Читать книгу Mesoamerican Archaeology - Группа авторов - Страница 25

Mesoamerica is mainly a concept that anthropologists have found useful as a way to refer to groups of people who lived within a defined geographic region over a long period time and who shared the aforementioned cultural features. These shared features coexisted with and crosscut social, linguistic, ecological, and political boundaries. The only viable social mechanism to explain the development of Mesoamerica as a cultural tradition, crosscutting all sorts of boundaries, is a long history of intensive interaction among social groups in the region.

In this sense, the term Mesoamerica is analogous to terms like Western civilization. These suggest the existence of various kinds of historical connections among a set of interacting societies that led to shared values, practices, and institutions, despite variation in language, political structure, religion, and cultural practices (Joyce 2000c; Pye and Clark 2000). Mesoamerican peoples had less intensive interaction with the societies to their north and south, making it possible for archaeologists and ethnographers to discern boundaries to an area of intense interaction that is Mesoamerica as a geographic region. Within this area, the intensity of interaction even produced shared features in unrelated languages spoken across the region.