An Unexplored Realm in the Heartland of the Southern Gulf ... - Famsi

Assmann (2006) argues that prehistoric monuments were constructed as expressions of
‘prospective memory’ or the will to remember. Thus, ancient monuments were designed
to be time markers, cultural reminders of the past. Ancestral activities and the locations at
which they occurred were memorialized across the natural and cultural landscapes. In
these ways specific locations became sites of memory, both individual and community.
For purposes of this discussion, a community is considered a social group of
varying size whose members reside in a specific locality, share government, and often
have a common cultural and historical heritage (see Arensberg 1961). The geographic
area is determined by members and includes economic, environmental, and social
features of that area. In respect to government, certain Gulf Coast Olmec centers are
acknowledged to have reached a level of sociopolitical complexity be it tribe, chiefdom,
or incipient state (Coe and Diehl 1980a; Grove 1997). The topic I address here, however,
is not about the type of political organization that existed nor does it address the timing or
causation of the transition from transegalitarian to ranked societies or hereditary
inequality. Rather, the concern is about a more fundamental issue of how the process that
eventually led to these various levels of complexity originated, and what factors may
have been necessary to provide the catalyst for this transition. It is possible that the
information collected by the El Marquesillo project may shed some light on these issues.
McAnany’s (1995) seminal examination of the Maya practice of ancestor
veneration resulted from her earlier investigation of economic organization. She
concluded that the archaeological data suggested that ancient people, elite or commoner,
and their regard for their ancestors, real or fictive, played a significant role in the origins
of land tenure, resource allocation, and the subsequent rise of ranked society among the
313