Talk:Chocolá

Good start
This is a good start on the article. It could benefit from a better description of the actual site itself. I also removed the following sentences:


 * "The first three seasons of work here demonstrated that this site, perched between the coast and a chain of volcanoes, can rightfully be called a great lost Maya city. ."


 * "Fundamental themes in history and anthropology, including the study of evolutionary sociopolitical processes leading to the rise of highly complex urban societies in prehistory, are illuminated by the researches at Chocola."

Declaring that Chocola is a "great lost Maya city" that "researches at Chocola are illuminating the rise of highly complex urban societies" runs up against Neutral point of view. Thanks, Madman (talk) 02:59, 19 January 2008 (UTC)

This article is about the Chocola site
Hey, Jonathan, this article has become seriously off-topic. This is an encyclopedia article on the Chocola archaeological site. However, there is very little information on the archaeological site itself. The bulk of the article seemingly an essay about how the Southern Maya area/whatever kicked-started the whole Maya culture/civ/etc with digressions into the history of Maya archaeology. This section needs to be written in a more encyclopedic style, and not to argue a point of view or to propose a theory. Thanks, Madman (talk) 03:19, 20 January 2008 (UTC)


 * Madman2001: Not off topic, I would argue. I have now added more about the site itself. Chocola can only be understood in context. The entire research has been motivated by questions about the Preclassic Southern Maya area as a putatively seminal time and place precedent to the rise of Maya civilization. Furthermore, it is precisely the longstanding debate about Lowland Maya (Northern Peten) vs Southern Maya area that gives Chocola its importance. Other themes in prehistory and ancient complex government are engaged, as well, such as hydraulics, but the more cogent and pertinent import is with respect to Maya originsJonathan (talk) 12:02, 20 January 2008 (UTC)
 * I agree with Madman - the context of the site can be explained in much less space, and if it can't it should be moved into smaller articles. For example a discussion of the concept of maya civilization and its roots belongs in the article Maya Civilization. The article as is doesn't provide much about the actual site and strays far off on different tangents·Maunus· · ƛ · 12:21, 20 January 2008 (UTC)


 * Jonathan, thanks for your response. However, the structure of this encyclopedia, or any encyclopedia, is that articles are narrowly focused on facts (not opinions or arguments) concerning the subject matter.  Check out articles concerning Monte Alban or Palenque to see how an archaeological site article should be structured.
 * One of the advantages of writing for Wikipedia is that we don't need to go into tangential detail because someone else has thoughtfully written an article on that tangential detail (and if they haven't we can!). So, take advantage of that and use links -- not digressions.
 * Also, as mentioned, the long rambling section dealing with the rise of the Maya Civilization is laced with "peacock terms" like "vigourous" add "exquisite".  These are out of place in an encyclopedia.  No essays allowed here.
 * Please take some time to turn the essay into a dispassionate overview and we can move it into the right place in this encyclopedia.
 * Thanks, Madman (talk) 14:44, 20 January 2008 (UTC)


 * I had earlier suggested to Jonathan that it'd be good to have a section or so in this article to give the reader some background and regional/historical context for this site, on the principle that articles ought to be able to stand on their own terms. Also, since Jonathan had indicated he had a lot of background info on the Southern Maya lowlands I suggested that he might as well put some of that down, and we could then work to see which bits would fit in to this article, and which could be used as a basis to kick off our currently-missing article on the region. Now that he's kindly supplied us with a good start on this material, I guess we just need to massage and sort this info so that the site remains the focus of this article, with an appropriate amount of backgrounding, and use the rest for a (new) regional overview article (and/or augment some of our existing overview ones). With a few passes of copyediting for style consistency, some inline cites, etc, we should be looking pretty good. --cjllw ʘ  TALK 22:54, 21 January 2008 (UTC)

Chocola biblio add?
Madman, you seem to have added the Coe, et al Atlas volume. A good book, by my old prof, Coe, but is it meant to be in "further reading"?Jonathan (talk) 22:39, 21 January 2008 (UTC)
 * No, there is a footnote that refers to this specific text, and so when I write up footnotes, I just refer to the reference by author. What you're doing is OK too.  There are a couple of ways to write up footnotes here (see WP:Footnote).  Madman (talk) 23:09, 21 January 2008 (UTC)


 * My personal preference FWIW is to have a "Notes" section containing the inline cites (generated by reflist), consisting of abbreviated Harvard-esque cites [eg Smith and Jones (1984, p.100)] plus any actual footnoted commentary, followed by a "References" section consisting of the standard alpha-sorted and expanded bibliographical-type listing of all works consulted. That way, you only need to expand the source reference once, it's easier (and takes up less space) to multiply-cite the same work, and easier to look up the biblio of all relevant works since they are sorted and not dependent on the order in which they are used in the text. Ultimately I'd propose this be a defacto standard for WP:MESO, though of course very happy to hear of any other alternatives. --cjllw  ʘ  TALK 23:50, 21 January 2008 (UTC)
 * Go for it, boss. I thoroughly support that format.  I wish I had your patience with formatting everything.   Madman (talk) 00:24, 22 January 2008 (UTC)

Removed this sentence
I removed this sentence:


 * "The strategic position of Chocolá, as well as the theorized intensive cultivation of and long-distance trade in cacao, may help to explain the possibility of the Southern Maya area as precedent to and underlying the rise of Classic Maya civilization. ."

The last sentence just doesn't say a whole lot, particularly with all the weasel words like "may" "help" and "possibility". Thanks, Madman (talk) 04:04, 23 January 2008 (UTC)

Chocola draft material fm JonathanK
Copying here from my talkpage (before I archive it and it gets forgotten) some text written by JK as an early suggested draft for this article: “Maya Civilization” Controversy continues about the origins of Maya civilization as scholars continue vigorously to search for and engage in debate about the roots or first impulses of what became an ancient civilization that traditionally is considered to have been one of the greatest of the world, that of the ancient Maya. In considering the question, one risks falling into ultimately meaningless arguments about how “origins” might be considered or defined – essentially arguments about inevitably subjectively rendered entities or topics, giving way to questions such as, What is “Maya civilization”? What is “Maya”? What is “civilization”? What allows us to call this or that civilization “great”? and even, What constitutes “ancient” as opposed to “modern”? (This last question is not so hair-splitting as one might think with regard to the Maya since, contrary to popular misunderstanding, the Maya did not disappear in the 10th century AD but continued, albeit in very different yet conceivably more “complex” ways, socially and culturally, until the coming in the 16th century of the Spanish conquerors of the New World.) Despite these seemingly terminologically pitfall-laden inquiries, the research question about Maya origins does contain certain innate justifications for professional focus and elaboration, since all historical topics are, by their very nature, constituted not only by ascriptions weighting the given topic in importance and cast by this or that interpretation or interpretative context but, also, by “fact.” Of necessity, these kinds of questions are rooted in the history of scholarship about this or that topic, and (to use the word even in Foucault’s sense or a critical or reflexive sense) an “archaeology” of the scholarship is undertaken often or inevitably with different or new emphases or de-emphases, usually generationally or paradigmatically determined. “Maya civilization” is both a reality and a construct, with strands in the weave composed of actual patterns and “emergent” entities and characteristics but also of patterns and agentive decisions in the scholarly world, these, themselves, retroactively considered and reconsidered in the same way, more or less, that a great author’s “importance” can enjoy waxings or suffer wanings of estimation. While discussions of “origins” of this or that entity in history is inevitably postdicted – that is, constructed in varying degree by the inquiry and the inquirer, with his or her presuppositions, prejudices and predilections inevitably in play – yet another possible confound is the very equally balanced options of consideration based on ascent or descent, configured in anthropology as between cladistics and genetics, or between overdetermination (per Marx, as in many causes leading to a single result), and multiple determinations from single causes. Again, for reasons of space, this article will not discuss such conceivably unanswerable questions, even though not to do so risks taking archaeology into the realm of armchair story-telling. The author of this article admits to the inclination to consider “cultures,” “peoples,” and “civilizations” in rough agreement with the views of Fustel de Coulanges in the 19th century and Wheatley in the 20th century of the “ancient city” as similar in many ways to the individual organism, with a birth, a life, and a death. Hence, Maya civilization was organic, with its own trajectory of rise and fall, albeit influenced or created in whatever degree by environmental and contextual factors: physical ecological impacts, non-Maya neighbors and rivals, and unique or historically acute contingencies such as earthquakes and volcanic eruptions that decimated ancient polities, rulerships and ideologies, and economic systems and networks. For reasons of space and to avoid spiralling down into unanswerable debates the scope of this article will not nor cannot be expanded to include such topics as “civilization” – although this term and concept has been debated in many different contexts including that of anthropology (see, for example, Kluckhohn and Kroeber’s famous dissection [1952]). The “facts” about the “Maya” – that “Maya” is a distinct and discrete entity in the reality of history, that it is an “emergent” with sufficiently stark and dramatic characteristics to justify its continued emphasis as such – derive from such varied observed inner cohesions as language and “culture” (this term, too, controversial and having many meanings and applications – in the context of this article, it is interchangeable with “cultural traits” and “cultures,” although – somewhat maddeningly – the very notion of fixed “cultures” is somewhat controversial, as well. Indeed, only with misgivings does the responsible prehistorian, historian, or archaeologist seek to avoid such otherwise glaring problems as the notion of “ethnicity,” since ethnicity, according to the work of Barth, Cohen, and others, refers to an entity – an ethnicity – as the product entirely of ascription of identity by a group of itself, and by other groups of that group, according at the most basic level to an existential requisite to distinguish Self from Other). The “Maya” and “Maya civilization” first began to coalesce as distinct topics in history and intellectual discourse with the development of Western, Enlightenment-based intellectual enterprises such as historiography, social science, anthropology and archaeology. Indicative of the “archaeological” nature of the development of the inquiry into the Maya is the fact that the first accurate descriptions and characterizations came from a travel writer, John Lloyd Stephens, a New York lawyer, romantically fascinated explorer, and amateur diplomat assigned the difficult task by President Martin Van Buren of locating for the purpose of presenting diplomatic credentials to the almost completely fictitious “government of Central America.” The difficulty of Stephens’ task derived from the fact that there was no single Central American government, despite very brief manifestations of efforts to create such an entity, efforts which quickly faltered and failed. Ironically – and to the great benefit of Maya scholarship – the very difficulty of Stephens’ mission served as a justification for Stephens to travel widely throughout what in the 1820’s was a true terra incognita to Western eyes, sensibilities and knowledge, and, in most practical respects, to allow him to discover Maya civilization for Western comprehension as a distinct entity spread out over much of Guatemala, southern Mexico, Yucatan, and parts of Honduras and El Salvador. In astonishingly prescient fashion, Stephens noticed a unity to and internal integrity in the jungle-covered edifices of ancient cities, carved monuments, and even Maya hieroglyphic writing, as he travelled, with great difficulty and often at great peril, through Yucatan, Mexico, and Honduras; his descriptions of travelling through some of the most difficult terrain in the world, enduring all sorts of hardship, and eventually succumbing to malaria contracted during his journeys, remain today as breathtakingly exciting as they were when first published – the occasion, indeed, nothing less than the discovery of Maya civilization as a whole. Accordingly, the Maya as a subject that remains wholly fascinating not only to scholars but to millions around the world are due in no small part to Stephens. His uncannily accurate observations and absolutely fresh and original assumptions – uninfluenced and untrammelled by the conclusions of others – not only have held up virtually to the entirety of Maya scholarship after him but have been resorted to nearly continuously by succeeding generations of professional scholars. His partner in travel and in the production of what became bestselling books in the 1830’s was the great illustrator, Leslie Catherwood, whose drawings of hieroglyphic-bearing sculptures and of jungle-choked buildings are prized even today for their depictions of now lost objects and perspectives. While Stephens and Catherwood were not the first Westerners to visit and record their observations of evidences of ancient Maya civilization, they remain unarguably the proper claimants to the title of its discoverers both because of the panoramic view they provided, integrating observations from areas as far distant from one another as Yucatan and northern Honduras, and because of the extraordinary accuracy of their detail and presciently correct conclusions. They remain at least on a par in importance with other great early modern scholars such as Brasseur de Bourbourg, Alfred Maudslay, Alfred Tozzer, and Ernst Förstemann, and later pioneers such as Sylvanus Morley, J. E. S. Thompson, Yuri Knorosov, Tatiana Proskouriakoff, and the extraordinary archaeologists of the Carnegie Institution of Washington. The point behind this detour into the origins of the discussion of the Maya and of Maya civilization is that there were “real” components allowing scholars to consider whatever it is that “Maya” was as a distinct and anciently unified entity, notwithstanding also the very real impacts and influences of scholarly biases, prejudices, presuppositions and predilections that have gone into the construction of the subject; with respect to these latter forces in scholarship, just as they are impactful in the popular mind and imagination for any topic, for the Maya the romantic allure continues to swell the ranks of Mayanists sometimes almost to absurdity and the fine-grained nature of the inquiries almost to the nano-level. The allure of the Maya to the public may be measured by the great proliferation of amusingly if not outrageously nonsensical tracts claiming to interpret the hieroglyphics and Maya calendar according to “New Age” teleologies and eschatologies. The pertinence of this observation for the present article on Chocolá leads into the next a discussion of the Southern Maya Zone, in the very heart of which lies the site of the ancient city of Chocolá.  The Southern Maya Zone Maya scholarship long has considered the ancient Maya in a temporal and geographic sense to have come into being, thermometer-fashion – as things began to “warm up,” socially and culturally – at the “bottom,” that is, in Southern Mesoamerica. In other words, events and processes coalesced in the coast, piedmont and highlands of southern Guatemala and the Pacific coast of Mexico. Mayanists principally from Brigham Young University’s New World Archaeological Foundation but from other centers as well have pioneered the efforts to discover the radix of Maya civilization from work at such sites as Izapa and Chiapa de Corzo, building on extraordinary efforts by scholars such as Michael Coe at La Victoria, on the southern Pacific coast of Mexico, and followed up by the work of scholars such as John Clark, Barbara Voorhies, Barbara Stark, and others. Notable, as well, is the work of Franz Termer at Palo Gordo. Work by Carnegie archaeologists, A. V. Kidder and E. M. Shook, at Kaminaljuyu has been fundamental in moving attention to the origins of Maya civilization to the South. Since their work, many other sites have been studied, including Paso de la Amada, El Sitio, El Jobo, La Blanca, and Ujuxte. The notion of an aboriginal Maya stimulus – linguistic, cultural, and ethnic strands interweaving together early on, that is, from late in the Paleoindian or Archaic periods – derives from two primary but not exclusive considerations, reconstructions of Maya linguistics and the Olmec. Beyond these two “emergent” factors, processual archaeology continues to look at functionalist and highly theoretized aspects of social and cultural process, including egalitarian-to-hierarchical communities and other cultural evolutionary sequences for example, those of Service and Fried, and of environmental-based, “man-land interactions,” and zero-sum finite resource responses (e.g., “carrying capacity”). Rough and sometimes illogically and erroneously inspired characterizations of social and development derived from evolutionary biology threaten to muddy the discussion just as traditional yet persistent cultural historical characterizations leave many questions unanswered, given their emphasis on description as opposed to explanation. Discussions of the Southern Maya Zone as important if not essential to the rise of Classic Maya civilization must be related to discussions of the putative primacy of developments in the Northern Petén, and vice-versa. Fundamentally, the debate is between those who put more weight on the temporal priority and complex cultural and social achievements in the South as opposed to those who favour northern Guatemala for these developments. Conclusions based on absolute dating, especially when events are dated by 14C (“calibrated” or “uncalibrated”) – still the most widely used absolute dating method in Mesoamerica – cannot be rendered more fine-grained than ca. 100 years and often are much less precise. Accordingly, the temporal priority debate will remain unresolved unless and until other absolute dating methods such as archaeomagnetics and luminescence (hitherto, thermoluminescence), are applied more widely. While relative dating methods, principally ceramic, are highly reliable, having been cross-referenced from many sites, and with sophisticated statistics available, unless anchored to absolute dates these remain uncertain especially when the scholar’s focus is on the early periods of development in Mesoamerica. “High traits” of ancient Maya civilization prominently include hieroglyphic writing and the Maya Long Count calendar, with the former constituting one of a handful, worldwide, of pristine inventions of writing and the latter comprising the invention of the concept of zero and other mathematical achievements unequalled at the time in Europe as well as extraordinary achievements in astronomy. Beginning in the Late Preclassic period and proliferating exponentially during the Classic Maya period, Maya texts are dateable because correlation can made between Maya Long Count dates and the Gregorian calendar. Accordingly, with great certainty we can speak of the Classic Maya as framed by the large-scale appearance throughout the Maya world of dated texts on carved monuments by the third-fourth century AD, and by the disappearance of these texts on monuments by the 10th century AD. (Consensual acceptance of one correlation between the Maya Long Count and the Gregorian calendar – known as the Good-Martinez-Thompson “or G.M.T.” correlation – has come only fairly recently. In this correlation, a beginning date of August 12, 3114 BC gives the Maya calendar its arrow-of-time character, just as the 0 date for the Christian calendar divides Western time-keeping into an absolute divide and, at the same, permits an infinity of both past and future time to be considered as opposed to “cyclical time.”) One of the arguments in favor of the Southern area as “more seminal” to those of the Petén is based on the thus far inarguable fact that by far the greatest number of hieroglyphic texts and a few of the earliest calendrical texts as well are found in the South, although the very earliest – by ca. 100 years – known thus far are found at Chiapa de Corzo and Tres Zapotes, that is, from sites with an Olmec (or “epi-Olmec”) identity. Calendrical origins, themselves, from the most compelling evidence, must be attributed to a thin latitudinal band stretching across southern Guatemala, and including sites such as Chocolá and Tak’alik Abaj. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 06:26, 18 January 2008 (UTC) There'd be some material, sources & points made here which cld be useful for future expansion of this article. --cjllw ʘ  TALK 01:49, 2 May 2008 (UTC)