Collision of Worlds

In Collision of Worlds, David Carballo, a professor of archaeology at Boston University, takes on the gargantuan task of interweaving archaeologically based knowledge with the field of history, with the goal of illuminating the conquest of Mexico in new ways. We have long needed just such a book, and I imagine that for many years historians will consult this volume whenever they need to understand more about archaeology's contributions to the study of early Mexico. Early on, the author provides a pithy reminder of what archaeologists can do for historians: “At its best, archaeology is cross-cutting and can incorporate information from other specialties in order to look at the broad scale of change in human societies over millennia, while also being able to zoom into the cultural minutiae of a particular moment in time when an individual person made or used something—a hearth, a clay figure, an article of clothing” (p. 9). Throughout, he offers information that only an archaeologist could provide: in the century after conquest, for instance, “many other pottery forms continued pre-Hispanic manufacturing techniques but saw subtle stylistic changes, such as Aztec black-on-orange wares that are often difficult to distinguish from those prior to Spanish arrival, except for the hybridization of Native and European conventions for depicting flowers or other motifs” (p. 269).It seems a great irony that the book's one significant weakness stems from its very effort to wed the work of archaeologists to the work of historians. Carballo thinks like an archaeologist and thus is rightly determined to place the conquest of Mexico in its deep history, the longue durée of both Mesoamerican and European chronology; at the same time, he has fallen sway to what is in effect a recent and undoubtedly transient fashion among historians—namely, an insistence that absolutely everything of any importance stems from cultural difference. His very first chapter pits fifteenth-century Mexico (and specifically the town of Cholula) against fifteenth-century Spain (specifically the town of Medellín), thus unintentionally facilitating the kinds of comparisons that it was fashionable to make in Renaissance Europe, with the finest of cathedrals placed in contradistinction to pyramids. His “deep timeline,” included in the book's front matter, is eye-opening and extremely helpful to those who read it carefully: the very first fully sedentary farming villages in Mesoamerica appear in about 2000 BCE, whereas they appear in Spain between 10,000 and 5000 BCE. That's an advantage of between three and eight millennia. However, Carballo quickly distracts the reader from that fact by saying that in Iberia “farming began at a similar time to Mesoamerica,” without explaining that he is comparing the earliest appearance of the occasional, purposeful planting of seeds on the part of hunter-gatherers in Mexico to the appearance of full-time farming towns in Iberia (p. 13).In ensuing chapters, those who are reading carefully can glean what they need to know, for Carballo is certainly deeply knowledgeable. The earliest occasional farming in Mexico does not give way to full-time farming for many millennia, much as in the ancient Fertile Crescent, whereas in Spain in those same early years a transition to fully sedentary life happened rapidly because the people there could import the full agricultural complex developed elsewhere many millennia earlier (pp. 24, 56). Yet Carballo, despite being an archaeologist, is unwilling to remind his readers that when the collision came in the early sixteenth century, the Old World peoples had by then experienced many more millennia of fully sedentary agricultural life and thus had both the population and technologies that would be requisite for conquest. Instead, presumably in deference to his historian colleagues, he offers us a vision of Aztec loss as culturally induced: “Castilian expansion and language homogenization undergirded nation building, whereas in Mesoamerica religious divisions did not define society, and the indirect governance of the Aztec Empire fostered micro-patriotism and primary allegiance to ethnic city-states” (p. 96). He does acknowledge deep technological differences between the two groups, efficiently outlined in a subsection beautifully titled “Technologies of Imperialism” (pp. 118–25). Then he attributes even these to cultural proclivities: they stem from different “relative understandings of the roles of technology, religion, and education” (p. 135).Why go to so much trouble to explain deep history to students of the sixteenth century, only to ignore it in the critical moments of 1519–21? It seems that Carballo's book illustrates the need not only to bring fields together but also to retain what is best about one's own field, despite any pressure from another field not to. Carballo himself certainly understands all of this. Toward the end, he briefly mentions what he knows as an archaeologist: “It is important to emphasize not only the role of micro-patriotism in stimulating Native people to actively shape the dynamic political landscape . . . but also the sustained arrival of Spanish forces to the Gulf of Mexico. The continued waves of expeditions to Mesoamerica underscores some of the inevitability of conquest and colonialism, even if Cortés' mission had failed” (p. 218). I hope that in Carballo's future work he never again hesitates to remind historians of more recent times of what knowledge of previous millennia may help us to rethink. There is no need to pull any punches. We can take it—and grow wiser for it

Ancient history · Archaeology · Art history · CONQUEST · Hearth · Pottery · Classics · History · Latin American history and culture

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