The volume considers how processes of political centralization, hierarchy building, and social differentiation were related in the political histories of ancient Southeast Mesoamerican societies. We define the above terms here and review how proponents of world systems, prestige goods, and community of practice theories have understood these connections. Subsequently, we summarize our approach to the topic. This perspective models political formations as the variably successful, never fully stable, outcomes of efforts made by agents of different ranks and identities to secure power by drawing on resources obtained through social networks of differing spatial extents. The resulting social webs were thus means for promoting cooperation among agents who were allied in the pursuit of shared goals even as they competed with those seeking comparable objectives through different social connections.

This chapter provides an overview of the theory of relationality – the idea that people care about how others relate to them, and whether they can successfully relate to others – and how potential collaborators can be uncertain about these relational aspects. “Relating to others” captures both the information to be shared, and also the experience of interacting. Key to the theory of relationality, as it applies to potential collaborators with diverse forms of expertise, is that status-based stereotypes can drive a wedge between having expertise and having that expertise be socially recognized. This chapter builds up to a series of hypotheses about how potential collaborators care about the information to be shared and the experience of interacting when choosing whether to engage in new collaborative relationships with diverse thinkers. It also identifies several possible interventions for fostering valuable new collaborative relationships.

The literary oeuvre of the seventeenth-century literary genius Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz is genre-diverse: it includes plays, texts defending women’s intellectual agency, correspondence, religious-themed works, and, last but not least, poetry. Sor Juana’s texts are touchpoints for nearly all facets of colonial literary studies; her lyric works are invoked in critical conversations treating transatlantic studies, Barroco de Indias, New Spanish creolism, and feminist studies. Sor Juana’s lyric works evince not only her intellectual prowess, but also her artistic mastery of a variety of poetic forms, unequalled in her day or after her lifetime. This chapter examines the range of Sor Juana’s lyric writing in its totality, from her masterpiece, Primero sueño, to her renowned romances, redondillas, sonetos, and villancicos, contextualizing these in the scholarly and historical contexts out of which they arise.

This chapter describes the political formation that took shape at Copán and how that center’s rulers sought to secure their regional preeminence by establishing a network of colonies and allies at varying distances from the center. These extensive political arrangements come closest to approximating the traditional view of Southeastern societies as existing within the periphery of powerful lowland Maya cores. Nonetheless, what stands out in this account is the varied forms these relations of relative inequality took as local leaders and Copán’s lords negotiated the ever-shifting terms of their mutual dealings. Special attention is devoted to two Copán colonies, Quirigua in Guatemala’s Lower Motagua valley and El Paraíso in the western Honduran valley of the same name. Both were established by Copán’s rulers to accomplish specific, but different objectives. Their divergent histories highlight the limits of royal rule and the capacity of the colonized to shape their own destinies.

The political events that unfolded in the neighboring Naco and Middle Chamelecón valleys of northwest Honduras from CE 600–800 differed from those recorded elsewhere in the Southeast. Naco valley elites, like many of their contemporaries, sought regional preeminence by judiciously drawing on things, ideas, and practices secured through their interactions with peers living in diverse locales, including the Copán valley. How these intellectual and physical resources were employed in the domination strategies of those ruling from their capital of La Sierra was, however, distinctive of that realm. Craft production also played an outsized role in the basin’s history. La Sierra’s rulers enjoyed monopolies over fashioning such widely used goods as ceramic vessels and obsidian blades to make their subordinates dependent on them for these essential goods. The Middle Chamelecón capital, Las Canoas, in turn emerged now as one of the largest pottery-making communities known from the Pre-Columbian Southeast. Such large-scale commitment to pursuing a specific craft seemingly contributed to more muted forms of political centralization and hierarchy than was the case at La Sierra.

This chapter tests two ways of overcoming uncertainty about relationality – having potential collaborators directly communicate how they will relate to each other, and using third parties such as matchmakers and boundary spanners. Both are useful for creating valuable new collaborative relationships, especially between people who begin as strangers. In addition, this chapter also presents evidence showing the impact of new collaborative relationships on strategic decision-making. Data in this chapter come from a variety of national surveys, field experiments, and case comparisons.

Certain poetic practices in Mexico which have traditionally received less attention from scholars have recently regained currency, and even urgency in poetic critique. This chapter explores the openly political and popular underside of twentieth-century Mexican poetry, starting with the Estridentismo movement and moving on to works by José Emilio Pacheco, Eduardo Lizalde, Renato Leduc, Efraín Huerta, Rosario Castellanos, Jaime Sabines, Francisco Hernández, Jaime Reyes, and Ricardo Castillo, among others, as well as the political poetry recently reprinted in the twenty volumes of the Archivo negro de la poesía mexicana. The chapter also examines two significant but historically silenced trends: poetry written by women and literature in Indigenous languages.

Since cultivation was late and marginal and there were no domestic animals (except the dog) in the Pampas and Patagonia, indigenous people in both regions depended almost exclusively on wild animals, both terrestrial and aquatic, and undomesticated plants. At the same time, stones were also crucial for making the tools to kill and butcher the prey and to process the plant products. As we will show, bone technology was secondary in most of the Pampas and significant only among coastal, both maritime and riverine, and Paraná Delta people. Therefore, wild natural resources were the key elements for human subsistence in the Pampas and Patagonian and, in some way, shaped their adaptive patterns.

The chapters presented before showed diverse historical trajectories, different adaptive patterns, and continuous human occupation of the Pampas and Patagonia since the end of the Pleistocene. Both regions were probably among the last continental lands, except Antarctica, colonized by Homo sapiens after their dispersal from Africa. The first outcome of this review of the archaeology of the Pampas and Patagonia is that it does not support a pre-15,000 cal BP human occupation of the Southern Cone. Putting this in the global discussion means that the Pampas-Patagonia peopling holds up a pre-13,000 cal BP (the so-called pre-Clovis Model) but post–Late Glacial Maximum human arrival at the continent, which is in agreement with current archaeological, ancient DNA, and paleoclimatic models (Llamas et al. 2016; Pitblado 2011; Posth et al. 2018; Prates et al. 2020; Sutter 2021; Waters and Stafford 2013). Moreover, most of the paleoclimatic evidence supports the hypothesis that the earliest human arrivals at the Pampas and Patagonia took place under cold climatic conditions in semiarid to arid environments (Borrero and Martin 2018; Prado et al. 2021) during the cooling period known as the Antarctic Cold Reversal (14,700–13,000 cal BP).

In this chapter, the historical background of the archaeology in the Pampas and Patagonia is discussed and summarized. It encompasses a period of about 100 years, between the 1870s when the first archaeological investigations took place in the Pampas and Patagonia (Ameghino 1880–1881; Holmberg 1884; Moreno 1874; Moseley 1892; Zeballos and Pico 1878) and the late 1970s when there was a theoretical and methodological shift in the archaeology of both regions, which gave rise to modern research. The current regional models in the Pampas and Patagonia are a product of this last period’s research, first with a processual orientation and then adding other theoretical approaches (evolutionary, processual-plus/neo-processualism, post-processualism, etc.). However, some of the data and ideas generated in this first 100 years of investigation are still present in contemporary debates, as shown in the following chapters of this book.