Material Relations: The Marriage Figurines of Prehispanic Honduras

Introduction

1 DOI: 10.5876_9781607322788.c000 Introduction This book has multiple goals. First, it demonstrates how an analysis drawing on contemporary theories of materiality can enhance our understanding of broad social processes from a dedicated, detailed study of small things. This is a point that is familiar from other archaeological studies in areas as far removed as the recent history of the United States (Beaudry 2006) and ancient Egypt (Meskell 2004). In our case, the small things are three-dimensional fired clay figures, shaped into images of human beings and animals through a combination of modeling by hand and using molds, produced in Honduras before European contact. Some of these figurines are musical instruments.Their abundance and wide geographic distribution signal their significance to the ancient people who made and used them. We have chosen to concentrate on a particular theme, that of human double figurines representing two figures standing next to each other. Second, we make an argument for returning to previously excavated and curated collections to interpret them in conjunction with more recent excavation data. It has long been a principle of the code of ethics of the Society for American Archaeology (1996) that archaeologists should undertake work on such collections , yet few such studies exist. We combine information from recently excavated samples of figurines with that derived from collections, now held by museums in Honduras,Europe,and the United States,deposited by early archaeologists and the systematic collectors often referred to as antiquarians. These two goals are global contributions to archaeology, and we hope they make this book interesting for readers not steeped in the specifics of Central American archaeology. INTRODUCTION 2 Our study also has specific aims rooted in the local history of archaeological practice in Honduras.The arguments we make turn away from a tradition,initiated in the late nineteenth century, of explaining variation across prehispanic Honduras in terms of a gradient from civilization to barbarism, from states to chiefdoms, from Mesoamerica to an area so inchoate it could only be called the periphery or frontier of the Intermediate Area. In this early archaeological approach, western Honduras—the zone where a few settlements are found that incorporate inscriptions in the Classic Maya script—is the source driving development throughout most of the rest of Honduras. Sites further east are compared, usually negatively, to these Classic Maya sites,especially the largest and longest studied,Copán.They are described as smaller, simpler, and derivative.The typically smaller size of settlements, and the division of the landscape into smaller territories occupied by a network of settlements sharing traditions of material culture, are viewed as problems to be explained: Why didn’t the rest of Honduras become as highly stratified socially as Copán? These arguments portray more economic inequality and greater disparities in power not just as normal but as almost more desirable than less economic inequality and lower differentials in power. Materialcultureisviewedthroughthesamenormativelens.UlúaPolychromes for example, are the main Classic period decorated serving, eating, and drinking ware in the lower Ulúa Valley, Lake Yojoa, and Comayagua Valley regions, where they develop out of earlier local traditions independently of Copán or the Maya heartland (Joyce 1993a; see also Baudez and Becquelin 1973; Joyce 1985, 1987a, 1988a; Robinson 1989; Viel 1978, 1993). Ulúa Polychromes have been described as Mayoid, a term we reject because of its inappropriate implication of secondhand copying of an existing Maya tradition that somehow represented an aspirational ideal for Ulúa Polychrome producing and using societies, an assumption not borne out by the archaeological record in these areas (Hendon 2007, 2009, 2010; Hendon and Joyce 1993; Hendon, Joyce, and Sheptak 2009; Joyce 1986,1993a; Joyce and Hendon 2000; Joyce,Hendon,and Lopiparo 2009a). From the perspective of twenty-first-century social archaeology, these older perspectives entirely miss the point about the variability we can document in Honduras. We should take a region like this, where between AD 500 and 1000 a network of social relations linked settlements of a variety of sizes, as an interesting place to understand the diversity of ways that human beings can inhabit a landscape. We should not take for granted an older evolutionary assumption that human societies always become more complex.We should be critical of the implicit endorsement of complexity of this kind, which is better characterized as inequality. Consequently, because Honduras has a history of being studied as INTRODUCTION 3 a site where...