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27 Lacandón Maya, a recent historic people who occupy an ecological niche similar to that reconstructed for the Chantuto people. Ethnographic data for gender1 distinctions in seasonal mobility and resource procurement among the Lacandón provide a strong explanatory framework for the archaeological record as currently known for the Chantuto people. LIFEWAYS OF THE CHANTUTO PEOPLE The fact that the lifeways of the Chantuto people are known principally to archaeologists from investigations of shell mounds inevitably makes it tempting to infer that these sites, formed initially as islands within the wetlands, were once occupied permanently. This seductive inference is also encouraged by the sheer size of these features. The largest shell mound of the six that we have studied, for instance, has a diameter of 160m and is presently 11m high.2 Such a substantial accumulation of deposits, principally shell, might seem to represent a sustained effort of the sort often expended by permanently settled peoples. Our purpose in this chapter is to investigate in detail the changes in subsistence and settlement mobility manifested over four millennia by the prehistoric Chantuto people. These ancient people occupied what is now the south Pacific coast of Mexico from approximately 7,500 to 4,000 years ago (Voorhies 2004:14). They are best known for the large, highly visible shell mounds that they formed within the wetlands along the outer coast, and this site type is the most thoroughly investigated of what we have inferred to be a settlement system comprising multiple site types formed by residentially mobile people (Voorhies 2004). The basic thesis of this chapter is that during the final phase (around 2700–2000 b.c.) of the Chantuto people’s adaptation to coastal resources that resulted in the formation of substantial shell mounds, women continued to make forays into the coastal wetlands to procure clams and small fish while men concentrated their activities on the inner coast rather than undertaking fishing expeditions to the coastal lagoons as they did in earlier times. This interpretation of the archaeological evidence rests on an analogy with the TWO A Gender-Based Model for Changes in Subsistence and Mobility During the Terminal Late Archaic Period on the Coast of Chiapas, Mexico Barbara Voorhies and Douglas J. Kennett 28 archaic to formative ble scarcity of artifacts in general and their extremely low diversity are not compatible with the expectations at a site where multiple activities are carried out, as at a residential base. Rather, this is what would be expected if a limited range of activities was being pursued at a location dedicated to specialized activities only. These considerations are spelled out more thoroughly in Voorhies (2004). If the shell mounds were processing stations for aquatic resources and not residential locations, where exactly did the people live? We propose that they lived farther inland on the coastal plain and that we have explored one such apparent base camp that we named Vuelta Limón. This site is coeval in time with the terminal dates from shell mounds located farther downstream in the wetlands in Acapetahua, the municipality where the Late Archaic Period shell mounds are located. Although our limited excavations did not produce evidence of many features usually associated with a settled lifestyle, such as permanent structures or hearths, we did find a dense concentration of discarded artifacts consisting of more tool types than in the shell mounds, along with abundant fire-cracked rock. This feature appears to be a refuse midden or dump. Such a wide diversity and quantity of artifacts is precisely what is expected for a residential base. We suspect that if we were to conduct further excavations at this site we would find evidence of residential features. Accordingly, the evidence for the Chantuto people being logistical foragers (collectors, in Binford’s 1980 terminology) or semi-mobile horticulturalists (or possibly even slash and burn agriculturalists as suggested by Kennett et al. 2010 and Neff et al. 2006) seems to us compelling. The known archaeological record, as we have mentioned, spans four millennia, and it is now possible to detect subtle shifts in the record that reflect temporal changes in the basic adaptation that we have described. The first shift to become apparent to us was in the record of the seasonal collection of marsh clams that was studied via oxygen isotopes at However tempting it may seem to infer permanent residency at the shell mound sites, the actual archaeological record suggests a very different interpretation. Most notable is...

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