The Political Economy of Ancient Mesoamerica: Transformations during the Formative and Classic Periods (review)

The editors’ esteem for Barry Isaac (long-time editor of the annual Research in Economic Anthropology) led them to honor Isaac’s editorial skills and signal contributions to economic anthropology. They selected scholars representing the geographic breadth of ancient Mesoamerica and convened a symposium at the Society for American Archaeology’s annual meeting in Montreal in 2004. Contributions focused on polities in the Mesoamerican world system and most of the papers appear in this 11-chapter festschrift, supplemented by 66 figures, 3 tables, 614 references cited, and an index.

The editors’ Introduction considers statecraft, the control and flow of labor and goods, population relocation, and subsistence intensification, providing a basis for the other papers. Clark’s “Mesoamerica’s First State” provides a compelling case for San Lorenzo (Veracruz) a 1300 BCE polity with a dynasty of monarchs who recruited labor and services, created a city of 10,000 inhabitants, and established a four-tiered settlement hierarchy with three administrative levels. Thirteen “issues” explicate state development in this Gulf Coast polity. “Out of Olmec” by Barbara Stark focuses on the control of specialized technologies and symbols of supernatural power. Stark discusses privilege, legitimacy, and the control of goods and their circulation among elites of different “sister cultures” in other Mesoamerican regions (1400 BCE ff.). In “The Local Village Community and the Larger Political Economy” by Robert Drennan and Mikael Haller, Preclassic/Formative and Classic interaction patterns in the Tehuacan Valley, maize-based villages are compared to those of the Valley of Oaxaca and the Basin of Mexico (1500 BCE ff.). They contend that villages arose through cooperation and interdependence but that no large centers arose in Tehuacan. Scarborough takes a different view of their discussion of irrigation practices.

Jorge Angulo’s “Early Teotihuacan and Its Government” emphasizes the “first true megalopolis in the New World” and its beginnings during the Late Preclassic. He comments on prestate Teotihuacan’s coalitions, ideology and rites that transcended ethnicity and divisiveness, water management, and obligatory community labor, as well as centripetal versus centrifugal expansion models. A neglected region is documented by Phil Weigand in “States in Prehispanic Western Mesoamerica” emphasizing the Teuchitlán state (west-central Jalisco). There is a four-tier hierarchy/stratification, chinampa cultivation, agricultural intensification and craft specialization during the Late Preclassic and Early Classic; effects on the Basin of Mexico are reviewed.

Robert Santley (deceased) and Heather Richards collaborated on “Rank-size Analysis of Classic Period Settlement in the Tuxtla Mountains, Southern Veracruz, Mexico” using data from the Matacapan site (300–1000 CE), a likely Teotihuacan enclave. Their methodological update examines regional economic models, settling on rank-size paradigms, and suggests a shift from a solar marketplace model to den-dritic political-economic control. “The Socioeconomic Organization of the Classic Period Zapotec State” by Gary Feinman and Linda Nicholas presents a “bottom-up” perspective from the low-level center of El Palmillo (200–800 CE). The Preclassic of Oaxaca is well studied, but this essay is a major contribution to Classic period archaeology. They postulate a heterarchical order and domestic artisan textile production and distribution at the site—one of the largest for this period. Kimberly Berry and Patricia McAnany’s “Reckoning with the Wetlands and Their Role in Ancient Maya Society” details riverine raised and drained field systems at K’axob (Pulltrouser Swamp, northern Belize) during the Preclassic and Classic periods. Pollen and phosphate chemical analyses document cultigens and chronologies; a heterarchical socioeconomic and sociopolitical organization is postulated.

Scarborough’s “Colonizing a Landscape” emphasizes wetlands engineering in highland and lowland contexts for the Preclassic and Classic period. He evaluates land and water management, focusing on the latter, and related ecological and economic changes. Economic ethnographer Rhoda Halperin presents “The Political Economy of Mesoamerican States,” following Karl Polyani’s model (Trade and Markets in the Early Empires [1957] and subsequent...