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New Light on the Most Ancient Maya*

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New Light on the Most Ancient Maya* NEW LIGHT ON THE MOST ANCIENT MAYA* NORMAN HAMMOND RutgersUniversity Recentdiscoveries have greatly extended the known period of human occupation of the Maya Areain Central America, and also indicate greater social complexity atan earlier date than hitherto envisaged.Human presence from the early Holocene at least, and sedentary village farming from the secondmillennium bc, formthe base on whichthe initial stages of Maya civilisation developedin thefirst millennium bc. Longdistance exchange networks, including contact with theOlmec of the Gulf Coast and with the highlands of Guatemala, developed during the first half ofthat millennium: trace element analysis of obsidian, jade andother materials has allowed precise sourcingand routenetworks to be suggested.After 500 bc thereis evidenceof risingpopu- lationsize, density and nucleation, with monumental architecture at sites such as El Mirador, Lamanai,Tikal, Nohmul and Cerros indicating an organised society with strong central control. Intensiveagriculture utilising drained wetlands probably began at this period, and towards its end in theearly centuries A.D. a coherenticonography and hieroglyphicwriting appear, to be adoptedas vehiclesfor dynastic propaganda by theruling elites of theMaya realms.Present evidencesuggests that the Classic Period of Maya civilisation (A. D. 250-900) isthe second, rather thanthe initial phase of a trulycomplex society. In I979 Gordon R. Willeygave a distinguishedHuxley Memorial Lecturein whichhe adumbratedan 'holistic'view of Classic Maya civilisationin Central Americain the firstmillennium A.D. (WilleyI980). He took fourthemes, of subsistence,settlement patterns, socio-political organisation and ideology, whichhe saw as systemicallyinterlinked, and showedhow perceivedimbalance in therelationship between these subsystems in thefunctioning of ancientMaya societyled to successiveemphases in researchin the four fields.Willey also showed how enhancedunderstanding of Maya ideologycould in turnfeed back into an appreciationof the role of the symbolic in somethingas basic as subsistenceproduction. Taking Willey'sholism as axiomatic,I am going to examinethe evidence for an earlierdevelopment of complexsociety in theMaya area thanwas apparent until very recently,for the appearanceof the sinews of civilisationin the Preclassicperiod which ended in thethird century A.D. In so doing I followthe formalchronological scheme for New Worldprehistory laid out by Willeyand Phillips(I958), in whichthe Classic periodof A.D. 250-900 (definedas thetime duringwhich the Maya erectedstone monuments bearing precise calendar dates in the InitialSeries format[Thompson I950]) was followed by a Postclassic lastinguntil the Spanishconquest in the sixteenthcentury, and precededwith *The CurlLecture, 1985. Man (N.S.) 21, 399-413 400 NORMAN HAMMOND equal logic by a Preclassic or Formative period beginningwith the first sedentarysettlements. This was placedformally at I 500 B. C.: sinceradiocarbon datinghad barelybegun to make an impact,and therelationship between raw and calibratedcarbon dates had notyet been perceived as a problem(Suess I 967) thiswas essentiallyan educatedguess. The concept of the Preclassicwas of a period of village-farmingcultures precedingthe rise (seen at thetime as a fairlyrapid emergence) of'civilisation' in not only the Maya Area of the Yucatan Peninsula and adjacent Guatemala, Belize, and westernHonduras and El Salvador, but also to the west in the highlandsof centralMexico. This unilinealmodel was modifiedfairly soon by the demonstrationthat the Olmec cultureof the GulfCoast regionof Mexico had flourishedin the firsthalf of the firstmillennium bc at centressuch as La Ventaand San Lorenzo (Coe, M. D. I970; Coe, M. D. & Diehl I980).1 Whether the Olmec had developeda societycomplex enough to meritthe sobriquetof 'civilisation',as arguedby Michael Coe (I968), or not, theirsubstantial earth- works and long-distancetransport of largeboulders, which were workedinto technicallysuperb and artisticallyand iconographicallyaccomplished sculpture, areevidence of advances far beyond those embodied in the'Formative' concept. Indicationsof advanced Preclassicdevelopments came fromother parts of centralMexico, fromthe Monte Alban II phasein Oaxaca by 200 B. C. and from Teotihuacanin theValley of Mexico by thefirst century A. D. In theMaya Area monumentalsculpture was known to exist in the Late Preclassic(450 B.C.- A.D. 250) towardsits end at Kaminaljuyu,and some architecturalelaborations previouslyconsidered characteristic of the Classic period were foundat Tikal fromthe first century B.C. onwards(Coe, W. R. I965), butthe overall concept of the'village Formative' remained remarkably obdurate well intothe I970'S. Over the past few yearsthere has been a dramaticchange in this attitude, stimulatedby a numberof developments:we now know theMaya, and people who were arguablytheir lineal ancestors, to have been in thetropical lowlands formillennia longer than we had thought;we know thata distinctivelyMaya culturaltradition had come into being by thelate second millenniumbc at the latest,and can thereforesay clearlythat the Maya were not thepoor cousinsof the Olmec and the highlandpeoples, but the authorsof theirown cultural history,creators rather than merely borrowers. This expanded temporal frameworkfor the developmentof Maya culturehas in turnmade it easierto acceptan earlierdevelopment of complexsociety in thetropical lowlands than had hithertobeen envisaged. Untilless than a decadeago theearliest known human occupation of the Maya Lowlands (the arid, scrub-coveredYucatan Peninsulaand the tropicalforest zone of Tabasco, Campeche,northern Chiapas, Petenand Belize) lay no earlier than the firsthalf of the firstmillennium bc (Berger et al. I974): hence an origin for both Maya cultureand its human bearersin the highlandsor the Olmec areato thewest was plausible(Adams I977; Hammond I977: 60-3). The initialradiocarbon dates for the Cuello sitein Belize pushedthe minimum date for settlementback a millenniumand more (Hammond et al. I976; I977), demonstratingthat maize-farming villagers with competent pottery and other accoutrementsof Formativelife had been establishedin Belize for centuries NORMAN HAMMOND 40I beforethe emergenceof the Olmec, and thus providingfor the firsttime evidencefor autochthonous development of theMaya culturaltradition. While some conservativecritics of theCuello chronologywould see its originsin the last ratherthan the firstquarter of the second millenniumbc (e.g. Marcus I984: 830), theindependence of Maya cultureis not therebychallenged. Discoveriesreported in thelate I970's and earlyI980's made even theCuello dates,so provocativein mid-decade,look modest:preceramic occupation was found in threewidely separatedareas of the Maya lands, rangingfrom the volcanichighlands of southernGuatemala to thenorthern Yucatan Peninsula. The Los Tapiales site in El Quiche, datingto the earlyHolocene (Gruhn & Bryan I977), was complementedby a largenumber of Archaicsites found by surfacesurvey in thatprovince (Brown I980). At LoltunCave in thePuuc Hills of Yucatan a deep preceramicand ceramic sequence (with the transition occurringaround i8oo bc) was reported(Velazquez V. I980), and in coastal Belize the Ladyvillefluted-base point of genericClovis (or perhapsTurrialba) type(Hester et al. I98I) indicatedan approximatelyearly Holocene occupation. Numerous aceramicsites from Belize foundby MacNeish have been seriated intoa postulatedsix-phase preceramic sequence spanning the period 9000-2000 bc (MacNeish et al. I980; Zeitlin I984), but thisis not as yetwidely accepted. The transitionfrom food-collecting to food-producingeconomies in theMaya Lowlands remainsan importanttopic for further field research. Whilelate preceramiccommunities may have been farmersto some extent, the earliestcertain evidence for the cultivationrather than collection of plants comes fromthe Early PreclassicSwasey phase at Cuello: the seed-grinding equipmentreported from sites that MacNeish and his colleaguesseriate as far back as 6ooo bc is not accompaniedby any evidenceof the species or wild/ cultivatedstatus of the foods processed, although the manos and metates allottedto thefinal Progreso phase (3000-2000 bc) of theproposed preceramic sequenceare indistinguishablefrom those of thesucceeding Swasey. At Cuello the remainsof maize, both cob and kernelfragments, have been recoveredby flotationfrom all levels, includingthe basal buried palaeosol (Miksiceket al. I98I). The earliestcobs were smallin size, perhapscomparable with those fromthe precedingmillennia in the Tehuacan Valley of highland centralMexico, but measurementof cupulefragments shows a secularincrease in cob diameter(and inferentiallyin cob length,kernel size and overallproduc- tivity)through the Cuello sequencewhich suggests deliberate manipulation by the Maya of theiragricultural resource base (Hammond i982a: fig. 4.9). That maize was cultivatedand not gatheredfrom wild stands is clear from the introducednature of the species,which is of highlandorigin, and which must have undergonethe process of adaptation to thehumid tropical lowland climate during the early second and, probably, thirdmillennia bc beforeits more robuststrains became the foundation of theMaya subsistenceeconomy. Maize-processingequipment is presentat Cuello from period II of the stratigraphicsequence onwards; (it should here be noted thatwhile periods 0-IIIA wereoriginally correlated with the Swasey phase as definedceramically, in the period 2000-I000 bc, the revisionof
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