30 SMITHSONIAN MISCELLANEOUS COLLECTIONS VOL. 146 
squash, pumpkin, and beans, were added to the Mesoamerican diet 
during this Archaic Period. 
It should be stressed, however, that we have here no agricultural 
"revolution" : the steps toward domestication were taken at different 
times and in different places within Mesoamerica, and for many thou- 
sands of years had hardly any effect upon either population density 
or level of cultural advancement. Until almost the very end of the 
Archaic, the Indians of Mesoamerica were living on the same level, 
and with many of the same tools, as the aborigines of Utah and 
Nevada. But gradually the way was prepared for the next great step 
forward, so that by the end of the period almost all the prerequisites 
for Formative life were already present: wattle-and-daub houses, 
metates and manos, basketry and matting, and all the important do- 
mesticates. The dominant pottery shapes of the Early Formative are 
even foreshadowed by the neckless jars and flat-bottomed dishes of 
stone recently discovered in terminal Archaic contexts in the Valley 
of Tehuacan. All that was lacking was an improvement in the yield of 
maize, which would release men from a primitive hunting and col- 
lecting existence, stretched out with a little gardening, into a full- 
fledged village-farming life. 
Actually, to the south of Tehuacan there is remarkably little evi- 
dence for Archaic occupation sites, but this is probably due to two 
factors — the lack of search and the scarcity of truly dry caves and 
rock shelters which might provide such information. However, a 
reconnaissance by Kent Flannery (personal communication) of caves 
in the Mixteca Alta of Oaxaca has disclosed a number of sites that 
are apparently prepottery, some of which have on the surface projec- 
tile points of types well-known in the Archaic occupations of Tamau- 
lipas and Puebla. At Yanhuitlan in Oaxaca, Lorenzo (1958) has un- 
covered a hearth area which has been radiocarbon-dated to around 
2000 B.C., but the few artifacts recovered, while probably preceramic, 
are hardly diagnostic of anything. Our best data for the Archaic of 
southeastern Mesoamerica come from Santa Marta rock shelter, in 
western Chiapas near the Grijalva drainage ; tool and projectile 
point types found in five successive, preceramic occupations are al- 
most identical to those of Tamaulipas and Puebla ( MacNeish and Pe- 
terson, 1961). However, and this is quite significant, there is no evi- 
dence for maize until the first ceramic component at the site, that is, 
until the Early Formative, and MacNeish believes that domesticated 
maize reached that part of Mesoamerica lying to the south of Puebla 
rather late in the story. In the Maya area proper, largely because ar- 
cheologists have been more concerned with later and more spectacular 
