Mesoamerican Architecture as a Cultural Symbol (review)

Mesoamerican Architecture as a Cultural Symbol. By Jeff Karl Kowalski. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. xiv + 416 pp., preface, introduction, bibliography, index. $75.00 cloth.)

By now, even the most casual observer of architecture will understand the heavy messages being sent by, say, a Donald Trump in New York City (self-glorification), a Frank Gehry in Bilbao (radical experimentation), and a Steve Wynn in Las Vegas (voluptuous fantasy). In this volume, Jeff Kowalski does an admirable job of collecting essays on meaning within a far older and semantically dense tradition of building, that found in Mesoamerica from the late second millennium B.C. to just before the Spanish conquest. For some time in the future, this volume will show the outlines of what can be understood from the present-day vantage.

Kowalski has organized the book both regionally and chronologically. The first section focuses on western Mesoamerica, beginning with the Olmec, then proceeding to Teuchitlán, Zapotec, Teotihuacan, Veracruz, Toltec, and Aztec architecture. The second section shifts to eastern Mesoamerica, principally the Maya but with close attention paid to the Yucatan Peninsula, where Kowalski himself has made vital contributions to architectural research. In his introduction, Kowalski justifies his organizational tool—the concept of Mesoamerica—and defends a historical approach that sees a “timeless” and “organismic” region less often than traditions that are historically variable and individually determined. Nonetheless, he does regard Mesoamerican buildings as, above all, “public symbols” that build on “interconnections” and the “collaboration of groups of people.” Within such webs of shared meaning, Mesoamerican buildings serve not so much as inert vessels for behavior as full participants in the ritual and political theater of ancient polities in the region. These are unobjectionable truths that achieve more detailed expression in the articles that follow.

The first, by Kent Reilly, illustrates an approach to Olmec buildings that draws on the work of Mircea Eliade and a Mayanist tinge courtesy of Reilly’s mentor, the late Linda Schele. A sacred landscape embodies cosmic templates, and spaces are “liminal” boundaries that define sacred zones; other places are “otherworld location[s] connected with a specific mythic time,” especially “the place of creation.” Since the Olmec were prehistoric, albeit with a rich iconography, it is understandable that Reilly would draw on a better-known and symbolically descendant civilization to explain his own data. At the same time, I am somewhat uncomfortable with an approach, however skillfully applied, that reduces different traditions to an unchanging ur-text.

The next two essays, by Phil Weigand and Joyce Marcus, deal with two vastly different architectural traditions, the Teuchitlán guachimontónes that Weigand has done so much to identify and study, and the Zapotec of Oaxaca. Weigand argues for a connection to wind symbolism in Mesoamerica (thus linking his buildings with a region from which they often have been excluded) and, at the same time, suggests that the tradition was “unique, without any close counterpart elsewhere in Mesoamerica.” In some respects, Weigand makes a case both for including the Teuchitlán tradition within Mesoamerica and for establishing it as something distinct from this region. Marcus’s essay reports on work she has done with Kent Flannery in the Valley of Oaxaca. Marcus asserts that most objects found on floors in archaeological sites are Pompeii-like in their positioning (61), a claim that many would regard with skepticism. It is something of a disappointing piece: The results have largely been presented elsewhere, and I regret to say that Marcus betters her previous record in self-citation (roughly 26 of 49 references). I was disconcerted to see no mention of the Monte Albán proyecto especial conducted by Marcus Winter and his colleagues, although, in fairness, Marcus’s article seems to have been written before 1992 (vii, but see her citation of Marcus and Flannery 1996).

The next three papers deal with roughly coeval (first millennium A.D.) civilizations centered on Teotihuacan, Veracruz, and Xochicalco. Kowalski very capably reviews the information from Teotihuacan, in...