Wearing Culture: Dress and Regalia in Early Mesoamerica and Central America

14. Conclusion

447 DOI: 10.5876_9781607322825.c014 14 Conclusion Undressing the Formative John W. Hoopes inTroduCTion “What did they look like?” is a question that captures the interest of scholars and the general public alike. “Why?” soon follows but is more difficult to answer. The authors in this volume address the oldest known archaeological evidence for how people wore costumes and ornaments in ancient Mexico and Central America, providing examples from the coasts and valleys of Veracruz and Oaxaca through Mexico, Guatemala, central Honduras, Costa Rica, and Panama in an exploration of costumes and the ways in which they established personhood and identity .Their goal is to reconstruct what people wore,how it made them look, and what we can learn from costume and adornment about modes of thought and belief during the Formative period. As Joyce (Chapter 3) points out, what people wore is “not simply a reflection of what people did, but what it was significant to do.” These studies contribute to a growing literature on the anthropology of the body and embodiment (Csordas 1990; Rautman 2000; Joyce 2005; MasciaLees 2011) and on the archaeology of agency, identity, and personhood (Dobres and Robb 2000; Meskell 2001; Fowler 2004), viewing bodies and their adornments as models for the persons who used them and exploring approaches for understanding both them and ourselves. As extensions of the body, costume and adornment provide insights into how perception of the world is conditioned by the body, by how the body (and its extensions) are imagined to be, and by the people who make use of their body and its adornment in specific ways. What they wore reflected, conditioned, and JOHN W. HOOPES 448 reinforced what it was significant for oneself and others to think and how thought was memorialized in material representation, both consciously and unconsciously. As Fowler (2004:7) has noted, “Persons are constituted, deconstituted , maintained and altered in social practices through life and after death,”and costumes of both the living and the dead make this clear.However, Fowler also emphasizes that people are “multiply authored” (ibid.:52). That multiplicity of authorship includes not only individuals in the past, but we as archaeologists interpreting and explaining the past. In writing about figurines, mortuary remains, monuments, and murals, we become coauthors of the personhood of people in the distant past. Costume can be interpreted as a form of embodiment and as a way of establishing personhood. Strathern and Stewart (2011:389) note that embodiment “crucially intersects with personhood” and divide personhood into two aspects: “One relates to formal ideas and culturally established concepts: what we might call ideal conceptions. The other, however, relates to practice: what people actually do, how they negotiate actions in their lives. This latter part of personhood is the part that inter-relates most closely with embodiment.” Costumes represent an expression of how people see themselves as well as how and what they communicate with others. Detailed analysis of costumes and adornments of the Formative period can reveal not only patterns that were manifest at this early time period but ones that anticipated those that were to follow. Interpretation of patterns in costumes and adornment seeks not only to discover conceptions of past persons, but to understand how these objects were used by agents and actors in active processes of embodiment. To what extent can costume and adornment, as known from scientifically documented archaeological contexts as well as well-known works of prehispanic artwork,be used to identify specific persons and aspects of personhood— identities, roles, and behaviors of individuals and groups of persons—in the distant past? Do costume and adornment help define a range of different categories of embodiment and personhood? Can costume and adornment reveal aspects of ancient cognition and how this was reified in various practices? A focus on critical evaluation of costume and regalia in the Formative addresses the oldest known archaeological evidence in Mexico and Central America. The chapters represent a wide variety of cultures within a broad geographic scope. Although Mesoamerica has been well defined since Kirchhoff (1943), the salient characteristics of the “Intermediate Area” remain poorly defined. Southern Central America and northwestern South America are now considered together as part of the Isthmo-Colombian Area (Hoopes and Fonseca Zamora 2003), itself a part of a larger Pan-Caribbean phenomenon (Hofman CONCLUSION 449 et al. 2007; Hofman and Bright 2010; Siegel 2010). Costa Rica and Panama have been included in acknowledgment...