Technology and Culture

How should we understand and interpret the history of technology in post-conquest, colonial, and postcolonial Latin America? How did individuals and communities draw on both indigenous practices and European introductions as they pursued production and consumption through the long colonial and into the modern era? How did these practices vary across locality and region, and across time, in non-linear fashion?

This fascinating edited volume offers a set of nine superbly focused studies by a talented group of archeologists examining the history of technology in Mesoamerica. They do not simply present conventional histories of the conquest of indigenous technology through European artefacts, techniques, and practices, nor straightforward stories of diffusion and progressive movement toward a saturation of European-influenced technique. Themes of transfer, hybridization, and transculturation are pervasive. They vividly illustrate the varied landscape of surviving indigenous practices, of local agency in the partial adoption of new practices, and how available technologies were embraced, adopted, and adapted, repurposed, and sometimes simply ignored in local settings. The authors probe “invisible transitions and apparent continuities” (p. 91) and are as equally interested in obsolescence as in innovation. These were rarely binary choices or patterns but varied in degree, by household, community or region, and shifted over time depending on the changing nature of external linkages and local conditions. This attention to local agency and context for explaining patterns observed in the archeological records runs through nearly all the chapters, ranging from the late fifteenth to the nineteenth century, situated in central and southern Mexico, Belize, and El Salvador.

Several examples illustrate these themes. Iron imported from Spain or made locally by Spanish blacksmiths did not quickly replace stone tools. Chapter two examines survival and change in the obsidian tool manufactures of central Mexico in the century after the conquest, driven by the relative price of metal and the expertise to fashion tools. In ceramics and building materials (chapters four, five, and eleven), production techniques and styles drew from European (not just Spanish) and indigenous traditions. Patterns of material and technique choices can be traced over space and time, but also varied by household, “spotty and idiosyncratic” (p. 190) within the broader trends. Even the industrialization of cacao, indigo, sugar, and henequen production in response to rising Atlantic demand in the nineteenth century illustrates borrowing, adaptation, and hybridity when seen through the archeological record of specific sites (chapters eight, nine and ten). As demand for henequen (sisal) fiber grew dramatically [End Page 967] in the mid-nineteenth century, initial efforts to automate de-fibering methods by U.S.-based inventors failed. It was Mexican mechanics who designed and over three decades refined the first viable decorticizing machines. Technological change looked very different in the nearby cacao and indigo districts: Spanish commercial agents could easily assert control over processing and distribution networks, seen here in the excavated remains of those physical sites. European conquest eventually produced a radically transformed technological landscape in Mesoamerica, but more provocative and diverse than expected in these chapters.

Historians of technology will find the introductory and concluding chapters (by Rani T. Alexander and Anthony P. Andrews, respectively) extremely useful syntheses of this book’s central issues and arguments. The entire volume benefits from effective leadership and editing by Alexander and her colleagues: intellectually wide-ranging but also tightly focused, coherent, and consistent in its presentation across chapters. The volumes’ contributors, all archeologists, drawn from universities in the United States, Europe, and Latin America, do an admirable job of writing for nonspecialist audiences. Most are familiar with the theoretical literature in the history of technology and cite it as relevant; the work of archeologist Michael Schiffer provides an important touchstone throughout. The authors are consistently attuned to questions of behavior, society, and culture, but are firmly rooted in the material and historical record of their subjects. This is a superb volume and should be a valuable reference for historians of technology.