Current Research on the Gulf Coast of Mexico

Abstract

The Gulf Coast of Mesoamerica is a culturally and environmentally heterogeneous area that encompasses the lowlands along the Gulf of Mexico as well as rugged inland highlands. Blessed with a wealth of valued resources and a favorable geographical setting, the pre-Hispanic Gulf Coast played a critical role as a cultural and economic crossroads, and its cultures contributed vital elements to other Mesoamerican traditions. Gulf Coast archaeology currently is experiencing the most active period in its history. This recent research underscores the diversity and dynamism of the area's cultures and environment. An enormous expansion of settlement pattern studies reveals considerable diversity in sociopolitical organization, urbanism, and human-land relationships. A second important trend focuses on documenting and understanding variation in craft production and exchange systems. A third is the continuing emphasis on interregional interaction through all time periods. These three foci merge in a growing interest in variation and change in Gulf Coast political economies. Future research will need to incorporate theoretical perspectives that focus on the generation of cultural variation, including agency-based models of technological choice and political economy, as well as those, like Darwinian approaches, that emphasize the differential persistence of variation.

The Elusive Maya Marketplace: An Archaeological Consideration of the Evidence

“…At that time, Tabasco would have qualified as a true port of trade, meaning that it was located in neutral territory. It was an important trading hub, and traders from all areas came together to exchange goods from the Valley of Mexico, the Maya lowlands, the Maya highlands, the Pacific Coast, and the southern Maya periphery in Honduras and El Salvador (Feldman 1978b;Lee and Navarrete 1978;Pool 2006;Scholes and Roys 1968). Trade reached even beyond this broad area, with gold coming from Panama (Coggins 1992) and turquoise from northern Mexico and the American southwest (Weigand and Harbottle 1993).…”

Frequencies of Rare Incisor Variations Reflect Factors Influencing Precontact Population Relationships in Mexico and the American Southwest

“…Our assumption is that the sites with larger populations in this study drew biological variation from surrounding sites by coalition, temporary migrations, or both. Population density estimates were obtained from a variety of archaeological sources and rounded to the nearest 1000 (DiPeso ; Hodge and Smith ; Gorenstein ; Balkansky ; Pool ; Joyce ; Córdova Tello et al ., ). We recorded population density distances by calculating the differences between the average population densities among the major geographic regions.…”

“…The Aztitlan trade route along the coast of Northwest Mexico facilitated high levels of trade, particularly of metals and marine goods, and was home to several densely populated towns (Beekman, 2010). Trade relationships were documented through archaeological and ethnohistorical data (Rathje and Sabloff, 1973;Berdan, 1989;Ericson and Baugh, 1993;Blanton, 1996;Smith and Berdan, 2003;Pool, 2006;Zaragoza Ocaña, 2009;Beekman, 2010). We identified each sample as a local, regional, or inter-regional market.…”

Contextualizing Archaeology’s “Locals”: A Scalar Approach from El Tajín, Mexico

“…While multiple scholars made their careers and produced a prodigious amount of archaeological data on the site (see Pool 2006), Proyecto Tajín was also designed to attract tourism to the traditionally impoverished north-central Veracruz region. Indeed, construction of the site museum was rushed in order to receive the King and Queen of Spain, accompanied by President Carlos Salinas de Gortari in 1992, the same year during which El Tajín was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site (Colburn 1992).…”