Ancient Civilizations of the
Americas
Lecture 1: Sources for the
reconstruction of American
Civilizations
Sources for the Reconstruction of Mesoamerican civilizations
1. Archaeology
Archaeologist – specialist in recovering information from the
archaeological record.
Archaeological record – artifacts, features, and sites abandoned
by past peoples occurring in the landscape of a region.
What are the institutions that support Mesoamerican
archaeologists?
- Universities and colleges with a Mesoamerican emphasis
- Government sponsored institutes: INAH Instituto Nacional de
Historia y Anthropologia
- Museums
Some common archaeological terms:
•Artifact: an object made or modified by a human.
•Feature: a concentration of associated artifacts within a
site.
•Monument: an isolated, large above-ground artifact or
structure.
•Site: a distinct spatial clustering of artifacts, features and
possibly structures, and organic remains. The boundaries of
a site can be somewhat arbitrary.
•Provenience: an artifact’s location in three-dimensions.
How do archaeologists determine the age of
something?
•Some classes of artifacts exhibit swift successive
stylistic changes; e.g. pottery.
•The timing of these changes can be established by
recognizing the patterns of succession in contexts with
chronological depth – these relationships allow
archaeologist to seriate the artifacts – to arrange in a
chronological sequence.
•Another seriation technique – frequency seriation..
• Carbon 14 (14C) – based on the known decay rate
of an unstable isotope of carbon. This technique
can only be applied to organic materials.
• A carbon date is a span of time, rather than a pinpoint date. The size of the span hinges on
fluctuations in the production of radiocarbon in
the atmosphere, the sample’s size, and the sample
type. This technique may not be as accurate as
diagnostic artifacts.
2. Anthropology
Anthropologist – a specialist who studies the behaviors of the people of a
living culture. Also called an ethnologist.
Ethnography – an examination of a culture written by an anthropologist.
• The pitfalls of ethnographic analogy.
• Examples of outstanding anthropological projects
• The Harvard Chiapas Project – established by Evon Vogt in 1959 and
continued into the 1980’s. It was one of the first multi-field projects, and
concentrated on the highland Tzotzil community of Zinacantan.
• Chan Kom, A Maya Village, Robert Redfield and Alfonso Villa Rojas,
1934 – classic study of a Mayan village in Quintana Roo.
• Peter Furst and Barbara Myerhoff’s studies of the Huichol 1966-1968.
Stemmed from an interest in the role played by shamanism and
hallucinogens in Pre-Columbian Mexican Art.
3. History
History – reconstruction of the past by specialists working from
written records.
•Sources: Writings of churchmen, archives on old court
cases, letters of and books by conquistadors.
•Examples of conquistador’s writings:
• 5 self-serving letters written by Hernán Cortes to
Charles V.
•Historia verdadera de la conquista de Nueva España
by Bernal Díaz del Castillo.
Examples of writing by Churchmen
Florintine Codex: Historia General de las Cosas de Nueva
España by Frey Bernardino de Sahagún. Primary source of
ethnographic information on the Aztecs.
Brevisima Relación de la Detrucion de las Indias by Bartolomé
de las Casas. De las Casas agitated for humane treatment of the
Indians, and for non-violent conversion.
Some churchmen were sympathetic to
Mesoamericans.
Ethnohistory – records created by indigenous peoples.
•Example: The Popol Vuh – A collection of religious,
mythological and historical documents written after the
conquest by a Quiché nobleman.
Books written by
Mesoamericans
on bark,
parchment, or
paper are called
codices (sing.
codex).
•Ethnohistorical sources come under the purview of
ethnohistorians, like Ralph L Roys. A work of his on colonial
Yucatan that is still heavily cited is The Indian Background of
Colonial Yucatan (1943).
Pre-conquest texts
written in indigenous
scripts are deciphered
by epigraphers.
Epigraphy is the
deciphering of ancient
inscriptions.
4. Linguistics
Terms:
Language – words, their pronunciation and the method of
combining them as understood by the members of a community. It
is not intelligible to speakers of another language.
Dialect – a regional variety of a language, intelligible to speakers
of other dialects of the parent language.
Language family – a grouping by linguists of languages that are
derived from an extinct parent language, and are therefore
historically and structurally related.
Proto-language – the extinct ancestor of a language family
reconstructed by historical linguists. Usually designated by a*, as
in *Indo-European.
80 indigenous languages
are currently spoken in
Mesoamerica.
They are grouped in the
following families.
Some languages, e.g.
Tarascan, are language
isolates. They are not
related to any other
language.
•The geographical distribution of languages, and their
relationships to each other provide clues as to past population
movements. Other clues may be provided by words for species
of plants and animals.
Glottochronology – There is a close analogy between the
way languages and DNA change through time. It occurs
gradually with the loss and gain of vocabulary. Therefore, it is
held that the number of vocabulary differences between related
languages is directly proportional to the amount of time that has
transpired since they became differentiated from a common
protolanguage.