, Mexico. Ancient Mesoamerica 25(1), pp. 49-67. 2015 The Salt of the Earth: Ethnoarchaeology of Salt Production in Michoacán, Western Mexico. British Archaeological Reports. BAR International Series 2725. Archaeopress, Oxford. 2016a Domestic Production and Decoration Styles in Pottery from Huáncito, Michoacán: An Ethnoarchaeological Study. In Cultural Dynamics and Production Activities in Ancient Western Mexico, edited by Eduardo Williams and Blanca Maldonado. Archaeopress, Oxford. 2016b Materialidad, naturaleza y cosmovisión en la cerámica purépecha de Huáncito, Michoacán. Materialidades: Perspectivas Actuales en Cultura Material 4, pp. 110143. 2017 Tarascan Pottery Production in Michoacán, Mexico: An Ethnoarchaeological Perspective. Archaeopress, Oxford. 2018 Ceramic Ethnoarchaeology in Huáncito, Michoacán, Mexico. Ancient Mesoamerica 29, pp. 11-44. 145 2020 Ancient West Mexico in the Mesoamerican Ecumene. Archaeopress Pre-Columbian Archaeology 12. Archaeopress Publishing Ltd., Oxford. 2021 Salt-Making in Mesoamerica: Production Sites and Tool Assemblages. Ancient Mesoamerica. DOI: 10.1017/S0956536121000031. 2022a Aquatic Adaptations in Mesoamerica: Subsistence Activities in Ethnoarchaeological Perspective. Pre-Columbian Archaeology 15. Archaeopress Publishing Ltd., Oxford. 2022b The Land of Fish: Reconstructing the Ancient Aquatic Lifeway in Michoacán, Western Mexico. Ancient Mesoamerica 33(2), pp. 347–382. Williams, Eduardo, and Lorenza López 2009 Las sociedades complejas de Mesoamérica: una perspectiva diacrónica. In Las sociedades complejas del Occidente de México en el mundo mesoamericano: homenaje al Dr. Phil C. Weigand, edited by Eduardo Williams, Lorenza López, and Rodrigo Esparza. El Colegio de Michoacán, Zamora. Wiseman, James 2002 Point: Archaeology as an Academic Discipline. SAA Archaeological Record 2(3), pp. 8-10. Witmore, Christopher 2014 Archaeology and the New Materialisms. Journal of Contemporary Archaeology 1(2), pp. 203-246. Wittfogel, Karl 1957 Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power. Yale University Press, New Haven and London. Wolf, Eric R. 1959 Sons of the Shaking Earth. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Wolf, Eric 1976 Introduction. In The Valley of Mexico: Studies in Pre-Hispanic Ecology and Society, edited by Eric R. Wolf. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque. 1999 Envisioning Power: Ideologies of Dominance and Crisis. University of California Press, Berkeley. Wright, David 1994 La colonización de los estados de Guanajuato y Querétaro por los otomíes según las fuentes etnohistóricas. In Contribuciones a la arqueología y etnohistoria del Occidente de México, edited by Eduardo Williams. El Colegio de Michoacán, Zamora. 146 Wylie, Alison 2002 Thinking from Things: Essays in the Philosophy of Archaeology. University of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London.