Early Colonial Coxoh Maya Syncretism in Chiapas, México

Abstract

That acculturation or culture change is a basic tenent of all archaeological study, I think is an undisputable fact. However, archaeological culture change is usually treated in one of two ways. Sometimes the concept of change, or the apparent lack of it, is treated rather offhandedly as an absolute: culture changed, or did not change, period. Here there is concern with only those items that changed or did not change; a part, in other words, but not the whole culture. This is a short-cut which does not tell the whole story. More often, where an archaeological sequence is described with considerable continuity, material culture change is detailed at great length in terms of contrasting percentages, with little or no conceptual recognization of the new combinations of cultural traits at different points of the continuum as new cultural entities. The view here is that continuity of old or very slowly changing items is almighty and little concern is given to the change represented by new items in the culture. Again, this is a partial view of culture. A more productive viewpoint is one which presents a balanced perspective of culture, which takes into account not only changing cultural attributes, but the non-changing ones and also the new cultural features.