With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Robert Santley and his colleagues will conduct two seasons of archaeological research in the Tuxtlas Mountains of southern Veracruz, Mexico. ThIs will center around the large Classic period site of Matacapan which has been the focus of past research by the investigator. With the assistance of aerial photographs several teams will carry out a broad scale regional survey designed to include all major environmental zones. The location of all sites will be noted. During the second season, more intensive work will focus on more limited regions. Ceramics and other cultural materials will be collected from the surface. This will be complemented by a limited number of excavations. Data will be analyzed to reconstruct the regional settlement, economic and political systems and to show how these developed and changed over time. The Matacapan region is of particular interest for the light it can shed on prehistoric Middle American society. Prior work has shown that contrary to what is observed in other parts of this region, the Matacapan area exhibited a dendritic form of organization where settlements are arranged in an economic and political hierarchy with clearly defined size ranks. It also appears that the economy was highly centralized in a dendritic form where very few goods passed horizontally among units of similar size, but rather flowed upwards to larger centers. The site of Matacapan which sits at the top of the hierarchy seems to be a major trading center both for pottery and obsidian which was highly prized for making stone tools. While extensive work has been conducted at Matacapan itself, to understand how the broader regional system operated, wide scale survey work is necessary. This research is important for several reasons. It will provide data of interest to a wide group of Middle American archaeologists. It will not only increase our understanding of how prehistoric societies functioned, but also provide insight into the mechanisms which control small scale societies in many parts of the third world today.
