Origins of the Ñuu: Archaeology in the Mixteca Alta, Mexico

Preface

xxiii We are most grateful that the National Science Foundation (NSF) funded our 1999 fieldwork. The Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (INAH) authorized this research and gave its institutional backing. INAH and NSF together should be credited for their achievements in advancing archaeological research in Mexico. Among many INAH colleagues we owe special thanks to Joaquín García Bárcena, Eduardo López Calzada, Raúl Matadamas, and Nelly Robles García. The Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Research also helped with travel support. To the thousands of friendly and welcoming people of the Mixteca Alta, and to all their elected authorities in the dozens of municipalities in which we had the pleasure of working, our saludos and heartfelt thanks. In Tlaxiaco the Santos and Cruz families helped out in many ways and we appreciate their friendship. Since well-fed surveyors are happy surveyors, we happily thank our fine cook, Rosa Fátima Múrcio Jiménez. We had excellent help in the field and lab from visiting students Xochitl Bautista, Minerva Delgado, Aline P. Lara Galicia, Joel Torrices, and Naoli Victoria Preface xxiv w Preface Lona. Dmitri Beliaev and Roberto Santos Pérez were full-time participants in the 1999 field- and lab work and they contributed greatly to the success of the project. Xinyu Ren digitized Figure 1.3 and helped with the settlement-pattern analysis. The paper and electronic topographic information comes from the Instituto Nacional de Estadística Geografía e Informática (INEGI), and we very much appreciate the consultations offered by numerous INEGI representatives. We thank Charles S. Spencer (American Museum of Natural History) and Arthur Demarest (Vanderbilt University) for arranging the assistance of their institutions. The Uni­ver­ sity of Georgia’s Department of Anthropology supplied resources and the Georgia Museum of Natural History gave us laboratory space. Members of the Center for Applied Spatial Analysis at the University of Arizona lent their technical expertise in the making of the settlement-pattern maps. Katy McNulty and Matt Powers are appreciated for providing a place to work on Tybee Island, Georgia. All the authors contributed their field, laboratory, and analytical expertise as well as their ideas to this book and each made additional contributions. Andrew Balkansky brought the Huamelulpan project to completion and in 1999 he was our excellent field director and chief ceramicist. Laura Stiver Walsh was in charge of the admirable Teposcolula survey and wrote the ceramic chronology chapter. As crew chief, Thomas Pluckhahn was a key organizer in the field, he led the mountain brigade, and he wrote the section on the Sierra de Nochixtlán. John Chamblee created and managed the database and GIS—almost all the settlement-pattern maps and tables in this book are his work. Verónica Pérez Rodríguez was our lama-bordo analyst and wrote the Spanish summary. Verenice Heredia became our expert on intrasite artifact analysis and moved the whole project along by taking a lot of the responsibility for our final report to INAH. Charlotte Smith was our superior lab organizer, artifact photographer, and macroregional analyst; all the architectural renderings are her work. We most gratefully credit John Christopher Burns (jcbD) for the elegant visual presentation of the archaeological data in this book. John’s support has been amazingly generous. He created the design and the look and feel of every map and drawing and spent long, long hours transforming each crude draft into a professional-quality figure. Many colleagues offered their good advice and we especially thank Richard E. Blanton, Gary Feinman, Laura Finsten, Jackie Saindon, Charles R. Spencer, Ron Spores, and Mark Williams. We sincerely thank Blanton and three anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful, helpful, and much-appreciated comments on the manuscript. We thank Darrin Pratt and the University Press of Colorado for their confidence in the idea of this book and the fact that they made it happen. This volume differs from conventional archaeological survey reports in its reliance on the graphic display of information (thank you again, John Christopher Burns). We do not describe individual sites one after another. Verbal descriptions of 999 sites and 1,668 components would be lengthy and numbingly redundant. Yet we wanted to let readers appreciate the richness of the archaeological detail and we wanted to make the data available and useful for future researchers. Our solution is Preface w xxv Chapters 2–6, which describe in...