From the early cities in the second millennium BC to the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan on the eve of the Spanish conquest, Ancient Mesoamericans created landscapes full of meaning and power in the center of their urban spaces. The sixteenth century description of Tenochtitlan by Bernal Diaz del Castillo and the archaeological remnants of Teotihuacan attest to the power and centrality of these urban configurations in Ancient Mesoamerican history. In Landscape and Power in Ancient Mesoamerica, Rex Koontz, Kathryn Reese-Taylor, and Annabeth Headrick explore the cultural logic that structured and generated these centers.Through case studies of specific urban spaces and their meanings, the authors examine the general principles by which the Ancient Mesoamericans created meaningful urban space. In a profoundly interdisciplinary exchange involving both archaeologists and art historians, this volume connects the symbolism of those landscapes, the performances that activated this symbolism, and the cultural poetics of these ensembles.

The authors of this volume investigate the meaning of Ancient Mesoamerican space, specifically, how the elements of urban landscape were related to each other, and to other fundamental aspects of Ancient Mesoamericans. Essays in this volume highlight the importance of performance, poetics, and politics in the construction of meaningful space and its deployment in performance.

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.

This interdisciplinary volume brings together a richly substantive collection of case studies that examine European-indigene interactions, economic relations, and their materialities in the formation of the modern world. Research has demonstrated the extent and complexity of the varied local economic and political systems, and diverse social formations that predated European contact. These preexisting systems articulated with the expanding European economy and, in doing so, shaped its emergence. Moving beyond the confines of national or Atlantic histories to examine regional systems and their historical trajectories on a global scale, the studies within this volume draw examples from the Caribbean, Mesoamerica, North America, South America, Africa, and South Asia. While the contributions are rooted in substantive studies from different world areas, their overarching aim is to negotiate between global and local frames, revealing how the expanding world-system entangled the non-Western world in global economies, yet did so in ways that were locally articulated, varied and, often, non-European in their expression.

The essays in this volume document trails, paths, and roads across different times and cultures, from those built by hunter-gatherers in the Great Basin of North America to causeway builders in the Bolivian Amazon to Bronze Age farms in the Near East, through aerial and satellite photography, surface survey, historical records, and excavation.

In Memory Traces, art historians and archaeologists come together to examine the nature of sacred space in Mesoamerica. Through five well-known and important centers of political power and artistic invention in Mesoamerica—Tetitla at Teotihuacan, Tula Grande, the Mound of the Building Columns at El Tajín, the House of the Phalli at Chichén Itzá, and Tonina—contributors explore the process of recognizing and defining sacred space, how sacred spaces were viewed and used both physically and symbolically, and what theoretical approaches are most useful for art historians and archaeologists seeking to understand these places. Memory Traces acknowledges that the creation, use, abandonment, and reuse of sacred space have a strongly recursive relation to collective memory and meanings linked to the places in question and reconciles issues of continuity and discontinuity of memory in ancient Mesoamerican sacred spaces. It will be of interest to students and scholars of Mesoamerican studies and material culture, art historians, architectural historians, and cultural anthropologists. Contributors: Laura M. Amrhein, Nicholas P. Dunning, Rex Koontz, Cynthia Kristan-Graham, Matthew G. Looper, Travis Nygard, Keith M. Prufer, Matthew H. Robb, Patricia J. Sarro, Kaylee Spencer, Eric Weaver, Linnea Wren