| Summary: |
In the early 1960s Richard MacNeish designed a groundbreaking
regional archaeological study focused on Mexico’s Tehuacán Valley.
Enlisting the collaboration of specialists in paleobotany, zoology,
geology, geography, hydrology, lithic technology, ethnography, and
ethnohistory, MacNeish and his colleagues applied the results of
their Tehuacán field and laboratory research to a processual-ecological
model through which they fashioned a wide-ranging reconstruction
of sociocultural evolution in that arid highland valley. Beginning
with the arrival of nomadic hunter-gatherers, their story continued
through the development of agriculture, settled village life, and
increasing sociopolitical complexity, right up to the time of the sixteenth-
century Spanish conquest of indigenous Mexico. The enduring
legacy of MacNeish’s Tehuacán project lies not only in its compelling
demonstration of the value of interdisciplinary research but
as an example of the importance of studies in hinterland regions at a
time when much archaeological attention was focused on the more
spectacular centers of high pre-Columbian civilization.
A half century later, Art Joyce and his colleagues continue in
that interdisciplinary tradition with their study Polity and Ecology
in Formative Period Coastal Oaxaca. Building upon the region’s earliest
archaeological research by Donald Brockington, to whom this
volume is dedicated, Joyce has gathered a group of researchers to employ their diverse expertise toward a comprehensive reconstruction of
Formative period archaeological and paleoecological developments in this
underappreciated Pacific coastal region of Mesoamerica.
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