Institutional Context of Course:
This course was taught as a first-year, writing-intensive seminar at Northwestern University. This was fortunate in that it compelled me to rethink my more traditional course on Mesoamerican Prehistory, to move away from a traditional lecture format and away from the tyranny of the chronological sequence, and to focus on broader issues beyond Mesoamerican prehistory. This course also coincided with the publication of Hendon and Joyce’s Mesoamerican Archaeology, a collection of original essays, with undergraduate students in Mesoamerican Archaeology as the intended audience. In general, the essays are focused, understandable, and comprehensive—a good compromise between a textbook format (which tends to flatten information and remove all controversy) and a coursepack of articles (that are opinionated, but too focused to give the big picture).
Approach, Rationale, and Overview:
Broad issues: I try to deal with broad issues beyond Mesoamerican prehistory. These issues include questions of evidence and bias in documents and in the archaeological record, the issue of “the enduring mystery” of social inequality and why complex societies eventually fail (and both of these as they relate to contemporary America).
Class format: I try to break the 1 ½ hour class into segments,
typically:
30-45 minutes of discussion of the readings for the day,
15 minutes of something visual (artifacts, slides, videos)
15 minutes of a mini-lecture
Inquiry-based learning: I spend quite a bit of class time preparing students to write three very challenging papers. This involves teaching basic archaeology and introductory anthropology concepts using examples drawn from Mesoamerican prehistory. Students learn to think of me as a friend that gives them what they need to write these impossibly difficult papers. They tend to forget that I am the one who assigned these impossibly difficult papers in the first place! Because I supply information that they need to complete class assignments, I have good attendance throughout the quarter.
The first paper is a kind of commodity chain analysis of an artifact: to learn how Mesoamerican people combined natural resources, human labor, and cultural knowledge to produce the artifacts that sustained their ways of life and how the artifact was used. For most students, this paper is based primarily up ethnohistoric and ethnographic information. Learning the factors that went into artifact production and use aided students’ “archaeological imagination.” That is, after this paper, they can use artifacts to draw inferences about the organization of society and culture.
The second paper explores the relationship between cultural institutions and social inequality. Students are asked to take a Mesoamerican institution (alcoholic consumption, the ballgame, the calendar, cuisine, clothing, illness and curing, human sacrifice, markets and marketing, writing, sacred landscapes, cities, warfare) and analyze how this institution served as a tool of elite dominance, or as a tool of subordinate resistance, or how it contained elements of both dominance and resistance. Students are also asked to generalize, to draw a general conclusion about the institution or about how social inequality is maintained.
The third paper asks student to write a research proposal for the cultural institution they have studied in the second paper. They are asked to define an interesting research question, relate the research question to some broader theoretical issue, choose a research technique, design a research strategy, and state criteria for answering the research question.
These papers are successful because I provide students with three things. First, I provide bibliographies of Mesoamerican technologies and Mesoamerican institutions, so that they work from a base of reliable information. Second, for each paper, I supply an example of a successful analysis, a model for the paper they are to write. For example, when they write their papers on social institutions that promotes equality or inequality, I have them read Linda Manzanilla’s chapter on Teotihuacan apartment complexes and then we have a class discussion on whether students think the apartment complexes promoted equality or inequality, and how residential architecture can do this. For the research proposal, I have them read Deb Nichols chapter on regional research in the Basin of Mexico, and then I lecture on how the regional research led me to questions that were the center of my research at Xaltocan, and the methods I used and the results I obtained. I also give them copies of my original Heinz Foundation Grant Proposal to read as an example of what a research proposal should look like. And finally, during the week before each paper is due, students come to class and talk to each other in pairs for 20-30 minutes about how they are planning to do the paper, then they can ask questions that I answer or all of us discuss about the assignment. Many students express gratitude for these discussions; they say they were way off the mark, but these discussions gave them the ability to recover and successfully complete the assignment.
Other special features included in-class activities: one day I bring home-cooked Mexican food to talk about Mesoamerican domesticates. Another day, students sort Mesoamerican surface collections so that they can understand attributes and think about the behavioral inferences that might be drawn from attributes and their distributions in time and space. Another day, students and I “decipher” a Maya stele—students really liked that. And hopefully, the next time I teach the class, we will be able to take a field trip to see Mesoamerican collections at the Chicago Art Institute or the Field Museum.
Matrix Principles:
Stewardship: I stress the importance of context in archaeological interpretation. I have found that once students really understand all the neat things that you can find out about the past through archaeological context, they get really indignant about looting. This is one of the best ways of making students really care about stewardship.
Diverse Interests: We did discuss how different cultural assumptions lead to different interpretations of cultural institutions. I would like to do more with how Mesoamerican archaeology plays into themes of nationalism, tourism, and indigenous rights today—the politics of archaeology and identity. I’ll add Rosemary Joyce’s “Archaeology and National Building: A View from Central America” in S. Kane, ed., The Politics of Archaeology and Identity in Global Context, pp. 79-99. Boston: Archaeological Institute of America, 2003, to my assigned readings.
Professional Ethics and Values: The emphasis here is on stewardship (see above) and on the honest interpretation of archaeological data.
Social Relevance: We attempt to understand questions of evidence and bias, ethnocentrism and relativism, whether or not ideas of “advanced” cultures are relevant and/or accurate, “the enduring mystery” of social inequality, and why complex societies fail.
Communication: Students write three papers that require them to describe artifacts, manufacturing processes, archaeological data sets, and archaeological hypotheses.
Basic Archaeological Skills: Students learn the basics of stratigraphy, dating, typology, functional analysis, site plan organization, regional survey and settlement patterns, and sampling.
Real World Problem Solving: Students have to be pretty resourceful in designing their research proposals. They have to focus in on the practical problems they might encounter finding an appropriate research site and in data collection.
Course Development:
The major questions in this course are:
1) What resources and challenges did the Mesoamerican environment provide
to
indigenous peoples?
2) How did dominant groups in Mesoamerica create and maintain social
inequality?
3) How did Mesoamerican commoners and elites perceive the world around
them?
4) What are the strengths and weaknesses of archaeology, epigraphy,
art history,
ethnohistory, and cultural anthropology in providing knowledge about
ancient
Mesoamerica?
5) How have Westerners used interpretations of Mesoamerica’s past to
advance their
own cultural and political projects?