Anthropology zines: We used to be trees / Material culture
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1bTo80Ono7lBEObGkUAWf7dPbB7f-MTn4cVHvJT5bFxc/edit?usp=sharing
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1kF8olPA5XamdnRWWyYukIPWsukWnfXWuExA7bePcRns/edit?tab=t.0
Richard’s work intersecting with the cacao + beer zine, Joyce’s research, Maya explorations, Mark’s ponderings, FUCK everything is interrelated and it’s so cool and kinda overwhelming
cool zine possibilities here but I still can’t seem to finish anything, not even a grant application
Joyce + Henderson 2010
What does it mean when objects are locally made in another regional “style”? What researchers call “Olmec” have vast form/style diffs even outside Gulf of Mexico; Honduras, “Olmec” objects made locally: not just imported. You are becoming the thing, the style is in you. “The creation of identity through entanglement with things” – what did it mean to formative period Mesoamerican villagers to make objects that were different from others in the community?
In places with long histories of exchanging goods - and the social relations this implies - like Mesoamerica, local practices always reflect cosmopolitan experiences
Were Hondurans making “Olmec style” objects trying to “be Olmec” and what could that have meant to them?
Formative period = earliest archaeological findings in Honduras
Olmec anointed Mesoamerica’s “first great art style” - developed in Gulf of Mexico population centers
Evidence reveals: first radiocarbon samples at Playa de los Muertos and Los Naranjos supported time lag in incorporating Olmec motifs > delayed participation in regional trends for Honduras?
Stratigraphic excavations show preceding style/complex motifs that harken to designs/techniques usually indicating integration into wider cosmopolitan networks of Mesoamerican communication/exchange.
What is “Olmec” in Honduras?
Olmec-style vessel styles/designs at Puerto Escondido and Los Naranjos that resemble those from Copan, in caves of Cuyamel; figurines, pendants, seals/stamps - local contexts, face-to-face practices > produce body ornamentation!
Includes crocodile motif on Mexican vessels > cacao and world tree!
Naturalistic animals, zoomorphic images from central mexico sites > Honduran more abstract, resemble Pacific Soconusco, highland Oazaca
In Honduras they were used to serve food for funerary feasts!
Visual culture recognized as “Olmec” = evidence of concepts shared by people participating in similar ritual practices w similar concepts of the structure of the universe
Like “Roman, Victorian, Byzantine” … conveys cultural/political commitment to beliefs, practices, material representations
METHODOLOGY: I did Gabriela’s meditation before this and asked to connect tot he plants… when I saw the ceramic pendant on page 195 they said was a clamshell, I saw a uterus, and I physically experienced the plate being placed over my womb and something jerking that part of my body up sharply - kind of like the kundalini exercise, “EK-ong-garaaaa…) - receiving information about use from the ARTIFACTS, the ROCK, directly?!
Ideologies separating elites and not were incorporated/combined in everyday experience through quotidian material culture
Same w beer and cacao
Olmec graphic style replacing local indigenous where local animals featured > homogeneity, capitalism like features begin? “Cosmopolitan zoomorphs” coming with new materialities - social as well as geologic stratification including luxury consumption begins to appear at Puerto Escondido
Honduran landscape = kin groups cultivating different PLANTS > shapes experience
Cacao cultivated before 1100 BC
Rivers supply abundant water in region
**MYCORHIZZAL RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN PEOPLE AND TREES SHAPE CULTURE!*** Long-term INVESTMENT IN TREE CULTIVATION SHAPES UNIQUE RELATIONSHIPS TO LAND AND PAST/FUTURE INHABITANTS
this is what it means that we used to be trees
Maize cultivation at lake/river possible before highlands because of water supply
“No single cosmology could have made sense of the diverse experiences of the natural and social world that would have arisen from the situated lives of farmers in these different villages. Imagined relations to ancestors, supernatural beings controlling rainfall, and plant spirits, all parts of suggested Formative Mesoamerican cosmologies, would have differed from place to place. In each place, different beliefs about the origins of local populations and their rights to land would likely have developed, particularly if, as has been suggested (Clark and Cheetham 2002), the first farmers ignored the preexisting use of the landscape by mobile Archaic people whose territories they occupied with their new permanent groves, fields, and houses.”
Obsidian exchange = requires forming systems of shared value, cooperation
“Studies of design resemblances in archaeology traditionally assumed that designs are symbols of group or subgroup identity, displayed to others to clarify social relationships. More recent work has suggested that the recognition of design similarities as information drops off quickly, so that microvariation may be more interpretable within communities than are generalized similarities between com- munities”
Social relations form value systems that define what artifacts look like - not the reverse (what a “proper pot should look like”)
Puerto Escondido had central place in network linking Honduras and Mesoamerica in late Early Formative period - and society was stratified
Exotic raw materials in costumes > used in community and household ceremonies, including burials
Primary burials in village, secondary in mountain cave shrines = local way of commemorating the dead and marking social groups > costume ornaments and food sharing vessels at burial reflects life stages, other affiliations of both living and dead
Birth, marriage, other life events = ceremonies with less material evidence but where NEW relations, stories could be invented
BOTTOM LINE: If they were trying to “be Olmec,” it wasn’t in the same way as Mexican peoples.
Involved participation in wider networks of value, hierarchy
Rooted in local cosmologies that tied humans to land, history, local deities
THEY USED MATERIAL CULTURE TO REMIX SOCIAL + COSMOLOGICAL MEANINGS FROM PEOPLE IN WIDER NETWORKS - especially in non-burial contexts where living culture was being shaped actively (though, I wonder about this wrt dead - shaping transdimensional relations?)
Honduran “Olmec” artifacts locally made, not canonical according to broader styles > show knowledge of entire range of practices developed elsewhere, they are not peripheral/late
Like “victorian” there are not clear geographic boundaries on artistic, spiritual, social practices and styles
Pilgrimage to Island of Cozumel - Patel
Cozumel's unique position as a pilgrimage centre responsible for the diffusion of intellectual (including astronomical) knowledge throughout eastern Mesoamerica.
defined through an analysis of the political importance Mesoamerican Tollans (pilgrimage centres) and oracular shrines.
In a religion that gave prominence to the cardinal directions, Cozumel's location as the furthest eastern point of the Maya realm extended the island's religious importance beyond its borders to all the
inhabitants living in the Maya region. Surrounded by the eastern Caribbean Sea, the Island of Cozumel embodied Mesoamerican conceptions of sacred geography that privileged locations adjacent to water.
Astronomy served to legitimize political power in Epiclassic/Postclassic period (900-1519 AD)
In the tradition of Teotihuacán, Tula, Cholula and Chichén Itzá, Cozumel was the Tollan of Postclassic Yucatan: regional religious complexes where intellectual achievements, art, and astronomy celebrated-!!! Omg… this is everything I’m doing right now.. . I’m just trying to get back to the Tollan-!!!!
Kings, queens, elites came to consult the planets and constellations; moon, sun, Venus - and studying the stars meant understanding the calendar >> and connecting it to rulers who wanted power.
They who control TIME control REALITY
Sites of divinatory info for astrology, exchanging astronomical, calendrical, historical, and religious info-!!!
Only 4 books survived Spanish book burning… from Mixtec region, Oaxaca - historical info to do with people, politics, genealogy, and “RITUAL TRAVEL” > completing this consummated the act of assuming leadership
THE SHRINES - THE SACRED SITES WHERE THE ALTARS ARE - WHERE THE ANCESTORS LIVE
Prenda as the container version of the altar - bodies as prendas, movable offerings
In ancient societies they didn’t draw these lines around things - sacred vs secular
Pilgrimage is a transformative social and individual process encompassing travel to a culturally significant place, deity, object or person (living or dead); the return journey home; and the portable objects exchanged along the way.
Includes religious rituals and rites of circumambulation, organized travel, the trade of highly regarded material objects, sacrifices of time, people and labour, requests and offerings directed to sacred figures or personage
Hard to isolate as a phenomenon for this reason
Meaning always changing based on individual desire and popular practice
People feel empowered because it feels like a way of influencing your fate/the future when all traditional methods exhausted.
Including treating incurable disa=ease
Sites are places where intracultural and intercultural exchange and interaction occurs
18 Mesoamerican pilgrimage centers at time of conquest
Incorporated natural landscape like mountains, volcanoes, caves, water, springs into ceremonial architecture and rituals
Many associated with an oracle that was consulted
Puerto Escondido on Honduras coast??
Delphi, Inca politics > way of sharing dissident opinions without challenging ruler’s authority >
oracle priestx lived in shrines aligned to cardinal directions, associated with celestial or earthly power > sun, moon, earth
Authority for different activities like dispute resolution and sanctioning new towns came from pan-Mesoamerican pilgrimage circuit assoc. W Cult of Quetzalcoatl, the Feathered Serpent
Accounts for similarity of art/architecture style across the whole above region
There WAS a dayworld vs nightworld!!! “Flower World” - Solar realm w flowers, birds, CRYSTALS - flowery road sun uses to cross heavens - flowery mountain in the east where honored dead were BIRDS and butterflies who accompanied sun on its E-W journey across sky
Astrology as allegory for life
Elite families in Chiapas linked to here
Ritual use of water causeways to access isolated coastal shrines > Postclassic Maya religions orientations re: primary of E Caribbean Sea-!!
priests and priestesses affiliated with the cult of Quetzalcoatl specialized in astronomical and calendar knowledge and resided at important pilgrimage and economic centres called Tollans
Here’s the expanded, quote-rich version of your thematic breakdown of "Pilgrimage, Politics, and Gender in Postclassic Mesoamerica", structured with direct citations and deeply attuned to your artistic, ritual, and ancestral concerns.
✦ Feathered Serpent Cult & Visionary Geographies
“The term ‘feathered serpent cult’ denotes, for better or worse, a variety of serpent traditions in Mesoamerica... from Preclassic Olmec depictions of an avian serpent... to Postclassic examples of the Toltec culture hero Topiltzin Quetzalcoatl.”
The cult is not singular—it's a constellation of shrine centers and symbols linked by trade, pilgrimage, and political ritual.
Its visual culture includes serpent balustrades, jade net skirts, flowering mountains, and ritual ballcourts.
Chichén Itzá’s “Castillo” is called both kaan witz (Snake Mountain) and k’aan witz (Precious Mountain)—a spiritual axis.
Inscriptions speak of “the flowers of the ancestors” and figures are seen conjuring visionary landscapes: one wears a jade net skirt and reclines as serpents rise from the ground.
This is Observatory gold: serpent portals as portals of vision, resurrection, and ancestral return.
✦ Material Culture: Ceramics, Sound, and Ceremony
“Fine Orange and Plumbate pottery comprised part of the trade wares involved in the consumption of ritual cuisines or beverages… jars were designed to resemble birds, turtles, coatimundis, monkeys…”
The Nepean Collection (from Isla de Sacrificios) is a trove of effigy jars, incensarios, tripod vessels, and animal-formed musical instruments.
Some jars likely held pulque or balché, used in rituals of transformation.
Rattles and whistles shaped like birds and serpents signal a musical component to the rites, resonating with your altar-based performances and multisensory practices.
✦ Caches, Altars & Prendas: Ritual Deposits as World-Builders
“Caches or votive offerings are deliberately deposited as a ‘gift directed to an other-worldly power’... one of the ways that the use value of nature to production processes was acknowledged and recompensed in Mesoamerica.”
Caches were found in temples, homes, caves, mountaintops, cenotes, and production zones.
Items included jade pebbles, celts, ceramics, faunal remains, bones, and human burials—sometimes burials as offerings.
Arranged in cruciform and quadripartite patterns, these altar bundles echo your prenda work—dense, symbolic nodes of power and reciprocity.
✦ Cacao, Pulque & Fermented Spirits in Ritual
“Social practices associated with the ritual consumption of beverages, such as cacao or pulque… may have played a factor in the distribution of trade wares at feathered serpent cult sites.”
These beverages were used in feasting, funerary rites, and likely interred for afterlife use.
Pulque priestesses appear in codices performing post-battle and seasonal rituals—linking female spiritual labor to psychoactive fermentation.
Zouche-Nuttall Codex: after battle, maguey/pulque priestesses perform rites of release, transformation, and ancestral communion.
This supports your zine’s thesis: fermentation = transformation, and women/gender-diverse people as its guardians.
✦ Goddess O, Tlazolteotl & Sacred Queerness
“Goddess O is also a weaver, midwife and warrior… her priestesses were diviners who often carried a mirror used in rituals… also depicted wearing the war serpent headdress.”
Not a fertility-only archetype—Goddess O (Chak Chel / Tlazolteotl) was associated with visionary rites, warfare, sacrifice, and weaving.
Wore quechquemitl robes, wielded serpents, carried mirrors for divination, and appeared on mural temples, codices, and effigies.
At Xochicalco, she holds a mirror with the face of God C inside—a ritual of seeing the divine through oneself.
✦ Priestesses, Vision, and the Power of the Dead
“The proximity of the dead was vital to the acts of divination that affected the living… an island used for the interment of the dead may have given priestesses the power of oracular divination.”
Isla de Sacrificios = shrine for death, oracles, and feminine cults.
Figurines wore quechquemitl, some were musical rattles, echoing ancestral voices.
Some pendants and rattles likely worn by priestesses enacting rituals to conjure visions or guide souls.
Figures reclining with jade skirts evoke the Earth Goddess or a trance state, the between of life and death.
✦ Myth, Rewriting History & the Erasure of Women
“The Feathered Serpent pilgrimage model erases the important role that women played in constructing and maintaining this cult.”
Colonial misreadings (e.g. Cortés = Quetzalcoatl) skewed scholarly vision toward male priest-kings, ignoring priestesses, diviners, weavers, and healers.
The author consistently reframes Quetzalcoatl not as a singular male figure, but as a network of ritual practitioners—many of whom were women.
This is the epistemic rupture your art can ride: visionary lineages of queer priestesses erased by empire, now reawakened.
✦ Artistic Applications & Altar Practice Fuel
Altar Design:
Use cruciform, layered deposits as structural references.
Include caches in natural vs architectural spaces: cave altars, river-offering bundles, ephemeral altars using biodegradable offerings.
Performance:
Integrate rattles, whistles, animal-formed vessels, and flutes that channel spirit allies.
Consider costuming with quechquemitl, jade net skirts, serpent/butterfly masks.
Exhibition:
Show archival vessels next to your own sculptural “vision containers.”
Use sound installations of “flowering mountains” + ancestral breathing/mourning.
Would you like this woven into a working section for your zine or exhibition? Or pulled out as ritual structure notes for future ceremonies?