and practices that were possibly similar to the shamanic traditions that survive today
among the Eskimos of Arctic North America and among the nomadic hunters and
gatherers of Amazonia. Such communities as these were scattered throughout Mex-
ico and Central America in what is known as the Paleo-Indian period (40,000 to
10,000 B.C.) (see Chapter 1). Although any effort to reconstruct their spiritual life
must be speculative, modern ethnographies of domestic curing and divination prac-
tices in Mesoamerica and elsewhere in the Americas suggest that shamanic belief
and supernatural mediation formed a substratum of spirituality in which all
Amerindian cultures participated to some degree. We therefore infer that shaman-
ism is a very old, elementary practice that was probably present in ancient Meso-
america.
Consider, for example, the title of a major recent book on the Mayas: Maya Cos-
mos: Three Thousand Years on the Shaman’s Path(Freidel, Schele, and Parker: 1993).
Shamanism is thought, in its ancient form, to have been a highly individualistic and
pragmatic form of spirituality, the goal of the religious quest being essentially to un-
derwrite human well-being, food supply, and health through interacting with the
spirits of animals, plants, geographical features, and deities that were believed to be
responsible for hunting, gathering, and fishing resources, and also for human des-
tiny. Practitioners were probably not full-time specialists nor members of organized
cults, but were individuals who, for their own ends and on behalf of family mem-
bers, sought to communicate by trance, vision quest, and dream interpretation with
the spirits of the natural world.
The Rise of Agriculture and Its Supernatural Charters
The slow process of domestication of food and fiber cultigens during the Archaic
period (8000–2000 B.C.) (see Chapter 1) brought with it a vastly increased food-
production capacity, a dramatic population increase, and a concomitant evolution
of sedentary village life. As new technologies evolved in relation to food production,
more complex social forms developed to regulate, defend, and renew the vulnera-
ble infrastructure of settled life: homes, equipment, storage facilities, fields, and
water supplies. Among these new social forms, a new configuration of agricultural and
ancestral cults appeared. Agricultural practice demanded propitiation of earth, water,
and solar and lunar deities, along with cults devoted to achieving supernatural pro-
tection of domestic plants and to ensuring their continuing fertility. In support of this
inference, scholars have noted the extraordinary prominence, in the symbolic rep-
resentation of this period, of ceramic figurines that portrayed females, sometimes with
exaggerated genitalia and breasts (Figure 14.2). This theme has been interpreted
to signify a cultural concern with both human and agrarian fertility.
Agriculture and sedentary life also required social control related to property
rights. The most typical expression of these new forms of social control was the ex-
panded importance of kin groups as the basis of permanent residential patterns and
of genealogical reckoning as the basis of ancestral rights to property and access to
water for irrigation. These “goals” appear to find expression in the rise of totemic an-
cestor cult affiliation, the ritual maintenance of the “founder’s memory” being closely
CHAPTER 14 THE RELIGIOUS TRADITIONS OF MESOAMERICA 507