XVI. COMMENTARY ON: THE CIVILIZATIONAL CONSEQUENCES OF VARYING DEGREES OF AGRI-
CULTURAL AND CERAMIC DEPENDENCY WITHIN THE BASIC ECOSYSTEMS OF MESOANERICA
Geoffrey Bushnell
I want to say at the outset that this struck me as a very good paper,
and that I found myself in agreement with most of it.
It falls into four sections:
(1) the Introduction. Lowe stresses the advantages of hunting and gathering
in the very varied and favorable conditions in Mesoamerica, and suggests that
this is one reason why dependence on agriculture came about so late there.
This is perhaps underlined by the fact that the idea of cultivation was very
much older. I would add that a modern hunting and gathering people, the
Hadza of East Africa, found this a very satisfactory way of life compared
with that of their agricultural neighbors until recent (and disastrous)
government interference. They got on very well, to borrow a phrase from
Lowe, without the trouble of planting crops and making pots. Leading on
from this, MacNeish is quoted on the subject of specially favored hunting
and gathering, and fishing, localities which allowed early settlement,
perhaps the year round (the Archaic shell mounds in Kentucky may be an in-
stance), but I feel that the idea should be treated with caution. Being
suspicious of MacNeish's pit house villages in the Abejas Phase at Tehuacan,
3000 B.C., I asked Flannery, who replied "Half a pit house". Lowe goes on
to point out that there comes a time in the second millenium B.C. (1500-1200)
when development accelerates, and agriculture and settlement spread rapidly.
This is demonstrated by the rapid spread of ceramics, acting as an index.
Incidentally, if one looks at this stage and not at the whole slow build-up
of cultivation from the beginning, there may be more to Childe's idea of a
neolithic revolution than I have been accustomed to believe, as applied to
Mesoamerica.
(2)  The Appearance of Pottery.  It is suggested that the availability of
abundant natural containers, e.g. calabashes, retarded the adoption of
pottery until beans began to be boiled rather than roasted and maize to be
soaked, which could have been true of upland valleys like Tehuacan but not
of lowland areas where pottery seems to have preceded the cultivation of
corn and beans. The suggestion that the conservative way in which the
shapes of the earliest pottery followed natural forms., indicates that its
introduction did not produce cultural upheaval, seems to be a good one, I
am not convinced by the suggestion that deepened stone mortars were the first
manufactured vessels capable of boiling use over the fire. I doubt if they
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would long survive such use. I agree that it is highly unlikely that the
Tehuacan stone bowls had any influence on pottery manufacture, although both
could have been inspired by gourd vessels. It is not very profitable to
speculate on this, because very few bowls were found.
There is a discussion of possible routes for the introduction of pottery
from a southern source, with a preference for the Gulf Coast with hints of
connections as far away as Florida. As to the actual source, Honduras is
mentioned as worthy of investigation, but I believe that the north coast of
Colombia is as good a candidate in spite of Lowe's unwillingness to claim
Puerto Hormiga as the source (of the Barra Phase pottery). The Chiapas pottery
at least shares many shapes with Puerto Hormiga, which is the oldest pottery
so far known in America, and apparently gives rise to a long succession with
similar forms in the same area (Canapote followed by Barlovento), so there
would be a possibility of a site intrusion at various times over a long
period. Lowe suggests that the Barra Phase pottery of Chiapas can be as early
as any in Mesoamerica, since there is no reason why the sparse and crude pot-
tery of the Purron Phase in Tehuacan should not have appeared towards the end
of the phase, so a reasonable date for both would be about 1600 B.C. After
that comes the critical period, less than 500 years in length, when there is
a rapid growth of population and the development of the San Lorenzo Phase of
the Olmec Culture, which many of us would regard as a civilization.
A word on the appearance of pottery in Peru. At Kotosh there are sub-
stantial buildings before pottery appears (a pyramid some 8 m. high). On the
coast there are large centres of population and substantial buildings, for
instance at Culebras and Chuquitanta. In both cases they are before 1800 B.C.
We know nothing of the population size at Kotosh or of the sources of food,
but on the coast there was a considerable reliance on sea food, guinea pigs,
and, in some places, plant cultivation.   Can these buildings, both secular and
ceremonial, be regarded as indices of civilization in a preceramic context?
It may be that it is safer to stick to the criteria suggested by Willey
earlier in this conference, namely, large population size and density, social
complexity, elaborate internal communications, and ideas.
(3) The Role of Ceramics and Agriculture. The suggestion is made that
population and social pressures forced man to take measures to ensure depend-
able harvests, and that increased dependence on agriculture created uses for
pottery and freed some time for its manufacture by specialists, in other words
demography is the independent variable, with agricultural systems dependent
on it, and pottery to some extent following them. Lowe goes on to suggest
that the rise in population in late Classic Maya times may have overtaken pro-
duction from agriculture and resulted in "tagricultural involution", and that
this, coupled with Mexican intrusions which upset the hierarchy, brought about
the collapse of Classic Maya civilization, a model which might well apply to
part of the area but I do not feel that it provides a full explanation. This,
however, is jumping ahead from the emergence of civilization to its downfall,
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and I do not propose to discuss it further except as regards the suggestion
that the failure of the hierarchy to recover is undoubtedly due to the
same factors as the late conquest of their habitat by the, presumably low-
land, Maya before about 700 B.C., namely a lack of aggressive leadership.
Aggressiveness is not something which I would have expected in general from
the character of the Maya, but if it ever did arise I would expect it in
late Classic times, when there is evidence of dynasties to which some asc-
ribe extreme militancy. The personal leadership factor is bound to be diffi-
cult to detect archaeologically, in fact it is probably impossible to do so
anywhere before the 16th century, when there can be little doubt that it was
important in the rise of the Incas.
There follows a discussion of diet, in which I would call attention to
two points. One is the effect of non-material considerations; Piggott's
remark "Custom notcalory is King" is shown to have "particular application
to Mesoamerica, where calories are destroyed or ignored right and left."
The other is the continued importance of wild resources, particularly from
hunting, in some parts of Mesoamerica even to the present day, and a milpa
may be valued as a source of animal food. I am glad that Lowe has drawn
attention to an essential difference between the Old and the New World in
the development of farming by mentioning the basic barley and sheep economy
practiced in Iran by 4000 B.C., although it is possible that the fewness
of domestic animals may be balanced to some extent by the unparallelled
improvement of maize once its domestication has begun.   Lowe makes the
point that the abundance of game animals in the lowlands of Mesoamerica
made more domestication relatively unnecessary, on which I would only com-
ment that it was probably impossible for lack of suitable animals.
Developments in highland Mexico and the tropical forest are sharply
contrasted, Lowe endorses that the destructiveness of man removed the natural
resources of the Valley of Mexico about 2000 years ago, setting in motion
a whole series of reactions which Sanders, in particular, has regarded as
leading inevitably to the urbanistic civilization of that region. On the
other hand, the slash-and-burn cultivation of the lowland Maya maintains
natural resources, so much so that human and non-ecological explanations
must be sought for their civilization. In spite of this most of us would
regard the two as facets of one civilization, which raises the question
whether there was something more at the back of both facets. Tbis seems to
bring us to what in their various ways John Graham, at this conference, and
Gordon Willey, many years ago ("The Early Great Styles and the Rise of Pre-
Columbia Civilizations", American Anthropologist, Vol. 64, No. 1, Part 1,
p. 1, 1962) have indicated as spiritual factors. Perhaps they might also
be described as human factors, as Lowe suggests for the lowland Maya    At any
rate I am sometimes weary and sometimes dissatisfied with the unrestrained
materialism of the ecological approach, and wonder whether spiritual factors
can not have had their influence in other regions than the tropical forest.
Lowe's final remarks about the unity of people from Honduras to Hidalgo
suggest that they did.