In this new volume on the archaeology of Paso de la Amada, located in southern Mesoamerica's Soconusco region, editor Richard Lesure and ten contributors present detailed information for several key contexts at the site. Intended as the first in a series of reports, this monograph focuses on several mounds, test pits, trenches, and off-mound areas. The well-known Mounds 6 and 7, as Lesure and coauthors John E. Clark and Michael Blake point out in their introductory chapter, have been the subject of previous publications and will be the focus of a future monograph in the series.
This hefty volume is divided into six parts with an appendix. Part I reintroduces readers to the objectives guiding the research at Paso de la Amada since the mid-1970s. Part II details the excavations at Mounds 1, 12, and 32, as well as a few other mound-testing and off-mound excavations. The section culminates with Chapter 7, dedicated to the “constructed landscape” surrounding Paso de la Amada. This chapter presents data for one of Lesure's primary social interpretations in the book, which is that domestic life at the site during the Locona phase (1700–1500 cal BC) was organized according to clusters of small structures and their occupants surrounding the larger homes of community leaders. Part III is rich in data and is dedicated to specific artifact types recovered from these excavations. The excellent imagery here will prove useful to researchers working in other regions and is one of the volume's major contributions. Part IV follows with a discussion of specialized ceramic studies, including Chapter 21 by Terry G. Powis, Lesure, Blake, Louis Grivetti, and Nilesh W. Gaikwad, which presents mass spectrometry analyses seeking evidence of maize, manioc, chili, and cacao. Although previous results and analyses of early cacao use in the region published by Powis and colleagues are not bolstered by new findings here, the team does report fifteen samples bearing Capsicum and providing “the earliest evidence of chili consumption in well-dated Mesoamerican archaeological contexts” (p. 467). Part V contains a burial catalog and evidence of skeletal health and demographic patterns. Part VI offers a selection of synthetic essays by Lesure and several collaborators, including Blake, Clark, R. J. Sinensky, Thomas Wake, and Kristin Hoffmeister; these chapters consider the evidence for social inequality, changes in subsistence, and occupational history. The volume's appendix provides the curious with tabulated contextual data for specific excavation areas.
This book is, at heart, an extensive site report. It maintains a focus on organization over narrative flow that can be seen, for example, in Chapter 13, where the discussion of carbonized plant remains occupies less than a page. Incidentally, the poor preservation of macrobotanical remains seems to be common among sites of this age, particularly in coastal Mesoamerica. However, the volume's focus on organization is not a weakness. The available data are here, and if a reader chooses to interpret them differently than the authors, they have the means to do so. In fact, volume contributors have indicated where they do not share interpretations. In the introduction, for example, Lesure and Clark clarify their differing interpretations of Barbara Voorhies's model of Archaicperiod settlement in the Soconusco region.
As mentioned, this volume really shines when it comes to imagery. Some reconstructions of pottery and figurines will be familiar to readers who have followed the Soconusco research in the past. But never, to my knowledge, has such a detailed and high-quality collection of imagery for the site appeared in one place. One might even say that very rarely has such a rich visual catalog of Early Formative materials appeared anywhere. In addition to the quantity and diversity of artifact drawings, photographs, site maps, vessel profiles, and figures illustrating interpretive models, some of the imagery is also innovative. Artifact photographs accompany schematic drawings to provide the best of both worlds in terms of realistic depictions and comparative data. One of Paso de la Amada's most remarkable finds—a large ceramic statuette with probable obsidian inlay eyes, known as the “Mokaya Matron”—is reconstructed to breathtaking effect in Figure 16.8 with the help of artist Ayax Moreno.
The social interpretations of life at Paso de la Amada include an intriguing take on variation in domestic structure size. Lesure (Chapter 7) infers from groups of smaller buildings accompanying a few larger houses that settlement clusters of “ordinary” residences surrounded those of emerging community leaders, whose lives were subject to varying degrees of public observation. These interpretations supplement Brian Hayden's aggrandizer models proposed since the late 1980s for the emergence of social complexity in the region. They also do not seem to entertain any serious refinements of those models, such as those by Rosemary Joyce, proposing that the agency of social collectives and women are essential considerations. At times, the assumption that community leaders were individualistic men is implicit, as with references to an asymmetrical bridewealth system as a critical vector of emerging social complexity (p. 578). With discussions of the “headman's house,” this assumption is explicit (p. 147). Women are depicted here more as symbols than as people. For example, Lesure seems more comfortable interpreting the Mokaya Matron as a “mythological entity” incorporating “themes of social power, fecundity, debt, and obligation,” rather than as an emerging leader herself. One might argue that the evidence is equivocal enough to leave that possibility open, at the very least (p. 572).
In sum, the interpretive components of the book do not push the envelope very far from existing models proposed for the site and region, save for the argument for a multifamily community organization that differs from the “nuclear family” model proposed by Kent Flannery and Joyce Marcus for the Valley of Oaxaca. Yet the sheer amount of contextual information reported, the excellent imagery, and the rich detail added to the published literature for early village life in Mesoamerica combine to make this volume indispensable for the scholar of the Early Formative period.
