Archaeology

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Archaeology

The European discovery of the existence of the American continents begun by the voyages of Christopher Columbus in the 1490s set up the conditions for a massively disruptive collision between two very different worlds of cultural and technological development. Despite achievements ranging from huge cities to the invention of unique writing and recording systems, the civilizations of Mexico and Central and South America were unable to withstand the combined impacts of more advanced technology and unfamiliar diseases or to mount effective military resistance to occupation and colonization.

The presence of ruins of many types posed questions almost immediately as to where the peoples of these lands had originated, how they had adapted to a huge variety of challenging environmental conditions, and what their histories had been. Answers have been sought through archaeological investigations ranging from surveys to long-term excavation and conservation projects. Over four centuries, a certain mystique has attached to the ancient Americas in the public mind, creating a global readership receptive to news of ongoing fieldwork and discoveries revealing the complexities of the hemisphere's past.

THE IDEA OF ARCHAEOLOGY IN LATIN AMERICA

When the conquistadores encountered the high cultures of the region, societies whose ancestry lay in a progression of invention and adaptation to environments as diverse as the jungles of Guatemala, the altiplano of Peru, and the Valley of Mexico, their mystification gave rise to the idea of archaeology in Latin America. The clash of cultures in the early sixteenth century was accompanied by the almost total destruction of written native histories and chronicles as well as the deaths of oral historians as a result of introduced diseases. Thus no more than fragmentary answers can be found to questions as to the origins and growth of the native American civilizations. Much of the surviving information comes from ethnographic accounts, compiled by friars such as Bernardino de Sahagún, and from histories written by eyewitnesses such as Bernal Díaz del Castillo and by descendants of the native ruling classes who had been educated in reading hieroglyphic writing systems and the cycles of the calendar, such as Pedro de Cieza de León, known as "El Inca."

Advocates for the treatment of the conquered peoples as human beings, such as Bartolomé de Las Casas, also wrote histories. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries speculation on the age and possible relationships of the New World to the recorded and mythological pasts of the Old ranged from the Lost Tribes of Israel to survivors of Atlantis. Yet even at this time scholars of Latin America had begun to attempt an objective assessment of their past, excavating at major sites such as Teotihuacán and beginning to gather the surviving manuscripts and artifacts that would form the core of the first national museum collections in Peru and Mexico during the 1820s.

Latin American archaeology in the modern scientific sense had its beginnings in the 1840s, when the findings of the American John Lloyd Stephens and the British Frederick Catherwood exploded into print as Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan (1841) and Incidents of Travel in Yucatan (1843), discussing and illustrating the ancient cities of Uxmal, Copan, and Palenque. The discovery of the ruins of Tikal in 1848 spurred further investigations by a highly varied cadre of outsiders, ranging from the American diplomat Ephraim Squier's visits to the major sites of Peru and Bolivia in the 1860s to photographic documentation produced by the French archaeologist Désiré Charnay (1828–1915). In the later nineteenth century the archaeological heritage of each nation began to be recognized as worth protecting. For example, the Mexican congress in 1880 passed an act to stop Charnay from exporting the results of his excavations. By the 1890s excavations were under way across Latin America, if not always under well-controlled conditions. Pottery types and stratigraphy were the first analytic tools used to attempt to construct an accurate picture of cultural succession, as in the work of the German archaeologist Max Uhle (1856–1944) on the Nasca and Moche areas of the Peruvian coast and his model of a sequence of six cultures progressing from fishermen to the fully developed Inca civilization.

The new methodology was adopted by Latin American archaeologists first in Argentina and later in Mexico, where the establishment of the Escuela Internacional de Arqueología y Etnología on January 20, 1911, laid the foundation for training future generations of excavators, among them Alfonso Caso. Stratigraphy, however, yielded only very broad divisions of cultural development, overlooking or minimizing individual local or regional phases. In 1917 Manuel Gamio's excavations beneath the lava beds of the Pedregal at the site of Cuicuilco revealed the first of what would come to be known as the Formative era cultures in the Valley of Mexico. Foreign involvement in the region continued for four decades, beginning in 1914 under the auspices of the Carnegie Institution of Washington, D.C, led by the Mayanist scholar Sylvanus G. Morley (1883–1948), with attention centered on the complex world of Mesoamerica's interacting civilizations.

MESOAMERICA

Mesoamerican research in the 1920s and 1930s addressed the questions of deciphering the glyphic writing systems and their origin and determining the developmental sequence of the interwoven civilizations in the highlands and tropical forests. Excavations at sites as varied as Zacatenco in the Valley of Mexico, the Mayan sites of Uaxactún and Kaminaljuyú, and the Zapotec ceremonial center of Monte Albán yielded data supporting general agreement on common features of regional cultural evolution. The question of the ancestral Olmec and their relationship to Mayan prehistory was partially resolved with the 1938 discovery of a stela at Tres Zapotes bearing a date earlier than any then known at a Maya site. Both the American archaeologist Matthew Stirling (1896–1975) and his Mexican colleague Miguel Covarrubias endorsed the concept of an Olmec core region in Veracruz and Tabasco preceding the known Formative phase of Maya culture. Subsequent radiocarbon testing of specimens from San Lorenzo and La Venta verified this model, although debate continues on the exact relationship of the two civilizations.

By the 1950s the predominance of North Americans as field investigators had begun to shift to joint projects with their Latin American host nation counterparts, allowing for increased funding. Their ambitious projects were often aimed at the stabilization and reconstruction of major sites with a view toward making them tourist destinations. Although such efforts had long-term preservation value, fewer resources were consequently available for more focused research on topics relating to more abstract cultural features, such as vanished political systems or economic structures. Attitudes toward foreign involvement in excavations (whether as administrators or field workers) began to shift during the 1960s to a more nationally oriented mindset. The discovery of the ruins of the Templo Mayor in Mexico City in 1978 as part of the construction of a mass transit system brought this disparity to public attention.

The decipherment of the Mayan glyphic writing system was a major project from the 1950s through the 1980s, with various approaches taken. The idea of Mayan society as led by priests whose city centers were unoccupied except at specific seasons (popularized by Morley and Eric Thompson) ignored the many depictions of warfare on both stelae and in the spectacular murals of Bonampak, known since 1946. The first major breakthrough in Mayan hieroglyphic linguistics was made in 1952, when the Russian scholar Yuri Knorozov (1922–1999) demonstrated that the glyphs were a mixture of phonetic as well as pictographic characters, followed in 1958 with the identification of name glyphs for specific sites. The discovery of a royal tomb at Palenque in 1959 by the Mexican archaeologist Alberto Ruiz further challenged the picture of Mayan society by offering instead an image of city-states led by kings engaged in dynastic wars. A sequence of rulers based on the glyphic signatures was first worked out in 1960 by the Russian-American Mayanist scholar Tatiana Proskouriakoff (1909–1985) for the Guatemalan site of Piedras Negras, followed by 1964 for similar king lists for Quirigua and Yaxchilán. The founding of the Corpus of Maya Hieroglyphic Writing project in 1967 laid the groundwork for further unifying the investigation of written Maya. The next three decades saw an extension of decipherment to retrieve details of individual reigns and an expansion of settlement, economic, and agricultural land use studies, a development that revised sharply upward the potential populations of centers such as Tikal into the tens of thousands and forced a reevaluation of Preclassic era accomplishments. The increase in textual data also allowed for the study of sociopolitical structures and the roles played by social elites and ideologies in the shaping of Mesoamerican cultures. An unusual new focus of field survey and excavation emerged in the late 1980s centering on the use of caves as centers of ritual activity and portals to the underworld. The 1976 discovery of the settlement of Cerén in El Salvador preserved under volcanic ash allowed for a detailed reconstruction of daily life and represents the expansion of archaeological work into areas outside the traditional core regions. In May 1993 the Declaration of Copán was signed by the governments of the five nations with significant Maya archaeological sites, committing resources to ecological conservation and the management of cultural resources.

The currently employed chronology of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica is as follows:

2000–900 bce: Early Formative/Preclassic
900–400 bce: Middle Formative/Preclassic
400 bce–200 ce: Late Formative/Preclassic
250–900: Classic
900–1200: Early Postclassic
1200–1519: Late Postclassic

SOUTH AMERICA

The principal regions of archaeological investigation and interest in South America prior to the twentieth century were Peru and adjacent areas of Bolivia, Ecuador, and Chile, which had been part of the Inca empire until its conquest by Francisco Pizarro in the 1530s. The massive ruins of Inca and pre-Inca architecture (whether freestanding such as the fortress of Sacsahuaman and Tiwanaku's Gateway of the Sun, or integrated into colonial Spanish buildings, the fate of Cuzco's Temple of the Sun) maintained a sense of the past as a visible presence for the Andean peoples in a fashion similar to the pyramids of Teotihuacán in Mexico. Hiram Bingham's 1911 discovery of the ruins of Machu Picchu in the Urubamba Valley was followed after World War I by excavations focused on determining the origins of Andean culture and showing that New World high civilization had its beginning in Peru rather than in Mexico. Julio Tello advanced the theory of a tropical forest culture moving into the mountains and later to the coast, based on his fieldwork at Chavín de Huántar, while his colleague Rafael Larco Hoyle saw Peruvian civilization arising on the coast and moving into the highlands, an argument rooted in work at the north coastal site of Cupisnique.

Beginning in the 1920s, research goals shifted from defining origins to establishing accurate cultural sequences for the central Andes through concentrated excavations at major sites of occupation. This concept was expanded in 1946 with the Viru Valley Project, which used one manageable, well-defined area as a model of the interplay of land use and culture, and yielded the most detailed sequence yet known anywhere in the Andes. Similar work continued in both the highlands and on the coast, centering attention on the origins and growth of public structures and regional cultural development. Emilio Estrada's 1956 discovery of the coastal site of Valdivia subsequently yielded pottery dating to 3000 bce, pushing back the dating of ceramics in Peru by a millennium. The 1960s saw major Peruvian campaigns by Japanese archaeologists testing the viability of Julio Tello's theory of the Chavín past, and the adoption by Peru's own archaeologists of a focus on ethnobotany, manifested in the international Ayacucho Archaeological-Botanical Project. The University of San Marcos renewed work at Chavín de Huántar, while regional work shifted emphasis to tracing stylistic variations over time (an example being the chronological sequence for the Ica Valley) and combining field data with ethnohistorical sources for Cuzco and the Incan province of Huánuco. The 1970s saw a renewal of large-scale investigations at sites as varied as Huari in the Central Highlands and the coastal metropolis of Chan Chan, exploring the development of urbanism and continuing the regional focus with work in the Moche Valley.

Debate over the origins of the Chavín tradition was augmented by findings documenting the existence of a tradition of monumental architecture on the coast and the verification of a highland ceremonial complex, both predating the appearance of ceramics. International public attention focused on Peruvian archaeology, with the finding of a lavish Moche burial at the coastal site of Sipán in 1987, and the almost perfectly preserved frozen body of a young woman at the peak of Mount Ampato in 1995. The widely scattered collections of khipu, the knotted cords used as recording systems by the Inca, began to be united and analyzed by computer according to physical features and components in the Khipu Database Project in 1996, incorporating then-recent finds from the northern Peruvian site of Chachapoyas.

The picture of Peru as the early center of cultural development for the continent shifted as further fieldwork was carried out in adjacent regions. Coastal cultures from Ecuador to Chile were understood to serve as sources for maritime materials traded from sites such as Valdivia into the highlands; further insight into the roles of the cultures of northwest South America and the Amazon basin began to develop. The 1961 discovery in northern Colombia of Puerto Hormiga (with ceramics of the same age as those on the Peruvian coast) was followed by similar work in lowland Ecuador and Donald Lathrap's research on the Ucayali River in the upper Amazon Basin. Lathrap advanced the idea that the richly varied Amazon environment had been capable of supporting complex societies, regarding the early ceramic sites outside Peru as supporting Tello's idea of an ancient tropical culture ancestral to much later development.

Away from the more intensively worked areas of the Andes and the western coast, archaeology developed along other lines. The vast landscape of Brazil, with field survey data organized by state, posed special problems for fieldwork because of a climate inimical to the preservation of artifacts made of materials other than stone, pottery, or shell. An early classification offered in 1937 by the Argentine archaeologist Antonio Serrano split the shell middens (known locally as sambaquis) into two groups by associated fauna, and Joao Angyone Costa's Introducao a arqueologia brasileira appeared in 1934 and was updated in 1938, when Anibal Mattos's Prehistoria brasileira was published. The archaeology of the Amazon basin before the end of the 1940s was based primarily on analysis of museum collections from Marajo and Santarem, a situation altered by the fieldwork of Betty Meggers at a group of sites in the mouth of the Amazon in 1948. The next thirty years witnessed the transformation of Brazilian archaeology from hobby to science, the revival and expansion of professional associations and opportunities for training, and the inauguration of long-term projects such as the five-year Programa Nacional de Pesquisas Arquelogicas (a partnership of the Smithsonian Institution and the Conselho Nacional de Pesquisas). This project surveyed the Atlantic coast of Brazil from the Amazon delta to the Uruguayan border, an effort yielding more than fifteen hundred sites ranging in age from pre-ceramic to colonial in date. The foundation of the Instituto de Arqueologia Brasileira by Ondemar Dias in 1961 provided for popular education and involvement in field excavations and laid the groundwork for the formation of the Sociedade de Arqueologia Brasileira in 1980.

South American archaeological chronology is as follows:

?–2500 bce: Preceramic
2500–1800 bce: Late Preceramic
1800–900 bce: Initial Period
900 bce–1 ce: Early Horizon (Chavín)
1–600 ce: Early Intermediate
600–1000: Middle Horizon
1000–1476: Late Intermediate
1476–1532: Late Horizon (Inca)

Somewhat overshadowed by the spectacular nature of the ruins of pre-Columbian civilizations, archaeology of historical period sites had nevertheless begun to emerge as a distinct area of research in South America during the later 1960s, particularly in Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay, although investigations of sites such as the eighteenth-century hostel at Pajatambo had begun in Peru by the 1970s. The types of sites examined ranged from Carlos Magono Guimaraes's work on maroon settlements in Minas Gerais, Kern's Jesuit Missions studies in southern Brazil (unique, as the sites were considered both Guarani and European communities), and Daniel Schávelzon's work on the past of Buenos Aires.

The Caribbean

Caribbean archaeology has likewise focused fieldwork on a mixture of historic period sites (often associated with some aspect of slavery) and investigations on the indigenous populations of the islands and their legacies since the initial settlement around 3100 bce. The foundation of the International Association for Caribbean Archaeology in 1961 created a professional forum for discussion on needed research priorities and current excavations with its conferences.

ARCHAELOGICAL QUESTIONS: THE 1990S

Major questions for Latin American archaeologists during the 1990s addressed developments occurring over a substantial portion of the continent, such as the domestication of the llama and alpaca in the Andes, the development and symbolic uses of metallurgy and the artifacts it produced, a reevaluation of the prehistory of the Amazon basin, and consideration of the unique processes that resulted in Latin American urbanism in cities as varied as Cuzco, Mayapan, and Tikal. Research in Brazil turned its attention to the antiquity of human presence in South America, the interplay of ecology and the prehistoric cultures of Brazil, and a return to the study of rock art, long a uniquely successful focus of fieldwork, publication, and classification within the country's scientific establishment. An ongoing regional problem for Latin American archaeology in general is the dissemination of theoretical proposals and important discoveries on the prehistory of the hemisphere outside the network of local or regional scientific publications and conferences; many of the models for the population of the Americas are dominated by arguments put forward by the North American archaeological community that either minimize Latin American work or do not integrate its results into their framework at all. In the tradition begun by Ignacio Bernal, the history of regional archaeology has continued to be written in works such as Mario Orellana Rodríguez's Historia de la arqueologia en Chile, 1842–1990 (1996) and Rafael Cobos's Sintesis de la arqueologia de El Salvador, 1850–1991 (1994), allowing significant research to receive the recognition it deserves. Efforts continue at the national and international levels to stem the trade in looted artifacts from Latin American sites. However, this effort collides with economic realities of the past, as resources are commonly exploited by "subsistence digging," a practice likely to continue until underlying factors of poverty and development are addressed.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bernal, Ignacio. Historia de la arqueología en México. México: Editorial Porrúa, 1979.

Brady, James Edward, and Keith M. Prufer, eds. In the Maw of the Earth Monster: Mesoamerican Ritual Cave Use. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005.

Burger, Richard L. "An Overview of Peruvian Archaeology (1976–1986)." Annual Review of Anthropology 18 (1989): 37-69.

Cobos, Rafael. Síntesis de la arqueología de El Salvador, 1850–1991. San Salvador: Dirección General de Publicaciones e Impresos, 1994.

Farnsworth, Paul, ed. Island Lives: Historical Archaeologies of the Caribbean. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2001.

Fash, William L. "Changing Perspectives on Maya Civilization." Annual Review of Anthropology 23 (1994): 181-208.

Funari, Pedro Paulo A. "Archaeology, History, and Historical Archaeology in South America." International Journal of Historical Archaeology 1, no. 3 (1997): 189-206.

Haviser, Jay B., ed. African Sites Archaeology in the Caribbean. Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener Publishers, 1999.

King, Jaime Litvak. "Mesoamerica: Events and Processes, the Last Fifty Years." American Antiquity 50, no. 2 (1985): 374-382.

Matsuda, D. "The Ethics of Archaeology, Subsistence Digging, and Artifact Looting in Latin America: Point Muted Counterpoint." International Journal of Cultural Property 7, no. 1 (1998): 87-97.

Orellana Rodríguez, Mario. Historia de la arqueología en Chile, 1842–1990. Santiago, Chile: Bravo y Allende Editores, 1996.

Politis, Gustavo G., and Benjamin Alberti, eds. Archaeology in Latin America. London and New York: Routledge, 1999.

Schávelzon, Daniel. The Historical Archaeology of Buenos Aires: A City at the End of the World, trans. Alex Lomonaco. New York: Kluwer, 1999.

Scheinsohn, Vivian. "Hunter-Gatherer Archaeology in South America." Annual Review of Anthropology 32 (2003): 339-361.

Stahl, Peter W., ed. Archaeology in the Lowland American Tropics: Current Analytical Methods and Recent Applications. Cambridge, U.K., and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

Stanish, Charles. "The Origin of State Societies in South America." Annual Review of Anthropology 30 (2001): 41-64.

Robert B. Ridinger

Encyclopedia of Latin American History and Culture