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

Maya. Although the assumptions she reached began with the Late Formative period
Maya (c. 400 BC), the same processes may have been at work among the Early
Formative period inhabitants of the Southern Gulf Lowlands as well (c. 1500 BC).
During my research, it became apparent that much of her evidence and reasoning for the
significance of ancestor veneration, kinship relations, and the material demonstration of
such was reflected at El Marquesillo.
There are, of course, variations between the Maya and Olmec datasets. The
primary points of divergence are attributable to the dearth of Formative period burial
evidence along the Southern Gulf Lowlands, differences in subsistence practices, and a
lack of an interpretable writing system. Nonetheless, iconographic depictions and
ideological symbolism at El Marquesillo and other Early Formative period sites along the
Southern Gulf Coast suggest ancestor veneration was a factor in the lifeways of the
inhabitants.
Fried (1967), Fortes (1953), and Service (1971) emphasized that emergent ranked
societies are a direct consequence of kinship and descent, and that these consanguineal or
fictive groups are established and reinforced within specific residential or occupational
clusters. Furthermore, these spatially centered kinship networks are thought to define and
promote the “intergenerational transmission of property” or resource rights, and that these
rights are “more often than not…anchored both symbolically and materially to the use of
a particular landscape” (McAnany 1995:15).
Along the Southern Gulf Lowlands by around 1500 BC, changes in the
underlying social structure of transegalitarian societies were brought about by shifting
demographic conditions (i.e., move to sedentism) (Coe 1968; Cyphers 1996b; Stark
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