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The method being used to analyze pottery from Uaxactún and Barton Ramie by the application of the type-variety concept is offered as an analytical approach well suited to the classification of Maya ceramics. Types and varieties are seen as the best archaeological approximation of the ceramic abstractions which existed in the prehistoric cultural configuration. The systematic application of the type-variety concept will make it possible to establish analytical ceramic units which will be comparable throughout the Maya territory, to undertake detailed chronological and areal studies, especially in areas away from the ceremonial centers, and to use ceramics as a step toward cultural interpretation. Considerable attention is given to the procedure of analysis and to the problem of naming the resulting analytical ceramic units. The most desirable nomenclature is illustrated by Aguacate Orange [type]: Holha Variety. Place names have been used for the primary type term and for the variety name, but a descriptive term is used for the second part of the type name. The desirability of keeping the variety flexible and free of bias or prejudice stemming from the nomenclature is stressed. The variety is the smallest meaningful unit of classification in the type-variety method. Sorting, naming, and tabulating begin with varieties which, in turn, lead to the recognition, naming and description of types.

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The Precolumbian culture sequences for Mesoamerica and Peru, the two New World areas where native civilizations attained their greatest complexity, show, in each case, an alternation between periods of horizon-style unifications and periods of marked regional stylistic diversity. It is the thesis of the present essay that this alternating process of intense regional interaction broken by periods of lesser interaction is a vital one in the rise to civilizational complexity.

The large preceramic site of Aspero, on the central Peruvian coast, was explored in the past by Uhle and by Willey and Corbett; however, these investigators did not recognize the presence of sizable artificial platform mounds or “corporate labor structures” at the site. In spite of its preceramic status, Aspero was a sedentary community, and the corporate labor structures suggest the beginnings of a complex, non-egalitarian society. The hypothesis is advanced that such a society was “pre-adapted” toward corporate labor activity and that this “pre-adaptation” expedited the rapid transference from a marine economy to an agricultural one at the close of the Cotton Preceramic period (about 2000-1800 B.C.).