Debating Oaxaca Archaeology

Description

Editor: Marcus, Joyce

Publisher: Museum of Anthropology, University of Michigan

Pub Date: 1990

Binding: Paperback

Condition:  Fair.  Binding tight.  No marks, tears, folds.  Lower front cover corner has an approx. 1/16″ bend, slight wear.  Sun-fading to spine and front and rear spine edges.  Light edge and corner wear.  Appears unused.

Notes: Anthropological Papers No. 84.  An archaeological catfight.  “This book is devoted largely to debates about the interpretation of Valley of Oaxaca prehistory.  Such debates can be intellectually entertaining.  Unfortunately, there are also a lot of factual errors in the recent literature on Oaxaca.  Correcting those errors is important, but rarely intellectually entertaining.”  On one side, Marcus and her husband Kent Flannery (both University of Michigan).  On the opposite side, William T. Sanders (1926-2008) (Penn State University).  Sanders’ position was that population pressure is the driver of cultural evolution, and land-use variables are the underlying foundation (environmental determinism).  You can’t eat what you can’t grow, and you can’t grow if you don’t have enough to eat.  Sounds simple enough.  Marcus (and Flannery) argue for an ” ethnohistorical based sociopolitical framework.”  (I can’t even begin to define that.)  All of this around Monte Alban.