Fall/Winter 1998
Head portion of ceramic statuette of a human female from mound 32, Paso de la Amada. Such statuettes are known only from platform buildings and seem to have been used in community rituals.	Excavations at Paso de la Amada, 1997 MAZATAN, CHIAPAS, MEXICO Excavating the Sites of Early Villages Understanding the subsistence adaptation of some of Mexico's earliest villages By Richard G. Lesure ALONG WITH TOMAS PEREZ SUAREZ OF THE NATIONAL AUTONOMOUS University of Mexico, I recently directed archaeological excavations in the state of Chiapas in southern Mexico. We were working at the sites of some of the earliest settled villages in Mesoamerica. Others in the crew were Oscar Niel, a Mexican undergraduate, and UCLA students Chris Attarian, Sheila Findley, and Enrique Flores. We spent seven weeks living in the town of Mazatán, just a few kilometers from the Pacific Ocean and quite close to the Guatemalan border. From there we commuted to a variety of excavation sites. The arrival of Tom Wake, director of UCLA's archaeology lab and project faunal analyst, livened things up considerably. Tom collected modern fish to serve as comparative specimens in his study of the ancient fauna (see Gone Fishing). He and I were able to go out on a fishing expedition to the Cantileña Swamp with some of our local workmen (photo, next article). Cantils are deadly snakes that inhabit this lowland region. We didn't see any snakes, but we did catch a small caiman. Participation in modern fishing expeditions gives us important clues about ancient practices as we seek to understand the subsistence adaptation of some of Mexico's earliest villages. The crew's UCLA contingent concentrated on Paso de la Amada, site of the largest Early Formative village in the region (photo above). We know that between 1400 and 1100 BC settlement covered 50 hectares, but, because there is no reliable surface evidence of individual houses, we don't have a good estimate of the population. There must certainly have been hundreds of people, perhaps more than a thousand. One of the fascinating features of Paso de la Amada are earthen platforms for large buildings dating back to 1400 BC. The most spectacular were excavated by Michael Blake of the University of British Columbia over several field seasons from 1985 to 1995. He and his crew excavated a series of superimposed platforms that once supported perishable structures up to 22 m long. My dissertation research revealed that other large platforms had been built at the site although, unlike the ones discovered by Blake, they had never been incorporated into buildings. Evidence suggested that many small structures at the site had not been constructed on platforms. These last must have been houses for the site's inhabitants. But what about the large, platform-top buildings? Were they temples? Residences for an emerging elite? Or could they have had some combination of uses? When interpreting these buildings, we have to be cautious in using late Mesoamerican developments. After 800 BC, platform structures were usually organized around rectangular plazas and clustered in site centers. Five hundred years earlier, at Paso de la Amada, these features of site organization had not yet developed. Large buildings on platforms were not arranged in plaza groups and were scattered across the site. Clearly, to understand how they were used we need to concentrate on evidence from the structures themselves. A major effort of the 1997 season was excavation of a large platform in mound 32. Because the surface had been damaged by erosion and plowing, we were unable to find clear evidence of the perishable structure it supported. We were, however, able to determine its dimensions and orientation: 30 m long, 12 m wide, and approximately 1 m high. An important discovery was a stratified trash midden back of the platform. The midden contained items used in the building of the platform top, broken, and tossed into a refuse heap. These contents provide valuable clues to what went on in the building. Intriguingly, the artifacts suggest activities appropriate to both temples and houses. We found the full range of domestic garbage, including broken cooking and serving vessels, obsidian flakes, bits of animal bone, and fragments of manos and metates. Seventy-three fragments of a single large ceramic statuette, 60 to 70 m high and representing a human female, were also mixed in with the other debris (see drawing in sidebar). Such statuettes are known only from platform buildings and seem to have been used in community rituals. At this early time in the development of Mesoamerican civilization, there may have been no absolute spatial division between ritual and domestic activities and formal temples had not yet emerged. Richard G. Lesure is Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology. He (and all Backdirt authors) can be reached by email through Publications (ioapubs@ucla.edu).
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