without much historical content. The importance of Knorosov’s phonetic analyses was not fully accepted until nearly twenty years later.

Major projects along the Gulf coast of Veracruz and Tabasco included García Payón’s excavations at El Tajin and Zempoala and his surveys in various regions (1954, 1955). Medellín Zenil established ceramic sequences in the Totonicapán and other areas of south-central Veracruz (1953, 1960), and in extensive excavation at La Venta, Tabasco, by Drucker, Heizer, and Squier 1959) many offering and monuments were uncovered. This work obtained the first radiocarbon dates for the Olmec culture, placing it tentatively between 1000–400 b.c., thus confirming the Olmec chronology proposed by Caso and Covarrubias.

In the Valley of Oaxaca, Bernal and Paddock excavated various centers as part of the investigation program for the newly founded Universidad de las Americas, and in the basin of Mexico, Piña Chan excavated formative sites while investigating some of the problems relating to early cultures there that had previously been defined by Vaillant, Noguera, and Covarrubias. In surveying the northern basin, Tolstoy (1958) refined ceramic typologies for some phases of the classic and postclassic periods, and Sejourné (1959) made controversial nonstratigraphic excavations in Teotihuacán that uncovered many murals and provided information concerning the planning and internal structure of residential buildings.

Richard MacNeish’s (1958) project in Tamaulipas in northeastern Mexico was significant because it attempted to investigate the early domestication processes for basic food plants such as maize and beans, a problem MacNeish would study more thoroughly later in his multidisciplinary project in the Tehuacán Valley.

The 1950s produced some ambitious general syntheses of Mesoamerican archaeology. In Marquina’s (1951) encyclopedic study of pre-Hispanic architecture, still an indispensable work in Mesoamerican studies, he cited and analyzed numerous unpublished reports from the archives of the Department of Pre-Hispanic Monuments in enriching his coverage of poorly known cultures and regions. Two book-length essays on cultural definitions of Mesoamerica were published by Olivé (1958) and Piña Chan (1960).

Contemporary Mexican Archaeology

Most of the concepts and theories currently in use by Mesoamerican archaeologists emerged, close to their present form, during the 1960s and 1970s. In some cases, the theoretical and methodological goals of new projects are so ambitious that there are lapses of as much as ten to twenty years between the beginning of fieldwork and the publication of the detailed “final reports.”

Mexican archaeology experienced some radical changes during the 1960s with numerous debates concerning the validity of the theory, methods, and objectives of traditional archaeology. Some of the debates were influenced by the development of “the new archaeology” in the United States, especially by the ideas and theories of lewis binford. Among younger Mexican archaeologists there was an even stronger interest in Marxism and the use of historical materialism to study social process and attempt to discover general “laws” of social development. This shift toward Marxism was part of a much larger intellectual and political process that eventually resulted in the student movement of 1968 that changed key aspects of the contemporary Mexican political system. So far, the best Marxist analyses have been produced by social anthropologists such as Bonfil and Olivera, and although numerous archaeological projects have used Marxist interpretive frameworks, no rigorous materialist syntheses have appeared similar to the ones that Childe produced for ancient peoples in the Old World. Some of the best materialist studies using archaeological and ethnohistorical data concern the development of social stratification and state-level societies (Batra 1969; Carrasco, ed., 1976; Carrasco and Broda 1978).

Starting in the 1960s, the National Institute of Anthropology and History steadily grew and diversified, and there was a considerable increase in the number of archaeologists on its staff. Laboratories for geological, biological, and ecological analyses were set up in the Department of Prehistory, and the Departments of Salvage Archaeology and Subaquatic Archaeology