This book is the first of a three-volume set dealing with cultural development in pre-Columbian, colonial, and contemporary Latin America. These volumes are intended both to mark the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s first voyage to America and to facilitate the study of Latin American society by university students. The present volume focuses on the long period that began with the initial settlement of the New World during Terminal Pleistocene times and ended with the contact between European explorers and the sophisticated Mesoamerican and Andean civilizations in the early sixteenth century. Seven scholars divide time and space into 11 chapters: “Los Orígenes,” by Manuel Lucena Salmoral; “Los Orígenes Culturales,” by Jordi Gussinyer; “Período Arcaico” and “Período Formativo,” by Emma Sánchez Montañés; “El Clásico Mesoamericano,” by Andrés Ciudad; “El Clásico Andino,” by José Alcina Franch; “El Período Postclásico de Mesoamérica,” by Andrés Ciudad; “El Período Postclásico del Área Andina,” by José Alcina Franch; “Los Pueblos de los Códices Mexicanos,” by Andrés Ciudad; “Los Aztecas,” by José Luis Rojas; and “Los Incas,” by José Alcina Franch and Josefina Palop.
The first three chapters deal in broad, general terms with the initial peopling of the New World and the long transition from hunting and gathering to agricultural subsistence in Middle and South America. The next five chapters (Formative through Postclassic periods) discuss in greater detail the development of complex, agriculturally based society in Mesoamerica and the Central Andes between circa 2000 B. C. and 1200 A. D. The last three chapters are based almost wholly on the rich protohistoric and ethnohistoric record of the last three pre-Hispanic centuries and the European contact era.
This book is a remarkable achievement in several ways. Most importantly, it provides an authoritative and systematic synthesis of much contemporary scholarship. The chapters on the Formative and the Mesoamerican Classic are particularly comprehensive and provocative. There are few other recent studies that approach the scope and depth of this volume’s inquiry, and its main intended audience (university students) will be well served by its availability. The volume also helps counter a common tendency to examine pre-Columbian America on a country-by-country or region-by-region basis.
The book also has some shortcomings. There are few maps or chronological charts. Some of the individual chapters are quite different in their orientation and coverage (this is particularly notable in the discussions of the Mesoamerican as against the Andean Classic). Although the basic division into Archaic, Formative, Classic, and Postclassic developmental periods is reasonable, it is sometimes apparent that the traditional Maya-centric trichotemy of Preclassic (Formative)- Classic-Postclassic has been too rigidly applied to other regions, thereby obscuring some important cultural change and continuity. The Andean “Classic,” for example, seems less coherent than the Mesoamerican as a developmental stage, and the development of Classic and Postclassic states in highland Mexico is deeply rooted in the antecedent Formative and Classic. The decision not to integrate relevant archeological data with protohistoric and ethnohistoric information in the final three chapters ignores some important new insights about Aztec and Inca polity and economy. This book achieves its greatest success as a general introduction to pre-Columbian Latin America for serious readers who will want to use it as a foundation for more specialized studies.
