The lowlands have fewer mineral resources. In some areas, locally available chert and limestone were exploited in place of obsidian and volcanic rocks. But lowland peoples also obtained minerals from the highlands through exchange for more perishable lowland resources. Precious substances employed in important Mesoamerican practices, such as cacao, and bird feathers used for costume, were products of the lowland tropical forests. Deer, tapir, peccary, jaguar, monkey, and crocodile, animals abundant in the wet tropical forests, were also exchanged with highland societies. Access to the coast provided lowland peoples with marine resources, including shells, stingray spines, and salt. The movement of local resources back and forth between highlands and lowlands and within each zone enabled practices through which diverse societies were integrated into a single Mesoamerican world, a network of communities of practice.
Mesoamerica as a Network of Communities of Practice
The anthropological concept of a community of practice (Lave and Wenger 1991; Roddick and Stahl 2016) recognizes that people identify with those with whom they share practices that promote values. Developed originally from observation of learning in contemporary small groups, such as tailors’ workshops, the concept can be used to understand everything from the shared identity of graduates of a training course, to the commonality among members of a family who learn how to act and how to evaluate action through growing up together. The learning and sharing of practices create identities, including identities based on differences within such communities of practice.
The concept of communities of practice has its roots in practice theory, as developed in anthropology after the 1960s (Ortner 1984, 2001). Practice theories posit that the focus of social analysis should be on the ways that people work within structures to which they are habituated while growing up in a particular society (Lave and Wenger 1991). Structures are not abstract entities outside people; they are embodied by human actors and come to be naturalized in unquestioned assumptions about the world. Actors can become aware of structures but never completely recognize the structures that influence their actions and are reshaped through them.
From this perspective, people engage in performances that are more or less routinized, with both expected and unexpected outcomes. Reformulation of structures, and their reproduction over time, including with changes, are products of these actions. When people choose their actions from among multiple options that they perceive as possible, we can say that they are exercising agency (Dobres and Robb 2000). A requirement of agency theory is that people understand themselves to have choices (although they need not be correct in this understanding or know all the options available to them). This knowledgeability places them in a position to consciously intend some outcome that may reinforce or change structures. But even when exercising agency, an actor is as likely to produce unintended consequences as those they intend. Debate exists over whether agency is always a property of an individual or can be exercised by a group (such as a household, a craft group, or a military society, to give a few Mesoamerican examples).
Concepts of agency and practice provide archaeologists with a set of tools with which to bridge the gap between the traces of individual and group action they can see archaeologically, and the questions they have, as social scientists, about how societies come to have an appearance of coherence over space and time – as something like Mesoamerica, for example. Viewed from the perspective of communities of practice, the people who used a writing system at a Maya city to record local history were not just learning to create documents; they were taking on roles in a structure that reproduced values. One advantage of this way of thinking is that it bases the identification of groups of people on their participation in activities, in practices, not in a preexisting essence. Another is that it allows for the same person to participate in multiple communities of practice. The Maya scribe might also simultaneously be thought of as part of a community of practice of cuisine, sharing taste for certain foods and their presentation with others who were not practitioners of writing history.
Practices may continue to be learned throughout a lifetime and can be shared with other people located at a distance. As a result, a concept of community of practice allows us to recognize fundamental Mesoamerican ways of doing things that circulated through the participation of small numbers of people in distant places in practices adopted in adulthood. When archaeologists talk about village leaders in highland Mexico, Guatemala, Belize, and Honduras using the same symbols as the leaders of Olmec communities in the Gulf Coast of Mexico between 1100 and 500 BCE, this is the identification of a distributed community of practice, or a network of local communities of practice, that promoted the use of cacao, jade, and certain ideas about relationships of humans and forces beyond the human that became enduring parts of Mesoamerica.
The Mesoamerican Subject
What was produced by participation in networks of communities of practices was a self-consciousness as a subject and a historical consciousness as a subject connected to others. Mesoamerican archaeology, in its contemporary form, is about these Mesoamerican people and their lives.
Mesoamerican archaeologists have always been concerned with the social position of the people they studied. Initially, this was framed in terms of group identity, particularly ethnic or ethnolinguistic identity, to link ancient sites with contemporary peoples, to allow researchers to use extensive observations of living people to fill in their static picture of the past. The assumption was that each group of people had a unique ethnic identity, coinciding with their styles of material culture and language.
Researchers were aware of, and interested in, social differences within these societies. While all the residents of Tenochtitlan might be Mexica, or speakers of Nahuatl, only some were nobles, and only one was the tlatoani (“speaker,” the title for the maximum political authority). Archaeologically, some people are more visible than others, and some people’s actions were likely to have had more extensive effects than others. Some had been warriors and others craft workers; archaeologists could identify differences between people with different life courses in excavations. Burials, especially, forcefully suggested highly individualized statuses.
The identification of specific human actors in visual images was a tool of early forms of archaeological research into different human subjectivities. A. M. Tozzer’s study of the art of Chichen Itza identified different ethnic groups, occupational groups, and social status groups represented by figures carved throughout the site (Tozzer 1957). Once Tatiana Proskouriakoff (1960) established that Classic Maya art and inscriptions recorded histories of the lives of individual people, the door was opened for the development of detailed interpretations of Maya Classic texts as genealogies of specific nobles and rulers. Similar efforts have been made in other literate traditions in Oaxaca and even in art lacking formal texts from the Gulf Coast of Mexico.
Proskouriakoff followed her initial insight by drawing attention to women in Classic Maya art and political history (Proskouriakoff 1961). Other scholars followed her lead in identifying noble Maya women, even reigning women, through iconography, the interpretation of texts, and burial analysis (Marcus 1976). Starting in the 1980s, a flood of publications extended recognition of the presence and actions of women, from Gulf Coast Olmec sites to Tenochtitlan, the Maya lowlands to Oaxaca. Archaeologists expanded from seeking histories of women to broader exploration of Mesoamerican concepts and experiences of gender beyond a binary, and including masculinities (Joyce 2000a; Meskell and Joyce 2003). Scholars engaged in household archaeology began to question the assumption that the interests of all members of a household were the same and started to create models of the dynamics between men and women and people of different ages within households (Hendon 1997, 2010).
The chapters in this volume follow in this trajectory. They use materials