Tehuacan Accomplishments

Have been asked to discuss in thirty typewritten pages the principal accomplishments of the
Tehuacan Project and my opinion of how these achievements have altered archaelogists basic
conceptions of prehistoric Mesoamerican development. This is a tough task to undertake even
in a book (MacNeish 1978), let alone in thirty pages, but I will give it a try. Obviously, there are
two separate questions involved. The first, and the easier one, is what I consider to be the
main contributions of the tehuacan projects that started in 1961 (and still are continuing). This
may be discussed in terms of (1) concrete new and significant findings that lead to (2) new
hypotheses or theoretical considerations concerned with prehistoric mesoamerican
development (Byers 1967; MacNeish, Nelken-Turner, and Johnson 1967; MacNeish, Peterson,
and Flannery 1970; Johnson 1972; MacNeish et al. 1975) The second question is how the
above have altered other archaeologists basic coneptions of prehistoric Middle American
cultural change. At the outset, let me say that it often seems that some archaeologists working
in Mesoamerica never change their minds no matter what the new data (Lathrap 0977), or if
they do, they never asmit it (Lorenzo 1975). Further, there is a great deal of provincialism in
respect to both time and space among Mesoamerican archaeologist, so that sometimes they
may change their minds about one aspect, usually an aspect that concerns their narrow
problems