Barbara L. Stark

The Archaeology of Political Organization is an examination of settlement in the rich coastal plain of lowland Mesoamerica, a region which was wealthy by Mesoamerican values, with fertile soil and tropical commodities such as jaguars, cacao, avian species with bright plumage, and cotton. The book provides basic archaeological data about regional settlement from three decades of survey research in south-central Veracruz in the western lower Papaloapan basin, a region with low density urbanism. The data reveals political and social change, with consolidation of wealth by elite families during the Late Classic period. The political analysis considers archaeological evidence related to several organizational principles: collective versus autocratic, corporate versus exclusionary/network, and segmentary (unspecialized versus specialized). Many variables related to these principles used by other scholars are either suited to historically documented states, not archaeological ones, or ambiguous. Many published studies either focus on a particular city or use documents or other evidence drawn from the top of the settlement hierarchy, characterizing the whole society politically from a biased sample. This political analysis is regional in scope and attentive to variation in the settlement hierarchy, providing a guidepost to analysis of political principles with archaeological data.

This archaeological site report presents new insights into an important but poorly studied Mesoamerican culture - the Classic period of the Mexican Gulf Coast. Stark discusses her excavations at several sites in the Mixtequilla region, describes the deposits and artefacts encountered, and provides interpretations of the sites and their significance within a wider context. Her analysis of the ephemeral remains of perishable houses is innovative and contains one of the most sophisticated treatments of site formation processes yet carried out in Latin America.Particularly important is the identification of some of the earliest spindle whorls in Mesoamerica, leading to new views of the importance of cotton textiles in the changing economies of the Late Preclassic and Classic periods. Superb artefact illustrations, detailed descriptions, and an ample use of data tables make this a valuable reference work. Mesoamericanists will find much of interest in this book, as will readers interested in tropical lowland settlement patterns, household archaeology, and site formation processes. Barbara L. Stark is Professor of Anthropology at Arizona State University.

Archaeological settlement patterns the ways in which ancient people distributed themselves across a natural and cultural landscape provide the central theme for this long-overdue update to our understanding of the Mexican Gulf lowlands Olmec to Aztec offers the only recent treatment of the region that considers its entire prehistory from the second millennium B.C. to A.D. 1519. The editors have assembled a distinguished group of international scholars, several of whom here provide the first widely available English-language account of ongoing research. Several studies present up-to-date syntheses of the archaeological record in their respective areas. Other chapters provide exciting new data and innovative insights into future directions in Gulf lowland archaeology. Olmec to Aztec is a crucial resource for archaeologists working in Mexico and other areas of Latin America. Its contributions help dispel long-standing misunderstandings about the prehistory of this region and also correct the sometimes overzealous manner in which cultural change within the Gulf lowlands has been attributed to external forces.This important book clearly demonstrates that the Gulf lowlands played a critical role in ancient Mesoamerica throughout the entirety of pre-Columbian history.