David Carballo on Archaeology and Mesoamerica - The Atlantic - 0 views
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David Carballo: At its most ambitious, archaeology can cover the totality of the human story, from our evolution as a species to today, since the focus is on material culture rather than on texts—though we typically examine both in tandem. By material culture I mean the places we inhabit (“sites”) and the stuff we use (“artifacts”). Much of our history as a species has no written records and can only be accessed through material remains like sites and artifacts, whereas for other places and times we may have texts, but they represent the official transcripts of the rich and powerful. In those cases, archaeology can provide a voice to the “99 percent” who were non-elites yet played their part in shaping history.
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Lacking large domesticated animals, Mesoamerican civilizations developed other solutions to common concerns. Rather than extensive, plowed-field systems, Mesoamericans intensified agriculture in various ways. The ingenious system of lakeshore fields called chinampas is especially noteworthy, as they permitted multiple crop harvests per year and led to a population boom in the Aztec period.
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Lacking pack animals, Mesoamericans moved commodities using human porters over land and using canoes over water. For maximizing the circulation of goods in this environment, it made economic sense for populations to nucleate and develop brisk marketplace exchange, daily in larger cities and on a rotating schedule in more rural areas. The twin-city capital of the Aztec empire, Tenochtitlan-Tlatelolco, was the largest of these, and likely larger than any city in Europe at the time except for Paris.
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As a result, and in contrast to their earlier colonization of the Caribbean, the Spanish encountered highly urbanized civilizations in Mesoamerica and continually equated them with those of the Islamic and Greco-Roman Mediterranean.
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Carballo: Just like historical texts can be biased to the rich and powerful, early archaeologists also prioritized excavating the tombs, palaces, and monuments in the centers of ruined cities, which of course give us a similar top-down bias to ancient societies.
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For the Aztecs, the main point of most war was to take prisoners in battle to be sacrificed to the gods back at a temple, so many of the casualties on the battlefield were moved to that ritual-religious stage. Although intimidating to the conquistadors, indigenous armies fought with quickly dulled obsidian weapons. Cities were usually not fortified, and so they were vulnerable to European-style sieges that hadn’t been part of Mesoamerican warfare until the Aztec-Spanish war.
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Although war was waged towards political ends, it contained highly ritualized elements common to pre-state warfare across the globe, including norms regarding where to kill and how to treat dead bodies. As in many other early states, warfare was one of best ways to rise in socioeconomic status in Aztec society, and warriors were credited not for kills on the battlefield but by taking captives to sacrifice to the gods, so shock troops fought to maim and capture rather than “take no prisoners.” As always, technology and ideology were interwoven.
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Mesoamericans had never experienced the brand of direct-control, territorial imperialism that the Spaniards and other European powers brought across the Atlantic. They were accustomed to hegemonic empires. They expected to pay some tax or tribute but to remain autonomous
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Unlike the Aztec empire, the Spanish system was absolutist in its intolerance for any other faiths. It was not simply a case of “meet the new boss, same as the old boss.” And though the racial classifications of New Spain were more of a gradated spectrum than in the early U.S., with its one-drop rule, it was highly racialized by skin color and generally the darker or more culturally indigenous (in language, attire) one was, the lower in the colonial status hierarchy.