Gary Feinman and Juan Carlos Moreno García wrote:
The Economic Basis: Agriculture, Sedentary Life and Productive Complexity
Agriculture and Communities in Mesoamerica:
In prehispanic Mesoamerica, the temporal coincidence between the transition to sedentary life and the beginnings of plant domestication was less clear than it was in ancient Egypt or Mesopotamia. Maize (Zea mays) is the key staple crop in Mesoamerica today, and for most of this cultural region, it was the main food source later in the prehispanic era. The first steps toward maize domestication from the wild teosinte plant occurred before 6000 BC in Central Mexico. Teosinte, which does not have a cob, likely was first exploited for its stalk, which was a source of a sugary liquid, and/or its seeds that, much like maize kernels, can be popped and eaten. Nevertheless, it was not until several millennia after the earliest maize, marked by the recovery of cobs in the archaeological record, that we see the first prehispanic Mesoamerican sedentary communities or villages.
Wild teosinte and early maize seemingly were spread broadly, at an early date, across Mesoamerica’s diverse landscape. The addition of maize to cultural niches across the Mesoamerican world, even at a time when populations were largely mobile, may have contributed to the transition to sedentary life that occurred widely and seemingly rapidly across this macroregion between 2000 and 1000 BC. In highland valleys and coastal lowlands, after 2000 BC, ceramics, semipermanent dwellings and other indications of less mobility are evidenced. The dating of these archaeological indicators for sedentary ways of life are timed consistently, within less than a millennium, across the entire macroregion. Although economically underpinned in part by domesticates in many Mesoamerican regions, the transition to sedentism (and hence the onset of the Formative period) was not purely a subsistence-driven process, since neither the dietary reliance on cultigens nor farming practices by which they were produced were equivalent across regions. Furthermore, if this was merely an outgrowth of local population-resource calculations, why was the timing so consistent across such highly diverse geographic settings? A central tenet then is that this transition, defined by a marked increase in the longevity of settlements and associated landscape investments, was a social process to an important extent.
In prehispanic Mesoamerica, the socioeconomic processes associated with the growth in community size and duration were negotiated in different ways through diverse relations and networks. As in ancient Egypt, some communities and settlement networks were dominated by top-down processes, focused on powerful leaders, who personalized their power and operated through transactional networks of kin and allies. Soon after the beginnings of sedentary life, such formations were evidenced in the Gulf Coast, where large stone portrait heads of the powerful stood in central communities. In other cases, leadership was more faceless, collective and operated with fewer elite trappings both in life or death.
Nevertheless, across the Mesoamerican world at this time, central places, larger than surrounding settlements, emerged coincident with or shortly following the advent of sedentary life. These communities interconnected people across regions, and even between regions, through long-distance networks, yet the modes of connectivity were not always the same.
Maize was a key subsistence resource for the people in early sedentary communities across Mesoamerica at this time, albeit to different extents. Beans, squash, avocados, tomatoes and cacao were other key cultigens. In stark contrast to Eurasia and Africa, domesticated animals had a far lesser role. When Mesoamericans first settled in villages, their only domesticated animal was the dog. Turkeys, a second key Mesoamerican domesticate, only went through this process centuries later. Needless to say, with only those tamed species, beasts of burden did not figure heavily in the prehispanic Mesoamerican world.
The diversity of the climate, landscapes and natural vegetation across Mesoamerica did provide opportunities for a wide array of farming and subsistence practices. Xerophytic plants (such as cacti and other succulents), well adapted to conditions with limited water, were a staple in more arid regions. Economic interdependencies between people who relied on these plants, such as maguey (a source of food, fiber and alcohol) and nopal (a resource for food, which also supported the insect), and communities of maize farmers in certain ways mirrored the Old World relations and economic symbioses between farmers and herders. In lowland regions, Mesoamerican farmers employed mostly extensive horticultural farming techniques that mimicked the environmental diversity of heavily forested regions. But, in certain contexts, more intensive systems of raised fields were constructed. Highland farmers developed an array of water control technologies, intended to supplement rainfall, which often was undependable and temporally and spatially fluctuating. In mountainous and hilly areas, terracing systems were often critical. From early in the history of Mesoamerican farming communities, most agricultural technologies were implemented from the bottom-up and did not necessitate governmental investments or management. Later in the prehispanic sequence, practices, such as the construction of large canals and other means of water control that required more top-down input, were built in certain regions, such as the later Aztec-era water management of the lake system in Central Mexico.
Although early maize, with its small cobs, had low productivity, the plant was highly susceptible to selective pressures, which facilitated adaptation to an array of environmental conditions over time. Selection for larger cob sizes also led to a more productive plant, which had the potential to feed large dense cities and regional populations, which arose in many areas relatively quickly following the formation of villages. Perhaps, in part due to the diverse and, in many ways, unpredictable environmental conditions, exchange and economic interdependence were a key aspect of the prehispanic Mesoamerican economy. When the Spanish arrived in Mexico during the sixteenth century, they were transfixed by the scale of prehispanic markets as well as the diversity of goods exchanged in them. They compared them favorably with the markets that they knew in the Mediterranean world, the hub of European commerce at that time. Marketplace exchange and regional market systems were too elaborate to have been new institutions without precedent, and all indications point to their long history in this region and to their centrality for understanding the prehispanic Mesoamerican economy.
Grounded in, but not determined by, environmental diversity and climatic fluctuations (daily, seasonally, annually) and reliant on multiscalar networks and connectivities … the Mesoamerican world was characterized by significant variance in settlement patterns, population and governance across space and time. Most central places and polities were relatively fragile, although notable exceptions did exist, such as Monte Albán, which dominated its region, the Valley of Oaxaca, for more than a millennium. It also is important to point out that, although Mesoamerica often was economically interconnected to different degrees and through distinct modes, it was never politically unified. Late in the prehispanic era, the Aztec politically dominated a significant section of Mesoamerica’s Central and Southern Highlands and extended tentacles of domination further afield. Yet, their empire did not encompass even half of the Mesoamerican world, and the nature of their political control was not deep, a factor that contributed to the rapid demise of this imperial domain following the invasion of the Spanish … Egypt and Mesoamerica thus provide solid ground to explore the emergence and construction of distinctive political structures based on agriculture as well as on trade and specialized craftsmanship.
The Beginnings of Complexity: Households, Cities and States
The Complex Articulation of Authority and Political Power in Mesoamerica:
In contrast to the Nilotic world, from the onset of village life through the growth of cities during the latter half of the first millennium BC to the eventual rise of the Aztec empire in the last centuries of the prehispanic era, Mesoamerica was not dominated by a solitary core region or a unified dynastic tradition. Rather, from early on, polities and urban centers continuously rose and fell, regional populations ebbed and flowed, and even the nature of governance was not uniform or consistent over time or space, or even temporally within specific cultural regions. Mesoamerica was always a political mosaic, where the fortunes of polities and places were in regular flux. Certain areas, such as Mesoamerica’s largest highland valley, the Basin of Mexico, where both the key early city of Teotihuacan and the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán were situated, were political and demographic cores for much of the history of this macroregion, but not throughout the entire sequence. Other regions, such as the Petén, which was densely settled during the first millennium AD when the temples of Classic-period Maya cities rose above the forested landscape, was much more sparsely populated later in prehispanic times.
As noted [earlier] nonresidential buildings and monuments were constructed generally in head towns, which were larger than neighboring communities in many regions, shortly following the establishment of settled villages across Mesoamerica (ca. 2000–1000 BC). At these head towns, a diverse array of spaces and nonresidential structures were defined and built that served to coordinate the community population and often the residents of smaller subsidiary settlements as well. In the Maya lowlands, early in the Formative, raised civic-ceremonial spaces may have preceded the construction of permanent residences. Across the Mesoamerican macroregion, intercommunity and interregional personal and domestic mobility may have continued, even after the advent of sedentary communities in some regions.
People likely moved to where there was greater economic opportunity and greater security. From the inception of positions of leadership and structures of socioeconomic inequalities, the constructions of power, its economic underpinnings and how governance was implemented varied markedly over time and space, and these factors prompted episodes of demographic growth and decline during this early period as well as later in prehispanic Mesoamerican history.
As noted, from the beginning of Mesoamerican village life during the Formative period (2000 BC–AD 250), the means and modes of suprahousehold governance were not uniform. For example, nonresidential architecture provides one critical comparative vantage on the rituals and civic-ceremonial activities that appear associated with emergent leadership and broad-scale cooperation. For the first half of the Formative era, archaeologists have recorded small nondomestic structures with lime-plastered floors at San José Mogote, E-Groups across the Maya lowlands, a ballcourt at Paso de la Amada in the Soconusco region of Pacific Coast Chiapas, circular platforms and a carved stone obelisk at Cuicuilco, monumental carved stone heads and tabletop altars/thrones at San Lorenzo, and rectangular plazas and platforms in various arrangements at many settlements.
Civic-ceremonial activities during the Early–Middle Formative period were enacted in distinctive ways, with variation both in how rituals were performed and the scale of the labor efforts deployed to construct nonresidential structures and spaces. One key difference was the emphasis placed on specific individuals in positions of power in parts of the Mesoamerican lowlands (most notably at sites near the Gulf Coast) compared to the highlands. At sites such as San Lorenzo and La Venta, in the Gulf lowlands, monumental sculptures were used to portray charismatic individuals, and these settlements also had palatial residences and elaborate mortuary contexts that are not found elsewhere at that time. Iconic symbols and supernatural imagery were evident more widely, but outside the Gulf, depictions of actual people were rare, and when they were present, they more frequently represent mythic narratives than efforts to legitimize and display personal power. Outside the Gulf centers, Formative ritual precincts tended to be more open and broadly accessible, residential architecture and funerary contexts were less starkly differentiated, and public art portraying individual personages was rare. Given the emphasis on public spaces and buildings, various architectural innovations, including adobes, stone masonry and lime plaster, were evidenced first in these highland regions.
Across Formative Mesoamerica at the outset (or within a few centuries following sedentism in certain regions), there are indications of vertical complexity as evidenced by the emergence of head towns with civic-ceremonial architecture (absent in smaller settlements), distinctions in residential architecture and burials, and differentiation in access to ritual spaces and goods, but the nature of leadership varied in ways that parallel differences both in other regions after the onset of sedentism (e.g., Renfrew 1974) and at larger scales during subsequent eras in prehispanic Mesoamerica. At the aforementioned Gulf Coast centers, leadership focused on individuals, who were glorified, legitimized and depicted larger than life in power-laden attire. Elsewhere, for the most part, individualizing rulership was not evidenced at that time and public spaces were prominent.
A key point here is that once head towns and leadership positions emerge, the relevant axis of variation is not between completely bottom-up and top-down governance, but rather it is in the nature of relations between leaders and followers. Governance is always relational, and it may take a continuous range of forms, but above scales of several thousands, closely knit networks always have suprahousehold institutions.
At one end of that continuum are more collective forms of rule, in which leaders are office holders, subject to checks, balances and limits on their personal clout. Voice and wealth tend to be more equitably distributed. At the other end of the axis are more autocratic, individualizing rulers, who are able to centralize power and wealth, rule through personality cults and face few checks from the rest of the populace. This continuum of ruler–follower dynamics, and its associations with the uses of nonresidential spaces, has been illustrated for Late Postclassic highland Mesoamerican centers.
Significantly, when the temporal perspective is expanded to the Formative period, it becomes evident that these different modes of governance are not entirely consistent within specific spatial or environmental realms or necessarily across time in a single location. David Carballo [reference] synthesized differences in governance and religious behaviors for the Central Highlands during this era, while Christopher Pool [references] noted that not all Gulf Coast regions conformed to the patterns evidenced at San Lorenzo and La Venta. In the lowland Maya region later in the Formative, not all centers adopted modes of individualizing rule at the same time or tempo. Furthermore, at Tres Zapotes on the Gulf Coast, leadership was initially more in parallel with the individualizing rule at contemporaneous La Venta, but subsequently governance shifted to a more collective formation, in which specific rulers were not depicted ostentatiously and power was shared. The Formative period Mesoamerican world was a shifting mosaic of many diverse polities that not only varied in their degree of vertical political complexity but also were not uniform in the relational ways they forged coalitions and implemented cooperation. At the same time, these regional political units were linked in macroscalar networks in which innovations, ideas, people and goods were regularly moved.
These axes of variation in governance and patterns of aggregation and settlement were evidenced in Mesoamerica’s earliest cities as well. Early highland cities tended to be relatively compact and densely settled, whereas early lowland cities were characterized by more dispersed residential patterns. During the Classic period (AD 250–900), Maya cities were governed by kings and their families and retinues, while highland urban centers, such as Teotihuacan and Monte Albán, were characterized by more faceless, less personalized leadership, albeit with seemingly more bureaucratized, institutionalized governmental structures.
The Source:
Gary Feinman and Juan Carlos Moreno García, Power and Regions in Ancient States, Cambridge University Press, 2022 [pp. 22-25, 32-35]
Evolutions of social order from the earliest humans to the present day and future machine age.