Chapter Two - The Comparative World-Systems Approach and Its Application to Archaeology

Summary

Between the 1960s and the 1980s, significant advances in Mesoamerican archaeology were under way in many regions through the undertaking of intensive surveys, the hallmark of processual archaeology (e.g., Blanton et al. 1982; Flannery and Marcus 1983; Parsons 1971; Parsons et al. 1982; Sanders, Parsons, and Santley 1979). The citation reveals a shortcoming of processual archaeology in its accentuation of the regional approach as an appropriate unit of analysis in seeking to understand the evolution of political complexity of what was primarily viewed (Kepecs, Feinman, and Boucher 1994: 141–144 Kowalewski 2004: 87–88) as an endogenous, ecosystemic, self-contained process (e.g., Flannery and Marcus 1983; Grove 1981; Price 1978; Sanders 1974; Sanders et al. 1979; Sanders and Price 1968).