In the unlikely event that you have just stumbled across this and you don't know me, my name is Kiernan McGowan. I'm a rising senior and archaeology major at George Washington University and this summer I'm headed off for field work in archaeological hotspot Oaxaca, Mexico. This blog will chronicle my travels and research and I hope to update it a few times a week so you can see what is going on.
Most likely if you are reading this you do know me though so you can skip over that last bit and jump to the good stuff.
The Site:
For over the last 10 years Professor Jeffrey Blomster of the GW anthropology deartment has been excavating and analyzing data from the site of Etlatongo, a moderately sized hill top village/early city located in the Nochixtlan Valley of the Mixteca Alta region of the modern state of Oaxaca. While the Nochixtlan Valley has seen human occuapation for thousands of years, the site of Etlatongo sees its first significant occupation around 1500 BC and is subsequently inhabited up until the arrival of the Spanish in the 1500's AD. The name Etlatongo comes to us from surviving Aztec codices, the region was under heavy influence from the Aztec Empire, and the name is problably a nahuatl (languge of the Aztecs) transliteration of the actual Mixtec name of the settlement. Etlatongo also has its own place glyph, literally a written symbol used to identify Etlatongo in documents, like if you put a picture of statue of liberty or a large red apple in lieu of writing the words "New York." Etlatongo's glyph has been understood to mean both "hill" and "place of beans. " However it is likely that Etlatongo was more than just a hill of beans. The entire site covers over 2 square kilometers and was likely an important regional Mixtec ceremonial center. The glyph has sometimes been translated to mean "temple of beans" which illudes to this broader significance. The site is also believed to have been an early urban center and it shows evidence of intense agricultural irrigation, some public architecture, and significant trading of both utilitarian and prestige goods with areas as far away as Mexico's Gulf Coast.
The Project:
So what's the big deal with Etlatongo and what am I going to be doing there? Here's the deal: beccause Etlatongo is an early urban center it can provide us important information on why urbanization occured in the past and what its effects on society were. Just to be clear, urbanization in the archaeology world describes when people began to move out of villages in which their houses were located directly next to their crop fields and into more densely packed larger towns and cities. This societal revolution represents periods of profound changes in economies, social orders, the development of class structures, and increases in craft production, food surpluses, etc. Generally the model for urbanization, its reasons and effects, has been modeled from the often scrutinized Oaxaca Valley in Mexico but this process is poorly understood in other regions of Mexico and one of the goals of the Etlatongo Project is to compare the modes of development between the Nochixtlan Valley and the Valley of Oaxaca to get a more comprehensive understanding and how and why urbanization occured. So what will I be doing? I've spend the past semester getting myself acquaited with the study of archaeological ceramics, in other words, I've been trained to examine bits of old pots. Cermaics are essential to any archaological investigation, largely because they don't easily decomose like other materials, wood, cloth, etc. and they can tell us a suprising amount of imformation if you just know where to look. I'll be looking at a series of ceramic phases from about 500-200 BC working to help better define the phases (groupings archaeologists use to help construct chronologies of developement) and to see how pottery and its production developed as urbanization occured. Through urbanization you normally expect to find a rising class of craft specialists, a group of people who give up agriculture to produce a certain good so that others can devote solely to agriculture without worrying about making their own domestic and utilitarian tools. So far there has not been compelling evidence of this at Etlatongo and this summer I will be trying to uncover more evidence to support this theory or trying to figure out why this societal shift did not occur.
General notes:
I've been working up to this field work for a while and I'm very excited to be doing this. I'll be in Mexico for about 6 weeks and when I'm not holed up in the ceramics lab (which is in a back room of a colonial era Spanish convent) I'll be out and about in the city of Oaxaca, often considered one of Mexico's most beautiful cities, and the surrounding regions. I hope to bring you news of both how the project is going as well as stories from my travels and if nothing else you can always come here to check in from time to time to see how i'm doing.
Also, a quick note on the title of the blog: I called it the grasshopper chronicles for two reasons. the first is the obvious silly link to kung fu movies in which the young student is referred as "grasshopper" I am a student and still consider myself fairly naive about this whole archaeology business. The second is that deep fried grasshopper is actually a regional delacacy in Oaxaca. I'll get back to you on how it tastes.
that's all for now, I arrive in Mexico on the 30th so stay tuned for more udates in the coming days.
