Unintended Consequences? Monumentality As a Novel Experience in Formative Mesoamerica

Home , Mesoamerican pyramids

P1: KEE/LOV P2: GCR/LOV/GDP Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory [jamt] pp1114-jarm-481119 January 20, 2004 20:38 Style ﬁle version Nov 28th, 2002

Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, Vol. 11, No. 1, March 2004 (C 2004)

Rosemary A. Joyce1

To contribute to creation of a model for the initial steps in monumental construction in Formative period Mesoamerica (ca. 1100–700 B.C.), this article employs concepts from theories of structuration. It treats evidence of differential durability of construction materials as sources of insight on possible intended and unintended consequences of the construction of earthen platforms by the generations of people who lived through these new construction projects. It explores the changes in spatiality, connection to place, and materialization of time at multiple scales that these construction projects produced. KEY WORDS: Mesoamerica; monumentality; structuration; architecture.

How can we model ancient processes with attention to the intentions of past actors and the role of existing structures in shaping their actions? In this article, I apply concepts from Giddens’ (1979) discussion of structuration in an examination of the development of early monumental architecture in Mesoamerica. To fully model structuration, archeologists need to consider both the agency of actors (whether individual or collective) and the constraints of the structures within which they act, and which they transform and reproduce through their actions. Actors are always knowledgeable, that is, they act with intention. But their knowledge is not always (or ever) perfect, and as a result, their actions often have unintended consequences. From our present perspective, looking backward, we are apt to interpret what we can see were the outcome of actions as those intended by past actors. But what we see is as likely to be a result of unforeseen effects of decisions made with other goals in mind. By instead “looking forward” (Vitelli, 1998), we can better model the possible intended and unintended consequences of actions by agents in the past, taking into account aspects of the structures within which they operated.

1Department of Anthropology, University of California, Kroeber Hall #3710, Berkeley, California 94720-3710; e-mail: [email protected]

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Specifically, I examine here how archeologists working on nonliterate societies can establish that part of structure represented by the knowledge that could have informed the decisions and actions of agents in the past. I make my argument through an examination of the emergence of monumental architecture in early Mesoamerica, drawing specifically on my own fieldwork in Honduras. The first monumental construction projects in this region were under- taken by agents with a long history of architectural manipulation of clay as a raw material. Their earliest innovations on the path leading to 20-m tall pyramids were broad and relatively low platforms that probably did not reflect a radically altered use of space or the invention of a new category of building. But the performance of the familiar material at this enlargened scale led to changes in durability that greatly transformed the temporal persistence these people could expect of buildings. These more durable buildings permanently changed the spatial arena within which agents lived and worked, and these arguably unintended consequences of the first building projects furnished new sites for innovative practices that, through repetition, became standardized parts of Mesoamerican practices as they were described centuries later by the first European chroniclers. The practices described for monumental architecture later in Mesoamerican history cannot be taken as the intended outcomes of the actions of Formative Period builders. But neither are the intentional actions of these original builders entirely lost to us, since we can, through meticulous archaeological examination, establish some of the structuring forces, including differential knowledge, that came into play when early Mesoamericans exercised their agency.

STRUCTURE, AGENCY, AND THE LONG TERM IN MESOAMERICAN MONUMENTALITY

In 1519, Spanish troops accompanying Hernan Cortés became the first Euro- peans to see the impressive cityscape of Tenochtitlan, capital of the tribute empire of the Mexica, or Aztecs. Located in the center of Tenochtitlan was a walled precinct over which loomed a massive pyramid supporting twin temples dedi- cated to the solar patron deity of the Mexica, Huitzilopochtli, and the ancient and widely venerated deity of earthly fertility and rainfall, Tlaloc. In the late twen- tieth century, archeologists working around the main plaza of modern Mexico City reexposed the remains of this great pyramid and its multiple predecessors (Matos, 1988, 2000). They located carefully built chambers placed at the cor- ners and on the centerline during episodes of remodeling, with highly structured caches that intimate complex cosmological orderings (López Luján, 1993). The analyses of these material remains support interpretations that parallel knowledge generated from the intensive study of documents created during the sixteenth century using the introduced European alphabet, in both native and European languages. The great temple of Tenochtitlan today is understood, as the Mexica P1: KEE/LOV P2: GCR/LOV/GDP Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory [jamt] pp1114-jarm-481119 January 20, 2004 20:38 Style file version Nov 28th, 2002

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people described it in the sixteenth century, as a sacred mountain (León-Portilla, 1978). Built as a replica of Coatepec, “serpent hill,” the site of key events in stories of the wanderings of Nahuatl peoples on their journey to the center of the physical geography and social landscape of the Valley of Mexico, the temple recreated a natural feature charged with ideological significance in a location under the central control of the ruling elite of the city. Mesoamericanists argue that such identifications of the built environment with the natural and supernatural landscape were part of the repertoire of strategies of ruling classes in a wide variety of Precolumbian Mesoamerican societies (Stone, 1992). The decipherment of written texts on earlier Classic Maya (ca. A.D. 250–850) sculptures, for example, has allowed the recognition that temple platforms were often individually named, and as a class were labeled “mountain” (Schele and Mathews, 1998; Stuart and Houston, 1994). An equation of temple enclosures built on top of these artificial mountains with caves has been suggested as well, based on a number of different lines of evidence (Bassie-Sweet, 1991, 1996). Many Maya temples were in fact sited over actual caves, and at least some of these caves were either partly or entirely constructed (Brady, 1997; Brady and Ashmore, 1999; Brady and Veni, 1992). The builders of Classic Teotihuacan in Central Mexico, contemporary with the Classic Maya, did not leave the same kind of textual documentation, but some of their temple platforms were also located over constructed caves, and appear to have been identified with mountains in the surrounding landscape (Heyden, 1975; López Austin et al., 1991; Manzanilla et al., 1994; Sugiyama, 1993). A regional historical tradition of building monumental platforms as effigies of sacred mountains whose interior caves were home to ancestral spirits or other supernatural beings has been posited based on these and other data from Classic and Postclassic Mesoamerican societies. Two and a half millennia before the construction of Coatepec, 1500 years before the builders of Teotihuacan and contemporary Classic Maya centers, earlier Mesoamerican people built the first great pyramids in the history of Central Amer- ica. No written records survive from these early times. The contemporary visual representations created by these Formative period peoples predate the development of writing and calendrical systems that provide information for later precolumbian societies. The very identity of these builders is highly contested, with scholars divided over the question of whether all such monuments stem from inspiration of the Olmec archeological sites of the Mexican Gulf Coast (Clark, 1997; Clark and Pye, 2000; Flannery and Marcus, 2000; Grove, 1989, 1993, 1997). Despite the long span of time and the significant developments that separate these moments in Mesoamerican history, understanding of the earliest monumental construction projects owes most to specifics of the later situations, projected back in time. Explanations of new forms of monumental construction in Formative Mesoamerica emphasize the identification of monumental buildings as features of P1: KEE/LOV P2: GCR/LOV/GDP Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory [jamt] pp1114-jarm-481119 January 20, 2004 20:38 Style file version Nov 28th, 2002

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“sacred landscapes,” artificial mountains sheltering the bodies and spirits of deceased ancestors. An alternative approach, often complementary to and combined with the first, is to explore the role of would-be “big men” in mobilizing the labor needed for these projects. In the pages that follow, I suggest that such arguments take as cause what may be consequences of the first monumental constructions. To begin to create a model for the creation of initial monumental constructions in Formative Mesoamerica, I explore what we can assume about the agency and knowledge of the generations of people who lived through these novel construction projects. People engaged in making these monuments and those simply witnessing the events would have experienced profound changes in spatiality, connection to place, and materialization of time at multiple scales as a result of the new constructions. But these changes cannot automatically be taken as the intended consequences of these projects. Rather than adopt the perspective of a charismatic director of these projects whose intentionality they realize, my goal is to iden- tify possible intended and unintended consequences of these projects and their contribution to structuration of the early societies that produced these monuments. Undoubtedly, Formative period monumental construction projects did provide a model that was reiterated by later peoples in the region (see Clark and Hansen, 2001). All of the distinctive forms of architecture and public art found in later Mesoamerican societies, such as ballcourts, stelae and altars, can be traced to prototypes in the Formative period (e.g. Grove, 1999; Hill et al., 1998; Joyce, 2000b). But at the same time, it is difficult to be comfortable with the assumption that from the beginning Mesoamerican monumental architecture was fully realized as an intentional effigy of sacred mountains establishing a tradition that remained unchanged for almost three millenia (compare Pauketat and Alt, 2003). To go beyond such a static and functionalist view, we need to begin to take the specific details of Formative Mesoamerican practices seriously in the way exemplified by Bradley (1998) in his studies of Neolithic European monumentality. A number of researchers working on the Mesoamerican Formative period have begun to explore the specific effects early monumental constructions would have had on the experiences of those who circulated in the spaces framed by such monumental buildings in different places and at different times (Clark, 2002; Grove, 1999; Hill et al., 1998; Joyce, 1992, 1996, 1999; Love, 1991, 1999; Ringle, 1999). In this paper, I add to this body of work a consideration of the experience of those for whom these were unprecedented projects, imagined landscapes whose realization surely had both intended and unintended consequences. I draw in this discussion on social theories of structure and agency, which are receiving serious attention in contemporary archeology. Most of the initial attention has been directed at outlining the conditions of agency (Dobres and Robb, 2000; Pauketat, 2000; Saitta, 1994; Silliman, 2001): what individuals or groups may be said to be agents? and under what conditions is action the exercise of agency? Somewhat less attention has been paid in archeology to the necessary second term, structure (Barrett, 2001). As Giddens (1979: 59–73) describes it, the key virtue of P1: KEE/LOV P2: GCR/LOV/GDP Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory [jamt] pp1114-jarm-481119 January 20, 2004 20:38 Style file version Nov 28th, 2002

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theories of structuration is their ability to overcome the dichotomizing of agency and structure, the equation of agency with the individual and structure with social systems, that requires the assumption of structuring institutions external to human agents. Giddens uses the term “duality of structure” to signal the indivisibility of structure and action:

the structural properties of social systems are both the medium and the outcome of the practices that constitute those systems. ...Structure is both enabling and constraining. ...The same structural characteristics participate in the subject (the actor) as in the object (society). Structure forms “personality” and “society” simultaneously-but in neither case ex- haustively: because of the signiﬁcance of unintended consequences of action, and because of unacknowledged conditions of action. (Giddens, 1979: 69–70) By positing that through the exercise of agency human actors reproduce and transform social structure, structuration theories dispense with problematic notions that superorganic institutions ensure the persistence of speciﬁc cultural practices, ideas that pose serious analytic problems for understanding change. Structuration theory places the ultimate responsibility for the reproduction of social structure in the hands of more or less knowledgeable agents, and makes the persistence of structure less automatic, more clearly a result of the actions, if not the intentions, of social agents:

there is no circumstance in which the conditions of action can become wholly opaque to agents, since action is constituted via the accountability of practices; actors are always knowledgeable about the structural framework within which their conduct is carried on, because they draw upon that framework in producing their action at the same time as they reconstitute it through that action. (Giddens, 1979: 144) Archeological analyses of the structuration side of the equation ask questions like, to what extent is differential knowledge (Giddens, 1979: 72–73) present within speciﬁc societies, and a basis for differential impacts on the reproduction of social structures (Hendon, 2000)? and how is knowledge reproduced among a group of people over time, such that their actions tend to reconstitute recognizably similar structures (Joyce, 2000a, 2003a; Joyce and Hendon, 2000; Pauketat, 2000, 2001; Pauketat and Alt, 2003)? In directing attention to the way that shared and differential knowledge is reproduced, consideration of structuration introduces the possibility that agents may, through their goal-oriented choices to act, produce not only those outcomes they intend, but also, or sometimes instead, produce unintended consequences (Giddens, 1979: 56–59). Rather than be required to act as if ancient people intended to change their social world every time they in fact did change that world through their actions, we can explore the possibility that outcomes we can see, from our long term historic perspective, were unforeseen by those who produced them. From the perspective of structuration, agents enact structure, and thus as archeologists interested in structuration we need to turn our attention from institutions to the processes by which traditions were maintained and transformed through the actions of agents over generations. This reorientation highlights the P1: KEE/LOV P2: GCR/LOV/GDP Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory [jamt] pp1114-jarm-481119 January 20, 2004 20:38 Style ﬁle version Nov 28th, 2002

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ways that actors learned how to get on within their society, and the knowledge, both discursive and nondiscursive, that they brought to bear whenever they acted. I thus begin my exploration of the utility of exploring unintended consequences with the question of what the builders of the ﬁrst monumental architecture in Mesoamerica could have expected of the materials they used to create these en- during marks on the landscape. In other words, when these early people exercised their agency through the decision to participate in these construction projects, and in the process reproduced a transformed social structure, what knowledge guided their actions?, what could they have expected to be the outcome of their labor? and what outcomes might have been unexpected, but once produced, integrated in the new social structures that were a product of the actions of the workers who raised the ﬁrst of these monumental works?

IMAGINED MONUMENTS

I am not, of course, literally claiming to examine the single original monumental building of which all others in Mesoamerica were copies. But I do want to explicitly think through the situation of the would-be builders who were successful in mobilizing the efforts of enough people to quickly create earthen platforms measuring up to 100 m on a side and 20 m in height where no such projects had previously been accomplished. In northwest Honduras, for example, the Middle Formative period (900–400 B.C.) pyramids of Los Naranjos (Baudez and Becquelin, 1973) were the largest precolumbian buildings ever constructed (Fig. 1). Even today, platforms of this vintage in Honduras, like that constructed at Yarumela further south (Dixon et al., 1994), are visible over broad areas. The visual ubiquity of these structures is still effective today in distracting our attention from fundamental questions about their construction. We tend to act as if, because they have lasted for three millennia, and are visible at great distances, they were built with those intentions (Joyce, 1992). Reinforced by the explicit narration of stories recorded in sixteenth-century texts identifying temple pyramids with sacred mountains, we also make the seemingly common-sense assumption that the earliest Mesoamerican monumental platforms were constructed to convey similarly explicit messages. Put together, these two assumptions lead us to interpret the persistence of these earthen platforms as the successful projection of a message to people in the future, like us, which we need only decode (compare Pauketat and Alt, 2003). But we today are in the position of already knowing that such monumental marks on the landscape exist and are ancient. Similarly, Mesoamerican people of the late prehispanic era, as well as at least some of their literate predecessors of earlier centuries, left unequivocal testimony that they were aware of abandoned monumental constructions that they interpreted as traces of the activity of earlier peoples (Hamann, 2002; Umberger, 1987). Monumental buildings surviving from P1: KEE/LOV P2: GCR/LOV/GDP Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory [jamt] pp1114-jarm-481119 January 20, 2004 20:38 Style ﬁle version Nov 28th, 2002

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Fig. 1. Map of southern Mesoamerican showing Formative period sites discussed in text. Courtesy of John S. Henderson, used by permission.

much earlier periods were part of the material world in which Classic Maya, Teoti- huacanos, and Postclassic Mexica lived, obtrusive presences there to be explained and related to later ongoing experience. Our experience today, like that of Post- classic, Classic, and even later Formative Mesoamerican peoples, is fundamentally different from the experience of those who lived through the initial construction projects that resulted in the pyramids of Los Naranjos, Yarumela, and a host of other sites extending from El Salvador to the Mexican Gulf Coast. Abandoned P1: KEE/LOV P2: GCR/LOV/GDP Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory [jamt] pp1114-jarm-481119 January 20, 2004 20:38 Style ﬁle version Nov 28th, 2002

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monuments provide a point of reference for us and for later Mesoamerican people that was literally absent from the landscape of the earliest Mesoamerican monument builders. In order to begin to imagine the circumstances in which these early construction projects took place, we have to forget that there ever were such buildings, fully developed as mimetic representations of creation mountains, homes to deceased ancestors, and central pivots of an axially oriented universe (compare Bradley, 1998: 73). Given the lack of texts, and paucity of visual records, if we hope to ask questions about the early period of construction that can in any way inform our understanding of the experience of those for whom these were unprecedented things, we need to exploit our few points of intersection with that premonumen- tal experience. For this purpose, the ﬁrst question I would put is, what might the original builders have expected to happen when they built the ﬁrst monumental earthen platforms, rising 5–15 m above the village ground surface?

THE EXPERIENCE OF MONUMENTALITY IN FORMATIVE HONDURAS

The phenomenon I am attempting to understand took place across a wide area, extending from Mexico to Honduras and El Salvador, over a period of about two centuries (ca. 1100–900 B.C.). The published record of the excavations of Structures I and IV, monumental earthen platforms at Los Naranjos, Honduras (Baudez and Becquelin, 1973), can be compared to information from contemporary and earlier village occupation at Puerto Escondido in the adjacent lower Ulua River Valley, where I am currently conducting excavations (co-directed with John S. Henderson) under the authority of the Instituto Hondureño de Antropolog´ıa e Historia (Joyce and Henderson, 2001, 2002a,b). The juxtaposition of these two site records provides a way to historicize the construction of the first monumental earthen platforms in the region, placing these projects in the context of a more general consideration of architecture as technical practice (following Stevanovic, 1997: 341–343). Structure I at Los Naranjos (Fig. 2) was the northenmost of a cluster of large earthen platforms located on the shore of Lake Yojoa, an upland lake surrounded by volcanic rocks including some relatively recent conical peaks. But Str I does not mimic the surrounding conical peaks. Instead, Str I in its final plan, as it appears today, measures 100 by 75 m, rising 19 m tall to a summit platform 25 by 30 m in extent (Baudez and Becquelin, 1973: 21–23). The longer basal dimension gives the structure a rectangular plan oriented slightly south of east to north of west. There were indications on the surface of distinctive treatment on each side, suggesting to the excavators that there was access from every direction. At the same time, the treatment of the west side was distinctive, singling that direction out as a possible preferred access direction, a suggestion in keeping with the elongated axis that P1: KEE/LOV P2: GCR/LOV/GDP Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory [jamt] pp1114-jarm-481119 January 20, 2004 20:38 Style file version Nov 28th, 2002

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Fig. 2. Plan of Los Naranjos showing Structures I and IV discussed in text. Based on map by Boyd Dixon and George Hasemann, adapted by John S. Henderson. Used by permission. P1: KEE/LOV P2: GCR/LOV/GDP Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory [jamt] pp1114-jarm-481119 January 20, 2004 20:38 Style ﬁle version Nov 28th, 2002

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runs southeast to northwest. Structure IV, the southern monumental construction in this area, is more modest in height, measuring about 6 m tall, but is almost as extensive in its basal dimensions as the taller Str I. Str IV supports a group of three platforms that rise an additional 3 m in height today (Baudez and Becquelin, 1973: 49–51). A stone-faced ramp was present on the west side of Str IV, facing a plaza area where monumental stone sculptures in Olmec style were originally located (Joyce and Henderson, 2002b). The western orientation of Str IV reinforces the hint of a preference for western orientation seen in the differential treatment of the west side of Str 1. Baudez and Becquelin (1973) obtained a single radiocarbon date for the Jaral phase, the earliest they defined at Los Naranjos, on material from a mixed deposit in secondary depositional context in architectural fills associated with the earthen platforms. The carbon sample was not from the deepest stratified levels of the sequence of architectural fills. The pottery in the same depositional contexts was analyzed using frequency seriation based on synthetic pottery types, resulting in the identification of a set of types uniformly present in early deposits and present only in trace amounts in later deposits. The excavators assigned dates of 800–400 B.C. to this group of ceramic types, and by extension, to the episodes of construction resulting in the first stages of construction of the massive earthen platforms built at the site, based on the single associated radiocarbon date. In our excavations at Puerto Escondido in the lower Ulua Valley (Joyce and Henderson, 2001, 2002a,b), 100 km north of Los Naranjos, we have developed a more extensive radiocarbon record based on 42 carbon samples from excavation of well stratified deposits 3.5 m deep, representing successive episodes of construction, use, and reconstruction of residential buildings beginning before 1400 B.C. (Fig. 3). Based on ceramic cross-ties with this more tightly defined chronologi- cal and stratigraphic sequence, the initial construction of the Los Naranjos pyramids probably shortly predates 900 B.C. Such a dating is consistent with the fine grained construction sequence and radiocarbon dating obtained by modern excavators working at Yarumela, some 125 km to the south, where a similarly impressive earthen construction was created during the contemporary initial Middle Formative phase of occupation (Dixon et al., 1994). The excavators of Los Naranjos estimated that in their initial phases, Str I rose to 13 m, while Structure IV was only 6 m tall (Baudez and Becquelin, 1973: 23, 49). In this initial phase of construction, no caches or burials were part of these constructions. Episodes of remodeling of Str IV that followed, after the initial pyramid was already a marked place on the landscape, did include a complex set of burial features and caches dating from 900 to 400 B.C. (Baudez and Becquelin, 1973: 91–93), in formats that are replicated repeatedly across Mesoamerica and provide precedents for later Formative patterns of ancestor interment and vener- ation (Hammond, 1999; Joyce, 1999; McAnany et al., 1999). But by this point in their history, the monumental platforms of Los Naranjos were already well P1: KEE/LOV P2: GCR/LOV/GDP Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory [jamt] pp1114-jarm-481119 January 20, 2004 20:38 Style file version Nov 28th, 2002

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Fig. 3. Simpliﬁed Harris matrix of Puerto Escondido Operation 4 showing Early to Middle Formative sequence of construction episodes and innovations in technical practices of architecture. Elevations in meters above sea level (msl). Calibrated radiocarbon dates after Joyce and Henderson (2001). Stratigraphy above and below this section omitted.

established, and had been for as much as several centuries during which we have no evidence for the burials and caches that provide a basis to infer such practices. The initial absence of caches and burials in the monumental platforms of Los Naranjos matches what little data are available for the earliest monumental constructions in other areas of Mesoamerica. Unlike the well-known Classic Maya funerary pyramids that are among their distant descendants, then, initial Forma- tive monumental construction cannot be automatically explained by an intended funerary function. Once marked sites on the Formative landscape were available, they did become reference points in burial treatments that stratified populations in complex ways (Joyce, 1999; Merry de Morales, 1987). Here is the first possible unintended consequence of the construction of monumental earthen platforms: because they shaped unique and novel spaces, they provided new sites for emerging social distinctions to be inscribed, including through exclusive burial practices (Love, 1999; compare Bradley, 1998: 146). A new practice of burial in monumental architecture may have contributed to an increase in visibility of burial in the centuries between 900 and 700 B.C. in Honduras and elsewhere in Mesoamerica. In our current excavations at Puerto Es- condido, with continuous occupation beginning before 1400 B.C., we have failed to recover any evidence of burial before the period contemporary with the conversion P1: KEE/LOV P2: GCR/LOV/GDP Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory [jamt] pp1114-jarm-481119 January 20, 2004 20:38 Style file version Nov 28th, 2002

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of Los Naranjos Str IV to mortuary use. I have previously argued that the burial of selected individuals in monumental architecture at Los Naranjos and other sites at this time was a promotion to a new locale of a previously established practice of burial in house compounds (Joyce, 1992, 1999). I now question the order of events I previously assumed, basing my understanding on later Mesoamerican practices of like kind. Empirically, we have no evidence of subfloor burial in buildings in Honduras that can be dated before the period encompassing Burial T18 in Los Naranjos Str IV. Other burial remains have been recovered from caves in Honduras, some with associated radiocarbon dates spanning the end of the Early Formative Period and the beginning of the Middle Formative period (Brady, 1995; Brady et al., 2001; Dixon et al., 1998; Gordon, 1898; Healy, 1974; Herrmann, 2002; Rue et al., 1989). The pottery found in these mortuary sites includes examples comparable to those made between 1100 and 900 B.C. at Puerto Escondido (Joyce and Henderson, 2001, 2002a,b). It would appear possible that disposal of the dead in early Honduras took place away from villages, in naturally occurring sites shared by multiple individuals, open to repeated reuse, until some families took advantage of the segregation of highly visible but inaccessible spaces within village sites for more exclusive burial of selected individuals. How some members of local societies were able to legitimately use such spaces for their own practices is a topic that I cannot pursue here, although elsewhere I have presented arguments concerning these social transformations (Joyce, 2000b, 2001). Whether we view the creation of burials in subfloor settings within household groups as resistance to a claim of exclusive privilege materialized in the use of monumental platforms for burial of a select few, or as the adoption of an ideology promulgated by an elite, subfloor burial in houses, characteristic of the period from 900 to 700 B.C. in Honduras, may also be better understood as an unintended consequence of the first monumental construction projects. But these are still outcomes of the use of monumental architecture, and as such post-date the first implementation of monumental construction projects. I continue to find it difficult to move back and examine that originary moment when labor was mobilized to create massive earthen platforms. If I cannot assume that these monuments were constructed as messages to a distant future, or as places intended to sacralize the burial of emergent elites, what can I say about what their builders may have planned, and accomplished? and what could the intentions of early Formative Mesoamerican builders have been when they worked to make monumental places on the landscape?

THE INTENTIONS OF FORMATIVE MESOAMERICAN BUILDERS

Let us imagine the ﬁrst builder seeking to enlist others in the community on the project of building Los Naranjos Str IV. We may want to assume that this builder had to have been an adult to have had the ability to persuade others in the P1: KEE/LOV P2: GCR/LOV/GDP Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory [jamt] pp1114-jarm-481119 January 20, 2004 20:38 Style ﬁle version Nov 28th, 2002

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community to take action. We might want to go further and assume, with some students of the Mesoamerican Formative, that the builder was a male aggrandizer (Clark, 1991; Clark and Blake, 1993, 1999; Clark and Gosser, 1995; but compare Clark, 2000). I part company with my respected colleagues here. Unlike them, I suspect that women are as given to aggrandizing behavior as man, if the circumstances permit. The dominance of representations of the female life course in Formative figurines from Honduras (Joyce, 2003b) suggests to me the possibility that social affiliation may have been primarily traced through women, a suggestion that can be compared to Tolstoy’s (1989) arguments for affiliation of household residents through women in the contemporary community of Tlatilco, in Central Mexico. More to the point, I would suggest that everything we know about social organization in small scale societies like those of Formative Mesoamerica points to, not individual aggrandizers, but social groups as the likely actors legitimately being able to originate such projects. Much of our debates about early Mesoamer- ican monument building have been plagued by the need to explain how, in an egalitarian society, a would-be aggrandizer could violate traditions intended to enforce group-oriented action and stifle self-serving behavior (compare Clark and Blake, 1999). This makes creating a model for the initial recruitment of labor in the service of an aggrandizer’s project quite difficult. Let us say, for example, that among the house-based (following Joyce and Gillespie, 2000) societies of Los Naranjos, possibly matrilineal, as discussed above, around 1000 B.C., an adult woman awoke one day with the inspiration to engage her housemates in creating a totally new thing: a soaring earthen pyramid, that would stand as a visible sign of place across the lake, and distinctively mark the village from all the others there and in the region. Going to the houses of out-married brothers, she enlisted enough others in her project to accomplish the construction between one harvest and the next planting. Does this seem remotely realistic? At the risk of presentism, how likely is it that anyone (let’s make the visionary a persuasive male, and try it that way) would persuade his neighbors and affines to spend the months between October and March dragging baskets of mud together to fulfill a dream with no practical purpose. Noah, even with divine mandate, was unable to persuade his neighbors to a similarly ambitious project. Unless we accept the premise that Formative Mesoamerican people were more easily led and less pragmatic than their later descendants, we cannot simply assume success for a visionary who tried to enlist a village to make the first monumental construction (compare Pauketat and Alt, 2003). Assuming such a different consciousness, I might further argue that my visionary builder had a divine mandate that was more effective than that of the biblical Noah, but doing so clearly becomes a simplifying step that lets me avoid the initial difficulty. I may as well say “assume a pyramid.” Instead, let’s return to that Formative mud and see what a builder would have known and expected about the behavior of that construction material. Starting P1: KEE/LOV P2: GCR/LOV/GDP Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory [jamt] pp1114-jarm-481119 January 20, 2004 20:38 Style file version Nov 28th, 2002

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literally from the ground up, from the act of construction rather than assumed goals for the project, perhaps we can construct a better notion of our early Formative builder, about to change forever not only her own experience, but that of all the generations to come, for three millenia (and still counting).

THE MATERIALITY OF FORMATIVE MESOAMERICAN EXPERIENCE

I have referred multiple times now to the initial Mesoamerican constructions as “earthen platforms.” Literally, the earliest Mesoamerican monumental constructions, unlike the stone pyramids that came after, were built of mud, earth, or clay. When the first builders embarked on Los Naranjos Str IV, people in the region already had centuries of experience with clay as a construction material, and with the transformation of clay through firing into pottery. As Stevanovic (1997) has argued for the Neolithic of southeastern Europe, this pervasive use of clay is evidence for a degree of technical expertise and practical knowledge about the behavior of this material. This knowledge framed the actions of early builders responsible for the first monumental platforms in the region. Buildings documented at Puerto Escondido in the stratigraphic levels dating before 900 B.C. include both relatively perishable wattle and daub houses, and others with rammed earth walls 15–25 cm thick, perhaps bases for wattle superstructures with or without finishing coats of clay plaster (Fig. 3). In the environment of Honduras, with its months-long tropical rains, these buildings would have been subject to erosion and would have required regular maintenance. We find abundant evidence of episodes of remodeling of these residential constructions, including the razing down to ground level of thick rammed earth walls. Debris from larger demolished structures, including structures burned as part of the processes of rebuilding, was spread around and served as a solid base for renewed construction (compare Fig. 3 and discussion below). Contemporary settlements from the neighboring Naco Valley reportedly had similar “incremental” construction of extensive earthen platforms up to 49 m in diameter, rising initially 20 cm to 1.2 m above the surrounding ground surface (Urban et al., 2002: 141–146). Similar sequences of reconstruction have been documented for Paso de la Amada, on the Pacific Coast of Mexico (Clark and Blake, 1993; Lesure, 1997a, 1999; Lesure and Blake, 2002), where they created subtle differences in elevation for some larger houses identified through other criteria as possible chief’s residences. It is possible, then, that the first monumental platforms built were not con- ceived as establishing a new category of building, but were an amplification in horizontal extension of the kinds of buildings constructed within some (not all) house compounds (compare Bradley, 1998: 162). I argue that the expectations that the builders of the earliest Honduran monumental earthen platforms would have had can be projected from the behavior of materials they already used in domestic P1: KEE/LOV P2: GCR/LOV/GDP Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory [jamt] pp1114-jarm-481119 January 20, 2004 20:38 Style file version Nov 28th, 2002

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construction. The builders would have understood clay platforms to be impermanent constructions which would regularly require refurbishment. In fact, of course, all early earthen monumental architecture was regularly remodeled. Given the history of domestic architectural technology, using clay in any building would have engaged knowledge of the probability of its erosion and the possibility that, to extend the life of the building, it would need to be renewed. From this perspective, the actual durability of monumental earthen constructions may be seen as another unintended consequence, in this case a product of the increase in volume of the unexposed mass of earth in a broader platform, relative to the surface area exposed. It is from this perspective that the initial experiences in Honduras, with wide, but relatively low, platforms, are most informative. With less exposed surface to actively erode, broader clay platforms of even relatively modest increased height, like those at the heart of the early monumental buildings of Los Naranjos, while still subject to decay, may have been ultimately more stable than their makers could have envisioned. Indeed, we may need to consider whether the earliest stages of most monumental platforms were even intended to persist at all, or if they initially might have been expected to weather away, as abandoned houses did. It may be most useful to think of the goal of these projects being the coordination of laborers in the activity of construction, as Pauketat and Alt (2003) suggest for some mound construction at Cahokia, rather than the production of an imperishable platform. As with the transformation in the signiﬁcance of burial that I suggested may have been accomplished by the use of the newly obvious monumental locales for burial of selected individuals, the persistence of monumental earthen platforms may have recursively inﬂuenced the value placed on durability in residential structures as well. A new concept of architecture as something potentially more permanent may have shifted the way that residential structures were assessed, placing a greater value on permanency in those as well. At Puerto Escondido, for example, the use of lime plaster and stone facings becomes a feature of monumental earthen platforms and of residential architecture simultaneously, with the earliest plastered platforms dating to 1100–900 B.C. Prior to that point, our construction evidence suggests buildings with post frameworks supported perishable superstructures, and these buildings were remodeled many times in succession.

LIVING WITH MONUMENTS IN FORMATIVE MESOAMERICA

I am suggesting, in short, that the first stage of the earthen platforms whose monumentality transformed Formative Mesoamerican landscapes, and became part of all later landscapes in the region, may have been constructed without an explicit intention that the structure endure to convey sentiments to future viewers (compare Bradley, 1998: 104). We can conjecture that these early platforms were built as supra-household spaces for specific activities whose nature may well have P1: KEE/LOV P2: GCR/LOV/GDP Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory [jamt] pp1114-jarm-481119 January 20, 2004 20:38 Style file version Nov 28th, 2002

20 Joyce

included hosting feasts, dances, games, and other community activities suggested by contemporary material culture (Clark and Blake, 1993, 1999; Clark and Gosser, 1995; Hill and Clark, 2001; Hill et al., 1998; Joyce, 1998, 1999, 2003b; Lesure, 1997b, 1998, 1999; Lesure and Blake, 2002). The labor for the production of the original platforms would have been provided by members of social groups sponsoring these activities. In Honduras, there are no signs of superstructures built on these early broad platforms. The lack of traces of superstructures or other features on these early platforms may reflect construction of impermanent forms of enclosures on earthen platforms primarily intended to raise participants up and increase their visibility during some social events. Once built, however, even the relatively low first stage platforms would have transformed the space of the communities where they were built. One effect these earthen structures had, as Love (1999) has proposed, is to create differentiated spaces within sites, with potential differences in access rights and knowledge stemming from experiences in different zones of these sites. Another effect to which Love draws attention would be the creation of new visual relations, in which the raised platform and anything on it would be more visible through- out the surrounding community. Love emphasizes the primary phenomenolog- ical, visual, and spatial effects of early Formative architecture, in place of the narrative or symbolic significance documented for much later structures similar in form, but products of structural reproduction of an already traditional form. These structures also would have affected the temporality of the communities in which they were built by challenging the knowledge of the inevitability of decay experienced in the physical settings of everyday life. The new, larger-scale structures were also longer in temporal scale; while they still required remodeling to persist, they persisted longer than domestic earthen architecture, even in a collapsed and abandoned state. The series of innovations in construction that followed, including the use of stone and plaster facings, allowed monumental architecture to be made to resist even the partial surface erosion to which fully earthen architecture was prone. At Puerto Escondido, our excavations produced evidence in two different locations for a transformation in practices of remodelling, dating around 900 B.C. (Joyce and Henderson, 2001, 2002a,b). In both cases, debris from the demolition of previous architecture was mounded, in at least one case having first been burned, to form platforms higher than any previously noted (Figs. 4 and 5). While relatively low, these new platforms were quite broad, and in fact we have yet to fully outline any of them despite excavating transects of up to 18 m across some of these features. Traces of plaster and stone facings were found on these platforms. The earliest examples of human burials in architectural settings at the site, and caches of whole vessels, in one case containing jade ornaments, were located in one of these new, more formalized earthen platforms (Figs. 6 and 7). Contemporary developments in the neighboring Naco Valley also appear to culminate in an episode of more P1: KEE/LOV P2: GCR/LOV/GDP Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory [jamt] pp1114-jarm-481119 January 20, 2004 20:38 Style file version Nov 28th, 2002

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Fig. 4. Puerto Escondido Operation 4 plan showing overlapping plans of buildings with rammed earth wall bases and wattle and daub superstructure (Structures 4A and 4B), demolished and encompassed within the later monumental platform Structure 4C.

intensive, deliberate construction of higher platforms with distinctive construction materials (Urban et al., 2002: 141–146). As remodeling increased the height of the original platforms created at these Honduran sites, it also increased their temporal stability. Mounds became physical

Fig. 5. Schematic section showing superimposition of Puerto Escondido Str 4C over Str 4A. P1: KEE/LOV P2: GCR/LOV/GDP Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory [jamt] pp1114-jarm-481119 January 20, 2004 20:38 Style ﬁle version Nov 28th, 2002

22 Joyce

Fig. 6. Plan view of Puerto Escondido Str 4C showing locations of terrace wall trenches, cached whole vessels and ground stone artifacts, and burials.

marks of communal and individual memory (Pauketat and Alt, 2003; Stevanovic, 1997: 388), sites for the construction of narratives like those recorded for Classic and Postclassic temple pyramids centuries later. When Mesoamerican pyramids first enter the textual record in Classic Maya inscriptions (ca. A.D. 250–850), they are identified with mountains, permanent stone features on the landscape containing caves where ancestral spirits dwelled. But if the earliest platforms were not built as imperishable structures, we cannot argue that they were already ancestral mountains, a narrative that may well be associated with their appropriation for burial after their initial physical persistence was noted. P1: KEE/LOV P2: GCR/LOV/GDP Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory [jamt] pp1114-jarm-481119 January 20, 2004 20:38 Style file version Nov 28th, 2002

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Fig. 7. Schematic section showing relative depths of Puerto Escondido Str 4C terrace wall trenches, cached whole vessels and ground stone artifacts, burials, and traces of plaster facing.

As visually omnipresent and stable points of reference in their communities, the monumental platforms also created physical centers in these Formative villages, an effect which their later descendants most notably carried on in their practices of locating temple platforms in central locations in communities. But again, rather than assuming that Formative precursors were built to center the community on an already valued axis mundi, I suggest we consider that, once these focal points existed, they lent themselves to the elaboration of new spatial stratifications of communities in terms of periphery and center. At Los Naranjos, this is indicated most spectacularly by the construction of 5 km of ringing ditches defining the zone of monumental platforms, during the Middle Formative Jaral phase (Baudez and Becquelin, 1973). At Los Naranjos, Yarumela and many other early sites, initial monumental platforms are juxtaposed in later construction stages to additional platforms framing plaza spaces. The centering effect of monumental platforms, a function of their heightened visibility, appears to have been reacted to and elabo- rated on, not necessarily intended, planned for, and produced from the beginning. Once Formative monumental platforms existed, the idea of building to last at the monumental scale was irrevocably a part of the traditional knowledge of later Mesoamerican peoples. Rebuilding pyramids, both conceptually and in practice, was a fundamentally different operation than first conceiving and accomplishing the construction of monumental platforms. Because the early examples formed the ground against which later examples were executed, it is tempting to use our more ample knowledge of later construction to explain the earliest examples. My argument here is that despite apparent formal similarities, the earliest Formative monumental architecture was different from later construction. As material re- alizations of different intentions, and the enactment of differential knowledge, apparently similar structures are, in the end, not at all the same. Each has effects that reproduce and transform the social order of the actors who make and use them. But while Formative monumental architecture was novel, later examples were re- iterations of a historically situated form. Building in the Formative was a means to invent new society; rebuilding through the Late Postclassic was a medium to reproduce societies. P1: KEE/LOV P2: GCR/LOV/GDP Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory [jamt] pp1114-jarm-481119 January 20, 2004 20:38 Style file version Nov 28th, 2002

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RETURNING TO STRUCTURE AND AGENCY

I have argued that it is possible to use the archeological documentation of the habitual “technical practice” (Stevanovic, 1997: 341–343) of architecture in the centuries preceding the first monumental construction projects in Honduras as a way to model the practical knowledge that would have framed the intentions of the builders of these early structures. A long history of working with clay as a building material, dealing with its tendency to erode and the requirement to renew rammed earth buildings periodically, is evident in sequences of repeated reconstruction of domestic structures. The fact that the early monumental platforms documented in Honduras are broad rather than high immediately calls into question the assumption that the goal was building an artificial mountain. Instead, these early platforms appear to have been expanded applications of techniques used in contemporary residential structures. To put it most simply, the intention of the builders seems to have been to raise some activities slightly higher, and/or to create a larger area that would ac- commodate more participants. This is consistent with the suggestions of activities likely to have taken place in these locales made by a variety of scholars (e.g., Clark and Blake, 1993, 1999; Clark and Gosser, 1995; Hill and Clark, 2001; Hill et al., 1998; Joyce, 1998, 1999, 2003b; Lesure, 1997b, 1998, 1999; Lesure and Blake, 2002). The feasts, dances, and games that these authors propose, based on other lines of evidence, as communally significant events likely to have taken place on and around early monumental architecture, are elaborations or expansions of practices that were part of everyday life within residential compounds. Dances, games, and feasts are understood to have already formed part of the domestic life of the inhabitants of Mesoamerica’s early villages. This basic repertoire of activities was already part of the structures constituted by the actions of agents in these communities before the first monumental platforms were built. If we understand structuration to be the process by which agents bring to bear practical and discursive knowledge, reproducing structure, then the builders of early monumental platforms can be understood as acting within traditional structures of technical, ritual, and domestic productive and reproductive practices. But as Giddens (1979) suggests, structuration also involves the transformation of structure; the process of reproducing structure is never without the possibility of change. Structural reproduction should be construed always as less a kind of automatic cloning, than reiteration with variation. Even if the intentions of actors are to reproduce structure with no change, they cannot do so because of the unacknowledged conditions of action and the unintended consequences of their actions. In the case of early Mesoamerican monumental architecture, these unintended consequences may have included changes in the behavior of the architectural materials when platforms were scaled up. The archeological identification of more P1: KEE/LOV P2: GCR/LOV/GDP Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory [jamt] pp1114-jarm-481119 January 20, 2004 20:38 Style file version Nov 28th, 2002

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durable, larger earthen platforms coincides with innovations in architectural fin- ishes, particularly the use of plaster and stone, which allowed the intentional construction of less perishable buildings. I propose that these innovations are effects of the incorporation into structure of unintended consequences of action. The unintended creation of durability as a technical feature of architecture created the potential for architectural durability to be recognized as a goal of intentional action. Unexpected outcomes of action, once produced, had to be integrated in the renewed social structures that were a product of the actions of the workers who raised the first of these monumental buildings. The more durable, broad, raised platforms built in early Honduran villages, resistant to weathering, could become points of reference for future action, including augmentation by new building projects. Through visual contrast with other structures in these villages, they re- organized space, creating center points where none had existed. The stratification of space accomplished within these villages by the production of high broad platforms could be reinforced through the building of additional constructions and the placement of distinctive features, such as the monumental stone sculpture noted at both Los Naranjos and Puerto Escondido. We cannot know exactly when the people of ancient Honduras began to regard the pyramids in their settlements as sacred mountains. But it is at least as possible that this was a consequence of the first burials placed in platforms instead of in caves in the surrounding mountains, as that the naming of these relatively low but broad platforms “mountain” preceded the acts of burial. What we do know, with little room for doubt, is that the builders of these early monumental platforms worked within the traditions of technical practice that were structural for them, traditions that dictated their approach to constructing the broader, relatively low platforms that are the first steps toward the sacred ancestral mountains of the Classic Maya and Postclassic Aztec. And our knowledge of the existing tradition of technical practice allows us to frame our understandings of agency and practice in this early society in terms of likely intentions and unintended consequences, thinking forward from the past, not backward from the present.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Excavations at Puerto Escondido, directed by Rosemary A. Joyce and John S. Henderson, were conducted under the authority of the Instituto Hondure˜no de Antropolog´ıa e Historia. Funding was provided by grants from the National Science Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, Heinz Charitable Fund, Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies, In- corporated; from the University of California, Berkeley Archeological Research Facility Stahl Endowment, Committee on Research, Center for Latin American Studies, and Undergraduate Research Apprentice Program; and from the Cornell P1: KEE/LOV P2: GCR/LOV/GDP Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory [jamt] pp1114-jarm-481119 January 20, 2004 20:38 Style ﬁle version Nov 28th, 2002

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University Ofﬁce of Sponsored Programs, Latin American Studies Program, and Archaeology Program. Research and writing for the original draft of this paper was completed while I was in residence at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, California, supported by Grant 2000–5633 and Hewlett Fellow Grant 98-2124 of the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation. I thank Brenda Bowser, Julia Hendon, Jeanne Lopiparo, and anonymous reviewers for their comments on earlier drafts.

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