Rosemary A. Joyce

Girling the girl and boying the boy: the production of adulthood in ancient Mesoamerica

Drawing on the work of Judith Butler, I analyse practices through which lifecycle transitions were marked on the bodies of sixteenth-century Aztec children. Because the production of disciplined adults was socially so significant, it was also profoundly conservative. I examine implications of this ethnohistoric study for earlier societies that formed part of a Mesoamerican longue duree. The interpretation of archaeologically excavated material is transformed when related to the life course. Examples discussed include new perspectives on Formative period (c. 1500-400 BC) costume ornaments, conventions of figural representation, and feasting in domestic quarters.

Chemical and archaeological evidence for the earliest cacao beverages

Chemical analyses of residues extracted from pottery vessels from Puerto Escondido in what is now Honduras show that cacao beverages were being made there before 1000 B.C., extending the confirmed use of cacao back at least 500 years. The famous chocolate beverage served on special occasions in later times in Mesoamerica, especially by elites, was made from cacao seeds. The earliest cacao beverages consumed at Puerto Escondido were likely produced by fermenting the sweet pulp surrounding the seeds.

Beginnings of Village Life in Eastern Mesoamerica

Excavations in northern Honduras have produced evidence of initial village life that is among the earliest cases documented in Mesoamerica. Settlement beginning prior to 1600 B. C., the production of sophisticated pottery by 1600 B. C., and integration in economic exchange networks extending into Guatemala and Mexico by 1100-900 B. C. (calendar ages), are all consistent with patterns recorded in the Gulf Coast, Central Highlands, and Pacific Coast of Mexico. Supported by a suite of 11 radiocarbon dates, these findings overturn traditional models that viewed Honduras as an underdeveloped periphery receiving delayed influences from Mexican centers.

Making Something of Herself: Embodiment in Life and Death at Playa de los Muertos, Honduras

Cambridge Archaeological Journal / Volume 13 / Issue 02 / October 2003, pp 248 261 DOI: 10.1017/S0959774303240142, Published online: 28 November 2003 Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0959774303240142 How to cite this article: Rosemary A. Joyce (2003). Making Something of Herself: Embodiment in Life and Death at Playa de los Muertos, Honduras. Cambridge Archaeological Journal, 13, pp 248-261 doi:10.1017/S0959774303240142 Request Permissions : Click here

Interdisciplinary Applications: Providing a Past for “Bodies That Matter”: Judith Butler's Impact on the Archaeology of Gender

Recent archeological work on gender and sexuality has drawn on Judith Butlers discussions of abjection and gender performance in ways that promise to contribute to explicating these concepts. Representations of the past have the potential to lend the illusion of time depth, and thus cultural legitimacy, to contemporary social phenomena. Initially, feminist scholarship in archaeology did not critically interrogate gender. Consequently, it could be used to reinforce static, natural, and binary representations of gender in reconstructions of the past and their use in conservative ways in the present. Recently, some archaeologists have begun to focus on the regulatory modes through which gender was produced and reproduced in prehistoric communities. Archaeological work has been especially successful in examining the material dimensions of gender performance, thus addressing one of the repeated criticisms of this concept. The authors of this essay provide an overview of this recent archaeological writing with an emphasis on the ways it draws on, critiques, and extends the work of Judith Butler.

Bodies Moving in Space: Ancient Mesoamerican Human Sculpture and Embodiment

Judith Butlers proposal that embodiment is a process of repeated citation of precedents leads us to consider the experiential effects of Mesoamerican practices of ornamenting space with images of the human body. At Late Classic Maya Copaan, life-size human sculptures were attached to residences, intimate settings in which body knowledge was produced and body practices institutionalized. Moving through the space of these house compounds, persons would have been insistently presented with measures of their bodily decorum. These insights are used to consider the possible effects on people of movement around Formative period Olmec human sculptures, which are not routinely recovered in such well-defined contexts as those of the much later Maya sites.

BEING “OLMEC” IN EARLY FORMATIVE PERIOD HONDURAS

Abstract Practices and features that many researchers have identified as “Olmec,” even when found outside of the Gulf Coast of Mexico, supposed by some to be the heartland of an Olmec culture, are often a minority within local assemblages with vast differences in style and form. This is the case in Honduras, where objects identified as “Olmec” were clearly locally made. Thus they cannot be explained simply in terms of the import to Honduras of “Olmec” objects made elsewhere. This paper seeks to address the question, “what did it mean to the inhabitants of Formative period Mesoamerican villages to make and use objects whose stylistic features made them stand out as different from others in their own communities?” Drawing on data from original fieldwork at multiple sites in Honduras and reanalysis of museum collections, this paper proposes a model for understanding this phenomenon rooted in social theories of materiality, the phenomenological experience of personhood, and the creation of identity through entanglement with things.

Working with clay

Abstract Evidence from sites in the lower Ulua valley of north-central Honduras, occupied between a.d. 500 and 1000, provides new insight into the connections between households, craft production, and the role of objects in maintaining social relations within and across households. Production of pottery vessels, figurines, and other items in a household context has been documented at several sites in the valley, including Cerro Palenque, Travesía, Campo Dos, and Campo Pineda. Differences in raw materials, in what was made, and in the size and design of firing facilities allow us to explore how crafting with clay created communities of practice made up of people with varying levels of knowledge, experience, and skill. We argue that focusing on the specific features of a particular craft and the crafters perspective gives us insight into the ways that crafting contributed to the reproduction of social identities, local histories, and connections among members of communities of practice who comprised multicrafting households.

MULTI-PROXY ANALYSIS OF PLANT USE AT FORMATIVE PERIOD LOS NARANJOS, HONDURAS

Author(s): Morell-Hart, S; Joyce, RA; Henderson, JS | Abstract: Copyright

Forming Mesoamerican Taste: Cacao Consumption in Formative Period Contexts

Until recently, most of our assumptions about cacao preparation and consumption in Mesoamerica were based on late documentary sources. In recent years, the amount of direct evidence of cacao consumption has rapidly grown. Even the earliest time periods of the Early and Middle Formative period have now provided evidence of cacao consumption, from the Gulf Coast of Mexico to the Pacific Coast of Chiapas, and as far east as Honduras. What is most remarkable about this early evidence for the use of cacao is the variety of preparations and serving practices implied by the combinations of vessels that have tested positive for chemical traces of cacao. In this paper, we discuss our own work at Puerto Escondido, Honduras, and argue that the initial use of cacao was as a fermented beverage, in comparison to other published data from Formative period sites. We emphasize the variety of ways cacao was prepared and consumed, rather than advocating a single model of area-wide cacao consumption. We suggest that we need to construct models that highlight variability over time and across space in the kinds of cacao foods prepared and served and the contexts of their preparation to fully understand the development of Mesoamerican taste over time.