Ancient Mesoamerican polities are an important source of data for considerations of state development, despite internal debate over their size and complexity. We review complex political units, usually referred to as “states” and “empires,” in ancient Mesoamerica and reach the following conclusions: these polities tended to be hegemonic, rather than territorial, in composition; they melded ritual and political action; and they utilized the ruler as a symbol of the “body politic.” We also note the apparently larger size of most Maya polities as compared to other Mesoamerican city-states. Besides reviewing the commonalities among ancient Mesoamerican states, we also highlight the variation among these polities and the need to consider historic and archaeological data contextually in making interpretations of political structure.

I was born in October 1939, the oldest of three children. Dad was an agricultural economist employed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture; Mom was a stay-at-home mother and part-time school librarian, with a vivid imagination and strong literary and historical interests, and our home was full of books. Since the 1780s, five generations of my father's family had owned and worked the same farm in western Maine, and that was where Dad was born and grew up. My mother's parents immigrated to America from Germany in 1884 and 1890; they met in Montana, worked a homestead there, and eventually became cattle ranchers in Alberta. After 1910, they took up a less rigorous life of farming in Connecticut and along the shore of Lake Cayuga in upstate New York, and it was there that Mom was born.

Landscapes figure centrally in conceptions and writings about ancient Mesoamerica. This selective review considers four interrelated kinds of landscapes investigated archaeologically in Mesoamerica: ecology and land use, social history, ritual expression, and cosmologic meaning. The literature on each topic is large, and from its inception, Ancient Mesoamerica has contributed significantly. Discussion here focuses on how we got to where we are in Mesoamerican landscape archaeology, important current developments, and directions for the decades ahead.

This paper reexamines the art and architecture of the Upper Temple of the Jaguars, Chichen Itza, in light of new unpublished digital images of Adela Breton's copies of the murals. Following discussion of the construction date of the building and previous interpretations of the murals, examination of costume, setting, and house form suggests that rather than depicting mythic or symbolic episodes, these murals illustrate actual military encounters between Chichen and its enemies. The occasion for their production seems to be the utilization of the Upper Temple of the Jaguars by a specific sector of Chichen Itza's military, perhaps for rites of investiture. This sector is argued to have been associated with the Cloud Serpent, either as the title of its leader or as a patron deity, and the structure itself is perhaps related to later Nahua buildings associated with penitential rites involving warfare and investiture.

The earthworks of Tikal have long been understood as the most extensive example of defensive architecture in the Maya Lowlands, with the ditch and embankment seen as part of a system of defense anchoring the north and south territorial limits of Tikal to impassable bajos on its flanks. New survey and excavation data suggest that the extent and course of the earthworks are not consistent with the demarcation of the north and south limits of the polity, and that the morphology of the feature is not consistent with a well-conceived or finished defensive construction. Here we present a hypothetical model of the earthworks as a limestone filtration trench that could have been used to collect subsurface water to mitigate the effects of canicular drought or to support off-season agriculture.

In this article I consider recent research on urbanism in ancient Mesoamerica, especially over the past twenty years. I focus on the theoretical perspectives that archaeologists use to address cities, urbanism, and urbanization. I argue that despite some significant advances in how we understand urbanism, most research continues to be embedded within cultural evolutionist, functionalist, and elitist theoretical frameworks. I highlight approaches drawn from poststructural theory that hold promise for developing a more dynamic, complex, and culturally compelling view of Mesoamerican urbanism. Using examples from pre-Hispanic Oaxaca, I discuss how a focus on practice, social negotiation, and materiality draws attention to the actions of people within their social, cultural, and material settings rather than on abstract high-level forces such as cultural evolutionary structures or the functioning of urban centers within broader societies.

Coba represents a major Classic period Maya urban center. Archaeological investigations have suggested a complex socioeconomic integration apparent in the heterogeneity of the size, shape, and quality of architecture while demonstrating a clear demarcation between commoner and elite compounds in addition to a complex system of raised roads (sacbeob). Results of the 1974–1976 mapping efforts at Coba revealed a generalized concentric settlement pattern with elite compounds concentrated at the core. In their analysis of the settlement patterns at Tikal, Guatemala, Arnold and Ford challenged this concentric model. Their analysis of labor investment in structures within the 9 km2 core area of Tikal suggested, in contrast to Coba, a scattered rather than a concentric pattern of high-status architecture. Using a geographic information system (GIS), we tested our concentric model hypothesis for Coba by applying Arnold and Ford's work investment parameters. Our results confirmed the presence of a concentric pattern of high-status architecture at Coba closest to the core that differed from Arnold and Ford's findings of a scattered pattern in Tikal. These unique and discrete findings suggest that all major cities in the Maya area may not possess identical settlement patterns. To support our findings indicating urbanism, we also make a detailed analysis of the Coba and Calakmul demographics focusing on the Late Classic period.

The role of human ecology in a Mesoamerican context requires both rigor and imagination to assess the sophistication and accomplishment of the many diverse groups sharing its varied resources. Three overlapping and complementary ecological orientations from recent literature found generally elsewhere—outside the culture area—are (1) resilience and vulnerability of communities and their landscapes, (2) economic tasking logics, and (3) complexity trajectories. Mesoamerica charted a unique economic, political, and ideological course when compared to the Old World, one significantly affected by its environmental opportunities and constraints. Brief attention is given to lessons learned.

Painted ceramic vessels of the Late Classic Maya, depicting scenes of the royal court, provide an entry into understanding the courtly community as an institution built on relationships and embodied through lived practice. By examining these ceramics both as circulating objects, representing the materialized form of courtly values, and as vehicles for imagery that conveys idealized representations of the court hierarchy and how it was enacted, archaeologists may more profoundly integrate material and iconographic investigations. Assertions of identity and status are examined through the ways in which they are “contained” by these decorated vessels and emerge as characterized by a series of simultaneous unifications and oppositions. A focus on bodily behaviors and interactions, and the ways in which objects played courtly roles in their own right, yields an animated understanding of a dynamic court and a larger perspective on the enactment of identity and difference in Classic Maya contexts.

A survey of the Mesoamerican geoarchaeological literature published from 1990 to the present—in celebration of Ancient Mesoamerica's first 20-year katun anniversary—shows the full spectrum of small, focused projects to broad-range programs. Some scholars defend subdisciplinary boundaries and only do their research as physical science. Others combine natural with social science investigations, and some delve well into the humanities. I suggest here that the more successful programs are the latter because I believe the human experience in ancient Mesoamerica does not fit neatly into one or two of our Western disciplinary categories. Hopefully the next katun can be characterized by more open inquiry including the fullest range of scholarship from the natural sciences, through the social sciences, and embracing the humanities. The growth of new “bottom-up” approaches and post-structural theory—often including agency, practice theory, and resistance—help broaden inquiry and therefore bode well for the next katun.

Research in Mesoamerican ethnohistory has made great strides over the past few decades. Innovations and refinements in the field follow several themes, including increased availability and more sophisticated interpretations of pictorial codices, the bringing to light of additional documentary materials and their translations, an increase in research on colonial life, a continuing interest in the Spanish conquest itself, and the development of particularly useful interpretations and perspectives from anthropology, history, and art history. Building on these themes, ethnohistory is in a position to further develop documentary analyses and text translations, encourage multidisciplinary and comparative research endeavors, and generate more sophisticated models for understanding culture change.

Over the past four decades the interpretive capacity of lithic analysis in Mesoamerica has changed dramatically. Lithic studies have grown from simple artifact descriptions to a powerful approach for studying and interpreting pre-Hispanic economy. The linchpin for this change was the development of the lithic technology approach (Collins 1975; Crabtree 1968; Flenniken 1981) and its use in asking culturally meaningful questions about the Mesoamerican past (Sheets 1975; Spence 1967). The utility of this approach is as obvious to those who employ it, as it is elusive to those who do not. It involves the recovery, analysis and interpretation of flaked stone residues, that is, the large and small flakes and chips produced when stone tools are manufactured and used. Moreover, it is the study of the mundane to view the mundane, and obtain a window onto the economic patterns of everyday life. The reward from studying thousands of ordinary flaked stone remains comes from the insight it provides for reconstructing and modeling past economic behavior.

This essay surveys recent trends in studies of Mesoamerican visual culture. Visual culture is defined here as more than an inclusive art history. I outline a tradition of approaches and methods in visual culture studies, arguing that this tradition pays particular attention to the reception and use of objects, as well as to their place in ancient economies. Several current trends in Mesoamerican studies, especially Postclassic period world-systems approaches and Classic period Maya courtly studies, have been particularly fecund strategies for visual culture studies. Other major trends in the field include studies of the symbolism of architecture and urban planning as well as performance studies. The insistence on economic contexts, the desire to capture indigenous visualities, and the need to situate the visual experience in larger cultural phenomena all bode well for future interdisciplinary work in visual cultural studies.

The marketplace was an important institution for household provisioning and elite resource conversion in pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica. Despite their importance, marketplaces are difficult to identify because exchange relationships are generally invisible in the archaeological record. This study examines the evidence for marketplaces at the Epiclassic period site of Xochicalco, Morelos, Mexico. It explores the role of craft production in the marketplace as a possible indicator of market activity. Excavations in a suspected market area at Xochicalco uncovered evidence for the production of obsidian prismatic blades on the floor of a public plaza. The results of these explorations are discussed and it is concluded that craft production can be a useful indicator for market activity if production debitage is found in primary contexts in public plazas.

This article presents some of the authors' perspectives on the past 20 years of work that applies the results of research in historical linguistics to the understanding of the histories and cultural practices of pre-Columbian Mesoamericans. It focuses on major cultural transformations to which both historical linguistic and archaeological data can contribute, such as the spread of agriculture, and migrations in Mesoamerican prehistory. It also addresses major culture-historical studies on narrower topics: on Nawa and its place in the prehistory of Mexico, in particular confirming standard views that Nawas were immigrants into Mesoamerica; on Archaic and Formative period interactions involving Oto-Mangeans, which is work that is largely still to be done; on the prospects for work on long-distance contacts between Mesoamerica and North America; on the contributions of historical linguistics in Mesoamerican epigraphy; and on the value and prospects of updating the methodology of glottochronology.

For much of their history, prismatic blades were a relatively scarce item whose restricted occurrence suggested they functioned as prestige or luxury items. Some time prior to the Postclassic period, however, they became a widespread, ubiquitous, and mundane commodity in Mesoamerica, as indicated by ethnohistorical accounts as well as archaeological evidence. This occurred around the same time that blademakers began to prepare core platforms by pecking and grinding, a labor intensive process whose advantages are presumed to have played the primary role. The specific causal relationships involved, however, appear to pertain less to factors of increased productivity on the part of individual blademakers than to those of skill, as suggested by comparisons between core/blade technology used in areas close to obsidian sources and those used at sites further removed from the sources.

Obsidian prismatic blades were widely traded across Mesoamerica during the Early and Middle Formative periods. However, it was not until the Late Formative period (400 b.c.—a.d. 100) that prismatic blade cores began to be exchanged extensively. Although it is generally accepted that the trading of blades preceded the trading of cores by almost 1,000 years, little is know about the structure of blade trading during the Early and Middle Formative periods. We describe three distributional models for the trade of obsidian prismatic blades: whole-blade trade, processed-blade trade, and local-blade production. These models were evaluated using obsidian consumption data from Oaxaca, the Basin of Mexico, and Tlaxcala. The results indicate that Formative period blade trade involved different forms over time and space.

Despite a long history of contributions by physical anthropologists to our understanding of the Mesoamerican past, it has only been over the past few decades that a closer relationship has developed between bioarchaeology and archaeology in the region. The next step should be the integration of bioarchaeologists in the planning as well as the execution of projects. In this review of the present status of bioarchaeology in Mesoamerica we examine its contributions to several broad topics, emphasizing its growing theoretical component and the development of new methods like isotopic analysis, and suggest some lines of inquiry for future investigations.