Flanner s Holistic Archaeology

Flannery’s Holistic Archaeology and Interpretation of Figurines

The Cognitive Archaeology is defined as a subdiscipline, which deals with the study of all aspects of human behavior, which survived in the archaeological record. Flannery and Marcus group these aspects under four topics: cosmology, religion, ideology and iconography. Here they exclude all subsistence and settlement behaviors claming that otherwise, there would be no difference between cognitive archaeology and archaeology. On the other hand, they state that cognitive archaeology should not be formed as a separate branch, because it risks to slip from scientific discipline to the archaeologist’s mental fantasies and even to charlatanism. While defending the cognitive approach, Flannery and Marcus recognize that there must be some limits to its application: that is, the cognitive approach can be used only when there is a body of data rich enough to support it. Otherwise, it would turn into speculation.

Flannery and Marcus coin a new term in their article about Zapotec religion and rituals, the Holistic Archaeology. This new approach seemingly fuses the subsistence-settlement- specific processual approach and symbolism-specific cognitive archaeology. The holistic archaeology gives equal weight to cognitive variables and ecological, sociopolitical and economic variables. The authors find a way of practicing their statements in a very interesting study about Zapotec religion and ritual, using direct historical approach. According to the authors, there has been a dichotomy in Mesoamerican archaeology, since the settlement-subsistence strategies were studied by anthropologists, while cognitive issues were studied by humanists. The sad fact was that, there was no communication between the two sides.

In the article Flannery and Marcus show how the religious, ideological, cosmological and iconographic aspects evolved while the Mesoamerican societies evolved from egalitarian village societies to urban states. Here the authors propose a methodological framework to be applied to cognitive archaeology. The Direct Historical approach refers to working back in time, from the known to the unknown, using ethnohistoric and ethnographic data. Aspects like religion and ritual are appropriate topics for this method to be applied, since they are more or less steady in time. On the other hand, DHA can be used only when there are continuity between the archaeological record and ethnographic data. And change in religion and ritual should also be considered.  The other two methods are “public architecture”, which deals with how religious principles are expressed in physical remains, and “contextual analysis of ritual paraphernalia”, which deals with the non-random relationship between the artifacts and the way they display the nature of the ritual. Here the authors make refer to the cognitive motto, stating that since they are mental constructs, religions cannot be reconstructed but their ritual practices can be recovered on archaeological data.

The ample amount of written documents, from both the Colonial and Pre-Spaniard period, provides a basis for this study. First the authors define the Zapotec religion, ethnohistory and supernatural forces. The written evidence accounts two-room temples, blood-spilling dedications, human and animal sacrifice, and use of narcotics in order to “communicate” with spirits, and religious calendars. The worship of the “lightning” and ancestors’ spirits as clouds is also interesting, since they back Flannery and Marcus’ emphasis on cosmology. The second step is to look for the archaeological evidence that backs this information. The archaeologist should now find two-room temple remains, braziers with sacrificial remains, bloodletting instruments, remains of sacrificial subjects, fossils of narcotics, evidence about “Piye” the religious calendar, depictions of lightning and evidence for ancestor worship. In other words, the archaeologist tests the ethnohistoric documents with the archaeological record.

In the following pages of the article, we see that the authors were successful to back the ethnohistorical data by archaeological evidence.  However, I did not understand why the authors chose to jump from the Spaniard invasion period back into early village times of Zapotec, and then coming to the stratified urban state period instead of going back step by step.  We see that all religious elements did not appear simultaneously, but were a result of a slow evolution. The early evidences show a primitive version of “lightning” worship, the first appearance of social stratification in the quality of stingray spines used to spill blood, and no evidence of the use of drugs. Around 500BC, we observe a fully developed, socially stratified state, with rich noble, priests and ordinary people. The two-room temples are standard, and there are clear representations of the “lightning”. Evidence in the temple remains give ample information about rituals and sacrifices. Besides all this, excavation makes one more contribution to the ethnohistoric evidence: it is found that Zapotec people dedicated elaborate foundation deposits under the floor of the temples. Finally, many of the ethnographically known aspects of the Zapotec religion were found in the archaeological material, and the authors were able to take it back to 1100-1000 BC, the very early periods of the Zapotec civilization. Unlike the opponents of the cognitive approach who condemned it as “armchair archaeology”, Flannery and Marcus were careful in checking the ethnographic material with archaeological evidence. On the other hand, they were also aware of the presence of some bias in the written documents. The authors are cautious about the use of the direct historical approach, stating that this method would be useless unless the historical documents are sufficiently supporting.