Teotihuacan in the news: 1966 and 2016

I was looking for some biograhical material on Rene Millon, director of the Teotihuacan Mapping Project. I came across this story, from Popular Mechanics magazine in July 1966:

This was from the early days of the Teotihuacan Mapping Project, when they were in the middle of making surface artifact collections and digging test excavations.  And now, 50 years later, here is another press item from Teotihuacan:

Wow, knowledge really does advance through time. Back in 1966 no one had any idea they would find rabbit bones at Teotihuacan, and asking questions about animal keeping and diet like this were out of the question. Our analytical methods, as well as our stock of excavated archaeological contexts, are now far beyond what they were in 1966. This rabbit study, by a couple of archaeologists who started out as anthropology majors at Arizona State University, shows the kind of detailed questions we can now ask about the past (see bibliography below).

But as an archaeologist and scholar, I like to try to stand above the weeds now and then and take a broad perspective on the past. Archaeology is not just about mapping a site or figuring out what people ate for dinner. We need to take facts like these--established from rigorous fieldwork and laboratory analyses--and put together a broad view of life, society, and cities in the past. When we do this, it turns out that many things are not all that different from life, society, and cities today. This insight is the basis for the "Wide Urban World."

And when you turn to your turkey dinner for the Thanksgiving holiday this week, don't just think back to the Native Americans and Pilgrims and the first Thanksgiving meal. Think, instead, about the Mayas and Teotihuacanos of ancient Mesoamerica, the ones who first domesticated the turkey in the first place.

Bibliography:

Somerville, Andrew D., Nawa Sugiyama, Linda R. Manzanilla, and Margaret J. Schoeninger
2016    Animal Management at the Ancient Metropolis of Teotihuacan, Mexico: Stable Isotopoe Analysis of Leporid (Cottontail and Jackrabbit) Bone Mineral. PLOS-One 11 (8): e0159982.

2016    Leporid management and specialized food production at Teotihuacan: stable isotope data from cottontail and jackrabbit bone collagen. Archaeological and Anthropological Sciences  (online first).

Pyramids of Teotihuacan in the 19th century

Jane Jacobs was wrong !!

Jane Jacobs in her community organizing mode

Jane Jacobs (1916-2006) was perhaps the most influential urban thinker of the 20th century. Her book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities (1961) shook up the planning profession and urban studies, and her other books and papers have been highly influential for many decades. Numerous biographies, books, and articles have been written about Jacobs, her ideas, her life, and her influence on scholarship and policy.

I have no problem with most of the writings and ideas of Jane Jacobs. Her books are informative and enjoyable, and I have gotten lots of good insights from her work. But in one small part of one book (The Economy of Cities, 1969), Jacobs made an erroneous claim about the origins of cities in the distant past. Whereas archaeologists had shown clearly that agriculture developed long before the first cities--in all well-documented regions, from Mesopotamia to China to Mesoamerica--Jacobs made the outrageous claim that the archaeologists were wrong. Cities had in fact arisen first, she said, and then the innovations that led to agriculture and farming (the domestication of plants and animals) happened in those earliest cities. She called this the "cities first" argument. Nonsense!

I first read The Economy of Cities as an undergraduate, writing my senior honors thesis on Teotihuacan. I almost put the book down in disgust when I read this baloney. With just my training as an anthropology major, I recognized the silliness of Jacobs's idea. I'm glad I kept reading, however, because the rest of the book provided lots of good ideas about how Teotihuacan might have grown as a result of its craft industry in the production of obsidian tools.

For many decades I didn't worry much about the cities first error of Jane Jacobs. But a few years ago I started to run into Jacobs's erroneous argument about cities before agriculture in both scholarly and popular writing. The Wikipedia article on cities stated that cities preceded agriculture, citing Jacobs. This is simply not true. I guess if there are people believing that the earth is flat, or that evolution has not happened, there might be people believing that cities came before agriculture. But from the point of evidence and science, Jacobs was wrong. I went through a period when I was contributing to Wikipedia, so I corrected the Cities article. Within a couple of days, my corrections had been reversed, and replaced with the erroneous information. I changed it again, and a second time my corrections were undone. I complained to a Wikipedia editor, that was the end of my editing and contributing to Wikipedia. (I see that the error has now been corrected).

Wikipedia is one thing, but urban textbooks are another. It turns out that a number of textbooks on urban studies and urban geography promote the erroneous views of Jacobs. These books do not cite the relevant archaeological works, but they do cite Jacobs. She is such an influential thinker and there seems to be something of a cult devoted to her ideas and their preservation. It really steamed me that students were being given false information in textbooks. So I did some Google searches, and found that a number of geographers had promoted the erroneous views in scholarly journal articles and books, including Edward Soja and Peter Taylor. I worked out my frustration in a blog post, and let it go. But then in 2012 a major journal published an article by Peter Taylor that, again, promoted the faulty views of Jacobs that cities preceded agriculture (Taylor 2012).

Enough was enough! I rounded up a couple of colleagues--Jason Ur and Gary Feinman--and we wrote a response to Taylor's paper, and it's just been published (Smith et al. 2014). We show the historical context of Jacobs's ideas about early urbanism and how she was unable to support her argument about cities before agriculture. We show the subsequent adoption of her ideas by scholars, mostly urban geographers. And we outline the archaeological evidence (which is indisputable) for agriculture preceding the earliest cities. Her argument was wrong when it was first formulated, and the archaeological evidence against it was clear. By now that evidence has piled up to the point where her claim is the logical equivalent to flat-earth or creationist stories. We were hoping for a reply from Taylor, but that hasn't happened yet.

This one error says nothing about the accuracy or importance of the other ideas of Jane Jacobs. I remain a big fan of her work, except for this one point. But its perpetuation by scholars does speak eloquently about the decline in scholarly rigor today, and about the lack of respect for archaeology by some writers. People who ought to know better have been willing to accept interpretations about archaeology without consulting archaeologists or works, but solely on the authority of Jane Jacobs, who had no archaeological training or knowledge. If such an urban icon said cities preceded agriculture, then it must be so. Well, I'm afraid Jane Jacobs was just plain wrong about this one fact.

Smith, Michael E., Jason Ur, and Gary M. Feinman
2014    Jane Jacobs’s 'Cities-First' Model and Archaeological Reality. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 38 (4): 1525-1535.

Taylor, Peter J.
2012    Extraordinary Cities: Early "City-ness" and the Origins of Agriculture and States. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 36 (3): 415-447.

Monumental archaeology and social archaeology in ancient cities

House excavations at Izapa, University at Albany (from Wade 2014)

The journal Science just published a nice "Newsfocus" article about how archaeologists working on cities in Mesoamerica are focusing more on households these days and less on the big monuments. The article is:

House at Mayapan

Wade, Lizzie  (2014)  Beyond the Temples: Turning Their Backs on Spectacular Monuments, Archaeologists are Studying Ordinary Households to Uncover the Daily Rhythms of Long-Lost Cities. Science 344:684-686.

Wade talks about the ancient cities of Teotihuacan, Mayapan, and Izapa, quoting the leading archaeologists working at these sites about their research. I am quoted a couple of times, in reference to definitions and concepts of urbanism.

It is good to see non-monumental archaeology featured in such a prominent place. In some of my publications (e.g., Smith 2012) I've used the terms social archaeology and monumental archaeology for the  two major kinds of research on ancient cities and complex societies. Archaeologists following the monumental approach excavate pyramids, temples, palaces, and other elite-related contexts. Those of us who pursue social archaeology excavate houses, workshops, and agricultural fields, or we  map sites and make surface collections, all in order to reconstruct society from the bottom up. We want to learn about ancient households, their activities, their social conditions, and how these things changed through time.

Apartment compound at Teotihuacan

To really understand any ancient city, we need information from both the monumental and social archaeology approaches. But since the monumental approach has a history of several centuries, and social archaeology only goes back a few decades, the monumental side is far ahead of the social side. For this reason it is important for archaeologists to focus on households, neighborhoods, and social processes so that we can catch up with the results on temples, palaces, and tombs.

(( TECHNICAL INTERLUDE:  Although I like the phrase "social archaeology" to describe research on households and social processes (especially non-elite contexts), I tend to avoid using the term when talking to fellow archaeologists. Why? Because the phrase was hijacked by postmodern archaeologists who take a non-scientific approach to the past. They emphasize interpretation over explanation of the past; they focus on detailed studies of individual contexts with little comparison or generalization; and they would rather speculate about "meanings" in the past than test hypotheses about economic phenomena. This group founded a journal called "The Journal of Social Archaeology," and the term is now associated with an approach that I dislike greatly! ))

Here is one the many contrasts between monumental and social archaeology: the timing of the moment of archaeological discovery (this paragraph is taken from my new book, At Home with the Aztecs, currently in search of a publisher). In the monumental approach, the major finds come during fieldwork: things like the opening of a tomb or the discovery of a new hieroglyphic inscription. But when excavating the trash-heaps of ancient peasant farmers--as in the social approach--excitement rarely reveals itself in the field. The houses are similar and the middens all look pretty much the same. The important discoveries come later, in the laboratory stage of research, once we have washed, classified, analyzed, and quantified the artifacts.

Here is just one example, from my excavations of Aztec commoner houses. We identified a couple of whistles during excavation. One or two were whole, and the excavators cleaned out the dirt and started blowing the whistles. (Hear what one sounds like, on my Calixtlahuaca blog). But it wasn't until we had gone through thousands of big bags of potsherds that it became clear that just about every commoner household had one or more musical instruments: whistles, flutes, rattles, and small bells were the most common, with a few drums and trumpets here and there. It turns out that music was important in these homes, perhaps for domestic rituals, or perhaps for monthly public ceremonies. But if we hadn't screened all the dirt, and looked carefully at every single bag of sherds, we would have missed these musical instruments, mainly because most were broken fragments.
 

Flute pieces from commoner houses at an Aztec city (Yautepec)

The discovery of the prevalence of these objects in commoner houses was a real breakthrough that changed ideas about Aztec music, and about Aztec households. Music had been assumed to be an activity of priests and elites, and experts had initially scoffed at the idea that I had excavated lots of these things from commoner trash heaps. This discovery came not in the field, but in the lab, and only after several seasons of painstaking study of tiny fragmentary artifacts.


As someone who has dedicated my career to social archaeology (the scientific kind, not the postmodern kind!), it is great to see a nice write-up in the journal Science.

Aztec rock band (from Sahagun, Florentine Codex)

Note the two kinds of drum and two kinds of rattle in this Aztec band. The flute and trumpet players have evidently stepped out for a smoke.

Ancient Maya cities are being destroyed

Maya pyramid being destroyed in Belize

A Maya pyramid (well, an ex-pyramid) at the ancient Maya city of Nohmul in Belize, Central America, is in the news this week. It seems that a local road builder decided the pyramid was the most convenient place to get road fill, so he went along merrily destroying the ancient pyramid. The main story is here; you can also check out a slightly earlier news story from Belize.

Unfortunately, this kind of thing goes on all the time. Hundreds of sites are seriously damaged, and even destroyed, every year. It turns out that most of the areas with the richest record of ancient urban sites happen to be some of the poorest countries in the world today. Belize has thousands of Maya ruins, but the country only has the resources to protect a small number of them. Mexico is a far richer country, with a far larger government archaeological agency to protect sites. But Mexico is also a very large country, with many tens of thousands of sites. There is no way that any of these countries can actively protect even a small part of their archaeological heritage.

Maya polychrome vase

Why should sites need protection? While the Maya site apparently was destroyed for the convenience of a local company, most of the sites are destroyed for international commercial interests. Looters find valuable artifacts, which they sell to antiquities traffickers, who in turn sell the objects to private galleries, mostly in the U.S., Europe, and Japan. If you can get a Maya polychrome vase to New York, Sotehby's can auction it off for anywhere from $10,000 to $300,000. Make that an Egyptian statue, for sale in London or Tokyo, and you are talking millions of dollars. Now the rich art collectors aren't the ones out there looting sites in the jungle. Big bucks are dangled in front of poor local people, who are happy to destroy a site or two for the boost in income it brings.

Egyptian statue

In Columbia, the big targets are deep tombs (called "shaft tombs") whose offerings contain many objects of gold. There is a recognized occupation of tomb robber in the country; they are called "huaqueros" ("huaca" means shrine or tomb). The huaqueros are better at locating tombs than are archaeologists.

Huaquero at work, looting a tomb in Colombia

 Even though looting sites and tombs is illegal in most countries (but NOT in the U.S !!!), their governments cannot protect all the sites. If sites are going to survive, it is up to local people to protect them. Many governments, schools, and other organizations sponsor public education programs to enlist people in the task of appreciating and protecting their local archaeological heritage. I directed excavations in Yautepec, Mexico, an Aztec city that was located under a modern city. We gave lots of lectures at the local schools, and we participated in a program where 6th grade classes visited our

I'm talking to school kids in Yautepec

excavations every Friday to learn what we were doing and why the site is important. We excavated Aztec houses in two schoolyards in Yautepec, and hundreds of kids got a close-up view of how we were uncovering the city built by their ancestors. I'm talking to some elementary-school kids in the photo, and a U.S. undergraduate (Nili Badanowski) is screening dirt in the background.

Many people got the message: the ruins in and around town were built by the ancestors of the people of Yautepec. This is their history, their heritage, and they need to protect it. There are few written documents, so archaeology is the only way to learn about the city's past. In Yautepec, the local equivalent of the YMCA (actually, a government health and recreation center, IMSS) put up an exhibit of artifacts from the excavations, where everyone in town got a chance to see them (and, my daughters, Heather and April, went to summer camp there!).

Looters at a site in the United States

Looted site in Iraq

There is information about Yautepec on this website, or see my book, The Aztecs (3rd edition, 2012, Blackwell Publishers). For looting and the antiquities trade, check out some of these books:

Atwood, Roger
2004    Stealing History: Tomb Raiders, Smugglers, and the Looting of the Ancient World. St. Martin's Press, New York.

Brodie, Neil and Kathryn Walker Tubb (editors)
2002    Illicit Antiquities: The Theft of Culture and the Extinction of Archaeology. Routledge, New York.

Renfrew, Colin
2000    Loot, Legitimacy and Ownership: The Ethical Crisis in Archaeology. Duckworth, London.

Archaeology as a social science

Excavated house at Calixtlahuaca

I haven't been posting very often lately because I have been on sabbatical leave, working hard to finish a book manuscript: Aztec Communities and Households: Archaeologists Discover a Sustainable Way of Life. I have gotten a draft finished, and now I am looking for a literary agent so that I can attract a publisher to provide a broad, nonspecialist, readership.

Today this paper was posted online by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences:

Smith, Michael E., Gary M. Feinman, Robert D. Drennan, Timothy Earle, and Ian Morris
    2012    Archaeology as a Social Science. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109:(published online).

I have posted the paper here.  ||  There is some ASU publicity about the paper here.

We argue that because of recent fieldwork and methodological advances, archaeology is now starting to contribute knowledge to the social sciences beyond anthropology. We illustrate this point with several examples:

• Early village society
• Cities and urban planning
• States and markets in deep history
• Standards of living.

 These are topics covered to some extent by various social sciences (economics, political science, historical sociology, urban studies), and for each, archaeologists now have data that relate to current concerns in those fields.

 A brief section on urban planning includes the figure shown above to illustrate the point that cities with unplanned neighborhoods (e.g., the Yoruba city Ado Ekiti) were much more common in the ancient past than fully-planned orthogonal cities (e.g., the Greek city Priene), despite the common assumption that ancient cities were mostly like the Greek example.

This is a topic I've blogged about before, for example:

Spatial order, visual order, and urban planning

Are shantytowns a normal form of urban residence?

If you want a copy of the PNAS paper, CLICK HERE.

Archaeology and pink flamingos in Chicago neighborhoods

I just received Robert Sampson's new book on Chicago neighborhoods in the mail, and it got me thinking about some student archaeology projects in Chicago that I supervised years ago. Sampson's book synthesizes many years of research and technical publications, and it looks great. He argues for the importance of urban neighborhoods in understanding cities, poverty, crime, and urban life. Not only is Sampson one of the most prominent urban sociologists, but he also writes well. I'll blog about it here once I've had a chance to read the book. It is published by the University of Chicago Press, 2012.

Chicago is a great city for its distinctive neighborhoods, many based on variation in ethnicity, national origin, wealth, and social class. My first teaching position was at Loyola University of Chicago, and for a couple of years I sent students out to do research on modern material culture in Chicago. The students did the kind of research archaeologists normally do, but addressed at modern Chicago, not at ancient sites.

For example, archaeologists often compare different contexts (neighborhoods, or houses, or settlements) in terms of the kinds of material objects each had. These could be portable artifacts, or buildings or architectural spaces. We use the differences in artifacts between contexts to make inferences about social differences in the past. But do wealthy and poor neighborhoods really differ in their material remains? Archaeologists rely on knowledge of modern and recent contexts to generate analogies (formal comparisons) to interpret the past. We study these issues in modern contexts where we know both the material remains and their social significance, and then we apply that knowledge to the past. While it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that rich and poor neighborhoods look different in their housing, their streets, and innumerable material measures, it is still useful to have firm data about how these relationships between artifacts and society work today, so that we can make better inferences about the distant past.

I wish I had kept better records about the student projects. I recall two projects where students selected an upper middle class neighborhood and a working class neighborhood and compared them systematically. One student was an ardent cyclist, and her project focused on bicycles parked at high schools in the two neighborhoods. Not surprisingly, one could predict the neighborhood on the basis of the types of bikes found at the schools. Another student, interested in gardening, looked at landscaping--the kinds of trees and bushes planted in the two neighborhoods (both in yards, and in public spaces). Again, the differences were clear. Actually, Robert Sampson carried out some generally similar research as part of his studies of Chicago neighborhoods, recording information about building types, trash in public places, graffiti, types of stores, and other observable traits of the urban build environment. He related those data to information on poverty, crime and social dynamics in various neighborhoods. Maybe he should be an archaeologist! If he ever gets tired of sociology, we can find things for him to do......

Another project I recall was done by a student who had a job working in the field house of a large public park. She rented out sports equipment and did other tasks relating to use of the park for sports activities. But in addition to the regular legal use of the park, there were quite a few unofficial, informal, and illegal activities going on. She did an archaeological survey, noting the presence and types of artifacts on the ground surface in different parts of the park (this was a survey WITHOUT artifact pick-up!). It turns out that the various informal activities were divided into separate areas, all out of sight behind vegetation and other features. Lovers used one part of the park (as evidenced by small foil packages), winos were in another area (bottles), and the junkies used a third place (needles). One issue in the use of space (in both modern and ancient cities) is whether activities are separated into specialized places, or whether they share common spaces, perhaps at different times. This project was called something like "Illicit activities in a Chicago city park."

My favorite student project on Chicago material culture was a test of the hypothesis that lawn ornaments were associated with ethnicity. If you asked people in Chicago about who tended to have lots of lawn ornaments -- pink flamingos, blue balls, jockeys holding lanterns, upturned bathtubs with shrines -- the most common answer was that the Polish people had lots of ornaments. But the Poles said that the Italians or Mexicans were the ones with lots of junk on their lawns. The basic local story was that lawn ornamentation was associated with ethnicity. The student had seen a neighborhood where lots of houses had lots of lawn ornaments, so she set out to see if these were associated with a particular ethnic group. She got a list of names and addresses in this neighborhood (from a Democratic party worker), and used surname as a measure of ethnicity for each household. This was obviously a rough measure, but good enough for a student term paper. She also counted the lawn ornaments on each lawn, and made a map of the neighborhood showing the distribution of the numbers of ornaments (this student went on go get a Ph.D. in archaeology).

It turns out that the number of ornaments had nothing to do with ethnicity (in this neighborhood, at least). There was a hot spot on one street -- two houses, diagonally across from one another, had far more ornaments than anybody else. These two homeowners were in competition with one another, and they both went bonkers with more than 100 things in their front yards. But they clearly had an effect on their neighbors, because most yards on that one street had far more ornaments than elsewhere in the area. In fact, the map showed a steady decline in the frequency of ornaments as one moved away from the two top houses (a nice distance decay distribution, to be technical). So, in this one Chicago neighborhood, ethnicity had nothing to do with the frequency (or type) of lawn ornaments. Instead, two homeowners went nuts competing with one another for the gaudiest yard, and their neighbors joined in and put lots of things in their yards too.


So in this case, archaeological methods of studying the spatial and quantitative distributions of artifacts yielded information about modern society in Chicago. While archaeologists more commonly use insights from modern cities to interpret ancient cities, in this case archaeological methods from ancient cities contributed to our knowledge of modern cities. Research on past and present cities can be a two-way street.