Digging the past

Digging the past

BY KEVIN MARKEY
Special to the Rice News

Over the course of 30 years of archaeological fieldwork, anthropologists Charles Spencer ’72 and Elsa Redmond ’73 have, at various times, found themselves fleeing a swarm of Africanized killer bees across a South American savanna, dodging lightning strikes that seared the ground around them and eluding large venomous snakes. On one particularly sticky occasion, this husband-and-wife team actually waded into a pool of quicksand. They managed to extricate themselves and then used a tree branch to rescue the assistant who had become trapped in the morass.

Spencer and Redmond can laugh about the misadventures from the relative comfort of their offices at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, where he is curator of Mexican and Central American archaeology and chair of the Division of Anthropology and she is a research associate. ”The incidents are better in the retelling than when they’re happening,” Spencer wryly observed. Still, there’s no place this dynamic duo would rather be than at a dig site, piecing together stories of ancient civilizations.

Charles Spencer ’72, curator of Mexican and Central American archaeology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, and his wife Elsa Redmond ’73, a research associate, discovered their passion for pre-Columbian Latin America while undergraduates at Rice.

Solving Mysteries

Specialists in the origins of urban states in pre-Columbian Latin America, Spencer and Redmond are perhaps best known for their discoveries in and around Mexico’s Valley of Oaxaca, seat of the ancient Zapotec civilization.

Dating back some 2,500 years, the Zapotec flourished as one of Mesoamerica’s earliest complex societies. More than a thousand years before the rise of the Aztecs, the Zapotec laid out towns, built stone and mortar temple platforms, created exquisite pottery and gold jewelry, and developed a calendar and a writing system. Their ancient capital of Monte Albán, located at the center of the Valley of Oaxaca within the rugged Sierra Madre Mountains in southwestern Mexico, was one of the earliest major cities in the Western Hemisphere — complete with temples, palaces, military buildings and a ball court flanking its main plaza. The Zapotec dominated the Oaxaca highlands from about 500 B.C. until A.D. 750, when the ancient settlement was largely abandoned.

For years, one of the unsolved riddles of Zapotec civilization was when, exactly, it emerged from a hazy prehistory of independent chiefdoms and blossomed into a centrally organized political entity with a bureaucratic government ruled by a king. Scientists knew the Zapotec had waged wars of conquest against neighboring peoples. Archaeological evidence spoke chillingly of fiery raids carried out by Zapotec warriors, and in time, the entire valley was under the control of Monte Albán. The ancient settlement soon evolved into something more than an expansionist city: It became the seat of an extensive, integrated state. What no one could say with certainty was when state government appeared.

The archaeological record reveals a wide-ranging network of Zapotec settlements dating as far back as 300 B.C. To many scholars, the extensive hierarchy of towns and villages surrounding Monte Albán represented a highly integrated and centralized system of government. As Spencer and Redmond wrote in one of their many papers, ”Because the internally specialized administration of a state is compatible with effective delegation of authority, a state usually can integrate a much larger territory than a chiefdom.”

A Puzzling Palace

The earliest known Zapotec palace architecture, however, could be traced back only to 100 B.C. For cultural archaeologists like Spencer and Redmond, who constantly examine the material record for clues about how ancient societies were organized, a palace is a key piece of the puzzle.

”Only state rulers have sufficient authority to call on unpaid labor to construct their own residences,” Spencer explained. In other words, if there’s a palace, there has to be a king. If there’s a king, there must be a state. On the other hand, no palace means no hierarchical head of state. Unless the conflicting dates could be reconciled — network of settlements in 300 B.C., palace in 100 B.C. — the jury would remain out on the birth of the Zapotec nation.

With this in mind, Spencer and Redmond embarked in 1993 on a multiyear program of intensive mapping and excavation at three sites in Oaxaca, hoping to unearth definitive evidence.

In summer 1997, their fifth field season, they discovered a startling complex of stone foundations and adobe brick walls on a densely overgrown hillside site called El Palenque. Over the next few years, the archaeologists and their team of graduate students and local workers painstakingly excavated the ruins.

”We don’t approach a site as if it was a layer cake of potsherds,” explained Redmond. ”We look at it as an abandoned village and excavate accordingly, trying to define cultural features such as middens, hearths, houses and the structures built on top of pyramid mounds.” The scientists then try to track how those features changed over time. The changes tell a story about the society’s evolution. A community’s temples and other public buildings, for example, may grow more elaborate. Its houses may grow bigger and more numerous. The largest residential complex belonging to the community’s leading family might become more than a high-status home and evolve into a true palace.

”A prehistoric archaeologist has to have a good imagination,” Spencer said. ”The people we are trying to understand have been dead for sometimes thousands of years. We have no written records to draw on for this time period, so we have to conjure up a picture in our minds of what life was like in towns and villages that we know only as long-abandoned archaeological sites.”

At El Palenque, Spencer and Redmond eventually uncovered a massive 7,600-square-foot structure, complete with a residential section befitting a royal family and an attached ceremonial court. The layout conformed to known palace designs. Through radiocarbon dating, the archaeologists were able to show that the palace was built around 300 B.C. The discovery filled a yawning gap in the Zapotec story, strongly supporting the earlier date as the one in which a state society first appeared in Oaxaca.

Research at Rice

By the time of their major discovery, Spencer and Redmond were old Oaxaca hands. Spencer first visited the region in 1971 as an undergraduate on a Rice-sponsored field trip. At the time, Rice anthropology professor Richard Blanton was just beginning a major project mapping Monte Albán. Redmond arrived to work on the project the following summer. As part of Blanton’s team, the two future members of the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Sciences assisted with an extensive survey of Zapotec ruins.

”The research opportunities that Rice provided were instrumental in my choosing anthropological archaeology as a profession,” Spencer said. ”The superb professors were an inspiration.”

He remembers arriving at Rice as a freshman in 1968, unsure of what career he eventually wanted to pursue. ”I grew up in Panama,” he said. ”Not being accustomed to winter, I decided to direct my college search toward southern parts of the United States. Rice seemed like a great college in a warm place.”

Specialists in the origins of urban states in pre-Columbian Latin America, Charles Spencer and Elsa Redmond are perhaps best known for their discoveries in and around Mexico’s Valley of Oaxaca, seat of the ancient Zapotec civilization.

During Spencer’s sophomore year, Rice brought Leslie White to campus for a semester. One of the most illustrious anthropologists of the 20th century, White was a champion of neoevolutionism, a social theory that applies aspects of Darwin’s theory of evolution to societies. Spencer took White’s undergraduate course and was instantly hooked.

”Dr. White presented his views on how human history and prehistory can be studied from a scientific point of view and how evolutionary theory offers a useful general framework for doing so,” Spencer recalled. ”The course had a profound effect on my thinking. I decided to major in anthropology and to focus on cultural evolution.”

For her part, Redmond was already an anthropology major when she arrived at Rice as a transfer student from Vassar College in fall 1971. ”Many of my friends planned to go abroad for junior year,” she remembered, ”but this didn’t particularly interest me.” One day she happened to notice a poster about Rice’s anthropology department pinned to a bulletin board at Vassar. The announcement mentioned archaeological fieldwork opportunities.

Curiosity piqued, Redmond asked her father, Rice alumnus W. Parker Redmond ’41, if he’d call the admissions office to find out if she could apply as a transfer student. He did, she could, and Redmond arrived in Houston for what she thought would be a one-year stay. ”I considered it to be my junior year abroad,” she laughed, ”only in Texas!”

The two budding scholars met in Frank Hole’s Archaeological Field Techniques course. ”It was held in the basement of Sewall Hall,” Redmond recalled, ”but had a field component each Saturday. We traveled in a caravan out to the Galveston Bay area and excavated shell middens of the Karankawa Indians.”

Before heading back to Houston in the evening, ”Hole’s Moles,” as the tightly knit group came to be called, often would grab a bite to eat at a cantina favored by locals. On a couple of occasions, these side trips took them to a place Spencer fondly described as a colorful rural Texas dancehall. ”Elsa and I enjoyed those weekend excursions,” he said.

Spencer went on to write a senior research paper about the subsistence and settlement patterns of Native American populations and early European settlers in the Upper Texas Gulf Coast region. A few years later, one of his Rice classmates, Michael O’Brien ’72, added some material, and the two published it jointly in The Texas Journal of Science. It was the first of Spencer’s now more than 100 scholarly papers and monographs, many of them published jointly with Redmond.

Redmond never did go back to Vassar, and in her years at Rice, she took two more classes taught by Hole, including his epic Old World Prehistory course. ”It was absolutely spellbinding,” Redmond remembered. ”During his lectures he would fill the blackboard with drawings of sites, buildings and artifacts. Toward the end of each lecture, he illustrated his talk with slides, reaffirming key points.” It is a technique Redmond later adopted in courses she has taught at the University of Connecticut, Yale University, Hunter College and Columbia University in New York City.

An impressive number of Hole’s Moles went on to pursue careers in archaeology. ”Frank Hole is now a retired professor in the Department of Anthropology at Yale,” Redmond said. ”In a letter he wrote me not too long ago, he mentioned how proud he is of having gotten the lot of us started.”

Post Rice

After Rice, Redmond and Spencer both went on to earn doctorates, she at Yale, he at the University of Michigan, home base of Leslie White. ”Ann Arbor certainly wasn’t warm,” Spencer chuckled as he recalled one of his criteria for choosing Rice as an undergrad. ”But I found that I like the change of seasons. I’ve been living in the North ever since.” He and Redmond currently make their home in the Connecticut suburbs of New York City.

Last year marked the 30th anniversary of the couple’s wedding and of their first jointly published academic article. Their marriage produced two children: a son, Eliot, who currently is pursuing graduate studies in Latin American history at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a daughter, Marion, who is a geography and anthropology major and philosophy minor at Vassar. The writing partnership has thrived as well, and produced scores of articles and books, including seminal works on early Zapotec imperialism and warfare strategies.

”We’ve been working as a team ever since we carried out our doctoral dissertation research projects in tandem,” Redmond said. ”Many of our publications are co-authored. So we decide in advance who will be the senior author, and he or she has final authority on what we present.”

The scientists are mum on whether they apply the same strategy to decisions within the marriage. Or who calls the shots when they’re going down in quicksand.