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1 rise in population.* The transition to the Formative was followed—still in the second millennium b.c. and thus rapidly on archaeological time scales—by the first indicators of inequality and sociopolitical complexity, including the emergence of settlement hierarchies, monumental sculpture with themes of rulership, and massive earthen platforms or modifications to the landscape. The period also includes, from 1400 b.c., a series of stylistic horizons involving the virtually pan-Mesoamerican dissemination of strikingly recognizable visual culture— including, most famously, Olmec art. Despite the concentration of those three phenomena in the pivotal second millennium b.c., considerations of them as a package, in a unit of time that straddles the divide between Archaic and Formative, is still relatively rare. One reason is the great disparity in the quantity of available evidence on either side of the point at which pottery enters the archaeological record. But relevant as well is a tendency toward fragmentation *Dates throughout the volume are in calibrated radiocarbon years unless otherwise noted. The period 3500 b.c. to 500 b.c. was one of momentous change in Mesoamerica . At the beginning of that span, the region was sparsely occupied by low-level food producers whose rhythms of existence were dominated by the concerns of hunting and gathering. By 500 b.c., it was populated with settled agriculturalists in a landscape increasingly full of people. Proto-urban communities , laid out according to spatial schemes that would continue through the Spanish Conquest two millennia later, were foci of social and political life. Public rituals included worship of deities that were to persist into the Classic and Postclassic eras. Though there was a complex history still to come, Mesoamerica as a culture area or civilization is by that point recognizable. Major developments between 3500 b.c. and 500 b.c. included the shift from the Archaic to the Formative period after 1900 b.c., a farreaching social transformation that involved the appearance of permanent villages, the introduction of pottery, the refocus of subsistence organization toward agriculture, and a steep ONE Early Social Transformations in the Soconusco an introduction Richard G. Lesure 2 early social transformations Guatemala (Figures 1.1 and 1.2). Sharply delimited inland by the Sierra Madre Mountains, it extends from around the modern town of Mapastepec, Chiapas southeast to the Tilapa River in Guatemala (Lowe, Lee, and Martínez 1982:55–62). High rainfall feeds numerous rivers that cross a short coastal plain to feed freshwater marshes and brackish estuaries and lagoons. To the northwest, the Chiapas coast is drier, and indeed there is variation within the Soconusco itself. As one moves to the southeast, the coast widens and rainfall increases. In Guatemala , the southeastern boundary of the Soconusco as a geographical region is marked by an inland extension of the coastal plain, but early settlement related to that of the Soconusco stretched throughout Pacific-coastal Guatemala into El Salvador. One essay included here (Chapter 9) extends coverage of the book into this related area. The Soconusco and adjacent coastal Guatemala are rich in natural resources. Since biotic communities tend to run in narrow strips parallel to the ocean, a range of wild resources would have been readily accessible to ancient inhabitants. Indeed, the sheer richness and diversity of aquatic resources have figured prominently in claims that subsistence well into the Formative was focused more on hunting, gathering, and fishing than on agriculture. THE LARGER IMPORT OF EARLY SOCONUSCO The period 3500 b.c. through 500 b.c. is of interest for studying the genesis of Mesoamerican civilization because it unites a set of deeply transformative developments—but also because scholarly work on those developments ranges across the full theoretical diversity of contemporary anthropological archaeology. Understandings of the transition to the Formative, the emergence of sociopolitical complexity, and the pan-Mesoamerican occurrence of Olmec art are drawn increasingly from evidence found in the Soconusco. of inquiry into multiple paths with different theoretical inspiration and little in the way of intersection or cross-communication among them. In this book, the period between 3500 b.c. and 500 b.c. is taken as crucial to understanding the genesis of Mesoamerican civilization, but the focus is narrowed from Mesoamerica as a whole to one particular region: the Soconusco, on the Pacific coast of Chiapas, Mexico and adjacent Guatemala. A volume focusing on the early archaeology of the Soconusco but with an eye on the topic of early Mesoamerican social transformations more generally is appropriate...

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