Long Term Social Stability in the Tres-Zapotes Region

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With National Science Foundation support, Dr. Christopher A. Pool and Dr. Michael L. Loughlin will direct a regional archeological survey to investigate causes for the remarkable resilience of the polity headed by Tres Zapotes in southern Veracruz, Mexico. From the Arab Spring, to the Haitian earthquake, to global climate change, contemporary events underscore the need for polities to adjust to social and natural disturbances in their environments. Archaeology has a unique ability to provide a comparative perspective on the resilience of human societies in the long term. While much scholarly and popular attention has been focused on the phenomenon of collapse, understanding why some polities and institutions are more resilient than others is as important as as understanding what collapses and why. Tres Zapotes was the capital of regional polity of the Olmec and epi-Olmec cultures between 1000 B.C. and A.D. 300. While other Olmec centers were collapsing around 400 B.C., Tres Zapotes grew and flourished for another 700 years before it suffered a protracted decline. During that time, the evolving Tres Zapotes polity experienced challenges from periodic volcanic eruptions, changing environmental conditions, and an increasingly competitive political landscape. Previous NSF-funded investigations by Dr. Pool suggest that a key factor in the resilience of the Tres Zapotes polity was its shift from monarchical rule to a system in which governance was shared among multiple competing factions in the capital. The current project focuses on how Tres Zapotes implemented governance within its territory and how that territory was created and maintained. Such understanding requires regional-scale data on the distribution of population, the plans of civic-ceremonial architecture, the organization of craft production, and the exploitation of the environment.The current project combines traditional archaeological survey and surface collection methods with the advanced remote sensing technologies of LiDAR and multispectral satellite imagery to investigate the relationship between Tres Zapotes and hinterland populations over time. In addition the project seeks evidence of earlier occupations stretching back into the Archaic period (8000-2000 B.C.) to better understand how humans adapted to the humid tropical environment that eventually gave rise to the Tres Zapotes polity. The intellectual merit of the project lies in its melding of political-economic and landscape perspectives to evaluate models of political resilience - a matter of considerable anthropological and practical importance.The broader impacts of the study include the training of Mexican and U.S. students in field and analytical techniques, interpretation of remote sensing data, and enhancement of the local research infrastructure through needed expansion to the project laboratory on the grounds of the Tres Zapotes Museum. The project will contribute to public education by (1) providing materials for museum displays (2) allowing museum visitors to observe laboratory activities, and (3) giving public talks to schools and civic organizations in the region. Information from the project will be widely disseminated through professional publications, graduate dissertations and theses, and a project web page.