The Southern Maya Area (SMA), also known as the Maya Highlands are a region of Pre-Columbian sites in Mesoamerica. It is long believed important to the rise of Maya civilization, during the period that is known as Preclassic. It lies within a broad arc going southeast from Chiapa de Corzo in Mexico to Copán and Chalchuapa, in Central America. Much of the area is now a part of the Guatemalan Highlands.
The Pacific Ocean forms the southern and western limits of the Southern Maya Area. Within this area and in addition to these sites are found the major centers of Kaminaljuyu, Takalik Abaj, Chocolá, El Sitio, El Jobo, La Blanca, Ujuxte, Palo Gordo, El Baúl, Cotzumalhuapa, Monte Alto, Semetabaj, El Portón, Zacualpa, Zaculeu, Balberta, and La Montana; many of these sites are believed to have been built and populated by speakers of Maya languages, and others by speakers of other Mesoamerican languages, including Xinca, Lenca, Mixe–Zoquean, and Pipil; accordingly, in consideration of the multilingual character of the Southern Maya Area, in many ways Southern "Maya" Area is a misnomer.Love and Kaplan (2011) point out that scholarship has been deficient in studying the Southern Maya Area as a cultural area unto itself, that is, without reference to other entities and areas.
Most of these centers developed to their apogees in the Preclassic period before declining or disappearing. In addition to these large sites, many Early Preclassic communities, found mostly along the Pacific Coast, bear witness to the seminal character of the Southern area; notably these include La Victoria, a site studied by Michael Coe that yielded the first secure ceramic sequence from early on in Preclassic times. Since Coe's work, John E. Clark and other scholars from the New World Archaeological Foundation have found, at Paso de la Amada and other sites, ceramics that refine Coe's sequence and deepen it in time, pushing it back to BC. This applies to the earliest nuclear centers, fine pottery, figurines, and other manifestations of the beginnings of complex society and culture in Mesoamerica.
The earliest pristine ballcourt and evidence of a ranked society (a rich child's burial), indicative of emerging social hierarchization, were found at Paso de la Amada. And nearby at La Blanca, archaeologists discovered a quatrefoil made of baked clay buried near Mound 1, one of the largest and earliest temple mounds in Mesoamerica, indicating an early fount of what later became core Maya ideology.Love and Guernsey interpret this as an icon for a "portal: Love, Michael; with Julia Guernsey (2005). The Context and Associations of Monument 3 from La Blanca, Guatemala. The Foundation Granting Department: Reports Submitted to FAMSI. Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies, Inc. (FAMSI). Retrieved on 2007-02-12.
Terminological and theoretical issues Controversy remains about the origins of Maya civilization as scholars continue to search for and engage in debate about the roots or first pulses of what became an ancient civilization traditionally considered to have been one of the greatest of the world. Combined with the early frame of cultural development relative to elsewhere in Mesoamerica and given that the Southern area remains distinctly mysterious with respect to how and why complex societies developed as dramatically as they did, the Southern Maya Area is almost as much a theoretical construct as it is a geographical and temporal reality. This is because topics such as cultural evolution, complex societies, early urbanism, and the construction of (ancient) identity, all framed and discussed in highly abstract ways, necessarily are raised.
If the Southern Maya Area is a part of Mesoamerica delineated from the rest of Mesoamerica spatially, temporally and, in one specific sense – by the still unresolved question of its possibly crucial role in the origins of Maya civilization - one needs to understand that posing this large research question risks falling into ultimately meaningless, infinitely regressing arguments about how “origins” might be considered or defined – essentially arguments about qualitative or inevitably subjectively rendered entities or topics, giving way to questions such as, What is “Maya civilization”? What is “Maya”? What is “civilization”? What allows us to call this or that civilization “great”? One way to conceptualize the quandary of seeking first cause/s is to understand that such an effort leads to infinite regression unless a metaconcept is accepted which, in the case of Maya civilization, is whatever it is primordially that made “Maya” “Maya.” Another way is to focus on ahistorical processes - environmental circumscription,See Carneiro (1970) A Theory of the Origin of the State. Science 169:733-738 peer polity interaction,See Renfrew, Colin and John F. Cherry (1986) Peer Polity Interaction and Socio-political Change. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and other theories.
Despite these seemingly terminologically pitfall-laden inquiries, the question of Maya origins is justified for professional focus and elaboration, since all historical topics are, by their nature, constituted not only by ascriptions weighting the given topic in importance and cast by this or that interpretation or interpretative context but also by “fact.” Of necessity, these kinds of questions are rooted in the history of scholarship about this or that topic, taking into account different or new emphases or de-emphases, usually generationally or paradigmatically determined. Accordingly, “Maya civilization” is both a reality - as John Lloyd Stephens first discovered - and a scholarly construct, with strands in the weave composed of actual patterns and “emergent” entities and characteristics but also of patterns and agentive decisions historically in the scholarly world, these, themselves, retroactively considered and reconsidered.
The Thermometer theory
Maya scholarship long has considered the ancient Maya in a temporal and geographic sense to have come into being, thermometer-fashion – as things began to “warm up,” socially and culturally – at the “bottom,” that is, in Southern Mesoamerica, in the Early Preclassic period: events and processes coalesced on the Pacific coast of what is now Guatemala and southern Mexico and in the piedmont and highlands of Guatemala and in northern El Salvador, moved north in Classic period times to the Maya Lowlands of northern Guatemala and southern Chiapas, Mexico; and migrated still further north into Yucatán following the Maya “collapse” in the 10th century AD. Mayanists from the New World Archaeological Foundation as well as other institutions have pioneered the efforts to discover the radix of Maya civilization from work at such sites as Chiapa de Corzo and Izapa building on efforts by Michael Coe at La Victoria, on the southern Pacific coast of Mexico,Coe, M. D. (1961) La Victoria, An Early Site on the Pacific Coast of Guatemala. Papers of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology LIII. Peabody Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge and followed up by the work of scholars such as John E. Clark, Barbara Voorhies, Barbara Stark, Robert Sharer and others. Notable, as well, is the work of Franz Termer at Palo Gordo. Work by Carnegie archaeologists A. V. Kidder and Edwin M. ShookKidder, Alfred V., Jesse D. Jennings, and Edwin M. Shook (1946) Excavations at Kaminaljuyú, Guatemala. Carnegie Institution of Washington Publication 561, Washington, D.C.; Shook, Edwin M. and Alfred V. Kidder (1952) Mound E-III-3, Kaminaljuyu, Guatemala. In Contributions to American Anthropology and History, Vol. 9 (53):33-127. Carnegie Institution of Washington Publication 596. Carnegie Institution of Washington, Washington, D.C. at Kaminaljuyu has been fundamental in moving attention to the origins of Maya civilization to the South. Since their work, many other sites have been identified and at which investigations have either been carried out or are contemplated in determining the role of the Southern area in the trajectory of Maya civilization.
Two “emergents,” linguistics and the Olmec The notion of an aboriginal Maya stimulus – linguistic, cultural, and ethnic strands interweaving together from late in the Paleoindian or Archaic periods – derives primarily from reconstructions of Maya linguistics. Ironically, a non-Maya stimulus also is considered, the Olmec; as at Takalik Abaj, direct Olmec influence seems to have come to Chocolá, as the remarkable monument known as the "Shook Panel" was found some ten kilometers south of the site.
Beyond these two “emergent” factors, processual archaeology continues to look at functionalist and highly theoretical aspects of social and cultural process, including egalitarian-to-hierarchical communities and other cultural evolutionary sequences, for example, those of Service and Fried, and of environment, “man-land interactions,” and zero-sum finite resource responses (e.g., “carrying capacity”).
Rough and sometimes illogically and erroneously inspired characterizations of social and cultural development derived from evolutionary biology threaten to muddy the discussion just as traditional yet persistent cultural historical characterizations leave many questions unanswered, given their emphasis on description as opposed to explanation.
By this token a theoretical dichotomy exists between advocates of autochthonous developments, that is, developments occurring from internal - often functionalist - processes, and those proposing that more fundamental in the creation of History have been native genius, diffusion, migrations, and so forth.
Historical linguists long have posed that a proto-Maya language had as its homeland the western highlands of southern Guatemala.McQuown, N. A. 1956 The Classification of the Mayan Languages; International Journal of American Linguistics 22:191-195; Swadesh, Mauricio (1961) Interrelaciones de las lenguas Mayenses Anales del Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia 13(42):231-267. Mexico; see also Justeson, John S., William M. Norman, Lyle Campbell and Terrence Kaufman 1985 The Foreign Impact on Lowland Mayan Language and Script. Middle American Research Institute Publication 53, Tulane University, New Orleans While the issue remains somewhat controversial, no viable competing theory yet has been offered, although qualifications to the original view of Maya linguistic origin continue to be provided.
Accordingly, since a language or language family may be considered a cultural universal, linguistics seemingly points to the Southern area as the aboriginal home of the Maya.
Another theorized stimulus, forerunner, or “mother” to the Maya, at least with regard to certain hallmark traits of Maya civilization – writing and the Maya calendar – is the Olmec phenomenon.See, for example, Coe, Michael D. and Richard A. Diehl (1980) In the Land of the Olmec; Vol. 1: Archaeology of San Lorenzo Tenochtitlán; Vol. 2: The People of the River. University of Texas Press, Austin; (1996) The Olmec World: Ritual and Rulership; with essays by Michael D. Coe, Richard A. Diehl, David A. Freidel, Peter T. Furst, F. Kent Reilly, III, Linda Schele, Carolyn Tate, and Karl A. Taube. The Art Museum, Princeton University/Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Princeton and New York; Sharer, Robert J. and David W. Grove, eds. (1989) Regional Perspectives on the Olmec. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge Archaeology does tend to support a movement through time and space, west from the Olmec heartland in Tabasco and Veracruz, Mexico; across the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, down the Pacific coast of Mexico and Guatemala, and east from the coast through the piedmont - where Chocolá and Takalik Abaj are found - and highlands beyond Kaminaljuyu. However, such a scenario depends on how much or little one attributes a formal unity to Olmec civilization.
Competing theories