In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

INTRODUCTION TO THE 2003 EDITION Xolalpan after Seventy Years George L. Cowgill Between 26 April and 29 July of 1932, Swedish anthropologist/archaeologist Sigvald Linne, accompanied by his wife and with the aid of a crew varying from four to nine, excavated in the house lot called Xolalpan, within the village ofSan Francisco Mazapan, part ofthe municipality ofSan Juan Teotihuacan, finding remains ofthe ancient Teotihuacan* civilization, as well as later materials above the floors of the Teotihuacan structure. He also worked briefly at the site called "Las Palmas," about 150 to 200 meters to the south, site 14:N3E2 oftheTeotihuacan map (Millon, Drewitt, and Cowgill 1973:46), where George C. Vaillant had excavated earlier, and he reported briefly on finds at a third site about 100 meters south ofXolalpan (pp. 90-91 and 104-105), probably site 33:N4E3. Xolalpan itself is site 2:N4E2. Both Kent Flannery and Rene Millon have observed, verbally if not in print, that our ideas have finite lifetimes, but good data are good forever. Even if there is no such thing as "pure" data free ofany interpretive presuppositions, this insight is basically true. The present volume and Linne's later report on his 1934-35 work at Tlamimilolpa (1 :N4E4) are cases in point. Linne made excellent use of the literature available to him, and most ofhis ideas were well-reasoned and often quite astute, given the knowledge and intellectual climate of the time. But he emphasized that the archaeology of Mesoamerica was barely beginning and that it was to be expected that there would be vast changes in our understandings of the pre-Conquest past. He would surely have been very disappointed if many of his ideas and interpretations had not been superseded. This has indeed been the case. Today they have an honorable place in the history of archaeological thought, but on their account alone, there would be little reason for republication of his reports, long out of print. His data are another story. To be sure, there is no evidence that he ever used screens, and he paid little attention to potsherds or other artifacts that were not part ofgrave offerings or of exceptional interest as individual objects. His field methods fell considerably short oftoday's * In referring to the modern municipality, I stress the final syllable; but in referring to the ancient city, I follow Nahuatl usage in stressing the next-to-last syllable. Of course, because we do not yet know the principal language of Teotihuacan, we do not know what the ancient inhabitants called their city. standards, but they compare favorably with other field practices of the time and, for that matter, those of many more recent projects. He published plans of the excavated part of Xolalpan (pp. 40, 42) and a few informative (though small and not very detailed) stratigraphic sections and plans of some features (pp. 43-45 and 216), but these include drawings of only one of the seven graves he encountered. Linne (p. 47) identified six construction stages. It is instructive to compare his stratigraphic information with the profiles of a number of deep but areally limited test excavations published by Millon (1992). Linne published almost no physical anthropological data. Contextual data on finds not associated with graves are often rather vague. I suspect that an attempt to construct a Harris diagram for Xolalpan would confront one with a number of irresolvable ambiguities, but the effort would be instructive. We need not belabor the quantities and kinds of data that Linne did not report, although it is worth mentioning that if had felt obliged to publish according to modern standards, he surely would not have published so promptly. The fact is that what he did report is ofexceptional and lasting importance. His discussions ofthe things that interested him are keenly observed, well illustrated, and highly informative. After an extensive review ofdata on Teotihuacan grave lots, Sempowski (1994:27) says Linne's "reports on and illustrations of the artifactual offerings associated with particular burials are unparalleled in their systematic presentation." Even today, with all the advances since 1932, very few Teotihuacan apartment compounds have been excavated as extensively as Xolalpan and also had the results published as fully as Linne did. Manzanilla (1993) is a major exception, although full reports ofsome other meticulous excavations of relatively large parts ofcompounds are in various stages of preparation. Thus, a great deal of the information in this book is of permanent interest, especially for Teotihuacan specialists but also...

Share