Pre-Mamom Pottery Variation and the Preclassic Origins of the Lowland Maya

Abstract

This volume on the earliest lowland Maya pottery began without a name and remained nameless until it was nearly completely written. Like the pre-Mamom era itself, even now a better moniker eludes us, and the reader will note that, while the participating authors agree there is something called pre-Mamom, we cannot yet reach consensus on exactly how to define it, set parameters on it, or place it precisely in absolute or relative time. In fact, we are not yet certain whether we have one pre-Mamom component or multiple, sequential pre-Mamoms, nor are we clear about exactly how many ceramic spheres we have encountered in our collective surveys and excavations. There is, however, substantial agreement among the authors on one point: the first potters in the Maya lowlands may not have been recognizably Maya when they started firing ceramics about 1000 BC, but they were by the time the pre-Mamom period ended around 600 BC. This evolution is evident in the ensuing Mamom ceramic sphere (600-300 BC), which constituted a broadly recognizable tradition in the Maya lowlands, materialized in the collective acceptance of waxy ware ceramic technology, monochrome slips, common vessel forms, and inferred similar functionality that undergirded