Revealing Ancestral Central America - Smithsonian Latino Center ...

Artisanry in Motion
Christina Luke and Rosemary A. Joyce
The people of ancestral Central America
were connected to each other through
travel, trade, and indirect knowledge
of distant peoples and lands. Honduras provides
examples of a long history of material
connections reaching as far north as central
Mexico and south to Panama and Costa Rica.
The Ulúa river valley on the Caribbean coast
was a particular center of connections with
distant places (Figure 1). Between AD 600
and 1000, people living here produced a
group of objects that traveled long distances
north, west, and south: Ulúa marble vases
(Figure 6). Because these were entangled
with other flows of objects and ideas, understanding
the movement of Ulúa marble
vases helps us gain a better sense of the
many ways pre-Hispanic Central Americans
were connected across the boundaries of
the independent cities, towns, and villages in
which they lived.
Things Assembled in Place
Because what survives from past societies are
things, it is easy to focus on them in isolation:
What are they made of How were they
made How were they used, and by whom
What meanings did they carry Yet each thing,
each item, formed part of an assemblage, a
group of things in a particular place, at a particular
time. Assemblages in place show us
people connecting with other places as part of
conducting their lives. Through using things
in everyday life, people impart qualities to the
places where they become entangled with
things. These qualities trail along with things
as they circulate from one place to another, or
as they are kept and used over time. They may
be seen as lodged in the material from which
items were made—clay, stone, or bone—or
in specific attributes, such as color, texture,
or even the sounds things make. People put
things in place, things link places and people,
and places assemble people, things, and their
associations.
Before 1100 BC, residents of the earliest
villages known in the Ulúa Valley used obsidian
that came from regions far south, near
the present-day town of La Esperanza, for
most everyday tools, preferring it even when
other local stone would work. We do not know
all the reasons for their preference. A form
of glass, obsidian makes very sharp tools. It
can be banded in white, gray, or brown, or be
green in color, but most obsidian in Honduras
is black. Its shiny black color and texture, and
its ability to reflect a shadowy image, made
obsidian a valued material for mirrors, used
for divination in later Central American societies.
Its black color was important: people in
Fig. 44. Pre-Classic
period Maya jar in the
form of an animal, 300
BC–AD 600. Ciudad Vieja,
Sacatepéquez Department,
Guatemala. Pottery, clay
slip. MAI purchase from
Julia M. Rodezno, 1923.
33 ARTISANRY IN MOTION