Читать книгу Mesoamerican Archaeology - Группа авторов - Страница 12

Rosemary A. Joyce

This book is an introduction to archaeological research on societies that flourished in Mexico and Central America before European colonization, whose descendants continue to occupy the region today. Archaeologists studying these societies describe them as part of a cultural area, Mesoamerica (Figure 1.1). Contemporary indigenous peoples who survived colonization have continuing traditions of practices recognizably connected to those of the period before colonization. Yet these people, past or present, never expressed an identification at this regional scale: instead, a mosaic of communities varying in size from small villages to large cities, governed in a variety of ways, with individual histories that intersected but unfolded in their own ways occupied this geographic territory. This book treats Mesoamerican archaeology as the exploration of the material traces of learned practices, reproduced over generations, through which people in this area engaged with each other, producing shared values and identities. This reinterpretation of Mesoamerica identifies it as a label for what, using anthropological concepts developed since the 1990s, we can call localized communities of practice and more widely distributed networks of practice.

Figure 1.1 Map of Mesoamerica.

To understand this approach, this chapter outlines how time is understood and measured in research on Mesoamerica; describes the practices that define Mesoamerican cultural traditions, giving special attention to mathematics, calendars, and writing that are the most distinctive aspects of these societies; and considers alternative ways of thinking about Mesoamerica as a linguistic area, as a geographic region, and as a network of communities of practice.