But there are also difficulties with this approach. Foremost among them, articles written for professional audiences assume a great degree of shared background knowledge. They begin in the middle of an ongoing research dialogue, where even everyday words can have very specific meanings. To use research articles in teaching requires us to spend substantial effort explaining specialist terms and assumptions. And even when this is done, there remains the fact that professional articles are written for particular contexts, often as part of edited volumes dealing with specific themes or issues. To make these articles effective outside their original setting, it is necessary to place them back in context through lectures, orienting notes, or annotations. We have been successful teaching from thematically focused edited volumes, where the context of all the articles is the same and the repetition of conceptual vocabulary reinforces our background discussions. But very few edited volumes cover the full chronological and geographic breadth of Mesoamerican archaeology.
Thus, in this second edition, we continue to provide a single volume containing new papers written with a nonspecialist reader in mind. By selecting contributors who are actively engaged in research on key time periods and topics in contemporary Mesoamerican archaeology, this volume provides what we have been piecing together from existing resources, but with an important difference. Written self-consciously as explanations of current issues in specific archaeological research areas within Mesoamerica and oriented toward the student or other nonspecialist, these papers provide the equivalent of a casebook optimally suited for teaching.
The response to our invitation to participate gratified us immensely, as extremely dedicated, busy researchers took the time to prepare new essays for this volume. Where possible, we sought to provide dual approaches to important time periods and places, hoping that these juxtapositions illuminate the way that research problems framed differently call for different methods of investigation and interpretation. We balanced contributions taking macroscale approaches with those examining the microscale that begins with the individual actor and extends outward to households, communities, and regions. The one thing we sought in every contribution was self-conscious attention to how problems were framed and what the effects of problem orientation were on research outcomes.
The resulting volume therefore considers research employing many different kinds of materials, highly diverse methods, and many strands of theory. Many of the contributors share with the editors an interest in questions of individual and group identity and agency and are exploring the implications of practice theory for Mesoamerican archaeology. Contributors who do not explicitly use concepts from practice theory nonetheless take seriously the same kinds of questions about how individual people who are raised in a specific cultural, social, and natural environment continue the traditions in which they were raised while also subtly modifying them so that, to modern observers, they can be seen as participants in sequences of social change. All the contributors examine particular practices, perceptible to modern researchers because they left material traces, and consider the significance these practices had in the formation and reformation of Mesoamerican societies over a long historical trajectory that did not end with Spanish colonization.
We have included sufficient orienting material in this volume to ensure that students and other interested readers will understand the chronological and geographic frameworks of the Mesoamerican tradition and will recognize key issues in its history. Because this volume includes an introduction explicitly sketching out the contexts necessary to understand Mesoamerican archaeology as a subject, it can also serve to contextualize other research articles that might be used to complement the contents of this volume. As a casebook of theoretically explicit studies, it should serve as a resource for comparison with archaeologies from other world areas. Our goal was to be selective, not exhaustive. We attempt not to replace comprehensive syntheses of Mesoamerican prehistory but instead to complement them with a volume that takes understanding how we know as central to understanding what we know. Finally, we hope that this volume gives all of its readers a sense of the exciting developments in the contemporary theory and practice of Mesoamerican archaeology and encourages them to delve further into the original research cited by all the contributors.
Julia A. Hendon
Lisa Overholtzer
Rosemary A. Joyce
Contributors
Wendy Ashmore (deceased) was professor emeritus of anthropology at the University of California, Riverside. She conducted field research in the Maya lowlands in Guatemala, Honduras, and Belize, and pioneered research in household archaeology and landscape archaeology.
Ángel González López is GSK curatorial research fellow at the North Carolina Museum of Art. The primary focus of his research is on iconographic analyses of Late Postclassic art in Central Mexico. He founded the Aztec Stone Sculpture from the Basin of Mexico Project to create a standardized database of monuments that are currently found in various educational institutions in the United States, Mexico, and Europe.
Julia A. Hendon is professor of anthropology at Gettysburg College. She has carried out research at the Maya kingdom of Copán and in the lower Ulúa river valley in Honduras. She studies social identity, daily life, technology, and social memory. Her book Houses in a Landscape: Memory and Everyday Life in Mesoamerica was awarded the 2015 Linda S. Cordell Book Award in Archaeology.
Arthur A. Joyce is professor of anthropology at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He directs long-term interdisciplinary research in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca on issues of political dynamics, urbanism, religion, human impact on the environment, and the preceramic. He draws on theoretical and methodological inspirations ranging from the social sciences and humanities to the natural sciences.
Rosemary A. Joyce is professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley. She conducts field and museum research on Honduras, in sites dating from the Formative through Republican periods. She uses analyses of ceramic artifacts to understand subjectivity (e.g., sex and gender) and materiality (e.g., technology and human–nonhuman networks of activity).
Stacie M. King is associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at Indiana University. Her research focuses on the long-term history of Oaxaca, Mexico, and her publications address colonial entanglements, household social organization, craft production, interregional interaction, mortuary practices, food sharing, and public outreach.
Linda R. Manzanilla is professor of archaeology at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM, Institute for Anthropological Research). She is also a member of El Colegio Nacional. Her research concerns the first urban settlements and early states. She is widely recognized for her innovative interdisciplinary research on households and neighborhoods at Teotihuacan. She holds a doctorate in Egyptology from the Sorbonne.
Marilyn Masson is professor of anthropology at the University at Albany State University New York. She directs a long-term archaeological research project in Yucatan, Mexico, with an international collaborative team. Her research interests include societal regeneration after collapse and culture contact from the perspective of household economies in urban and rural settings of late Pre-Columbian and early Colonial Maya society.
Lisa Overholtzer is assistant professor and William Dawson Chair at McGill University. Her research examines the everyday material practices of ordinary people in Postclassic and Colonial Central Mexico. She is interested in household production and consumption; gender, ethnic, class, and age-based