Collaborative Research: Foraging to Farming on the Pacific Coast of Southern Mexico

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With National Science Foundation support Drs. Douglas Kennett and Barbara Voorhies will conduct one season of archaeological excavation at sites located on and near the Pacific coast in southern Mexico. Previous work in this area has indicated the presence of sites which span the Archaic through Early Formative periods from ca. 7,500 to 2,700 years before the present. Shell middens located along the coast indicate that Archaic period hunters and gatherers made extensive use of fish and shell fish, and botanical evidence suggests that these groups may have had access to domestic maize. They also collected wild plant and animal resources from a variety of resource zones and probably foraged out from central base camps located on the forested coastal plain. By the beginning of the Middle Formative Period, ca 2,700 years ago these settlements were transformed into sedentary agricultural villages which dotted the landscape. Inhabitants depended primarily on maize agriculture. The goal of this research is to gain insight into this poorly understood and crucial transformation in human subsistence and settlement patterns, because this basic change, from reliance on wild to cultivated resources occurred independently in many parts of the world and set the stage for the development of complex societies. Tentative evidence suggests that early Archaic peoples had access to maize but it is unclear how this domesticate was incorporated into their diets and how this altered subsistence and settlement strategies. Previous research in the area on this crucial transformational time span has indicated the presence of abundant sites but has failed to define shifts in land use, changes in human interactions and regional variations in human behavior. Drs. Kennett and Voorhies believe that these changes may best be understood in the context of larger land use patterns. While many sites have been discovered along the Pacific coast much less is known about adjacent inland mountainous regions. Survey has indicated that a series of caves and rock shelters are present and quite likely were inhabited by Archaic peoples. Because of the shelter they offer from rain, such sites often provide excellent protection for plant remains and Dr. Kennett and Voorhies wish to conduct test excavations to recover archaeological and botanical materials. They will also excavate later coastal Formative agricultural sites to gain additional insight into subsistence practices. To reconstruct possible seasonal movements the investigators will carry out isotopic analysis of shells because variation in the ratio of oxygen isotopes provides insight into the season in which they were harvested. They will focus also on trace element studies of ceramics in an attempt to link finished products to clay sources and thus reconstruct the movements of goods and the corresponding economic links between groups of people over time. This research is important for several reasons. It will provide data on a poorly known archaeological region and this will be of interest to many archaeologists. The work will also increase understanding of the transition from foraging to farming in Mesoamerica and offer insight into the processes which led to the rise of an important New World civilization.