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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.