Sedentism and food production in early complex societies of the Soconusco, Mexico

Abstract

This paper presents a case study of the relationship between increasing plant use, sedentism and political complexity among societies on the Pacific coast of southern Mexico during the Early and Middle Formative period (1600–800 bce). I argue that each of these variables increased at different paces in the region. Some of the earliest ceramics in Mesoamerica are documented by 1600 bce as is increasingly sedentary village life. During the following centuries a number of political centres rose and fell. While macrobotanical remains of numerous domestic plant species have been recovered from Early Formative and earlier Archaic period contexts, the overall diet was very broad based with extensive resources exploited from the nearby swamp and estuary systems. Isotopic, ground stone and iconographic data all indicate that the subsistence base underwent a marked transformation during the Middle Formative Conchas phase (900–800 bce) which corresponds to an environmental shift to stable, moist conditions conducive to increased plant production. Therefore, there was over half a millennium during which ceramic-using, horticultural villagers developed political rank prior to the adoption of agriculture and evidence of the first stratified political organization in the region. Evidence from the Soconusco is reviewed and new data are presented from the site of Cuauhtémoc, which was occupied through the entire 800-year period in question.

Keywords:

• Mesoamerica
• sedentism
• origins of agriculture
• horticulture
• rank society
• social stratification
• Olmec

Acknowledgements

The Cuauhtémoc data were collected under a series of permits issued by Mexico's INAH, Consejo de Arqueología. Funding was provided by: a NSF Dissertation Improvement Grant; a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship; a Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies (FAMSI) Research Grant; a New World Archaeological Foundation Research Grant; a Doctoral Fellowship, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada; Yale Council of International and Area Studies (YCIAS) Dissertation and Pre-Dissertation Grants; the Albers Fund (on various occasions) and the Williams Fund – both from the Department of Anthropology, Yale University. The New World Archaeological Foundation (NWAF) provided logistical and curatorial support without which the project would not have been possible. Special thanks are due to the NWAF director John Clark. Douglas Kennett, Marilyn Masson, David Grove and two anonymous reviewers each provided useful comments on earlier drafts of this paper and Yvonne Marshall's suggestions were also helpful. I alone am responsible for the ideas and errors in this paper.

Notes

1 In this paper I deal exclusively with plant domestication. Similar arguments could be applied to animal domestication but in Mesoamerica the only domesticated animals were dogs that had been domesticated prior to the Formative era (see Fiedel 2005) and turkeys that were domesticated during the Postclassic period, i.e. within the last 500 years before the arrival of the Spanish. The timing of the domestication of these two animal species thus does not correspond to increased sedentism, plant cultivation or political complexity.

2 There is a tendency among Mesoamerican archaeologists to equate agriculture with maize agriculture due to the clear historical and contemporary importance of this crop in the region. Equating agriculture with a reliance on maize should not be accepted uncritically for the early prehistory of Mesoamerica. However, maize is Mesoamerica's only cereal crop and is unique among crops grown commercially to this day for the efficiency of caloric production. Due to the modern world's insatiable appetite for sugar, the production of corn syrup and fructose has made maize the world's third most cultivated crop and this has had a significant impact on many areas of the modern world (e.g. McCann 2005). As maize was by far the crop most represented in indigenous Mesoamerican art and iconography this also appears to have been the case in prehistory (Taube 1996 2000). The only other plant species to receive anywhere near as much attention in Prehispanic iconography is cacao, which was clearly a prestige crop (Coe and Coe 1996). Wild forest products continued to be important through the Prehispanic period (Lentz 1991; Lentz et al. 1996 1997).

3 Uncalibrated radiocarbon years before the common era (bce) are employed in this paper when discussing the Soconusco phase limits. While there are problems with not using calibrated dates, such as correlating cultural events with environmental changes (see Rosenswig 2006a), Formative Mesoamerican scholars have traditionally reported their dates in this manner and I follow Clark and Cheetham's (in press; which updates Blake et al. 1995) definition of Soconusco ceramic phase limits. Calibrating these dates will not affect the relative sequence of events (which is all that is necessary for my purposes in this paper) and will shift all dates earlier by a century or two. So, for example, the beginning of the earliest ceramic Barra phase dates to cal. 1800 bce rather than the uncalibrated 1600 bce.

4 Another factor affecting the quantity of processing tools could be the use of hard versus soft kernel variants of maize. While possibly a confounding factor in interpreting the significance of ground stone data, sufficient botanical evidence does not yet exist with which to explore this problem systematically.

5 Well timed only in the sense that without this economic push the changes being studied in this paper would not have happened as they did. I do not intend a value judgement on the development of social stratification being a positive turn as it has likely led to more harm than good in the course of human history.