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67 Soconusco do not add up in any single, coherent way. On the one hand, macrobotanical remains are dominated by the expected Mesoamerican domesticates from the Locona phase (1700 b.c. through 1500 b.c.)* at the latest (Feddema 1993). Sedimentary and pollen records of human impact on the environment in three different locations of the Guatemalan coast all register disturbance during the Early Formative . Since Archaic disturbances are by contrast uncoordinated and followed in one case by reforestation, a possible implication is for a transition from shifting, extensive land use in the Archaic to greater sedentism and more intensive cultivation in the Early Formative (Neff et al. 2006), much as traditional understandings of the Archaic-Formative transition would lead us to expect. On the other hand, stable isotope analyses of human bone from Early Formative sites yield carbon values inconsistent with a diet based on maize (Blake et al. *See Figure 1.2 for site locations and Figure 1.3 for regional chronological chart. All dates are in calendar years. Recent work in the early archaeology of the Soconusco leaves unresolved the nature of local adaptive transformations between the Archaic and Early Formative periods and the distinctiveness of those transformations within the larger picture of Mesoamerica . Three important elements of the local Early Formative adaptive reorientation—greater sedentism, the adoption of pottery, and the initiation of a trajectory of demographic expansion—were shared with regions that were environmentally very different, including the Gulf Coast, the Valley of Oaxaca, and the Basin of Mexico. Those similarities of pattern, together with the simultaneity of transitions to the Early Formative (1800 ± 100 b.c.) in diverse regions, would seem to indicate that explanation for the changes should be sought in general processes not tied to the details of local ecologies. Yet the status of a fourth element routinely linked to the other three—a step increase in the significance of agriculture—is less clear in the Soconusco than in the other cases. Available data on Early Formative subsistence in the FOUR Archaic to Formative in Soconusco the adaptive and organizational transformation Richard G. Lesure and Thomas A. Wake 68 archaic to formative sition from the Early to Middle Formative around 1000 cal b.c. (Blake et al. 1992a, 1992b; Clark, Pye, and Gosser 2007; Love 1999; Rosenswig 2006). Is it reasonable to portray the local Early Formative as sharing some aspects of contemporaneous adaptive shifts (sedentism, pottery, population growth) with diverse other regions in Mesoamerica but not a reorientation toward agriculture? How distinctive were local adaptations ? Could the Soconusco Early Formative, afterasuggestionbyBlakeetal.(1992a:145–146), even represent a transitory shift away from agriculture? Beyond any debate over the relative importance of different foods, how was the Early Formative subsistence system organized? Did the social organization of food procurement , processing, and consumption then differ from that of the Late Archaic, and, if so, how? Neff et al. (2006) provide a possible solution to the puzzle of simultaneous but locally distinctive Early Formative readaptations by identifying climatic drying as a causal factor in the early second millennium b.c. With simultaneity explained by climate, the inhabitants in each area can be imagined to have responded to subsistence stress in a manner appropriate to the local ecology. For the Soconusco, Neff et al. propose that innovations in technology allowed an expanded breadth of diet and intensi fied production of estuary foods; drawing on Blake et al. (1992a), they point specifically to net weights and fishhooks—in other words, to recovery technology. We find the basic scheme proposed by Neff et al. (2006) appealing, especially their emphasis on the Archaic-Early Formative shift as a demographically highly successful adaptive transformation founded on technological innovation . We are unconvinced, however, that innovations in recovery of aquatic animals could have kicked off Formative-scale population expansion. Recourse to climatic drying as an ultimate causal factor seems at first glance to allow readaptations across Mesoamerica that were different (in their articulation with local ecological conditions) and yet simultaneous. But 1992a, 1992b; Chisholm and Blake 2006). Although it is worth remembering that the reliability of those data has been the subject of debate (Ambrose and Norr 1992; Chisholm, Blake, and Love 1993), it is relevant as well that settlement pattern changes between Late Archaic and Early Formative seem to have involved concerns other than agricultural intensi fication. In the reconstructed settlement system of the Archaic, residential bases were located on the interior coastal plain...

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