dates established the first absolute chronology in Mesoamerica, and the projects of Maudslay, Maler, Morley, and others who discovered and recorded a preliminary corpus of Maya inscriptions made possible the subsequent breakthroughs in the deciphering of this writing system.

Consolidation

In some ways, the 1940s constituted a period of consolidation and critical reviews of previous investigations in Mexico. During the second half of the decade, however, a series of projects began that had new kinds of objectives and new fields of study.

In 1940, the social anthropologist Clyde Kluckhohn published a severe criticism of archaeological investigation in Mexico and Central America. He was especially critical of the tendency of archaeologists to study pre-Hispanic cultures in terms of isolated elements such as architecture, ceramics, and inscriptions, and he argued that there was little commitment to produce syntheses concerning the totality of a culture similar to the analyses that ethnologists were making of living peoples. These criticisms were expanded and essentially codified by his archaeologist student walter taylor (1948), whose work was a forerunner of some of the concepts “the new archaeology” of the 1960s. Pedro Armillas similarly criticized traditional Mesoamerican archaeology in Mexico during the same period.

The 1940s began with debates among archaeologists concerning two poorly understood cultures: the Toltecs and the Olmec. The Toltecs were mentioned in many pre-Hispanic chronicles as the ancestors of the Aztecs and some other peoples. Their empire, which was said to have reached its apogee during the tenth or eleventh century a.d., had its capital city called Tula, or Tollan, somewhere in the central highlands. Charnay (1885) and others had proposed that the center called Tula in the state of Hidalgo was the legendary Tollan, but many early-twentieth-century archaeologists, including Gamio and Vaillant, thought that Teotihuacán was the Toltec capital.

In 1941, the distinguished ethnohistorian Jiménez Moreno had analyzed the place-names and geographical regions mentioned in the chronicles concerning the location of ancient Tollan and had showed that most of the places were clearly identified with the area of Tula, Hidalgo. In 1940, with the support of the newly founded National Institute of Anthropology and History, Jorge R. Acosta began the first of nearly twenty archaeological field seasons at Tula, and the first roundtable conference of the Mexican Society of Anthropology was organized the next year with Tula and the Toltecs as its theme. Over thirty archaeologists discussed the significance of the findings of Jiménez Moreno and Acosta and concluded that Tula, Hidalgo, was the Tollan described in the chronicles of central Mexico.

The Olmec were the subject of the second roundtable conference of the Mexican Society of Anthropology, held in 1942 with Caso, M. Stirling, M. Covarrubias, and Jiménez Moreno as key participants. Discussions centered on Stirling’s recent investigations of Olmec centers in Veracruz and Tabasco, especially his discovery of Stela C at Tres Zapotes, Veracruz, which had an inscribed date corresponding to 32 b.c. The iconographic studies of Caso and Covarrubias, and the ethnohistorical syntheses of Jiménez Moreno, all presented cases for the great antiquity of the Olmec. On the basis of these investigations, the majority of the roundtable participants concluded that, as Caso had proposed, the Olmec were “the mother culture” of Mesoamerican civilizations such as the classic Maya, Teotihuacán, and Zapotecs of Monte Alban. The chronological placement of the Olmec was debated until the 1950s when radiocarbon dating showed that this culture existed at least as early as 1000 b.c., during the formative period.

During the 1940s, many Mayanists, including Morley and Thompson, did not accept that the Olmec were older than the Maya of the classic period (a.d. 300–900). In 1941, Thompson published a complex analysis that tried to demonstrate that the Olmec were a postclassic culture of the fourteenth or fifteenth century a.d. Stirling continued excavating Olmec sites during the 1940s at La Venta, Tres Zapotes, and San Lorenzo, and Covarrubias (1943, 1946a, 1946, 1949) excavated Tlatilco in the basin of Mexico where he found evidence for the early