Paso de la Amada, an archaeological site in the Soconusco region of the Pacific coast of Mexico, was among the earliest sedentary, ceramic-using villages of Mesoamerica. With an occupation that extended across 140 ha in 1600 BC, it was also one of the largest communities of its era. First settled around 1900 BC, the site was abandoned 600 years later during what appears to have been a period of local political turmoil. The decline of Paso de la Amada corresponded with a rupture in local traditions of material culture and local adoption of the Early Olmec style. Stylistically, the material culture of Paso de la Amada corresponds predominantly to the pre-Olmec Mokaya tradition.

Excavations at the site have revealed significant earthen constructions from as early as 1700 BC. Those include the earliest known Mesoamerican ball court and traces of a series of high-status residences. This monograph reports on large-scale excavations in Mounds 1, 12, and 32, as well as soundings in other locations. The volume covers all aspects of excavations and artifacts and includes three lengthy interpretive chapters dealing with the main research questions, which concern subsistence, social inequality, and the organizational history of the site.

The Soconusco region, a narrow strip of the Pacific coast of Mexico and Guatemala, is the location of some of the earliest pottery-using villages of ancient Mesoamerica. Mobile early inhabitants of the area harvested marsh clams in the estuaries, leaving behind vast mounds of shell. With the introduction of pottery and the establishment of permanent villages (from 1900 B.C.), use of the resource-rich estuary changed. The archaeological manifestation of that new estuary adaptation is a dramatic pattern of inter-site variability in pottery vessel forms. Vessels at sites within the estuary were about seventy percent neckless jars -- "tecomates" -- while vessels at contemporaneous sites a few kilometers inland were seventy percent open dishes. The pattern is well-known, but the the settlement arrangements or subsistence practices that produced it have remained unclear. Archaeological investigations at El Varal, a special-purpose estuary site of the later Early Formative (1250-1000 B.C.) expand possibilities for an anthropological understanding of the archaeological patterns. The goal of this volume is to describe excavations and finds at the site and to propose, based on a variety of analyses, a new understanding of Early Formative assemblage variability.

Series: Monographs 65

Ethnographic accounts of the precontact Yurok of Northwest California serve as a test case for evaluating Jane Collier's (1988) recent models of the constitution of inequality in kin-based societies. This analysis does not support Collier's basic thesis that the nature of the relationship between husbands and their wives' kin determines the degree of social inequality. Nor does it support her contention that each of three contrastive models represents a particular type of society, since two of her three models apply to the Yurok case. However, Collier's models, treated as organizational themes rather than societal types, represent useful analytical tools for understanding the bases of inequality in Yurok society. In addition to the social structural relations explored by Collier, particular material circumstances and cosmological tenets established the contexts in which people negotiated the distribution of power, privilege, and prestige.

In seeking to understand variation and change in past human societies, archaeologists have shown that complex societies develop in a variety of cultural and ecological contexts. Reconstructions of emergent complexity throughout the New World reveal that past peoples constructed and maintained the type of landscapes ideal for supporting larger, more sedentary populations. An excellent case study of built landscapes is the prehistoric chiefdoms of lower Central America, a region bordered to the north by present-day El Salvador and Honduras and to the south by Colombia. By AD 200, prehistoric settlements located in both agriculturally productive and marginal areas became part of a network of paramount chiefdoms spanning lower Central America. These chiefdoms experienced population growth and political expansion up until sixteenth-century European colonization.

In this study, the relationship between environmental conditions and sociopolitical complexity is addressed through examination of plant and animal remains excavated from midden contexts at Sitio Drago (AD 800 to 1900), a Late Ceramic phase village site located on a Caribbean island in western Panama. The analyzed macrobotanical and faunal remains are derived from five excavation units representing human occupations spanning the Pre-Biscuitware (AD 800 to 1200), Biscuitware (AD 1200 to 1450), and Historic (AD 1600 to 1900) Phases. This project is the first integrative analysis of plant and animal remains from western Panama and provides new datasets valuable for regional and global comparisons.

Analyses of plant and animal taxa present in the assemblages suggest that Late Ceramic people at Sitio Drago used continual investments in the landscape to overcome the island’s thin, acidic soils. Differences in ubiquity values, densities, and standard counts confirm that villagers intensified production of tree fruits and maize in fields near residential structures. These managed plant foods appear to have become more important in the overall diet during a phase of population growth, while diversity of plant and animal resources declined. During the same time, as local fisheries are overexploited and depleted, people focused more on trapping and hunting terrestrial animals that are attracted to cleared-edge forest and orchards. This reconstruction of subsistence activities at Sitio Drago provides an example of how people living in areas less agriculturally productive and lacking key material resources can develop a resilient subsistence economy capable of supporting complex society without degrading the environment.

This dissertation builds foundations for documenting the material and artistic history of micro-locales in the Jammu region of the Western Himalayas. This geographical zone has held immense research potential, yet archaeological sites have remained under-explored. The dissertation presents my archaeological fieldwork-based survey, mapping and photo-documentation of pre-modern local landscapes in the hill tracts of Jammu, known as “Ghora-Galis” or horse passes. These distinctive landscapes consist of scattered stone media, including complex water fountain structures, three-dimensional horse-warrior sculptures, pillar bases and reliefs - each displaying intricate narrative art and stone craftsmanship. In the dearth of historical research in the region and the absence of any writing or inscriptional evidence associated with the finds, little is known about the communities who created them.

The dissertation presents my documentation and mapping across six Ghora-Gali sites with the conscious clustering of similar stone features. The artistic peculiarity of these finds makes them unique in the material-cultural history of South Asia. The only prior study conducted at the sites was by a Russian team of archaeologists led by Polosmak (2018), who suggested Central Asian connections to the finds. In contrast, this dissertation presents my alternative hypothesis of a Medieval timeline that connects the Jammu region to its southern neighbors such as Chamba, Kangra and Kullu. On the basis of historical and cultural connections, particularly with Chamba’s inscribed water fountains (dated between 10th-12th centuries C.E.), I propose a tentative 7th -15th century C.E. chronology of the finds.

Examining the robust visual archive collected, the dissertation builds an interdisciplinary methodology to address chronological uncertainties of the finds. I study archaeological landscape distribution patterns, Medieval textual sources, art-historical iconographic elements, and gather insights from local communities. Applying this approach to two primary features of the Ghora-Gali landscapes, water fountains and horse-warrior sculptures, I identify traces of a broader Medieval commemorative tradition associated with the cult of the water. Highlighting the ideological and cultural significance of these finds at the time of their creation, I also explore how such pre-modern landscapes continue to be engaged with by local communities in the present day, preserving them and making new meanings.

Bird remains from archaeological sites have the potential to inform research on many aspects of prehistoric life. In Mesoamerica, they were a food source, as well as a source of feathers and bone. But they were also components of ritual performance, dedicatory offerings, subjects of iconographic representation, characters in myth, and even deities. Their significance is demonstrated ethnographically, ethnohistorically, and archaeologically. This thesis addresses the role of birds at an Early Formative period ceremonial center on the Pacific coast of Chiapas, Mexico. The avian faunal assemblage from the site of Paso de la Amada was analyzed in order to understand how the exploitation and use of birds articulated with the establishment of hereditary inequality at Paso de la Amada and its emergence as a ceremonial center. Results indicate that birds were exploited as a food source as well as for their feathers and bone, and that they played a particularly strong role in ritual performance.

In the North American Southwest, the long-term centrality of birds to Pueblo ceremonial life has been demonstrated both ethnographically and archaeologically. Whole birds, their parts, and their feathers have been frequent participants in or components of ritual practice. Despite the wide acceptance that Chaco Canyon was a central location for ceremony and ritual in the northern Southwest during the Pueblo II period, few details of the nature of ritual practice have been reconstructed. This dissertation explores the use and significance of birds in Chaco in order to reconstruct details of ceremonial life during the canyon’s major occupation (800-1150 CE). Six museum collections were examined to produce a dataset that presents avifaunal remains from Chaco Canyon excavated over the last 130 years. This research demonstrates that, while birds may have been occasional contributions to diet, and while their bones were used to manufacture certain bone ornaments and implements, their primary importance in Chaco Canyon was in ceremonial life. Birds were active and frequent participants in ritual practice, used widely across the canyon. Many local and several exotic types of birds were important to the inhabitants of Chaco Canyon; foremost among these were eagles, hawks, macaws, and turkeys. The distribution of these birds between different sites, however, hints at the presence of social hierarchy in the canyon, and that differentiation may have been based in ritual authority and differential access to certain ceremonial resources. Results not only shed light on the value of birds to the prehispanic occupants of Chaco Canyon and on the nature of Chacoan ritual, but also demonstrate the importance of (re)examining collections from historic excavations, and the value of using legacy and archival data to enhance provenience and contextual information in studies of Chaco’s material culture.