Good evening, ladies
and gentlemen. I'm Jeffrey Quilter, director
of the Peabody Museum. And welcome, tonight, to The
Origins of Maya Civilization, New Insights into Ceibal. It is the Gordon
R. Willey Lecture. It's one of our two most
prestigious lectures of the year. And it's presented this
year by the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, as
well as the Museum of Science, with its new
exhibit on the Maya. I'd also like to note, thanks to
the Harvard Museums of Science and Culture, with
whom we partnered, and who enables our
public programs. You can pick up a flyer on
the Harvard Museums of Science and Culture events, which
include Peabody events, as well as events at the Museum of
Natural History at the table. There should be a
table over there. Tonight, anthropologist
Daniela Triadan of the University of Arizona,
as well as Takeshi Inomata, will discuss their joint
work at the sight of Ceibal, a Maya site in Guatemala, and
what this work is revealing about Maya culture and society. At the table, you can
also sign up, by the way, to join our mailing
list and receive regular updates about our
lectures and other events. We also have
information about how you can become a
member of the Harvard Museums of Science and Culture. It gets you admission
to all of our museums. It also helps support
our museum mission to bring you public educational
programs like this one. Also, after the talk, there will
be a reception in the Peabody Museum on the third floor. Please join us there. I'd also like to invite you
to join our museum's upcoming events. On March 12 at 6:00
PM, Stanley Ambrose, Professor of Anthropology at
the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, will deliver
the annual Hallam L. Movius lecture, the second of
our two prestigious talks. Dr. Ambrose's talk will
focus on human evolution, and in particular,
on the behaviors that contributed to competitive
advantage of modern humans and the demise of
the Neanderthals. On Thursday, March 26,
at 6:00 PM, Don LaRocca, Curator of Arms and Armor at
the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and consultant to our
exhibit The Arts Of War, also on the third floor,
will review how and why armored weapons have
been acquired, studied, and preserved since
the 16th century by both private
collectors and by museums. And on Tuesday, March 31,
Peabody curators Diana Loren and Patricia Capone will discuss
the findings of the Harvard Yard Archaeology Project,
an initiative that seeks deeper knowledge of
17th century Harvard College and the lives of its Native
American and English students. I'm now delighted to introduce
William Fash, Charles P. Bowditch Professor of
Central American and Mexican Archaeology, former Director
of the Peabody Museum, who will introduce our speakers
tonight and tell you more about them. Thanks very much. [APPLAUSE] Good evening, all, and welcome. Thanks for coming out on
a less than ideal might. Ceibal in the
tropics this is not. But we are happy to
see you all, and I know that we can count on
some terrific questions after the presentation. So this evening's lecture,
as Jeffrey mentioned, will be given by
Professor Daniela Triadan of the University
of Arizona, who is also a research associate
at the Smithsonian Institution. The Gordon Willey
Lecture is made possible by the generous
gift of his former student, Richard Leventhal,
now at the University of Pennsylvania Museum of
Archaeology and Anthropology, who wanted to do honor
to Gordon by sponsoring an annual public lecture,
as well as a seminar presentation to
members and students of the Department
of Anthropology. So tonight, our good friend
Daniela-- Dani to one and all-- will present the findings
that she and her partner, in life and in work,
Takeshi Inomata, also a professor at
Arizona and Director of Graduate Studies at the
School of Anthropology there, have been making
through their research at the archaeological site
of Ceibal in Guatemala. Takeshi, by the way, presented
the seminar talk to us earlier this afternoon. So Takeshi and Dani are seated
right here in the front. And Takeshi has agreed to
also help answer questions after the presentation. Dani received her PhD from
the Free University of Berlin in 1995, and her
research interests focus on the study of the
sociopolitical development of small sedentary societies and
more hierarchical ones, as well as prehistoric economic
systems, with a specialization in ceramic
technology, provenance studies, and the integration
of material analyses into archaeological research. She's conducted extensive
field and laboratory research in the
American Southwest, as well as Mesoamerica. In the Southwest, she
works on two large scale studies of late prehistoric
polychrome ceramic production and distribution, one centered
on White Mountain redware from East Central Arizona,
and the implications of that for transformations
of the Pueblos in the 14th century, and the
other on Chihuahua polychrome from the Casas Grandes
region in Chihuahua, Mexico. She was delighted to
see the Casas Grandes collections in the storage
areas of the Peabody. Her research in the
Maya area includes work in Belize and
Guatemala, where she co-directed the
Aguateca Archaeological Project with Professor Inomata. The investigations
at Aguateca have been one of the most innovative
and informative research projects in lowland Maya
archaeology for the past two decades. The many articles,
book chapters, and the technical
monographs from that project have addressed many
significant research questions of broad anthropological
interest, with a level of accuracy
and attention to detail that make them
models for our field. Dani has a well
deserved reputation for meticulous excavations and
recording standards learned and earned at the University
of Arizona's Grasshopper Fiend School, where I understand
she was the TF for our very own Bill Saturno, that
bring great credibility to the research and its
presentation in published form. She's the series
coeditor with Takeshi of the Monograph series,
volume three of which came out last year, entitled
Life and Politics at the Royal Court of Aguateca. And the important
2010 volume, also, Burned Palaces and Elite
Residences of Aguateca. Professor Triadan's
research there is geared toward examining
social, political, and economic
organization, and its changed through the analysis
of domestic assemblages. Excavations of elite
residential structures at the epicenter this
rapidly abandoned city-- amazing
place-- have revealed the richest in situ
floor assemblages found to date at a
classic Maya site, providing a unique
opportunity for reconstructing classic Maya household
organization. Presently, as
co-director, with Takeshi, of the ongoing Ceibal
project, she works and directs an international
team investigating the processes of the foundation
of that important site, and its political disintegration
during the Terminal Classic. It's providing new
information on the foundation of Maya civilization, the
subject of tonight's talk, as well as the so-called
collapse or reorganization at the end. She's the author of numerous
important publications on the Maya and the southwest
in the major peer reviewed journals of our profession, a
marvelous teacher and mentor, and a very personable
and popular colleague in both Mesoamerica
and the southwest, sought after at meetings and
any gathering of friends. The list of her
accomplishments goes on and on, but let's cut to the chase. Please join me in welcoming
Professor Daniela Triadan. [APPLAUSE] Thank you so much, Bill. I hope I can actually
live up to the reputation that you kind of laid
out there for me. It sounds like a person that I
don't know, somehow or other. But thank you so much, Bill,
for your very kind words and, really, major exaggerations
in those accolades, I have to say. And thank you for coming
out and braving the weather. I have to say that maybe
for the one time in my life, I'm actually glad for
my pack rat tendencies. I was actually able to find
winter clothes somewhere hidden away before we came here. We live in Arizona,
as you've heard. Let's just say today,
it was 82 degrees. I'm glad. I'm glad I found
my winter coat that was still somewhere left over
from our New Haven days early on. So we were actually fairly well
equipped to get here and talk to you tonight. You can also see that we have
slightly changed the title. We have made it longer. This is kind of a tendency,
I guess, of professors. But the point was
we really wanted to do honor to Gordon
Willey, not just because it's the Gordon Willey Lecture,
but as Bill mentioned, Gordon Willey was, of course,
the uber archaeologist when it comes to
Maya archaeology. And he and Harvard University
had a long term project at Ceibal in the 1960s. So they've done very
important work at Ceibal, and our work there
is really building on what Harvard and Gordon
Willey has done in Ceibal. When we decided to go there,
we could thankfully really look at Harvard's
research results, and we didn't have to
basically reinvent the wheel. It was amazingly helpful to us. So we came out with
a good idea, and we could develop a very
specific research design when we came in to
work, again, at Ceibal, after about 40 years when
Harvard had been there. And in this photo,
just to cue you in, we have Gordon Willey
in the center right here, Ledyard Smith. I was informed, Dick
Adams in the back. And we have a very
handsome and young Jerry Sabloff on the left side of
Gordon Willey, I have to say. So some of the main protagonists
of the Ceibal project. So today, I'm going to
talk about new ideas that we're developing about
origins of Maya civilization based on our research in Ceibal. The origins of
Maya civilization, as you probably know,
and how the Maya became what we call the
Maya, is really one of the big research questions
of Mesoamerican archaeologists, right? I mean, this is one
of the big things, and people have been
thinking about this and researching this
question for a long time. So we're not the
first ones, obviously. And as I said, Harvard
did a lot of work. But we, building on
Harvard, have come up with some very
interesting new data that we would like to
share with you today. So just to orient you, Ceibal
is in the southwestern part of the Maya lowlands. And the Harvard
Project had shown that it was one of the sites
with the earliest occupations for the Maya lowlands. So that was one of the really
important results that came out of the Harvard project. So we already knew
that there were early occupations at Ceibal. Just to orient
you timewise, when we talk about origins of lowland
Mayan civilization, most of you are probably familiar with the
classic period of the Maya. This is where we
have the big stelae. We have kings. We have nice buildings. This is a stelae from Ceibal
and a building from Ceibal from the Classic period. So this is the typical
Maya expression that everybody knows. Texts, art, so on and so forth. When we are starting
to look at the origins of these expressions, we
know through new research-- relatively new research
at the important site of San Bartolo, where Dr.
Saturno has been working, who is in the
audience-- as well as research at the site of
Mirador, that the foundations, the fundamental things
of Maya civilization, were pretty much already
in place in the period that we call the
Late Preclassic. So what we see
later, pretty much we see already expressed
fairly early on. So when we're looking for
the origins of these ideas and the origins of
Maya culture, we really have to go farther back in time. We have to go into a period that
we call the Middle Preclassic. Now, when we go there, we
are talking about, really, the earliest sedentary
settlements in the Maya area that are also using ceramics. These are ceramics from Ceibal. This is how they look like. Not very impressive. Now, I should remind you
that while the Maya are doing this type of
thing-- they're just starting to become villagers--
this is what's going on in the Mexican Gulf Coast. So when me talk about
the Middle Preclassic, we've already have several
years of Olmec civilization, with people who are schlepping
giant heads over the landscape for large, over long distances,
maybe have had kings already. We have the center of the major
Olmec center of San Lorenzo. So clearly, outside of the Maya
area, people are much more, quote unquote, "civilized," than
what we are seeing-- already civilized than what we're
seeing in the Maya lowlands. But really, when
we're trying to look at what's going on
in the Maya area, The middle Preclassic period is
what we have to concentrate on. So to do our research
to really ask questions of when and
how Maya became Maya and what the social
processes were that played a role in
these developments, as well as development
of social complexity, of different political
organization, one of the things that's
really important is chronology. We need good chronological
detail and control to try to trace what
has been going on, and to understand better
what kind of processes were involved in
these developments. So one of the foci
of our research has been to really work
on a better chronology for the Middle Preclassic. And then, as I
said, we're really interested in the social
changes that are taking place during this time period. And to some degree, they must
have been dramatic, right? We have a very dramatic
change in lifestyles of people who live in the Maya lowlands. And specifically, when we're
talking about social change today, I'm going
to focus on changes in ritual and symbolism, as well
as the development of sedentism that happened in
this early period. So going back to
Ceibal, I'm going to talk a little bit about
what kind of research we have been doing there. This is the map that
Harvard created. It's a marvelous map
of the larger site. It covers the center, as well
as the peripheries of the site. So, again, it was wonderful. We didn't really have to do any
of the bushwhacking and survey in a lot of these areas. We had a very accurate map that
helped us a lot to structure our research design. As I mentioned,
Harvard had found that they had very early
occupations at Ceibal, and these very early
occupations are centered in what
we call Group A. So because we were
looking for the roots and foundations of
Maya civilization, we focused our own research
predominately in Group A. So this is a close up of Group
A. What you see here on the map is the latest configuration. This is the classic
period configuration. This is what you see
today on the ground. And when we're looking a
little bit closer on this map, Dr. Inomata realized that
when you look closely, he saw a pattern that you also
see in many sites in Chiapas-- Middle Preclassic sites in
Chiapas in the Grijalva Basin. What you see, basically, is
this architectural compound right here, which we call
an E Group, surrounded by large rectangular platforms. An E group, in
Maya understanding, is a formal ceremonial
complex that consists of a smaller western
platform or pyramid, and then a range structure-- a long
platform on the east side. And many Mayanists think
that these E groups were aligned with solar-- that
they had a solar alignment. So they were basically recording
equinoxes and solstices. So he was looking
at the pattern. He's like, man, I think
we have an E group here, and then we have
these platforms. And this looks awfully
like some of the patterns that we see in Chiapas
sites, especially in the Grijalva Basin. And this pattern is
called by John Clarke the middle formative
Chiapas pattern. So it's very typical
for Chiapas sites. So one of the
questions that came up was, hmm, so we have a
Chiapas pattern site that doesn't look very Maya. What's going on? We really want to figure
out whether this was indeed the early configuration
at Ceibal. These sites in
Chiapas also often have axe caches on the
center line of the E groups right here. So that was another question
that we were interested in. So when we start to
work there, we actually find greenstone axe
caches in Ceibal. So with these questions
in mind, as I said, we focused our main
excavations on group A. And you see these
little red things all over the place, so we're
focusing on the platforms as well as on the E
group-- potential E group and the center line. And we really wanted to know
how early this E group was and how far back some of
these platforms actually went. So to verify that,
we were excavating into the existing structure,
especially on the west side. And in this particular
area, we had to tunnel. This is a pyramid today
that is about-- I'm probably lying-- but it's about
15 to 18 meters high. It's a massive structure. And we have to get into
the core of the pyramid to get to the earliest
construction of the E group. So we tunneled into the bedrock. We basically
tunneled in bedrock. We followed bedrock and
then dug up a little bit. So we had to kind of
reverse stratigraphy. We dug up a little bit and
followed the bedrock area, and we dug, and we dug,
and we dug, and we dug. And there was [INAUDIBLE],
and there was nothing. And we dug. And we were about 20
meters inside this pyramid, and we had a little
grad student in there. And he's like, it is so
hot, and really, we're never going to find anything. We have bedrock, you know? Until lo and behold,
after about 20 meters in, we finally see this
bedrock rising. And we're like, oh,
something's going on here. Is it natural? Is it not? Well, it turns out it is not. It is actually a man-made
ramp that was dug into bedrock and led to the very first
structure of the E group, which you can see here. This is about five to
six meters farther west, continuing the tunnel. So we're up the ramp. Here is the bedrock surface. And what happened once they hit
the height that they wanted? They actually constructed
a small platform here out of clay. So this is the very
first construction phase. This is the first floor. And lo and behold,
it dates to 950 BC. Then, of course-- so we
have the structure there. Hooray. Everybody's really happy. But to make sure that it is
an E group, we, of course, have to find the
eastern platform. So we are digging
in the center line, and also on the east side. And that also took a little
bit of stamina and time, because we found
several versions of an eastern platform. The earliest is the closest
to the western structure. This is a shot of the plaza
area where we were excavating along the center line. And so the earliest structure--
the back of it is about here. It dates also to 950 BC. And then we had several
later iterations that were not built on top of
this early structure, but out. So they are actually moving
this eastern platform towards the east. They're making the
plaza space bigger, and they're building
larger platforms. So we have several versions
of this eastern part of the building. This is the backside
of the building, similar to the
Western structure. A ramp cut into bedrock actually
leads to this eastern building. And again, the date is the same. So looking at 950 BC, as of
this day, as far as I know, this is the earliest
E group that we have anywhere in the Maya lowlands. We also excavated in the
surrounding large platforms. Again, we're trying to find
out whether we have a Chiapas pattern and how early
that pattern is at Ceibal. So one of our
biggest excavations was in this big platform
in front of the largest pyramid at Ceibal. And it was a 10 by 8 meter
excavation, very challenging. You can imagine,
we're trying to get to the origins of
Maya civilization at a site that was
occupied for 2,000 years. This excavation, 8 by
10 meters, we actually worked on for four
field seasons. It reached more than 8 meters
when we went to bedrock. We had to completely rethink
our excavation strategies. We came from Aguateca. Everything was on the surface. Lots of stuff, but easy to do. Now, all of a sudden,
we had to go down. Quite challenging. Took quite some time. Very different situation. I mean, just think about how
we would get the dirt out of this mega pit. But what was actually
most surprising about this excavation
was that the majority of the construction
that you see here dates to the early part
of the Middle Preclassic. So more than 2/3 of
the constructions here date between
950 and 800 BC. We're talking
massive construction. The earliest platform down here
was a very large structure, actually. It was probably something
like 30 by 20 meters or so. So we have massive
early constructions. And in the later
part here, we also have-- you can see, maybe, these
little flags-- we have floors upon floors upon
floors upon floors. So we have a very detailed
stratigraphic sequence that is sealed with floors. So we have, actually,
a great situation where we can look at
chronology of stratigraphy and those things. We also excavated in the
northeastern platform, which is called the east court. This thing is about 8 and
1/2 meters high right now. It's all man-made. And what we found here was
very interesting, because here, we found a series of
small clay platforms that were built onto
larger clay platforms, and that we think were
actual residences. So this is the first evidence
of people actually living on one of these platforms. What they did is they remodeled
a lot of these little platforms constantly, and
they built, also, one structure on
top of the other in several different versions. So once we are about
800 BC, and we're looking at the east
court, there seems to be this sense of place. People are now living there. And not only that,
but we have evidence that these structures were
actually forming a patio group. We have other excavations
at the E group, and we found buildings that are
on the same floors than the one that I just showed you. So we have a very
early patio group that, again, supports that we
probably had people now living there in houses. We also think that the
people who lived there were people that had
higher social status than the rest of the community. So these are what we tentatively
call potential emerging elites that lived in
this eastern platform. So to just summarize
what was going on here with the early
layout of the site, this is the early phase. We have the earliest E group. We have this big construction
in the southwestern platform. Then a little bit later,
the E group gets bigger. It gets moved towards
the eastern structure, gets pushed towards the east. We have the addition of
the east court platform right here, which
is now supporting potential elite residences. And then a little
bit later, in what we call the Escoba phase, which
is also called the Mamon phase, between 700 and 350, we have
the full Chiapas pattern, basically. So it really looks as
if we have this type of middle formative Chiapas
pattern early on at Ceibal. The earliest version
of the E group was probably a
relatively modest affair. We think it was a
communal construction, but it was not very high. It was carved out of bedrock. And it was probably
accessible and visible to the majority of people
who were doing rituals there. So it was very community
oriented, not very exclusive. And as you may
recall, I was also talking about
potential axe caches on the center line
of E groups, right? And we were looking for them. And what do you know? Let's just say we found some
axe caches on the center line. So we were obviously, again,
very excited about these finds. So this whole idea
about Chiapas pattern with axe caches and
everything really played out nicely as Chiapas. Within these caches,
we have these caches of greenstone celts, and
we have additional caches with some other objects. But we found some very
interesting Olmec style objects in these caches. So here you can see a
pectoral, typical Olmec style, and a perforator
made out of jade. We have these
marvelous objects that look incredibly Olmec
to us, including this upper object
right here, which looks like a typical
Olmec spoon pendant. And what's important
about these objects is that they're
personal ornaments. So we have them in these
caches in the E group, which to us indicate that we now have
people who wear these objects, potentially as personal
adornment in rituals. And to us, that
indicates that, again, we may have people now of slightly
higher social status that are more visible in the
community already this early on. We also have this amazing
Olmec stone figurine head which was on the flyers for the talk. And we have here on the right
what I call the evil artifact. This thing gives me the willies. You have no idea. I actually restored it. It was the creepiest thing
that I've ever had in my hands. Seriously. It really gives you bad vibes. It's a spondylus shell
that is carved to show a head that is desiccating. So you can see the
teeth coming out because the flesh is
basically shrinking. So it's probably the
depiction of a trophy head. It was worn upside
down like this, and it is actually an
indication that people this early on in the
Middle Preclassic were probably taking heads
of people as trophies, and we probably have
some warfare going on. So people were not always nice
to each other during this time period. So I was mentioning chronology,
and that this is very important to address the
questions that we're having about the social changes
and political changes that are going on at the beginning of
this Middle Preclassic period. And we, in the project,
actually concentrated a lot of our efforts on refining
the chronology for the Middle Preclassic. So we took a lot of
radiocarbon samples. We also were very careful
about stratigraphy revisited stratigraphy, which is
why I was showing you this picture with
all these floors. So we have a very fine
grained stratigraphic control of all of our excavations. And we were also revisiting
the ceramic chronology and aligning it with
dates-- radiocarbon dates as well as with our very
detailed stratigraphic record. So Sabloff-- Jeremy
Sabloff-- did a marvelous job when he originally established
the chronology for Ceibal. He was mostly
looking at ceramics and correlating them
with excavations. And this general
chronology still holds. I mean, Sabloff was right on. He was spot on. But as you can see, those
are pretty big time periods that we're talking about. And so this doesn't really give
us a very fine grain picture of what has been going on. So with all of our efforts,
we are now actually able to subdivide Sabloff's
phases into subphases, and now we have, actually,
a chronological control of about 50 to 100
years in these phases, and we can correlate
it with ceramics. So this is actually very good. I work in the southwest. We usually have about
50 year ceramic phases, and everybody's
envious about this. We are close with this. So we're getting to a
point in this early time in Maya archaeology where we
get some very good time control. So the chronology
that we developed is also important
to revisit some of the more regional and
interregional interactions that are going on and the social
changes on a larger scale. So we were using
our new chronology to reevaluate and reassess
some of the ideas that have been floating
around when it comes to the development
of social complexity in the Maya lowlands. One of the ideas has
been for a long time that the Olmec, who by then are
carving this type of things, were instrumental in the Maya
becoming civilized, right? So the big question,
really, is if we think there was a connection
between the Olmec-- at that time, we're talking
about the center of La Venta-- is La Venta earlier or
contemporaneous with Ceibal? I mean, that's kind of
it in a nutshell, right? If there's influence,
then it had to be there before
to influence Ceibal. So to just give you a brief
idea about how detailed and how good our dates are,
this is the radiocarbon sequence of the dates for the E group. Each one of these
states is basically shown with a 95% probability, so
each one of these is a sample. All of these are mass
accelerator dates. And you can see for the
earliest construction period in the western structure,
the dates fall very nicely in the majority around 950. The next period-- the
next construction phase-- we have two dates that are
slightly later, which is great, because that basically
shows us that our first date sequence is good. We have a later construction. It should date
later, and it does. And then we have
dates from the back of the eastern platform
that are also falling into this general range. So we are very confident
that our dating of 950 for the earliest phase
of the E group is correct. Now look at the
dates from La Venta. These are dates from
the Franco phase. The Franco phase
is the phase where La Venta is supposed to
have become a major center-- a major influential
settlement in the Gulf Coast and in surrounding regions. And you can see there's
not a single date here that is before 800 BC. So clearly, La
Venta was probably not the impetus
for all the changes that we are seeing in the Maya
lowlands, because it wasn't that La Venta didn't exist,
but it wasn't a major player before 800 BC. We also looked at
this chronology and reevaluated some of the
regional Maya chronologies and ceramics sequences. So this is the refined Ceibal
sequence that you see here, and these are the
chronological sequences and the ceramic complexes
that go with them from other early sites in the
Maya lowlands, especially sites in Belize. And what you can see is that
the colors are basically showing ceramics that are
similar to each other. So they're very closely related. They kind of look the same. So they're all kind
of overlapping. But what you can see is that
in many sites, especially the Belize sites, people are
pushing the dates earlier than what we have in Ceibal. So a lot of people
think that these sites started around 1200 BC. And one site that I want
to actually point out is Nakbe, where we actually
have a situation where this middle part is
pushed even farther back. So Richard Hanson
and colleagues think that what they call Early
Ox dates to about 1000 BC. This is significant because
major construction at Nakbe, and Nakbe is a very big site
in the late Middle Preclassic, starts basically here. So pushing it to
1,000 makes Nakbe the earliest monumental site
in the Middle Preclassic. I have this slide
up here to show you that when we're doing
this comparison using our chronology, we pretty
much have the same date ranges at some of these Belizian. We cover it all, except
that we have 100 dates. So we have the best data right
now for the Maya lowlands. We have the best
dating sequence. And when we look at
the Ceibal sequence, we really have to critically
evaluate radiocarbon dates. And Takeshi talked about
this today in the seminar. And by looking at
these dates, we have decided that
these early dates that we have are questionable. So we are not using them. We are not pushing the beginning
of Ceibal to about 1100, which we could easily do
if we look at these dates. So looking at some of the
other dating sequences, we argue that basically these
dates are also too early, and should be disregarded. Getting back to Nakbe, these
are the earliest ceramics that they found in Nakbe. This is the Ceibal
sequence on the right side. And I dare you to say that these
look awfully the same, yeah? So we are pretty convinced
that what they have at Nakbe is what we have here in
Ceibal, and we have good dates. And these things are
later than 800 BC. So we are convinced that the
Nakbe sequence is not correct, and it needs to be
pushed up younger. So when we look at
all of this, again, and we take into
consideration that we think some of these early
dates need to be discarded, and obviously the
Nakbe situation, as I've just described
it, we really think that the situation
in the Maya lowlands looks something like this. So we really don't have any
good dates that are before 1000. And as you can see, there's
a remarkable consistency, actually, with these
ceramic complexes. So this, to us, makes
much more sense, actually. But it's also interesting,
because something big seems to be happening
right around 1000 BC. So to summarize this
kind of regional picture, I want to reemphasize
that when we talk about the beginnings in
the Maya area, this is late. Compared to the rest
of America, these guys are way behind the curve. We have San Lorenzo
starting at 1400, right, in the Olmec big site. San Lorenzo goes down
around 1100 BC, disappears, and as I mentioned, we really
don't have a major Olmec center until 800 BC. So between 1100 and
800, we have some kind of a vacuum in the Olmec coast. We may have a power
gap in this area. And what's interesting is that
a lot of these things that I've been showing you-- the E groups
and the Chiapas pattern-- seem to be happening
precisely in this time gap. And they're happening in the
area between the Maya lowlands and the Gulf Coast. They're happening in
this intermediate area. So around 1000 BC, we have
Ceibal, earliest E group, and we have a site in
the Grijalva Basin-- think Acapulco-- which may be
the site that has the earliest Chiapas pattern and dates,
potentially, to the same time period as Ceibal. In the Pacific
Coast, we have a site called La Blanca, which also
has a formal ceremonial complex a little bit different
from the Chiapas pattern. This is about 1000 BC. A little bit later, we're
starting to see, around 800 BC, other sites in
the Grijalva Basin with now a Chiapas
pattern, and also La Venta, which may have adopted
a Chiapas pattern. Only after 800 BC
are we starting to see E groups in the
rest of the Maya lowlands. And interestingly, those
sites like Ceibal and Tikal only seemed to adopt the
E group, but not the rest of the Chiapas pattern. So we have E groups,
but we do not have the platforms that we
see in this area right here. So to us, that
actually indicates that the idea of E groups did
not originate in the Maya area. This kind of
coagulated somewhere in this intermediate
area-- this whole idea of more formal architectural
layout E groups-- and then some of
these Maya centers adopted part of these new
ideas a little bit later on. So what really is
interesting to us, of course, is when we're thinking
about all these changes, that this is an enormous time
period and a very interesting time period. A lot of different
things are going on, and there's an enormous
amount of social change and organizational change
going on in the Maya lowlands. And the thing that we want
to focus on in this talk is changes in
ritual and symbolism that go on during this time
period as well as sedentism, and I'm going to talk about
this in a little while. So Mayanists have the tendency
to have a relatively-- not everybody-- but many
Mayanists have a tendency to have a relatively static view
when we're talking about ritual and symbolism, right? They're coming from
the classic, and we're looking for signs in the time. And they're seeing this kind of
as a static development, right? It's this kind of, oh,
we have this there. Oh, the roots go all the way
back to the Middle Preclassic, as if nothing ever changed. And we really question this. We really think in these early
times in the Middle Preclassic, a lot of things happened, and
there were hundreds of changes. It was very dynamic. Mayanists also have the
tendency to see E groups as a solar alignment,
often accompanied by these axe caches and
these cruciform caches also as being aligned
with cardinal directions or with celestial
type of symbolism. But with our newer chronology,
we have a much more fine grained view, and
we can tell you that things actually changed. They were not static. So again, E groups
probably originated here-- E groups and axe caches. But what we actually
see when we look at the actual alignment of E
groups is that in many cases, they're not aligned
to the north. There's quite a
bit of variability. We have them either veering
a little bit west of north, as in these two cases,
or in some cases, they're actually
veering east of north. So what's going on? If this is supposed to
be a pattern, if it's supposed to be solar alignment,
why are these people-- I mean, they can't find north? I mean, what's going on here? We have an even more extreme
example in Tzutzuculi, where they are really
going towards the east. So Michael Blake, a
very esteemed colleague and brilliant
colleague, is actually doing a study on E
group alignments. And he postulates that
the main reference in early times for
E groups is not a solar alignment, but
our landscape references, such as hills or
mountains, so that we have a very localized
orientation that references directly
the surrounding landscape for these E groups. And then as a
secondary reference, we have a solar alignment. So he's really arguing that
in the early parts of these, we have a more
earthly symbolism. And then the celestial
part of this is secondary. And if you look at
landscape pictures-- this is the view from Chiapa
de Corzo-- the E group is aligned with a prominent hill. The same is true for Izapa,
where the E group is directly aligned with the major volcano
to the north of the site. So clearly, it looks as
if in these early places, these kind of earthly landscape
references were very important, and people then also
incorporated or tried to incorporate some kind
of a solar alignment. Now, when we go to the Maya
lowlands in Ceibal, earliest E group, we basically have
nothing on the horizon, right? There are no landscapes. We're sitting on a [INAUDIBLE]
plane, and there's no hill. And so at Ceibal,
the E group actually does have a solar alignment. So more cardinal direction. And if you go to La
Venta, Olmec being Olmec, they don't have any
landmarks, either. They're sitting in
the coastal plain. They're building their own
landmark for the E group with this gigantic mount that
is to the north of the E group. And that to us indicates
that this whole idea about the Chiapas
pattern and the E groups probably came from
the south, and was not invented by La Venta,
because they're adopting this kind of localized pattern. They're creating a
landmark, basically, which is really not necessary,
if you think about it. So they're probably still
thinking along those lines. We see the same changes
when we look at the caches. These are axe caches
from El Manati. This is a site that is
contemporaneous with San Lorenzo and close
to San Lorenzo. These caches were
placed in the spring, so we have a very clear
earthly reference. And these caches are
either in a flower shape or they're in a
horizontal alignment. So probably some earthly
references there. With our new
chronology at Ceibal, we can actually
sequence the caches. We can look at
stratigraphy and the dates, and we can sequence
our axe caches. The early caches at Ceibal
look like El Manati caches, so they seem to be having these
earthly type of references. After 800 BC, we have
cruciform caches. So we have a direct change
towards cardinal directions and potential more
celestial reference when we talk about ritual. This, by the way, is cache
number seven, the famous cache that was found by Gordon Willey
and colleagues in the plaza. We see the same change, by
the way, using our chronology and making the comparisons
in other sites. Now that we have a
better idea about time, we can actually see
the same changes at La Venta and some
of the Chiapas sites. They all go to cruciform caches. So again, we see this change
towards more celestial symbolism. But they also maintain
some of the water and earthly symbolism, because
many of these cruciform caches-- this is the
one from Ceibal-- actually also have water
jars in the directions. So there's a change,
but then there's also this maintaining of some
of the earlier symbolism. We also start to see the
cardinality in iconography. You can see basically
four axes right here. And it looks as
if we're starting to see a connection
with the maize god from a symbolic perspective. So to summarize,
before 1000 BC, we have this very
earthly reference. We have these caches in
these type of formations. No Chiapas pattern yet. Around 1000 BC, we see the
earliest Chiapas pattern, E groups, still these
type of firstly references in the caches. There's probably
some solar alignment, but it's not necessarily
the primary reference. And then after 800 BC, we
see the fully fledged Chiapas pattern and these
cruciform caches. So we see the shift towards a
different meaning and symbolism around 800 BC. So clearly not a
static situation. I should also mention that
around that time, again, we have this eastern
platform where we may have the first
elites that are directly tied into some of the ritual
performances that are going on. So as a summary slide, we first
have this earthly symbolism expressed in the caches. We're starting to see
mounted complexes, E groups, around 1000 BC, mostly
connected with this. In the lowlands, more solar
or celestial symbolism. We see a development
to more standardization in the architectural
pattern and a clear change from earthly symbolism to
a more celestial symbolism. So the second big question when
we talk about social change is sedentism, right? I mean, how did people
become sedentary? Before about 1000
BC, we don't really have any evidence for sedentary
sites in the Maya lowlands. Sorry, I'm losing my voice. So going back to our
now refined chronology in the Maya lowlands,
as I mentioned, what's really striking here
is that everything seems to be happening around 1000 BC. All the early sites seem
to date, more or less, around 1000 BC. So what's going on? Is there something
fundamentally happening that kind of synchronizes
all of these people? And one factor actually may be
a change in maize productivity. In this slide, we're
looking at carbon isotopes in human bone, which represent
consumption of maize. And as you can see,
before 1000 BC, there's very low maize
consumption from samples from the Pacific coast. We have no data from the
Maya area, by the way, before 1000 BC. But then around 1000
BC, all of a sudden, we have a major jump
in maize consumption. It's still not a lot,
but it is noticeable, and it is a dramatic jump. And we now have data
from the Maya lowlands, and it is very similar to what
we see in the Pacific coast. So many people think
that around this time, maize may have become
more productive. It may have been better
adapted to the lowlands. People now can use maize
in the central lowlands, which were probably not a very
good place to live before that. And people are starting
to incorporate more maize into their subsistence strategy,
which gives them a basis to become more sedentary. So when we started to
look at the distributions of early occupations at
Ceibal, we were really becoming interested in how did
the sedentism thing actually happen? I mean, did everybody
come together, they build the E group, and
they became sedentary, or what's actually going on? So this slide
shows you the areas where we have real phase
or early Middle Preclassic constructions, or
we have deposits. And then we have
some areas-- the ones that are dotted lines here--
where we have ceramics, but we don't have
actual construction. And the areas where
we have blue circles are areas that have been
excavated or tested, either by Harvard
or by ourselves, and there's no evidence
of early occupation. So it's a relatively restricted
area, as you can see. But I really want to
draw your attention to a couple of these
outlying groups. They're really very
close to group A, but they're a little bit
farther away, especially the Karinel group right here. So we have E group 950. We have this platform at 950. We don't have much evidence
for any sedentary buildings. When we look at
the Karinel group, we have here no evidence
of real phase construction. But around 850, we have
ceramics directly on bedrock. So what this tells
us is that we have people in the area
that are clearly there at this time period, but they're
not living there permanently. So they're visiting the
area, but they're still actually moving around. A little bit later, at a little
temple group called Caobal, we have post holes
in the bedrock. We don't have
actual constructions of the real phase, but we
have ephemeral structures. So people seem to be maybe
doing a little bit more, maybe be there for a few
months, or who knows? But they're clearly not
permanently living there, either. At the same time, as at
Caobal, for the first time, we're starting to see
burials in the Karinel group. So people are burying
their dead into bedrock, which may indicate that
they have a little bit more ties to the place, but
they're still not actually building houses in this area. So people are moving around. They may be coming back
to bury their dead, but they're not
permanently living in these groups that are very
close to the central part of group A. So if we were to construct this
in a more fine grained way, as I said, we have the
E group right here. We have this platform
that date early. We have no evidence for any type
of actual sedentary occupation. So they're building a major
formal ceremonial complex which probably involved quite a few
people, quite a community, but they're not living
there permanently. So we have ritual construction
before we have actual sedentary buildings. In the next phase,
we have this platform that's built where we may have
the first sedentary buildings for Ceibal. And as I said, those
were potentially elites. They were potentially
directly tied with activities in the E group. And then we have
burials in these areas. But we're not really
getting any kind of more substantial
evidence for residences until we hit this period
starting at 700 BC. And even then, the area
is relatively small. Again, the blue here
are excavated areas where we do not
have any evidence for this type of occupation. We have a very similar thing
going on in the region. Ceibal is the earliest site. It has the earliest occupation
with that E group complex. We know now, again,
based on our chronology, that some of these
other sites, especially Altar de Sacrificios,
where people actually thought it was contemporaneous
with Ceibal, is actually later. And we don't have
evidence for sedentism before these later phases
in these sites, either. So it really looks
that not only locally do we have very little sedentary
population, even though they're investing into public
ritual buildings, but also in the
region, we have still people moving around
all over the place. And they may actually see
Ceibal as a center point. They may come to
Ceibal, to that E group, to do some kind of ceremonies
and then go back out. So to summarize,
this, in our view, is we have foraging going on in
those southern Maya lowlands. Around 1000,
something dramatically is starting to shift. It may have to do with
more productive maize. We're getting more and
more maize cultivation. We're getting the first
ceremonial complex investment into these ritual constructions. We are starting to see the first
elite sedentary residents quite a bit later, actually, and we
may not reach full sedentism in some of these
communities until 700, 600 BC-- so relatively late. So sedentism-- this development
is actually a very complicated and a long term process. But what's really important
here is that in many models, people, when they talk about
development of sedentism, they think we have
people coming together and they're starting to live
at places longer and longer. Eventually, they're
starting to invest into more monumental communal
structures, ritual structures, and these structures are used
for community integration, right? That's usually the story
that we are all familiar with in the Near East or from
other places in Mesoamerica. So what's really
amazing here is that we seem to have the opposite. We have the majority
of people still moving around the landscape for
several hundred years. But these same people--
these mobile people-- are building a very
formal ceremonial complex. So it's really kind of
a reverse situation, if you think about it. And with this, I'm
coming to my conclusions. So when we talk about the
chronology, some of the, I think, for us, big, important
things that we learned, is that La Venta is about 150
years later than the first E group instruction at Ceibal. A lot of things are happening in
this vacuum between San Lorenzo and La Venta. E groups and Chiapas patterns
are getting developed. So many new ideas seem to be
kind of focusing precisely in this, if you want, power
vacuum, when we do not actually have these Olmec people
dominating the landscape or whatever. When we talk about
social change, we see clear dynamic changes
in ritual and symbolism. People are, early on,
when they're still mobile, potentially, building these
kind of integrated structures, but they're not static. They're clearly changing the
meaning and the symbolism in relatively short
periods of time, and then things become
more standardized. And when we talk
about sedentism, it's a pretty
complicated picture. Yes, we all kind of agree
that it takes some time, but what's really
amazing here is that we seem to have the elites
being the first people who are sedentary. They seem to be tied
into ritual performances. Maybe that's why
they're sedentary. They have to be
close to the E group. And then we see, for
quite some time, still mobile populations
that are invested into these communities, but
they're not living there on a permanent basis. Thank you very much
for your attention. [APPLAUSE] Thank you. Thank you. So, any questions? I have a question
for our speaker. I'm the expert in
radiocarbon dates. He's the one who does
the Bayesian voodoo. What about the maize? What about the
sequencing genome? Have you found any
kernels or any evidence of it changing genetically
or the spread of that? Yes. That's a difficult question. In the tropical area, the
preservation is not great. So we don't find much of
those direct maize remains. We have small
fragments of maize, but I don't know if
anybody has succeeded in recovering DNA from them. Probably not. The preservation is
bad, so it's difficult. It would be great if
we can do it, yes. So it's kind of
circumstantial, right? But we do see this
major and pretty eye popping change in consumption
when we look at human bone. So that's kind of
why people-- they don't know exactly
what morphologically happened to the maize, though. But, you know. I suggest that you
repeat the question. Oh, OK. OK, yes. Do we have a mobile mic? No, just repeat. Yeah. So obviously this development
of the sedentism-- I mean, how did it evolve? Where were people staying? Were people coming periodically
to the ceremonial center for ritual, and were they
living semi-permanently somewhere else, or were they
wandering around the area and meeting up a
couple of times a year? Could you flesh that
out a little bit? So the question is about
how we're envisioning this-- What would the [INAUDIBLE]
be that changed [INAUDIBLE] ended up in full sedentism? Right. So what the processes
were, and how we actually envision people
on the landscape, I assume, and what
kind of movements and so on and so forth. So originally, people
moving around, probably, because we don't have
any permanent buildings, or we don't have ceramics during
those early periods before 1000 BC. But 1000 BC, we have
ceremonial structure, but we still don't
have those residences. We think that the people
were still moving around, although they are starting
to do more maize cultivation. Then, those mobile
people are still gathering for the construction
of ceremonial center, and then gathering for the
rituals that happened there. Then, gradually, people
started to settle down. But it's not that everybody
started to settle down at the same time. Many people tend to think that
the sedentism just happened. Everybody started
to adopt sedentism. But it's not like that. Some people started to
settle down near the center, but at the same
time, there's still people-- lots of
people-- maintaining a traditional way of life,
doing lots of foraging. Then, after about
400 years or so, finally, large
majority of people settled down, focused
more on maize cultivation. So there was a long period
of this mixed economy. People do some
maize cultivation, but do lots of gathering,
hunting, and fishing. And then so there are those
different kind of people. On one side, sedentary people. On the other side,
still mobile people. So that kind of situation. But it may also very
well be that they're coming periodically together,
because we have construction phases of this E group, right? They're actually enlarging it. They're moving it out. So there may be these
communal events, because you need, obviously,
more than five people to bring all this
earth together. So there may be, actually,
these kind of periodic events where people come together. And they may even come, as
I said, from farther away, because we don't have the
same type of early occupations in these surrounding sites. So it may actually involve
more than just people all around Ceibal. It may be a more
regional thing, even. Yes? Are you finding changes
in art and weaponry during this period? And how, today, are
these sites protected? Good question. Is there any change
in arts and weaponry that we're seeing, also, and
how are the sites protected? For the first question,
we see clear changes in the ceramics, which is
why we have this very, very fine grained chronology. So it's dates, but it's
also ceramics sequencing. And we see changes in forms and
slightly in decorations, which is why we can narrow it down
to these much smaller time periods. And it's pretty robust. I mean, now we can
look at ceramics and can say, similar to
what we do in the southwest, oh, these look like this,
so these have to be earlier. This is this phase, right? And so we can start to do some
cross dating, which is also what we're doing with some of
these other ceramics sequences. Because there are lots of
similarities, actually. And we see the changes pretty
much in other sites, too. So yes, there are changes. Not so much in the
lithics, but ceramics tend to be a little bit more
sensitive to time change. Maybe people are just
experimenting more, and they're coming
in with new ideas. Site protection, big
problem in [INAUDIBLE]. These lower levels are
obviously well protected, because we have 11 meters
of later construction, and you really,
really have to work very hard to get to the bottom. But yeah. I mean, looting-- in general,
Maya sites, it's a big problem, and especially in northern
Guatemala, where, as many of our colleagues know,
they have situations that are even worse than ours. Guards are not there, or
especially the out sites are looted. So it's a problem. It's a big problem. I was very impressed by
the quality of the material as well as the form of
many of the [INAUDIBLE] artifacts that you illustrated,
specifically that some of them were, to my eye,
indistinguishable from the so-called Olmec
[INAUDIBLE] source we found in Xalapa about 10 years ago. Questions arise which
isotopic systemics might aid in resolving
in terms of both the isotopic geochemistry of
these well treated lithics. And also, just something
far more speculative. I hesitate, but now
that you're here, I was fascinated by the
magnetic alignment issue. I'd not seen that raised before. Could you tell us a
little about the sense we do have evidence of
Olmecs' spoon magnets and magnetic materials that
are basically magnetite and [INAUDIBLE]? Oh, for cardinal directions? Yeah. Yeah, as to whether
the geomagnetic variations around 1000 BC
encompasses the variations seen. So the first question was about
the jades and the Olmec style artifacts. They looked like the
blue jade source, and we think they're probably
from the [INAUDIBLE]. They certainly
overlap-- the ones you showed overlap with
the ones we've got here. Yes, yes. And we probably think that
they're from the Motagua. So the question is,
where are these-- Not from the Motagua. From Xalapa the new source. Oh, the Xalapa. Yeah. OK. So the question was, what's
the source of these jades? Yeah. The idea has been
for a long time that they are coming
from Guatemala. There's a blue
jade source there. We don't know. We haven't actually done
any isotopic analysis or any sourcing analysis
on these artifacts. But it was mentioned that
with newer techniques, we may actually be able
to source some of them, If I understood you correctly. There are about 10 geochemical
dates for different sources now, so there is
something to correlate. sorry? Dates. Isotopic dates. They're geochemical
age of formation dates. Ah, OK. Yeah, yeah, right. We've got them for about
10 different sources now. For Motagua jade. For the Xalapa jade. Not for-- the Motagua turned
out to be the wrong stuff. The interesting ones are
in Xalapa, in one fault farther south. And the most recently
reported ones are from an area about
50 miles west of Ceibal, at an elevation of
about 2,000 meters, actually, in the
highlands on the north side of Motagua fault. Hmm. New information. Yes. I have to say that I wasn't
aware of those new sources. So he just said that there
were new sources in Xalapa as well as closer to the north
side of the Motagua fault, right? Both sites. So we haven't done any
actual sourcing on the jades. We, obviously, as you were
mentioning, they look Olmec. I mean, they could
come from the Gulf. If we had them somewhere
in Gulf Coast sites, nobody would raise an eyebrow. They would basically
say this is good. But your second question-- The alignment of the-- Oh, the alignment. The magnetism. The geomagnetic drift
of the first millennium BC, does it correlate
quantitatively with the changes
in alignment seen? That we have been showing? Yeah. Well, I mean, but that's
the whole point, right? I mean, they're actually,
interestingly enough, these alignments of the E groups
are not cardinal direction. And this is Michael
Blake's point. They should be closer
to whatever-- I mean, if it was a truly cardinal
point and celestial type of symbolism, there's no
reason why these E groups couldn't be-- So actually, when we see
the size of the one time, there's a variation. It's not that the
change through time. So in that sense, we cannot
clearly correlate to change in the magnetic directions. Actually, we can see that
each many of cases, they're aligned to specific
landmarks in the one place. So that tells us that
it was not aligned to solar direction, primarily,
or magnetic direction, or any of those more
standardized things. It's really aligned to
specific local [INAUDIBLE]. I understand. The point simply is
that magnetic north varies several degrees-- Yes. On a century time scale. Right. You just have to go and do
the geomagnetic [INAUDIBLE]. Thank you. It was a very, very
interesting talk. I'm curious about this
transitional period around 1000 BC, when people
suggested to practice sort of mobile maize agriculture. And I was wondering, do you
have paleontological evidence that would tell you mobile
it is, whether people are disrupting the vegetation
right there around Ceibal, or if they're moving
further out and coming in? So the question is
whether we can actually see in the pollen record whether
there has been deforestation around 1000 BC, which would
also support doing more maize, doing more agriculture, even
though people are still mobile. That's actually a
difficult question. We take lake cores to
reconstruct those vegetations and climate-- those things. Actually, possible change in
forest starts around 1500 BC, before the beginning
of these sites. Then, everybody
thought that that's the effect of people
cutting down forest. Then you get the
different species. You get more erosion
refracted to these lake cores. But now there's
a different idea. Actually, that time, there
was a climate drying. And because of climate
drying, vegetation changed. You get more erosion, starting
around 1500, or even earlier. It may not be done by people. So there's still
different opinions. So then, there may not
have been too many people before 1000 BC around
this time in this area, because the lowland environment
is not a good place to live. You don't have much food
unless you have good crop. So there may not have been
many people living there. Then, 1000 BC, we start
to see this new site. But since this change in pollen
and erosion happens earlier, it's very hard to see
what kind of change in terms of vegetation is
happening around that time. But the change is not
that clear around 1000 BC. We think that the
people are still doing lots of this
hunting and gathering. They were cutting some forest. But not to extensive levels. Well, the isotopic
signature is not that high. I mean, the maize consumption
is not really super high, so they're not probably
relying predominately on maize. It's just more incorporation
into the subsistence pattern, [INAUDIBLE] thing right here. We have time for
one more question. Yes. Hi. Could you elaborate a little
bit on the postulated shift in the symbolism going from
earlier terrestrial emphasis to then celestial? Especially because afterwards
in the Maya region, we know that both of them
are intricately related [INAUDIBLE]. So what could explain these
different [INAUDIBLE] emphasis? Yes. So the question is
about this symbolism, particularly in relation
to earthly symbolism to later celestial symbolism. We are not really
separating them clearly. Of course, in
Mesoamerican thought, all those things go together. You cannot separate
them clearly. What we are trying
to say is that that's a change in emphasis. Early days, there's a stronger
reference to earthly features, like El Manati. Those caches are
placed in the spring-- a prominent earthly feature. And their sites are
oriented to mountains-- prominent earthly features. But later time, the
celestial reference becomes important,
particularly after 800 BC. This solar directionality
becomes important. This cardinal symbolism,
represented by cruciform, becomes important. To us, that seems to represent
a more standardized way of thinking, standardized
way of representation. If you are referring to
individual local features, those things change from
one community to another. But once people started to
refer to the sun and stars, you go to the next
community, people are talking about
the same thing. So that's actually, I
think, an important process. There's a more standardized
way of ritual and religion. That's probably sort
of conditioned people for more centralized
political ways or standardized
political way, too. I don't know if that answers
your question, though. Well, thank you again very much. Please join us
for the reception.
