You Be the Judge, but Let Me Comment

I will coin the term irresponsible archeology in my assessment of:

Ancient Tollan: Tula and the Toltec Heartland

by Alba Guadalupe Mastache, Robert H. Cobean and Dan M. Healan.

Boulder: University of Colorado Press. 2002

 

Terry Stocker

Began May 22, 2005; began sending August 14, 2005

 

First draft. This will be posted on my multimedia web-site (under construction) and when the second draft is finished, it will replace this draft, which will be stored in archives. Comments in <> are notes to myself for the second draft. This draft is abbreviated.

 

My comments on Ancient Tollan are about what archaeology is, or what it is not. The authors, of Ancient Tollan , have a combined 105 years of experience of dealing with the Tula area and Tula archaeology. What we are presented with is inadequate for the time and money invested, and more to the point; most of it is inaccurate and distorted.

 

The following comments on Ancient Tollan are not about who is right or wrong, but it is about how we look at problems and how we intend to solve them. This is about reality, truth. The hour is getting late. What is archaeology as we now have it? It should be a complete presentation of data. I'm concerned to see Toltec society reconstructed as thoroughly as possible. To do that, we need settlement pattern data and all the artifact data we can get our hands on from those settlements. However, without centralized data banks to manage the increasing amount of data generated every year, this is almost an impossible task. Nevertheless, the paucity of artifact data in Ancient Tollan is a bit ridiculous.

 

Two theoretical points need to be presented before the critique. We must change our epistemological approach to solving archaeological problems. For example, Dixon and Stocker (n.d.) have proposed that the demise of Teotihuacan, which has traditionally been explained by population movement, might just as well have been the result of deaths by warfare, or even annihilation. We should be trying to project some of the dynamics recorded for Aztec society back into the past. In their 200 year history the Aztecs captured approximately 169 towns . They did this to obtain tribute like all states, big and little. They captured others in part to get sacrificial victims, which were sometimes cannibalized ( Stocker and Kylar 1984). Yet, when archaeologists talk about Teotihuacan, there are no conquests. Teotihuacan's art is full of human sacrifice (or at least human hearts and trilobals) but no archaeologist is talking about how sacrificial victims were obtained. When Teotihuacan is talked about, we hear about corn-eating traders. Really, Teotihuacan had no tribute paying states in the gulf-coast region? If one reads what has been written about that area, one gets a sense of a stilted epistemology harking back to the peaceful Maya. (See Dixon and Stocker n.d.). <Size of teo. Stark, Santley>

Also, to really understand some of the problems that are approached in archaeology we need to have a hand on ethnography. (See Flannery et al. 2005.) And better yet we should have a hand on the ethnographic present. I call the latter “hang time,” spending time with natives. How much time did the authors of Ancient Tollan really interact with natives? I'm not talking about the individuals who excavated for them, and I have written about them (Jackson and Stocker 1985). 1 I'm talking about subsistence villages that continue the traditions of the past.

 

Basically Ancient Tollan can be coalesced into two topics. First: They propose Tula's ceremonial center was the product of people's coming from both the south and the north. Pyramid C resulted from Teotihuacanos, coming to Tula and, continuing their Teotihuacan architectural tradition. People coming from the north are given credit for Pyramid B. Second. They attempt to show how Tula's hinterland might have been organized politically based on archaeological data viewed through local ethnohistorical documents and similar analyses elsewhere in Mesoamerica.

 

I present my critique of Ancient Tollan in the good news/bad news scenario.

 

GOOD NEWS:

Figure 1.1: is great.

Figure 2.8: really good.

Figure 2.9: really good.

Figure 2.10 really good.

Figure 5.18 really good.

Figure 5.47 is what we need more of.

Figure 7.13 is great.

Fig. 7.5 is good.

Fig. 7.6 is really good.

Fig. 7.19 is good.

Fig. 7.20 is good.

Fig. 7.21 is impressive.

Fig. 9.3 is great.

 

Chapter 10, “Hinterland Settlement” is a good offering of certain general survey data, and the strongest point of the book. However, this presentation is proof of the need for all of archaeology to switch to electronic form. This is not to say that there will not be books, but when dealing with the magnitude of this type of information, the printed format no longer suffices. Let's take Figure 8.1 (p. 219) for beginners. Outside of about five people on planet earth, everyone else has to decipher this. You the reader try it, begin with: “68. Mazapan figurines.” (I wish we could have visuals for this.)