Correspondence Analysis and West Mexico Archaeology: Ceramics from the Long-Glassow Collection

Foreword

xv Foreword By Michael A. Glassow Department of Anthropology, University of California, Santa Barbara vvvThe correspondence analysis that Roger Nance, Jan de Leeuw, and their colleagues present in the following pages demonstrates how far ceramic analysis has progressed since my efforts in the mid-1960s to understand the ceramics from the site of Huistla. At that time, seriation analysis was just emerging as something more than a visual process of arranging assemblages, and graduate students such as I did not receive training in quantitative analysis. All this began to change a few years after my analysis of the Huistla ceramics, when archaeologists began to recognize the power of computers and were able to gain access to them. A few pioneering multivariate analyses, such as the Binfords’ analysis of French Mousterian assemblages, stimulated this development. Nonetheless, as De Leeuw points out in this volume, correspondence analysis, as one of a variety of multivariate techniques, has a relatively recent history in Americanist archaeology despite its appropriateness for teasing out chronological relationships between categories of artifacts such as pottery types. The fieldwork of the Etzatlán Project occurred during the fall and winter of 1963 and early 1964. Stan Long was the director of the project, and the resulting collections were to be integral to his doctoral dissertation . He asked me to be his field assistant after another graduate student foreword / xvi who was to serve in this capacity had to decline because of other obligations . I had been involved in fieldwork in New Mexico through the summer of 1963, and upon returning to the University of California– Los Angeles (UCLA), I had only a few days to settle my affairs before leaving for Etzatlán. Stan was already there. I took a Greyhound bus to the Mexican border at San Diego, crossed the border into Tijuana, and then took a Tres Estrellas de Oro bus to Guadalajara. In Guadalajara I proceeded to another bus station where I caught a local bus to Etzatlán. I had never been in Mexico aside from a visit to Tijuana with friends several years earlier. I had taken two years of Spanish as an undergraduate , but my speaking ability was still very rudimentary. Needless to say, I experienced a great deal of anxiety during the course of the trip. I found Stan and his wife, Luty, at a small hotel facing Etzatlán’s main plaza. This hotel served as our residence until excavation was completed, and we ate our morning and evening meals there as well. The location of the hotel exposed us to life in a small Mexican town. Occasionally loud reports of skyrockets punctuated the night, apparently in recognition of the death of a town resident. Evenings after supper were a time to watch young adults walking around the plaza, men in one direction and women in the other. Stan was a well-organized and hardworking field director. Each day we were up early and out to our respective sites. We each supervised two to four hired workers, men who otherwise would be agricultural laborers. Stan put me in charge of excavation at three sites, although he made most of the decisions about placement of test pits. I also had the responsibility of producing a topographic map with a transit of each site I investigated. Huistla was the first, then Anona, and finally Las Cuevas. The sites of Huistla and Anona were on either side of Etzatl án, but Las Cuevas was several kilometers distant. We had a university vehicle, an International Scout, for transporting personnel and equipment . This vehicle ultimately caused us great grief when a rear axle snapped while it was carrying a heavy load up a short but steep grade. As replacement parts for this vehicle were unavailable in Mexico, Stan had the two axle pieces welded back together—not an ideal solution but one that worked so long as we were very careful not to put too much torque on the vehicle’s drivetrain. Excavation at Las Cuevas consumed most of my time. It was a large and complex site, and deposits were generally deeper than at Huistla or Michael A. Glassow / xvii Anona. In addition to excavating pits in habitation deposits on the flatlands at the base of a hill, we also excavated at an obsidian workshop on the hill slope. In one of the pits in the flatlands we encountered a small, shallow double tomb...