The southern Maya lowlands present a largely redundant environment which does not possess the potential for major internal symbiotic regions or for irrigation. In fact, the interior of this region is uniformly deficient in resources essential to the efficiency of every individual household engaged in the Mesoamerican agricultural subsistence economy: mineral salt, obsidian for blades, and hard stone for grinding. Yet, in the core of this rain forest region, the basic elements of Classic Maya civilization first coalesced. A model involving methods of procuring and distributing the resources necessary to the efficiency of an agricultural subsistence economy explains the loci of lowland Classic Maya development and the order in which these loci developed. This model can also be applied to the Olmec civilization.
To some it might seem as though archaeology has ceased to exist as an organized d i s c i p l i n e ."Paleoethnology," "ethnoarchaeology," "action," ''living,'' "experim e n t a l , " "contract," "public," "processual," "historic," "systems," and "industrial archaeology," as well as many other seemingly disparate programs, compete for the attention of modern archaeologists. This diversification of research interests is so far-reaching that it compels us t o ask fundamental questions about what we are doing, why we are doing it, and how it relates to what others are doing. We contend that the expansion of archaeology into little-explored domains is an expectable outcome of several long-term processes operating in the discipline. Clearly, these processes are leading t o an expanded conception of the nature and aims of archaeology. Archaeology has not ceased to exist as an organized discipline; it is merely reorganizing into a new configuration.This paper outlines some features of that new configuration. We show that archaeology can be defined simply as the study of relationships between human behavior and material culture. The kinds of questions that can be asked about these relationships form the basis for our proposal that a behavioral archaeology consists of four interrelated strategies. These strategies are integrated by the circulation of general questions and general laws.
Behavioral ArchaeologyA behavioral archaeology is the study of material objects regardless of time o r space in order to describe and explain human behavior (Deetz 1972; Leone 1972; Longacre 1972; Reid and Schiffer 1973). The relationships between human behavior and material objects can be approached from several directions, depending o n the nature of the questions asked. Therefore, the four strategies of a behavioral archaeology are defined o n the basis of question type (Fig.
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