Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”

This review calls for the definition of a landscape approach in archaeology. After tracing the development of the landscape idea over its history in the social sciences and examining the compatibility between this concept and traditional archaeological practice, we suggest that archaeology is particularly well suited among the social sciences for defining and applying a landscape approach. If archaeologists are to use the landscape paradigm as a “pattern which connects” human behavior with particular places and times, however, we need a common terminology and methodology to build a construct paradigm. We suggest that settlement ecology, ritual landscapes, and ethnic landscapes will contribute toward the definition of such a broadly encompassing paradigm that also will facilitate dialogue between archaeologists and traditional communities.

An Archaeology of Landscapes: Perspectives and Directions

1. The Meaning of Social Anthropology2. Structure and Organization in a Small Community3. Social Change in Peasant Communities4. The Social Framework of Economic Organization5. The Social Framework of Primitive Art6. Moral Standards and Social Organization7. Religion in Social Reality

Elements of Social Organization

Under the influence of phenomenological approaches, a semiotic perspective on the body is being replaced in archaeology by analysis of the production and experience of lived bodies in the past through the juxtaposition of traces of body practices, idealized representations, and evidence of the effects of habitual gestures, postures, and consumption practices on the corporal body. On the basis of a shared assumption that social understandings of the body were created and reproduced through associations with material culture, archaeology of the body has proceeded from two theoretical positions: the body as the scene of display and the body as artifact. Today, the body as a site of lived experience, a social body, and site of embodied agency, is replacing prior static conceptions of an archaeology of the body as a public, legible surface.

Archaeology of the Body

Zinacantan: A Maya Community in the Highlands of Chiapas.

Starting from Giddens's concept of mutual knowledge, in this article I argue for an expanded definition of storage as a situated practice through which groups construct identity, remember, and control knowledge as part of a moral economy. Drawing on ethnographic and archaeological examples from a range of societies, including those of the Trobriand Islands, Neolithic Europe, and Mesoamerica, I consider the spatial and social meaning of utilitarian, household storage. Many of the social meanings embodied in utilitarian storage are found to also inform other kinds of storage, especially those categorized as burials and votive offerings, or caches, [storage, mutual knowledge, social memory, inalienable wealth, Mesoamerica]

Having and Holding: Storage, Memory, Knowledge, and Social Relations

This article uses archeological data to examine how social relations allocate economic and political power in ancient complex societies. Based on recent excavations in the Copan Valley, Honduras, the socioeconomic organization of the basic residential group is reconstructed and the existence of a pervasive social hierarchy demonstrated. I argue that during the Late and Terminal Classic periods, the Maya were organized into a series of internally ranked and externally stratified status lineages (Goldman 1970) that structured social, economic, and political relationships.

Status and Power in Classic Maya Society: An Archeological Study

In Houses in a Landscape, Julia A. Hendon examines the connections between social identity and social memory using archaeological research on indigenous societies that existed more than one thousand years ago in what is now Honduras. While these societies left behind monumental buildings, the remains of their dead, remnants of their daily life, intricate works of art, and fine examples of craftsmanship such as pottery and stone tools, they left only a small body of written records. Despite this paucity of written information, Hendon contends that an archaeological study of memory in such societies is possible and worthwhile. It is possible because memory is not just a faculty of the individual mind operating in isolation, but a social process embedded in the materiality of human existence. Intimately bound up in the relations people develop with one another and with the world around them through what they do, where and how they do it, and with whom or what, memory leaves material traces. Hendon conducted research on three contemporaneous Native American civilizations that flourished from the seventh century through the eleventh CE: the Maya kingdom of Copan, the hilltop center of Cerro Palenque, and the dispersed settlement of the Cuyumapa valley. She analyzes domestic life in these societies, from cooking to crafting, as well as public and private ritual events including the ballgame. Combining her findings with a rich body of theory from anthropology, history, and geography, she explores how objects-the things people build, make, use, exchange, and discard-help people remember. In so doing, she demonstrates how everyday life becomes part of the social processes of remembering and forgetting, and how "memory communities" assert connections between the past and the present.

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Houses in a Landscape: Memory and Everyday Life in Mesoamerica

Textile production in Mesoamerica, as a process and set of relationships, has been seen as the full-time work of women but not as an occupational specialization. I take an alternative approach by c...

Textile production as craft in Mesoamerica Time, labor and knowledge

The Sowing and the Dawning: Termination, Dedication and Transformation in the Archaeological and Ethnographic Record of Mesoamerica. Edited by Shirley Boteler-Mock. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1998. vi + 198 pp., figures, index. $60.00 (cloth).

Julia A. Hendon

Papers

Having and Holding: Storage, Memory, Knowledge, and Social Relations

Status and Power in Classic Maya Society: An Archeological Study

Houses in a Landscape: Memory and Everyday Life in Mesoamerica

Textile production as craft in Mesoamerica Time, labor and knowledge

The Sowing and the Dawning: Termination, Dedication and Transformation in the Archaeological and Ethnographic Record of Mesoamerica. Edited by Shirley Boteler-Mock. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1998. vi + 198 pp., figures, index. $60.00 (cloth).