Ancient Households of the Americas: Conceptualizing What Households Do

11. Fluctuating Community Organization

| 325 IntrOductIOn In many Formative Mesoamerican communities multifamily corporate groups emerged following the transition to sedentism (Flannery 2002). When surface remains of artifacts and architecture are detectable, aspects of social organization can be inferred. However, in some regions, recovering evidence of household and community organization is difficult because of the perishable nature of houses and the fact that archaeological deposits are deeply buried. For this reason we know little about household or community organization of Formative southern Gulf Coast societies. This chapter investigates community organization at the Formative village of La Joya, Veracruz, Mexico, by determining the conditions that produced nuclear family households and those that produced multifamily corporate groups. Several changes in household organization are detected for La Joya and these changes are placed within the regional environmental and social landscape. While this community-level focus is unable to reveal fine-scaled analysis at the level of individual households, the community approach reveals significant changes in village organization over time. The intrasite spatial patterns e l e v e n Fluctuating community Organization Formation and Dissolution of Multifamily Corporate Groups at La Joya, Veracruz, Mexico Valerie J. McCorMaCk 326 | Valerie J. McCormack at La Joya illustrate that community organization fluctuated between independent nuclear family households and multifamily corporate groups. Comparisons of the activities based in the multifamily corporate groups reveal that organization differs through time, but the presence of multifamily corporate groups is strongly correlated with periods of land scarcity. La Joya is a twenty-five-hectare village situated along the Río Catemaco, a major drainage and transportation route of the Sierra de los Tuxtlas (Figure 11.1), which is a 4,500-square-kilometer active volcanic mountain range located along Mexico’s southern Gulf Coast. While the southern Gulf Coast is best known for the emergence of Olmec societies by 1200 BC (uncalibrated), social organization varies widely throughout the region during the Formative period (Stark and Arnold 1997). For example, societies in the Tuxtlas engaged in similar ideological and ceremonial traditions, shared ceramic technologies, and participated in similar long-distance exchange routes as the San Lorenzo Olmec, but a chiefly society did not emerge until 400 BC in the Río Catemaco drainage. Over the past decade, research of Formative societies in the Tuxtlas has helped establish broad cultural patterns and chronological sequence for the region (Table 11.1). The earliest evidence for human occupation derives from pollen data, which indicate that around 2250 BC, populations were clearing forests and growing corn in the Tuxtlas (Goman 1992). However, no sites have been identified for this time, suggesting populations moved frequently and did not occupy any single location for an extended length of time. By 1300 BC, hamlets and villages occupied the best agricultural lands within the Tuxtlas, a pattern that continues throughout prehispanic times (Santley and Arnold 1996; Santley, Arnold, and Barrett 1997). La Joya was first settled around 1300 BC and occupation continued through AD 100, when Cerro Puntiagudo erupted and blanketed the region with a layer of thick volcanic ash (Arnold et al. 1996; Arnold and McCormack 2002; Reinhardt 1991). This 1,400-year occupation from the Early Formative through the Terminal Formative makes La Joya an ideal location for studying changes in community organization as social complexity increases. HOuseHOld OrganIzatIOn and tHe MultIFaMIly cOrPOrate grOuP The internal organization of communities reflects the social, economic, and political relationships and boundaries defined and maintained by individuals and households. Household organization varies along a continuum from independent nuclear family households to multifamily corporate groups. Corporate groups consist of several families that are linked together through lineage, kin, or clan affiliation, and members share residence or live in close proximity to one another (Hayden and Cannon 1982). Anthropologists have linked corporate group organization to scheduling conflicts, resource control, inheritance, Fluctuating Community Organization | 327 and the size of the labor group necessary to extract key subsistence resources (Hayden and Cannon 1982; Nimkoff and Middleton 1960; Pasternak, Ember, and Ember 1976). Cross-cultural studies of household composition and size Figure 11.1. Location of La Joya within Sierra de las Tuxtlas, Veracruz, Mexico 328 | Valerie J. McCormack suggest that the natural tendency is for households to resemble nuclear family units. When independent families are able to carry out subsistence activities on their own, household organization tends to favor nuclear families (Hayden 1995; Pasternak, Ember, and Ember 1976; Wolf 1966). In reality, this continuum is more complex than it...