Middle America (with Mesoamerica)
The Middle American sequence of early settlements and agriculture differs a little from that in the Andes, in that there is no clear-cut Preceramic phase of both sedentary agricultural settlements and monument construction, comparable for instance to sites such as El Paraiso and La Galgada. The specifically Mesoamerican Early Formative sequence nowhere dates convincingly before 2000 BC, and the first large monuments equivalent to those of the Late Preceramic and Initial Periods in Peru were under construction in the Gulf Lowlands of Mexico only by 1000 BC. By this time an area of about 11,000 square kilometers, extending right across Mesoamerica from western Mexico to Honduras, was coming within the orbit of the Olmec interaction network (Middle Formative), a near-contemporary and very similar phenomenon in a structural sense to the Chavin horizon in Peru.
Examples of Early Formative communities in Mesoamerica dating from about 1800 / 1600 Bc and onward are widespread (Figure 8.6). El Arbolillo, Tlatilco, and Coapexco are located in the Valley of Mexico, the latter with a population of possibly 1,000 people (Santley and Pool 1993; Tolstoy 1989; Grove 2000). In the Valley of Oaxaca, settlements between one and three hectares in size with rectangular pole and thatch houses, bell-shaped storage pits, pottery, and human figurines made their appearance during the Espiridion Phase, at about 1700 BC. The Barra, Locona, and Ocos phases of the Soconusco region of Chiapas, between 1800 and 1200 BC, record similar developments. During Locona times, a ceremonial center consisting of oval earthen platforms up to 2.5 meters high was constructed at Paso de la Amada (Lesure 1997).
Further east, pottery appears by 1500 Bc in the Chalchuapa region of El Salvador, and at this time there is also a possibility of ceramic relationships between Pacific coastal Mesoamerica and contemporary cultures in Ecuador. Closely related Barahona phase pottery at Puerto Escondido, near the Caribbean coast of Honduras, dates from 1600-1400 BC, and pottery with rocker-stamped decoration and maize agriculture is attested at Tronadora Vieja in inland Costa Rica by soon after 2000 BC, again with possible cultural linkages with Chiapas
(Joyce and Henderson 2001; Sharer 1978; Sheets 1984, 2000; Hoopes 1991, 1993).
All of this implies a very solid development of agricultural life with very similar painted, incised, and stamped pottery styles in most parts of Mesoamerica by at least 1500 BC, associated with rapid population growth and an increasing interest in the construction of ceremonial centers with their implications for the rise of power, authority, and increasing warfare (Flannery and Marcus 2003). A settlement study of Early Formative sites over an area of about 600 square kilometers in the Valley of Guatemala postulates a doubling of population density every 250-300 years at this time, all underpinned by maize agriculture. The authors of this study (Sanders and Murdy 1982:58) refer to "rapid population growth, fissioning of settlement, and lateral expansion of population that is characteristic of a pioneer-farming population with ... an extensive approach to land use." Joyce Marcus and Kent Flannery (1996:84) estimate a fivefold or tenfold increase in Early Formative population in the Valley of Oaxaca, where by 1200 sc the large settlement of San Jose Mogote covered about 20 hectares, with outlying hamlets spreading over an area of about 70 hectares. Skeletal analyses also indicate continuing levels of good health amongst these early Oaxacan cultivators (Flannery ed. 1976; Whalen 1981; Hodges 1989; Flannery and Marcus 1983, 2000; Christensen 1998).
Figure 8.6 Mesoamerican archaeological sites discussed in the text. The map shows the extent of the Olmec Horizon, and the distributions of the Early Formative red-on-buff and Locona pottery traditions, ca. 1600-1000 ac, after Clark 1991.
In terms of regional style zones, John Clark (1991) proposes the existence of two separate interaction spheres in Mesoamerica during the Early Formative, ca. 1500 BC. One incorporates a large region of central Mexico, from the Gulf of Mexico across to the Pacific coast, and has characteristic red-on-buff pottery. The other, termed the Locona style zone, with fluted, incised, and bichrome tecomates, incorporates the Isthmus of Tehuantepec and the southern portions of Chiapas and Guatemala (Figure 8.6). Kent Flannery and Joyce Marcus (2000) have recently commented that the boundary between these two zones equates quite closely with the distributions of the Otomanguean language family to the west and the Mixe-Zoque and Mayan families to the east, a topic to be discussed further in chapter 10. The first zone has uncertain western boundaries, but the second extends as far as the eastern boundary of Mesoamerica, located at 1000 BC in Honduras and El Salvador (Sheets 2000:418) and correlating well with the eastern boundary of the Mayan languages.
The culmination of these widening horizons of agricultural spread and interaction in Mesoamerica was the remarkable Middle Formative interaction sphere known as the Olmec horizon (ca. 1200 to 500 Bc) (Clark and Pye 2000). Opinions concerning the topic of "Olmec origins" have been very varied, with some favoring the Gulf Coast region, others Chiapas and Guatemala (Bernal 1969; Coe 1989; Lowe 1989; Graham 1989). To my mind, it is quite possible that the Olmec complex, as also Chavin, had no specific origin locus at all (Flannery and Marcus 2000). Instead of being a result of conquest or proselytization, perhaps like Chavin it represented a reemphasis of existing lines of shared ancestry and identity amongst populations already ethnolinguistically related.
Artifacts and rock carvings classified as Olmec occur throughout a very large area of Mesoamerica; Gulf Coast, Valley of Mexico, Guerrero, Puebla, Morelos, Oaxaca, Chiapas, Guatemala, and onward into El Salvador and Honduras. But rather interestingly, from an ethnolinguistic perspective, the
Olmec distribution excludes the Maya lowlands (Hammond 2000). David Grove (1989) notes that most Olmec artifacts were produced locally rather than traded, and, as with Chavin in Peru, they occur through all social levels, rather than just in association with an elite (Pye and Demarest 1991). Typical features of Olmec pottery include a dish on a perforated ring stand, gourd-shaped bottles, neckless globular vessels (tecomates, like contemporary forms in Peru), flat-based plates, and surface decoration emphasizing infilled incision ("zoned hachure") and grooving. The ceremonial centers of the Gulf lowlands, such as La Venta, now depended upon maize for their subsistence, probably grown on riverine levees (Rust and Leyden 1994; Pope et al. 2001). Obsidian was traded widely from sources in central Mexico, Puebla, and Guatemala.
Most authors today regard the Olmec phenomenon as something imposed through increased interaction between far-flung communities. Perhaps it was, but it is suggested here that such interaction, as with Chavin in Peru, brought together peoples who were already related in much deeper ethnolinguistic senses by virtue of earlier population radiations, following on from the establishment of systematic agriculture. As far as Mesoamerica is concerned, this suggestion is not really new.
In 1969, James A. Ford's massive work on the American Formative was published posthumously. It is a book which today usually rates only a brief dismissal, partly because Ford was under the assumption that all the American early pottery industries spread from a source close to Valdivia in Ecuador. Today, this assumption can probably be rejected (Hoopes 1994). But there was much more to Ford 1969 than this, because for the first time an enormous effort was made to plot some very specific material cultural similarities across the Formative Americas, from Peru to the Eastern Woodlands, focusing on specific categories such as mound construction, blade technologies, barkcloth beaters, grooved axes, manos and metates, stone beads, ear spools and plugs, anthropomorphic pottery figurines, cylinder and button seals, tobacco pipes, and a large array of pottery vessel and decoration types (e.g., tecomates, carinated pots, ring feet and tripods, stirrup spouts, red slip and zoned red slip, zoned hachuring, and excising). Close relationships across a vast area between about 1500 and 500 ac were displayed in 22 magnificent charts.
Ford asked one very significant question as the subtitle to his book. Did the resemblances point toward "diffusion or the psychic unity of man?" Ford chose
diffusion, following such earlier scholars as Spinden and Kroeber. We are here only concerned with those traits that spread "subsequent to the Colonial Formative" in Ford's terms (Ford 1969:148), dating in terms of current chronology between 2500 and 1000 BC. For these he stressed a pattern of early homogeneity, followed by increasing heterogeneity through time as cultures differentiated. We know today that this period, essentially the Early Formative in Mesoamerican terms, Late Preceramic and Initial Periods in Peruvian terms, was a period of remarkable, indeed unique, cultural and linguistic expansion in the Americas, paralleled only by the initial Paleoindian colonization of the two continents ten thousand years before, and by the expansion of European cultures three thousand years afterward.