With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Michael Love and a team of colleagues will conduct two field seasons of archaeological excavations on the Pacific Coast of Guatemala. The project will study the impact of increasing social complexity and greater political centralization on the economic and ritual activities of the household. The project will, in effect, study how the development of civilization impacts the daily lives of people. The development of social complexity and civilization is one of the enduring central interests of anthropological archaeology. Developing and testing models of how small groups of egalitarian hunters and gatherers were transformed into socially stratified urban dwelling consumers of domesticated foodstuffs still provides the fodder for productive and lively discourse among scholars of different theoretical orientations. The development of social complexity was a multi-faceted phenomenon, involving population growth, political centralization, increasing social complexity, and economic intensification. Traditionally, archaeologists looked to ostentatious changes in material culture to signal complexity, such as the appearance of monumental architecture, public art, or even large scale urbanism. More recently, however, they have also incorporated more subtle transformations in social and cultural life as basic aspects of complexity. Many of these shifts took place at the household level, such as reorganization of the domestic economy, changes in household ritual, shifts in gender relationships, and new uses of social space. Examination of household economies and ritual activities opens up many theoretical possibilities, especially when they can be analyzed in the context of data from regional survey and the more traditional examination of monumental art and architecture. The Mesoamerican case is generally regarded as one of the relatively few instances in the world in which civilization developed sui generis. Research on the Pacific coast of Guatemala and Chiapas over the past fifteen years has established that zone as critical to understanding the development of social complexity in Mesoamerica during the Formative period (ca 1500 BCE - 250 CE). From the Early Formative villages in the Mazatan region of Chiapas to the Late Formative centers of Ujuxte, Izapa, and Abaj Takalik, this region has sites and polities as large as those anywhere else in Mesoamerica and a dataset unmatched elsewhere for this time period. For that reason, it can provide key insights to a phenomenon of very broad anthropological interest. The research by Love and his colleagues at La Blanca will provide much needed information. Focusing on the large Middle Formative (900-600 B.C.) site of La Blanca, Love's project will excavate at least one dozen residences and collect information on the subsistence practices, economic activities, and ritual activities of those households. The data collected will be compared to those collected from the Late Formative (ca 600 B.C. - A.D. 100) city of El Ujuxte, which Love and his team studied from 1993 to 2000. That comparison will tell us how domestic life changed after the development of a state-level government at El Ujuxte. The broader impacts of the study are that it will contribute significant information on a region of the world vital to understanding how civilizations develop and impact the lives of people who live in them. The project will provide a substantial increase in knowledge about an important topic and will provide the basis for major revisions in the scientific understanding of the development of ancient civilizations. International cooperation and understanding will also be enhanced, as Guatemalan and U.S. students will participate in the project jointly and collaborate in developing theses to obtain undergraduate and advanced degrees.
