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119 questions of how we should understand the organization and development of the Paso de la Amada community. John Clark’s (2004a, 2004b) recent proposals on the site are thus of great interest. He suggests that those of us who have worked there have approached it with a “naturalistic bias” and a preconceived vision of the “Early Mesoamerican Village” as an unorganized scatter of domestic structures (2004a:53, 57). His bold counterproposal is that the residents of Paso de la Amada constructed their landscape on a massive scale. The site thus deserves the status of “earliest known ceremonial center in Mesoamerica ” (Clark 2004a:45). This chapter is a response to that suggestion from the perspective of the excavations in small mounds and off-mound areas that I conducted at the site from 1990 through 1997. I take a “ceremonial center” to be a community deliberately configured for rituals involving substantial numbers of people and embedding, in its large-scale design, a consistent vision of sacredness or the cosmos. This is not a stringent definition. From 900 b.c. or so, most Paso de la Amada, with its dozens of low mounds and an occupation from the Barra through Cherla phases, has been known for some time as a significant Early Formative site of the Soconusco region (Blake et al. 1995; Ceja Tenorio 1985; Lowe 1977). Though discoveries of the sequence of high-status residences in Mound 6 and the ballcourt in Mound 7 irrevocably established the site’s larger importance (Chapter 5 in this book), in a sense they pull interpretation in divergent directions. The ballcourt links Paso de la Amada firmly to larger Mesoamerican traditions. The large buildings in Mound 6 are rather different. Outside the Soconusco, there is nothing comparable to the spectacularly preserved Structure 4 of Mound 6 (henceforth, Structure 6-4), with its low clay walls and inset porches. Whereas the Mound 7 finds make Paso de la Amada “Mesoamerican,” those at Mound 6 raise the possibility of precocity, even uniqueness , for Early Formative developments in the Soconusco. Buildings 22m long are not something we would have expected in the seventeenth century b.c., and they prompt larger SIX Paso de la Amada as a Ceremonial Center Richard G. Lesure 120 emergent complexity ANALYTICAL STRATEGY My twin goals are thus to assess Clark’s “ceremonial center” suggestion and to push toward a deeper understanding of the site as constructed , lived, ceremonial space. Clark (2004a, 2004b) founds his proposals on a claim that Paso de la Amada was laid out with the aid of two units of measure, a Standard Unit (SU) of 1666mm and a Standard Macro-Unit of 52 SUs, or 86.63m. I am skeptical of the claim, though in all fairness I should point out that my estimate of 30m for the length of the Locona platform in Mound 32 (Lesure 1999) corresponds to 18 SUs (18 × 1666mm = 29.988m). Basically, I am at a loss as to how we could satisfactorily evaluate the proposed units of measure . The fact that the same unit can form the basis for two radically different versions of the large-scale organization of the site (in Clark 2004a and 2004b) is, in my view, a mark against it rather than for it. It is possible, though, to bracket and set aside the question of units of measure as we investigate the construction and use of space at Paso de la Amada, and that is my plan for this paper. Beyond the units-of-measure issue, Clark’s (2004a) ceremonial center designation is based on a claim that the site was massively constructed , laid out according to a grand vision, with contexts for ritual action at scales of 200m to 300m (Figure 6.1, square units) and larger patterning at scales of 500m or more (alignment of squares in Figure 6.1). It is possible to view his claims for the site as falling at one extreme of a continuum of conceivable degrees of “constructedness” and arrangement . At the opposite end of the continuum would be a minimally constructed “early village ,” characterized by little intervention into the natural landscape and a lack of patterning beyond the scale of the house yard, perhaps 40m in diameter. My procedure is to build toward a synthetic assessment of the site from smaller scales. The operating question becomes this: at what scales substantial Mesoamerican communities were ceremonial centers in this sense. Our question here is the emergence...

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