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242 Most Mesoamerican archaeologists work at sites that were inhabited by sedentary peoples who subsisted from intensive food production. Their data therefore tend to document the parts of a regional settlement system where villagers and urban dwellers left the densest concentrations of material remains. The ethnographic and ethnohistoric records, however, are replete with examples of peoples practicing different subsistence strategies living side by side (for example, Alizadeh 2010; Kelly, Poyer, and Tucker 2005; Kent 1992; Lee 1993). It is reasonable to assume that parts of Mesoamerica were occupied by peoples relying on different mobility and subsistence strategies and that those who were more mobile left less material residue for archaeologists to find. This was likely true during the Classic and Postclassic periods and even more likely the further one goes back into prehistory. Steadman Upham (1992) has focused attention on the archaeologically “empty” spaces in the Desert West region of the Southwestern United States. He argues that the apparently empty areas in that region were occupied by hunter-gatherers and others Fernand Braudel (1992) employed the term Archipelago of Towns to describe the spottiness of innovation in Medieval Europe against a “sea of backwardness.” The analogy is to a network of cultural islands, forming an archipelago of interaction across the continent . These centers were dazzling because in nearby areas people lived a traditional existence without the material trappings of urban life (Braudel 1992:30). On the eve of the Industrial Revolution, in extensive regions of the countryside, even that surrounding London and Amsterdam, people lived by hunting and fishing as they had for millennia (Braudel 1992:42–43). Similarly, in his recent synthesis of native adaptation across the preHispanic New World, Charles Mann (2006:ii, 23) illustrates how in c.e. 1000 and c.e. 1491 the American continents were occupied by an intricate mosaic of states, chiefdoms, and foraging peoples. Both of these authors emphasize that any region will realistically contain a mosaic of peoples with different adaptations (see further discussion in Rosenswig 2010:13–46). ELEVEN An Early Mesoamerican Archipelago of Complexity Robert M. Rosenswig archipelago of complexity 243 neighboring states, sometimes for long periods and large areas. Thus there were often large stateless areas in which other kinds of social groupings could and did flourish and hold sway.” Ann Stahl (2004:147) further characterizes the last 2,000 years of African history as “mosaics in which foragers interact with agriculturalists , peripatetic herders passed through courts of kings, and so-called tribal societies formed on the margins of complex polities.” The current conflict in Darfur has its roots in mobile pastoralists coming into conflict with sedentary agricultural populations (Faris 2007). Though often framed in idealist terms of ethnic and racial clashes between Arabs and Africans, the distinction is more insightfully understood as a clash of material interests when the economic viability of one group (“Arab” pastoralists) is undermined by deteriorating environmental conditions. Thus ancient and modern pastoralists are examples of groups with nonsedentary subsistence strategies living interspersed among settled agricultural populations. As opposed to their sedentary neighbors, pastoralists produce much lower quantities of material culture that result in more ephemeral sites. The areas that nonsedentary peoples occupy may well appear to be “empty” archaeologically, but they certainly were not. Depictions of Second Millennium b.c. Mesoamerica A number of authors have recently depicted initial Early Formative Mesoamerica as consisting of a Locona and a Red-on-Buff interaction sphere—employing shared styles of ceramic decoration as the criteria defining zones of more intense interaction (Clark 1991:figure 8; Evans 2004:figure 4.5; Flannery and Marcus 2000:figure 3). These authors do not explicitly describe how they envision the distribution of peoples across the landscape (or the mix of peoples practicing difference subsistence and mobility strategies) within each sphere. However , each sphere is defined by the style of not tied into regional systems whose remains have low archaeological visibility (also, see Vandermontfort 2008). In this chapter, I posit that along with early agriculturalists, less sedentary peoples were present (and probably quite common) in Mesoamerica during the second millennium b.c. (see also Arnold 2009; Blake and Neff, Chapter 2 in this book; Kennett, Voorhies, and Martorana 2006:104–105; Neff et al. 2006:308; Rosenswig 2006a, 2006b, 2010). During the course of this millennium, sedentary food-producing villagers went from being an anomaly to being the most pervasive settlement and subsistence strategy across Mesoamerica. The implication of this proposal is that...

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