Contextualizing Archaeology’s “Locals”: A Scalar Approach from El Tajín, Mexico

RESEARCH

Archaeologies: Journal of the World Archaeological Congress ( 2015) DOI 10.1007/s11759-015-9268-9

Contextualizing Archaeology’s ‘‘Locals’’: A Scalar Approach from El Tajı´n, Mexico Sam Holley-Kline, Department of Anthropology, Stanford University, Main Quad, Building 50, 450 Serra Mall, Stanford, CA 94305-2034, USA E-mail: [email protected]

ABSTRACT ________________________________________________________________

In this article, I build on critiques of the ‘‘local’’ trope in archaeology by suggesting that the scalar dimensions of the ‘‘local‘‘ are worth considering in terms of recent thinking on scale in human geography, particularly in the work of Richard Howitt. Employing Howitt’s conception of scale as size, level, and relation, I develop a case study centered on the archaeological site of El Tajı´n. A scale-sensitive analysis yields federal administration, local intervention, and archaeological practice as topics for study, and I trace their developments and contestations over the course of the 20th century with reference to Howitt’s categories. I conclude by arguing for closer attention to scale in locally oriented archaeology.

ARCHAEOLOGIES Volume 11 Number 1 April 2015

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Re´sume´: Dans cet article, je m’appuie sur les critiques de la trope « locale » en arche´ologie en faisant observer que les dimensions scalaires du « local » sont utiles a` prendre en compte au regard de la pense´e re´cente sur l’e´chelle en ge´ographie humaine, en particulier dans les travaux de Richard Howitt. En utilisant la conception d’e´chelle de Howitt en tant que dimension, niveau et relation, j’e´labore une e´tude de cas centre´e sur le site arche´ologique d’El Tajin. Une analyse spe´cifique par l’e´chelle donne comme sujets d’e´tude l’administration fe´de´rale, les interventions locales et la pratique arche´ologique, et je de´cris leurs de´veloppements et contestations au cours du XXe sie`cle me re´fe´rant aux cate´gories de Howitt. Je conclus en pre´conisant d’accorder plus d’attention a` l’e´chelle en arche´ologie locale. ________________________________________________________________

Resumen: En el presente artı´culo, me baso en las crı´ticas del tropo ‘‘local’’ en arqueologı´a sugiriendo que vale la pena considerar las dimensiones escalares de lo ‘‘local’’ en te´rminos del pensamiento reciente sobre la escala en geografı´a humana, en particular en el trabajo de Richard Howitt. Empleando la concepcio´n de escala de Howitt como taman˜o, nivel y relacio´n, desarrollo un estudio de caso centrado en el emplazamiento arqueolo´gico de El Tajı´n. Un ana´lisis sensible a la escala da como fruto la

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administracio´n federal, la intervencio´n local y la pra´ctica arqueolo´gica como temas de estudio, y sigo el rastro de sus desarrollos y cuestionamientos a lo largo del siglo XX con referencia a las categorı´as de Howitt. Concluyo abogando por una atencio´n ma´s estrecha a la escala en la arqueologı´a orientada localmente. _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

KEY WORDS

Archaeological ethnography, Human geography, Local community, Scale, El Tajı´n _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Introduction In multiple currents of archaeological theory, the analytical category of ‘‘local’’ has come to the fore. Building on recent critiques of its uncritical deployment, I argue for increased attention to explicit theorizations of scale (Howitt 2003; Bailey 2007) as a means of contextualizing the local, through an examination of the recent history of the archaeological site of El Tajı´n, Mexico. Considered the most extensive expression of an autochthonous regional culture influenced by the highland metropolis of Teotihuacan and the Gulf Coast city of El Pital that developed between 350 and 1100 CE, El Tajı´n is known in Mesoamerican archaeology for its distinctive architecture, including niches, flying cornices, and stepped frets (Wilkerson 1999; Pascual 2006). The site was first documented in 1785 and has attracted the attention of travelers, antiquaries, archaeologists, and—after conservation work beginning in 1924—tourists. Following the scale-oriented work of human geographer Richard Howitt (1993, 1998, 2003) and based on ethnographic fieldwork and historical research, I develop a compensatory historiography that examines the interrelated development of state laws governing archaeology in Mexico, archaeological practice, and local usage of the archaeological site of El Tajı´n, Veracruz. The analysis demonstrates the utility of a well-theorized conceptualization of scale for locally focused research.

The ‘‘Local’’ Trope and Its Critics That the ‘‘local’’ should assume that the status of a ‘‘trope’’ (McClanahan 2007:52; Meskell 2005:90; Waterton and Smith 2009:10) is an advance over the uncritical ethnographic analogy once considered ethnography’s best contribution to archaeology (Flannery 2006). However, critiques of the uncritical use of the terms ‘‘local,’’ ‘‘community,’’ or ‘‘local community’’ have emerged from nearly every archaeology-related current of scholarship that

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has employed them, including heritage studies (McClanahan 2007; Waterton and Smith 2009), public archaeology (Pyburn 2011), Indigenous archaeology (Zimmerman 2010), and archaeological ethnography (Meskell 2005). In examining these critiques, I draw out a few common observations to suggest a concrete way forward. The aforementioned authors have elaborated on the pernicious effects of employing the local trope in archaeological practice. First, use of the ‘‘local’’ tends to reify the collectives it seeks to describe as ‘‘some passive collective that we must include, engage, and appease’’ (Meskell 2005:90; see also McClanahan 2007). As such, the group in question becomes a creation of the archaeologist (Pyburn 2011). Second, the term homogenizes the diverse and varied populations in question (McClanahan 2007; Meskell 2005; Waterton and Smith 2009). For Pyburn (2011), identities are cross-cutting and any single person may be a member of multiple communities; a singular designation homogenizes important emic distinctions. Third, the local trope’s work in relation to a broader disciplinary context has also been the focus of criticism. For Meskell, engagement with the local ‘‘effectively gets you off the hook if you happen to conduct fieldwork in foreign or postcolonial contexts’’ (2005:90), while Waterton and Smith (2009) are concerned with the Othering effect of reification in context of heritage management in the UK. Heritage managers, with their technical and academic expertise, are placed in a position to evaluate others’ claims about their pasts, resulting in an inherently unequal situation (Waterton and Smith 2009:13). Thus, employing the category of local both reifies and homogenizes the groups in question as it protects or empowers the archaeologies. While the specifics of these critiques vary, all advocate for more critical approaches and, in many cases, the use of ethnographic methods. The proposed approaches vary by scope. Zimmerman (2010) advocates a case-by-case definition of the local, while McClanahan (2007) argues for a multi-sited ethnographic approach. Others make broad theoretical– methodological proposals. Meskell’s (2005) archaeological ethnography seeks to investigate how the past is differentially understood and deployed across variable social contexts, while Pyburn (2011) argues for the use of a Participatory Action Research framework related to applied anthropological approaches. Generally, such proposals seek to understand the relationships between archaeological and heritage sites and the populations to which they are proximate. While accepting the utility of these overarching approaches, and following Meskell’s invocation to understand ‘‘the ways in which archaeology works in the world’’ (2005:84), my suggestion is more modest and specific. In order to contextualize and historicize these populations, I argue that explicit attention to the concept of geographical scale, as used in the work

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of Howitt (1993, 1998), proves useful for disentangling some of the conceptual knots that the aforementioned critiques have addressed. While attention to scale is neither a substitute for ethnographic engagement with archaeological practice, nor the intended final result of such an analysis, I will argue and attempt to demonstrate that scale proves an important and operationalizable conceptual tool.

Scaling the Local Although the ‘‘local’’ in these archaeological contexts is an inherently scalar concept (cf. Meskell 2005), the implications of the use of geographical scale as an analytical tool have rarely been drawn out; more often than not, scale has been naturalized and taken for granted. In the field of human geography, however, the concept of scale has been a topic of productive debate since the 1990s (Howitt 2003; Marston 2000; Marston et al. 2005; Moore 2008) and has been taken up along temporal lines in archaeology (Bailey 2007, 2008). In what follows, I suggest that a critical use of geographical scale that, rather than reifying, essentializing, or artificially bounding particular communities, better attends to the contexts and histories of life in and around archaeological sites. While the danger of misunderstanding and misapplication in redeploying such analytical concepts outside of their disciplinary contexts is ever-present, Jonas has argued that ‘‘the politics of scale is partly about getting scholars of different disciplinary persuasions to embrace wholeheartedly concepts and practices of scale-spatiality’’ (2006:399). Following this call, I attempt to demonstrate the benefits of such thinking with an empirical example from the archaeological site of El Tajı´n. To begin, two key points on scale in human geography and their relevance to archaeological ethnography are worth elaborating. First, although geographers have staked distinct positions in scale-related debates, they have tended to agree on the rejection of scale as an objective category in favor of a constructionist view (Marston 2000). Here, the emphasis is on the ‘‘local’’ as scalar social construction. This recognition calls attention to the fact that the local designation may be the creation of the analyst, a community in question, or any other number of actors; indeed, the language of scale is often deployed in projects of boundary marking and political action (Marston et al. 2005:418). In this sense, scale is a useful heuristic, a way of knowing that foregrounds certain questions and relations without taking scalar properties for granted (cf. Jones 1997; Jonas 2006; though contrast Moore 2008). Furthermore, recognizing that the local as a scalar concept is a construction whose constitution may vary by social, geographical, and economic factors (among others) provides an

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analytical entry point into local-oriented analyses. In this context, the research question is not one of which local population to investigate but one of who designates the local, who is considered local, and under what criteria. Second, scale is a multi-faceted concept. With this basic recognition, it becomes clear that there are a variety of ways one could approach scale in this context: Sheppard and McMaster’s (2004) edited volume incorporates uses of scale from across the discipline of geography, while Moore (2008) has a useful overview of recent debates on the utility of the concept. Marston et al.’s (2005) call for the rejection of scale in favor of a flat ontology generated a variety of responses (e.g., Jonas 2006; Leitner and Miller 2007; Collinge 2006; Escobar 2007; Hoefle 2006) that, considered together, also provide a useful entry point into the latest iterations of the debate, which involves not just definitions and analytics but epistemology and ontology. Although Howitt (2003) comments that the scale-oriented scholarship of Australian human geographers like himself has been less prevalent than that of American and United Kingdom-based geographers, it is by no means negligible (Marston 2000; Marston et al. 2005). As I intend to show, Howitt’s conception of scale is of particular utility for understanding the local contexts of archaeology. Howitt (1998) argues that scale comprises three aspects: size, level, and relation. In recognizing that archaeological–ethnographic research uses the local as a scalar concept, I alluded to the first of these: scale as size. The size in question may be small or ‘‘local’’ (Meskell 2005) or large and regional or even national (Zimmerman 2010); regardless, scale is treated as analogous to territorial extension. For Howitt (1998), using scale as size alone risks reductionism and impoverishes the scale concept. Scale as level is also implicit in my treatment of the question of scale as size. The sequence I outlined—local/regional/national—alludes to this conception of scale, which sees the concept as referring to a certain tier in a size-related hierarchy (see Marston et al. 2005:417). As Howitt (1993) argues, relying on scale as hierarchy simplifies interscalar relations. In his view, ‘‘there is no necessary relationship between scale [as level] and order, importance, or causation’’ (1993:36); social processes occur nondeterministically, between, within, and across scalar levels. Following this conception of scale as level, the primacy or efficacy of social action at the local level, economic trends at the regional level, governmental activity at the national level, or any other combination of social process and scale as level must be investigated rather than assumed. In the context of these ideas, Howitt (1993) argues for a dialectal, rather than hierarchical, conceptualization of interscalar interactions, which he later develops into the consideration of scale as relation (see Howitt 1998). Here, Howitt is worth quoting at length:

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in a geographical totality, many elements will remain consistent in a geographical analysis that spans across different geographical scales. What changes in such analysis is not the elements… but the relationships that we perceive between them and the ways in which we might emphasize specific elements for analytical attention. What we emphasize at one scale may not be what we emphasize at another. [1998:55].

What is significant about a given focus of study depends on the scalar context. Thus, for instance, in the work of Breglia (2006) and Castan˜eda (1996), Chiche´n Itza´ can be analyzed in relation to local labor, Yucatec regionalism, the Mexican state, international tourism, and American social science. Chiche´n Itza´ is not more real or authentic as the product of American and Mexican archaeologists (Castan˜eda 1996) than it is as the result of a century of private-sector interventions (Breglia 2006). Their significances in the resulting analyses depend on scalar context, or their conception of scale as relation. This emphasis on geographical scale as relation finds a parallel in Bailey’s (2007, 2008) notion of time perspectivism. Bailey’s emphasis is on time scale in archaeology, which refers to both the extent of different processes in time (time scale as size, in Howitt’s terms) and the resolution of analysis used to understand them (time scale as relation, for Howitt). If Howitt’s conception of scale as relation enables the recognition that significance depends on the context of the geographical scale in question, Bailey argues that the same is the case for temporal scale: ‘‘short-lived phenomena require highly resolved measures of time for their observation and study, while larger and more extensive phenomena require and permit a coarser scale of measurement’’ (Bailey 2007:201). As a result, the scales at play in any ‘‘local’’ context may be defined both geographically and temporally. Howitt’s (1993, 1998, 2003) arguments are, by no means, the end of geographic thinking on scale, and I do not attempt to engage the genealogy, analytical depth, or disciplinary breadth of the topic. In like manner, Bailey’s (2008, 2007) work on time scale in archaeology does not represent the entirety of archaeological thinking on scale in geography or time (see, for example, Lock and Molyneaux 2006). The distinct disciplinary context of Howitt’s arguments is also worth considering: these conceptualizations of the concept are geared towards applied people’s geography (Howitt 1993:41). I am not a geographer, nor I do assume such aims for locally focused archaeological practice, but, given the scalar implications of the local designation, unpacking the term offers a concrete way to address the problematic local. Indeed, as Howitt (2003:151) argues, the concept of scale is most useful as a generalization derived from empirical data in context. With that in mind, I turn to El Tajı´n.

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El Tajı´n: Histories and Historiographies If scale is conceived as an epistemological category (cf. Jones 1997), a starting point might be to ask how the locals of El Tajı´n came into existence as a unit of analysis. To understand how this proximate population became ‘‘local’’ to the archaeological site, the question becomes the means by which El Tajı´n was transformed from a set of overgrown Late Classic structures to a federally designated zona arqueolo´gica. Unfortunately, El Tajı´n’s recent history is rarely the focus of the site’s historiography. A typical introduction to a work dealing with El Tajı´n (e.g., Wilkerson 1987; Ladro´n de Guevara 2010) begins with the discovery of the Pyramid of the Niches in 1785 by Diego Ruiz, who stumbled upon the structure while looking for illegal tobacco crops. After describing the discovery and visits by travelers and antiquaries, there are typically brief but laudatory descriptions of the work of Jose´ Garcı´a Payo´n, who worked various seasons at the site between 1938 and 1971. The work of Ju¨rgen Bru¨ggemann and Proyecto Tajı´n, which officially ran from 1982 to 1992 and involved work on 36 structures, often concludes the historiography. Almost all such studies focus on the archaeology of the pre-Hispanic city of El Tajı´n. Non-archaeological studies of the past often involve the municipality of Papantla, to which El Tajı´n belongs. The breakup of communal lands, or disentailment, during the latter part of the 19th century has been a popular topic (Kourı´ 2004; Velasco and Garcı´a 2009). The rebellions associated with disentailment and the 18th-century risings that preceded them have also been addressed (Chenaut 1995; Frederick 2005). Historical work focusing on the more recent past has dealt with the reorganization of regional markets (Vela´zquez 1995), changes in agricultural practices (Ortiz 1995), and the state policies affecting them (Ramı´rez 2002). However, such discussions rarely address the archaeological site of El Tajı´n except as historical background, if at all. To date, archaeological research has omitted recent histories of the site, while historical research tends to address local issues unrelated to the archaeological site itself. Brizuela (1999, 2011, n.d.) and Nahmad (1998, 2008; Nahmad and Rodrı´guez 2003) work between these trends to address time periods not focused on the pre-Hispanic city with attention to nonarchaeological perspectives. Brizuela (2011, n.d.), in particular, has addressed the disentailment of the lot in which El Tajı´n is situated, Ojital y Potrero, as it occurred during the 1890s, as well as the development of the foreign oil industry in early 20th-century El Tajı´n. In an extended interview, Nahmad (1998) records the life history of Pedro Pe´rez, who worked at the site as a laborer, custodian, and manager at various times between 1928 and around 1984, while Nahmad and Rodrı´guez (2003) have

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examined the local reaction to the creation of the Zona de Monumentos Arqueolo´gicos El Tajı´n via presidential decree. Although important for their de-centering of both archaeological practice and the temporality of pre-Hispanic city as subjects of analysis, none has attempted a broad, scale-sensitive synthesis of El Tajı´n’s history as an archaeological site; it is to this project that I now turn. Given that scale is an aspect of all social relations (Howitt 2003:145), then—having designated El Tajı´n and its proximate populations as the place in question—the question becomes one of parsing out the scales involved in the mutual constitution of the site and its locals. Based on the aforementioned proximity, local intervention would seem to be a probable scale of analysis. Historical evidence substantiates this view: the early accounts of Ruiz (Lo´pez 2008) and von Humboldt (1811) mention local knowledge of the site, and, as I will show, El Tajı´n has been the site of a number of local practices over the course of the 20th century. However, given the well-recognized and deeply rooted ‘‘absolute state monopoly’’ (Lorenzo 1981:200) over archaeological research in Mexico, the question of national-scale processes comes into play. As I will describe, state interventions in El Tajı´n, typically through federal laws regulating archaeological sites, have been instrumental in delimiting and constituting the site. Attending to scale as size in this context yields local and national frames for analysis, while taking them together creates a nested hierarchy. The question, then, becomes one of understanding the cross-cutting, multidirectional, and interpenetrating relations within and between scales. In this case, archaeological practice—regulated by the federal government, carried out in association with state agencies, and with transformative effects on the ground, among others—provides one way to focus the analysis of scalar relationships in El Tajı´n. With these lines of investigation in place, an analytical time scale has already emerged. Use of state control over archaeology (which emerged during the latter decades of the 19th century; see Bueno 2004 and Kelly 2011) as a justification for exploring national interventions in El Tajı´n emphasizes archaeological practice in Porfirian and Revolutionary political contexts, as opposed to the study of the past in the Viceroyalty of New Spain, the First Mexican Empire, or any other form of historical Mexican political organization (see Bernal 1980). A longer time scale (say, El Tajı´n from its discovery in 1785 to the present) would have required a coarser resolution of analysis; using that time scale, for example, archaeological practice and state intervention become proportionally shorter periods in El Tajı´n’s history and could not be addressed in the same kind of detail within the formal constraints of this kind of work (an academic article, as opposed to a monograph, for instance). The notion of time scale, in both senses, necessitates designation of some period of time relative to the subject studied and

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appropriate corresponding detail. For that reason, it is a useful step toward a notion of ‘‘local’’ as it exists in a historical context. At the same time, the relationship between geographical and time scale requires further investigation; as this brief analysis indicates, neither is conceptually prior to the other. Rather, their interrelations are mutually constraining and enabling. With a general time scale already specified, the time periods in question can be further defined in relation to the site-specific historiography, which recognizes three periods: the 1890s (the Porfiriato), the 1930s (the beginnings of Garcı´a Payo´n’s excavations), and the 1980s (Proyecto Tajı´n). This temporal division is heuristic but grounded in the site’s historiography: Bru¨ggemann (1992), for example, divides the history of El Tajı´n into three chronological phases: first, the travelers; second, individual archaeologists; and third, multidisciplinary research. The archaeological works that created these temporal categories tend to privilege foreign and national travelers over customary and local visits and archaeological practice over local understandings, but the categories themselves are useful, given a renewed attention to geographical scale. As Trouillot has described, new histories require ‘‘extra labor not so much in the production of new facts but in their transformation into a new narrative’’ (1995:58). The process, then, involves the use of scale to recontextualize the locals of El Tajı´n, by compensating for the pre-Hispanic archaeological bias in the site’s historiography. In what follows, I outline such a project, charting the transformations of relevant national politics, the practice of archaeology, and local usages during the three historiographic periods outlined above. I use each period to illustrate a certain aspect of Howitt’s (1998) conception of scale and to argue for its analytical relevance. I conclude by highlighting directions for further research and summarizing the relevance of the scalar approach I have outlined in this paper.

Law, Locals, and Labor in Archaeology, I: The 1890s After the political upheavals of the 19th century, the dictatorship of Porfirio Dı´az (the Porfiriato, 1876-1911) established a strong central government, opened Mexico to foreign investment, and brutally suppressed anyone who disagreed. With the Porfiriato came an effort to construct a Mexican nationalism rooted in the pre-Hispanic past, and, as a result, the professionalization of Mexican archaeology (Bueno 2004; Kelly 2011). In the 1890s, two emergent factors combined to reshape local practice in El Tajı´n and to create a template for the site’s development during the following century: first, the professionalization and institutionalization of archaeology in Mexico and with it, the creation of caretaker (conserje) positions

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for archaeological sites; second, the earliest apparent demarcation of a protective zone in El Tajı´n beyond the Pyramid of the Niches. The first’s legacy is the system of custodian positions, while the second factor would be the first in a long line of state interventions. Because of the paucity of documented excavations in El Tajı´n itself during this period, I will put off discussing archaeological practice until the next section (though see Galindo y Villa 1912). The strong presence of state authority in El Tajı´n and the employment of local individuals in conserje positions have their origins in the Inspectorate of Monuments, the principal Porfirian archaeological administration. Conserjes were guards, tour guides, restorers, bureaucrats, and representatives of state authority all at once (Bueno 2004; Kelly 2011). Before the mid-1890s, the conserjes tended to be unpaid men of prominence and wealth, with the ability to fund and carry out cleaning and restoration projects. As the Inspectorate continued to professionalize over the course of the Porfiriato, the conserjes became salaried employees, preferably poor and local (L. Kelly 2011). While the activities of the conserjes of El Tajı´n require further investigation, the archival sources described below provide some provocative information on state and local negotiations of territory. The first delimitations of El Tajı´n, as a site set apart from the surrounding landscape, were enabled by legal processes whose foundations—state control over the pre-Hispanic past—remain in place today (Lorenzo 1981). Mexico’s archaeological sites formally came under state control with the Law of Archaeological Monuments of 1897, but the first formal demarcation of a protective zone beyond the Pyramid of the Niches in El Tajı´n seems to appear in 1895 (Cottom 2008; Brizuela 2011). During the disentailment of communal lands, military engineer Ignacio Mun˜oz informed the mayor that the subdivision of Lot 19 had been completed, including ‘‘a hectare in the place that the monument of El Taxı´n occupies’’ (in Brizuela 2011:5; translation mine). In this way, the implementation of state-level disentailment processes (see Kourı´ 2004) was a means of scaling down state administrative action to the local level. Yet, as Howitt (1993) argues, there is no inherent reason that certain relations or processes are more important at one scale than other. To understand activity at the local scale, we cannot assume the automatic primacy and efficacy of action at the federal scale; conversely, the local interventions that follow are most intelligible in a context of federal regulation. As a result, the question becomes whether this delimitation was salient for El Tajı´n’s inhabitants. The question is a complex one, but archives examined by Kelly (2011) record two instances in which El Tajı´n’s boundaries became salient, the position of conserje became locally relevant, and federal laws came into contact with local practices. In the first instance, one L. Decuir L. tried to dislodge Agapito Fontecilla from his position as conserje, writing to Inspector of Monuments

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Leopoldo Batres that Fontecilla had moved to Tuxpan, some 50 miles away. In response, Fontecilla replied that ‘‘El Tajı´n is limited by property line divisions within which nothing has happened and outside of which is the private property of cultivators… the El Tajı´n monument must be distinguished from the El Tajı´n congregacio´n.’’1 Kelly (personal communication) suggests that Fontecilla emphasized the boundaries of the archaeological site and distinguished them from those of the community to underscore the fact that he was responsible for only what happened inside the borders of the site. In the second instance, the salience of this particular boundary for use of El Tajı´n becomes clear. A group of citizens from around El Tajı´n questioned Batres on whether ‘‘the order that prohibits the taking of stone from the archaeological monument called El Tajı´n is established in the area in which the pyramid is located and not in the parcels of private property.’’2 In writing their request, Quirino Jua´rez, Enrique H. A´vila, Melquiades Patin˜o, C. Patin˜o, Adolfo Espinosa, and J. G. Pe´rez recognize the implications of federal-scale processes for local practice. Attributing some significance to this boundary, they are careful to describe the locations of the stones relative to the borders in their question: In the aforementioned lots, Ojital y Potrero, the ruins of Tajı´n are found, whose area… is perfectly delineated, just like the contiguous parcels whose deeds contain the surface area, and the denomination of corresponding borders. In the east–west zone, and in a distance of about 20 km in length and a width that varies between seven and nine kilometers, there exist scattered on the ground slabs of stone in natural states of various dimensions and thicknesses.3

While an analytics of scale sensu Howitt (1998) recognizes that size, level, and relation are at play at each of these historical moments, these examples from Porfirian El Tajı´n illustrate the utility of considering scale as size. Specifically, it brings the question of extension to the fore: what processes were involved in the delimiting of El Tajı´n? In other words, how did it emerge as a bounded, sized, and fixed archaeological site? A more complete analysis would consider the historic place-making practices that maintained Pyramid of the Niches relatively clear of vegetation between the pre-Hispanic city’s decline and its initial documentation in 1785 (see Lo´pez 2008), as well as the antiquarian scholarship and disentailment processes that enabled El Tajı´n to become an object of archaeological interest. Attention to these factors provokes a consideration of their results: did this particular boundary-making project engender conflicts? What were they? Who was involved? The above-mentioned examples suggest that the

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boundary-making project was not inconsequential to the area’s inhabitants, involving, for example, a local conserje, his political opponent, and the Porfirian archaeological administration, in one case, and local citizens, resource-extraction process, and Porfirian authorities in another. Here, attending to scale as size in the constitution of an archaeological site enables an understanding of how it emerged and with what consequences, such that a group of proximate people could become its locals in the first place.

Law, Locals, and Labor in Archaeology, II: The 1930s The political and social turmoil of the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920) led to substantial changes in state-run institutional archaeology during the early decades of the 20th century. Legal federal control over archaeological materials did not reemerge until 1934, but, as I will illustrate, it was now joined by the practice of archaeology in El Tajı´n. If the boundaries and communities constituted during the 1890s are critical to understanding El Tajı´n today, so too are the beginnings of the excavations that resulted in the pre-Hispanic city as it currently exists. The government of Porfirio Dı´az had fallen by 1911. The Law of Protection and Conservation of Archaeological and Historical Monuments, Typical Towns, and Places of Natural Beauty of 1934 reestablished federal control over archaeology (Cottom 2008). Articles 5 and 6 of the Law are particularly noteworthy: federal control over archaeological materials does not imply federal ownership of the lands on which they are found, but property owners cannot oppose excavations taking place on their properties (Cottom 2008:468). With the enlargement of the archaeological site in the 1980s, this tension would become especially salient—even though the Law of 1934 had been superseded. Archaeological practice—excavation, reconstruction, and conservation—began in 1924. The early work of Agustı´n Garcı´a Vega (1939) documents excavations outside the Pyramid of the Niches beginning in 1934, but the era before Proyecto Tajı´n is most associated with Jose´ Garcı´a Payo´n (Daneels 2006; Ruı´z 2002). It appears that the relatively small extent of Garcı´a Payo´n’s work—nine structures had been restored by 1967 (Garcı´a Payo´n 1967)—and his longevity at the site did not affect local usage of the site to the extent that the later Proyecto Tajı´n would. While El Tajı´n did become a tourist destination during this period, most people did not make a living from tourism (I. Kelly & Palerm 1952). Unlike the local negotiations described in the previous section, the ways in which people worked on and enjoyed El Tajı´n during this period persist in the memories of older generations and were described to me during

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fieldwork. ‘‘Local usage’’ is a gloss for a number of different activities, labor and leisure alike. Some labor was unpaid: local people practiced faena—obligatory, unpaid communal labor—at the site, clearing structures and controlling the growth of vegetation with machetes. However, similar maintenance work was paid. Modesto Gonza´lez is remembered as the ‘‘first custodian.’’ He was described to me as such on multiple occasions during my fieldwork, and Kelly and Palerm, for whom Gonza´lez worked as a paid informant, cite him as ‘‘caretaker of the archaeological site for close to 30 years’’ (I. Kelly & Palerm, 1952:xi). Whether paid or not, that Gonza´lez had a recognized position does indicate the importance that the site would have had to some members of the community during this period. Another well-respected figure, Pedro Pe´rez, started working for Garcı´a Vega at age 11 and, by the time that Garcı´a Payo´n began excavations, was a paid custodian and manager of the site (Nahmad 1998). At the same time, the formal employment of local community members as custodians eventually led to career-long local engagements with the site. Specifically, it seems to be the case that the stable employment enabled custodians’ families to weather the regional economic transformations of the 20th century. During that period, the concomitant processes of deforestation for cattle-ranching pastureland, oil development, and increasing monocultivation (particularly of citric fruits) resulted in an increased reliance on wage labor (Ortiz 1995; Vela´squez 1995). Given the familial inheritance of custodial positions (cf. Breglia 2005) and the benefits of stable employment in what became an organized labor union during the latter half of the century, these families were able to benefit from the archaeological site in ways that those reliant on seasonal tourism were not. Given a limited (and, as many custodians stressed to me, insufficient) number of custodial positions at El Tajı´n, these benefits were not distributed evenly across local families. At the same time, nearly all custodians hail from the nearby community of El Tajı´n; as such, custodianship was also not distributed evenly across the ‘‘local’’ population. The extent to which these factors affected local intracommunal relations is a question for further research, but a recent study conducted by Breglia (2005) with the custodians of Chiche´n Itza´ suggests that the growth of the custodial class in relation to other local groups and the Mexican state led to conflict and tension and, as such, warrants further investigation. However, not all local people who went to El Tajı´n did so to work. Pe´rez also notes that a schoolteacher took him to visit the Pyramid of the Niches in 1928 (see Nahmad 1998), while late Porfirian archival materials describe that, even in 1909, visiting El Tajı´n on days off was a ‘‘traditional Panantec [coming from Papantla] custom’’.4 I do not assume uniformity or consistency in local usage or valuation of El Tajı´n. On one occasion, a custodian told me that, although he had grown up just a kilometer and a

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half from the Pyramid of the Niches and passed it daily while going to school, he knew nothing of the site, and neither his parents nor his grandparents ever told him anything about it. He only learned about it as a custodian. These brief examples suggest a conclusion well established by the above-cited critiques of the ‘‘local’’ trope: to the extent that the local can be even considered as a singular category, there is no necessary relation between the proximity that often defines ‘‘local’’ and specific ways of using a given site. While Howitt (1993, 1998) argues that conceiving scale as level alone reduces nondeterministic interscalar relations to predetermined hierarchies, examining scale as level in mid-century El Tajı´n calls attention to both the local and extra-local factors at play in the development of the archaeological site. The relative availability of published material and persistence of local memory have led me to focus on local-level interactions with the site in the abovecited examples, but understanding scale as level in the context provokes a host of other questions: what were the relationships between the national archaeological administration and El Tajı´n? Did the municipality of Papantla or the state of Veracruz play a role? If an analysis based on the 20th-century Mexican hierarchy of political organization—national government, state government, and municipal government—cannot necessarily account for the complex interscalar relations at play in El Tajı´n (see below), then considering scale as level at least brings the question of what intrascalar processes (the growth of the custodial class, for example) might have been taking place during this period, and what their effects may have been.

Law, Locals, and Labor in Archaeology, III: The 1980s Garcı´a Payo´n died in 1977, and in the last years of his life most work done on the site was for conservation and maintenance purposes (Castillo et al. 2009). In 1982, Proyecto Tajı´n officially began with the signing of an agreement between the Instituto Nacional de Antropologı´a e Historia (INAH), the federal body that regulates archaeology in Mexico, and the Universidad Veracruzana (UV), the state of Veracruz’s most prominent public university; as a result, a new set of scale relations came into being. By this time, the Law of Archaeological, Artistic, and Historic Monuments and Zones of 1972 was in effect. Consolidating earlier revisions of the Law of 1934, it brought human, floral, and faunal remains associated with archaeological sites under federal control (Cottom 2008). The Law also created the category of Zona de Monumentos Arqueolo´gicos to allow the federal government, via presidential decree, to regulate archaeological sites as bounded entities rather than collections of individual structures; territories, rather than buildings alone, could thus be protected. The law was not

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uncontroversial; the UV regarded it as an infringement on state sovereignty (Cottom 2008:311–315). Nevertheless, it was passed and remains in effect today. The impacts of the Law of 1972—especially the Zona de Monumentos Arqueolo´gicos provision—would be felt sometime later: in 2001, the declaration of El Tajı´n as such a site would more than quadruple the protected area’s size to 1,221 hectares, encompassing five communities and prompting a fierce reaction (see Nahmad 2008; Nahmad and Rodrı´guez 2003). As I have noted, Proyecto Tajı´n entailed a fundamental change in Tajı´n’s landscape. While multiple scholars made their careers and produced a prodigious amount of archaeological data on the site (see Pool 2006), Proyecto Tajı´n was also designed to attract tourism to the traditionally impoverished north-central Veracruz region. Indeed, construction of the site museum was rushed in order to receive the King and Queen of Spain, accompanied by President Carlos Salinas de Gortari in 1992, the same year during which El Tajı´n was declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site (Colburn 1992). Thus, El Tajı´n was reconstituted as an international-scale entity. However, the local-scale results of international-scale processes are nondeterministic and multidirectional (Howitt 1993); processes operating at other scales of analysis interacted with these international processes to generate conflicts and uneven development. Local usage of the site began to change as the tourism industry grew and the tensions explicit in the Law of 1934 also became salient. Brizuela (1999) has documented the effects of the latter in the community of San Antonio Ojital. Dispersed subsistence cultivators who lived north of the archaeological site, the people of San Antonio Ojital were apparently not informed that the project might affect their milpas; although they owned the land, they did not own the structures under it and could not refuse any excavation thereof. One Francisca Jua´rez learned of the possible effects when project workers began to clear her orange grove and cut down her subsistence cultivation field. She was fortunate to receive, after much legal wrangling, a fair payment for her lands. Thirty families in San Antonio Ojital participated in the so-called land ‘‘donation’’ program, selling 40 hectares of land to the state government of Veracruz for prices that they considered unsatisfactory (Nahmad and Rodrı´guez 2003:68). This process resulted in the people of San Antonio Ojital abandoning the dispersed settlement pattern in favor of a centrally organized and legally recognized congregacio´n, in order to gain some political standing (Nahmad and Rodrı´guez 2003). Currently, San Antonio Ojital can be reached by car from Papantla, though the rough quality of the dirt roads makes some taxi drivers hesitant to go. Because so few of the now 44 families in San Antonio own cars, most walk about 45 minutes down the dirt road that ends in the archaeological site of El Tajı´n to reach their places of work, medical services, and any number of infrastructural developments

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currently lacking in the community. The people of San Antonio Ojital hope that this dirt road will become an ecotourism route ending with a new restaurant serving Totonac cuisine on the outskirts of town; the project was in development during my fieldwork, with INAH anthropologist Jesu´s Trejo working with local authorities to navigate the archaeological and legal regulations necessary to finish the process. People in the community of El Tajı´n, a kilometer south of the archaeological site, remember this period as one of great change. Electricity came for the first time, along with water drainage systems and pavement. The hiring of additional custodians created the need for a state-run medical clinic, and the growth of tourism resulted in the situation that, by 2001, some 80% of the community made a living from the archaeological site (Nahmad and Rodrı´guez 2003:40). Although large and comparatively well equipped, few believe that El Tajı´n has sufficient resources; faulty infrastructure was a common complaint during my fieldwork. Not all streets are paved, and even the paved ones have potholes deep enough that taxis go around them to avoid scraping their undercarriages. When it rains, such potholes become impassible, and the bedrock prevents the water from filtering through the ground. The resulting pools of stagnant water create mosquito breeding grounds that make dengue a concern, to say nothing of the mud: impassible mud is a valid reason for not being able to go to work. Unfortunately, the community of El Tajı´n does not have the PVC drainage system installed that prevents that problem in most of the archaeological site. Such has been the community of El Tajı´n in the wake of Proyecto Tajı´n. These examples suggest the utility of considering scale as relation (Howitt 1998). Size (consider the expansion of the archaeological site and its effects) and level (including the involvement of international actors like UNESCO) are certainly at play, and the relations between them are not reducible to hegemonic imposition or subaltern resistance according to the logic of size differential or hierarchical distinctions. National laws did not filter down through the state and municipality to El Tajı´n unproblematically. Regional development plans did not automatically result in even infrastructural improvement. Individual agitation at the community level did not result in systematic change. Considering scale as relation emphasizes the contingency of interscalar action (cf. Howitt 1993). In this case, scalar action was overdetermined and dialectical, with a variety of differentially-scaled processes working together and coming into conflict to produce change.

Conclusion The 1990s were not the end of state regulation, local intervention, and archaeological practice in El Tajı´n. Nor were the roles of UNESCO, the

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Mexican executive branch, mass tourism, and neoliberal economic reforms—forces peripheral in my analysis—irrelevant. In that sense, this case study has been more exploratory and demonstrative than conclusive or exhaustive. Specifically, I have employed Howitt’s (1993, 1998) conception of scale as size, level, and relation at two distinct analytical moments: first, in the conceptual delimitation of a case study, and second, as an analytic in the case study itself. The first of these moments yielded the categories according to which my case study unfolded: national politics, local interactions, and archaeological practice; here, the issue of time scale also became relevant (see Bailey 2007, 2008). The second provided the categories according to which I analyzed the case study; I argued for their utility at the conclusion to each section. As I noted, scale as size, level, and relation could have been put into play at each section of the narrative; the decision not to do so was a heuristic move rather than an empirical claim. These analytical moves are risky; importing categories from human geography via historical analysis to locally oriented archaeological ethnography is fraught with the potential for decontextualization, misunderstanding, and misapplication at every step. Indeed, the likes of Marston et al. (2005) and Moore (2008) have argued against treating scale as an epistemological category of analysis at all. Nevertheless, my objective has not necessarily been to contribute to this set of debates in human geography but to outline an analytical approach that addresses critiques of the ‘‘local’’ trope by drawing out the implication of the implied scalar designation. Without disputing the salience of other scholars’ criticisms of the trope or the utility of their proposed solutions, I have argued that Howitt’s (1993, 1998, 2003) conceptualization of scale as size, scale, and relation enables a contextual approach that is both operationalizable and avoids some of the most common critiques of reification, homogenization, and essentialization. In my account, an analysis oriented toward these aspects of scale in El Tajı´n led to the consideration of federal administration, local intervention, and archaeological practice over the course of the 20th century. Tracing these developments with attention to their scalar dimensions enabled a local-centered analysis that attended to the contexts of the archaeological site of El Tajı´n without reifying, essentializing, or disempowering the populations in question. While not a full-fledged substitute for methodological innovation stemming from anthropological, archaeological, and heritageoriented research, the analytical use of scale in contexts of locally oriented archaeology has the potential to yield linkages between and across groups, institutions, and practices; the result is a ‘‘local community’’ whose representation in scholarship more closely mirrors the social complexity of living near an archaeological site.

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Acknowledgments This research was supported by a 2012–2013 Fulbright-Garcı´a Robles AllDisciplines Award to Mexico, the Stanford University Department of Anthropology, and the Stanford Archaeology Center. I would like to thank Dr. Larissa Kennedy Kelly for kindly providing transcriptions of materials related to El Tajı´n from the Archivo General de la Nacio´n in Mexico, Dr. Lynn Meskell for commenting on various iterations of this article, and the anonymous reviews for their insightful and constructive criticism.

Notes 1. Archivo General de la Nacio´n, Instruccio´n Pu´blica y Bellas Artes, volumen 112, expediente 71, foja 7; translation mine. Larissa Kennedy Kelly provided transcriptions of the cited AGN materials. 2. AGN, IPBA, vol. 112, exp. 94, foja 3; translation mine. 3. AGN, IPBA, vol. 112, exp. 94, foja 3; translation mine. 4. AGN, IPBA, caja 111, exp. 7, foja 11, translation mine. It is worth noting that the context of the comment was a critique of Agapito Fontecilla’s care for the monument; as a result, exaggeration of Papantec value of the site would emphasize the complaint.

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