Robert M. Rosenswig. The beginnings of Mesoamerzcan civilization: inter-regional interaction and the Olmec.

Hammond, Norman

ROBERT M. ROSENSWIG. The beginnings of Mesoamerzcan civilization: inter-regional interaction and the Olmec. xxii+374 pages, 69 illustrations, 10 tables. 2010. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press; 978-0-521-11102-7 hardback $95 & 60 [pounds sterling].

Rosenswig's book derives from his 2005 Yale PhD dissertation, which dealt with settlement patterns in the Cuauhtemoc zone of the Soconusco region of Chiapas, on the Pacific coast of Mexico just west of Guatemala. Soconusco was noted in Aztec times as a prime source ofcacao--in fact they conquered it to control this sumptuary resource, which also functioned as currency. Three millennia earlier, some of the oldest pottery in Mesoamerica appeared there in the Barra phase at Altamira and ar Paso de la Amada, the largest site of what Rosenswig calls the Initial Ceramic Period, embracing the Barra, Locona and Ocos ceramic complexes and the period from 1600-1250 uncal BC (2000-1500 cal BC: Rosenswig uses uncallbrated radiocarbon dates, in line with the New World Archaeological Foundation, which has long dominated work in this coastal Chiapas region; in this review all dates are cited as uncallbrated dates BC, e.g. 900 BC, not using the lower case convention bc).

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Rosenswig's main interest lies slightly later, at the rime when Olmec culture flourished on the Gulf Coast of Mexico at places like San Lorenzo (1250-900 BC) and then La Venta, and which (in the view of the cultura madre school of thought) spread across much of Mesoamerica by means of military, missionary or mercantile efforts (the opposing cultura hermana view is that Olmec was one of several coeval and interacting regional cultures [see Hammond 1989]). The Yale viewpoint has been firmly cultura madre, and Rosenswig outlines this problem in the opening section and then reconsiders it on the basis of his fieldwork.

The second part of the book is a 180-page summary of that work, clear and useful. There are chapters on survey and settlement, and on the broad-spectrum diet, including food processing and the evidence for feasting based on the size and frequency of large and especially decorated vessels. Rosenswig sees significant changes in practice around 1250 BC and then at 900 BC when maize became important and meat sources concentrated on deer and domestic dogs. In art, 1250 BC also saw a shift from a naturallstic aesthetic to one incorporating abstract iconography as synecdoche for complex ritual concepts. By around 1450 BC animal-masked figurines appear, one (fig. 6.5A) looking like a duck-bill; an effigy vessel of the Locona phase (1450-1350 BC, fig. 6.15) is certainly a duck-bill masked human suggesting that the Aztec cult of Ehecatl-Quetzalcoatl had deep roots.

Early obsidian came from the nearby (and not very satisfactory) Tajumulco area, but after 1250 BC there is a shift to the more distant but higherquallty EI Chayal source, which post-1150 may have been shipped onwards to Gulf Coast sites. Ceramics from there were already present in Cuauhtemoc sites, indicating that the long Z-shaped interaction sphere from Veracruz south across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec and then east towards EI Salvador defined by Parsons (1964) was now functioning. Around 900 BC there were overall cultural shifts coinciding with the collapse of the Gulf Coast Olmec polity of San Lorenzo, the rise of a local major centre ar La Blanca just across the border in Guatemala, and the possibly-linked abandonment of the Mazatan settlement zone where Paso de la Amada once flourished.

From the model of an 'archipetago of complexity' introduced in the first part of the book, in which separate regions ofcomplex society interacted across areas oflower development which were outwith the system, Rosenswig's analysis segues to Wilk's (2004) notion of 'common difference' in which external interchanges are driven by an internal, and possibly quite different, dynamic in each complex-society area. In both areas "novel sources of foreign prestige" (p. 299) would have bolstered the status of the ruling elite.

Rosenswig then asks "was San Lorenzo Mesoamerica's mother?" and was it % chiefdom or a state?" (pp. 300, 304), concluding that there is insufficient evidence for the first with the sophistical "San Lorenzo did not birth Mesoamerica, but it was certainly its most crucial ancestor", not as "Mesoamerica's mother or sister, bur instead as a grandmother" (p. 304). On the question of chiefdom-versus-state, Rosenswig dismisses the distinction and its protagonists as outmoded, arguing instead for the historicalmateriallst thesis that "exploitation is the qualltative, watershed characteristic that irrevocably changed social, political and economic relations" (p. 307).

He concludes that during the apogee of San Lorenzo (1250-900 BC) "the political aspirations of Soconusco elites outstripped their economic means" (p. 310) and that the allure of distant domains propped them up, while between 900 and 800 BC the economy caught up and the elite cemented their power; then both the La Blanca centre and the Cuauhtemoc zone folded and the cultural caravan moved on, to Izapa.

References

HAMMOND, N. 1989. Cultura hermana: reappraising the Olmec. Quarterly Review of Archaeology 9: l~J.

PARSONS, L.A. 1964. The Middle American cotradition. Unpublished PhD dissertation, Departmem ofAnthropology, Harvard University.

WILK, R.R. 2004. Miss Universe, the Olmec and the Valley of Oaxaca. Journal of SocialArchaeology 4: 81-98.

NORMAN HAMMOND

Department of Archaeology, Boston University, USA (Email: ndch@bu.edu)