Ancient Civilizations of the Americas

Lecture 1: Sources for the reconstruction of American

Civilizations

Sources for the Reconstruction of Mesoamerican civilizations

1. Archaeology

Archaeologist – specialist in recovering information from the

archaeological record.

Archaeological record – artifacts, features, and sites abandoned by past peoples occurring in the landscape of a region.

What are the institutions that support Mesoamerican archaeologists?

- Universities and colleges with a Mesoamerican emphasis

- Government sponsored institutes: INAH Instituto Nacional de Historia y Anthropologia

- Museums

Some common archaeological terms:•Artifact: an object made or modified by a human.

•Feature: a concentration of associated artifacts within a site.

•Monument: an isolated, large above-ground artifact or structure.

•Site: a distinct spatial clustering of artifacts, features and possibly structures, and organic remains. The boundaries of a site can be somewhat arbitrary.

•Provenience: an artifact’s location in three-dimensions.

How do archaeologists determine the age of something?

•Some classes of artifacts exhibit swift successive stylistic changes; e.g. pottery.

•The timing of these changes can be established by recognizing the patterns of succession in contexts with chronological depth – these relationships allow archaeologist to seriate the artifacts – to arrange in a chronological sequence.

•Another seriation technique – frequency seriation..

• Carbon 14 (14C) – based on the known decay rate of an unstable isotope of carbon. This technique can only be applied to organic materials.

• A carbon date is a span of time, rather than a pin-point date. The size of the span hinges on fluctuations in the production of radiocarbon in the atmosphere, the sample’s size, and the sample type. This technique may not be as accurate as diagnostic artifacts.

2. AnthropologyAnthropologist – a specialist who studies the behaviors of the people of a

living culture. Also called an ethnologist.Ethnography – an examination of a culture written by an anthropologist.

• The pitfalls of ethnographic analogy.• Examples of outstanding anthropological projects

• The Harvard Chiapas Project – established by Evon Vogt in 1959 and continued into the 1980’s. It was one of the first multi-field projects, and concentrated on the highland Tzotzil community of Zinacantan.

• Chan Kom, A Maya Village, Robert Redfield and Alfonso Villa Rojas, 1934 – classic study of a Mayan village in Quintana Roo.

• Peter Furst and Barbara Myerhoff’s studies of the Huichol 1966-1968.Stemmed from an interest in the role played by shamanism and

hallucinogens in Pre-Columbian Mexican Art.

3. History

History – reconstruction of the past by specialists working from written records.

•Sources: Writings of churchmen, archives on old court cases, letters of and books by conquistadors.

•Examples of conquistador’s writings:

• 5 self-serving letters written by Hernán Cortes to Charles V.

•Historia verdadera de la conquista de Nueva España by Bernal Díaz del Castillo.

Examples of writing by Churchmen

Florintine Codex: Historia General de las Cosas de Nueva España by Frey Bernardino de Sahagún. Primary source of ethnographic information on the Aztecs.

Brevisima Relación de la Detrucion de las Indias by Bartolomé de las Casas. De las Casas agitated for humane treatment of the Indians, and for non-violent conversion.

Some churchmen were sympathetic to Mesoamericans.

Ethnohistory – records created by indigenous peoples.

•Example: The Popol Vuh – A collection of religious, mythological and historical documents written after the conquest by a Quiché nobleman.

Books written by Mesoamericans on bark, parchment, or paper are called codices (sing. codex).

•Ethnohistorical sources come under the purview of ethnohistorians, like Ralph L Roys. A work of his on colonial Yucatan that is still heavily cited is The Indian Background of Colonial Yucatan (1943).

Pre-conquest texts written in indigenous scripts are deciphered by epigraphers. Epigraphy is the deciphering of ancient inscriptions.

4. Linguistics

Terms:

Language – words, their pronunciation and the method of combining them as understood by the members of a community. It is not intelligible to speakers of another language.

Dialect – a regional variety of a language, intelligible to speakers of other dialects of the parent language.

Language family – a grouping by linguists of languages that are derived from an extinct parent language, and are therefore historically and structurally related.

Proto-language – the extinct ancestor of a language family reconstructed by historical linguists. Usually designated by a*, as in *Indo-European.

80 indigenous languages are currently spoken in Mesoamerica.

They are grouped in the following families.

Some languages, e.g. Tarascan, are language isolates. They are not related to any other language.

•The geographical distribution of languages, and their relationships to each other provide clues as to past population movements. Other clues may be provided by words for species of plants and animals.

Glottochronology – There is a close analogy between the way languages and DNA change through time. It occurs gradually with the loss and gain of vocabulary. Therefore, it is held that the number of vocabulary differences between related languages is directly proportional to the amount of time that has transpired since they became differentiated from a common protolanguage.