Talk:Cerro Palenque

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[edit] Rewrite

I was very surprised to find this entry. I was part of the project that did the survey and original excavation at Cerro Palenque with Rosemary Joyce and have spent the last 26 years working in and around the valley. Its well written, though needs some edits, which I'll supply shortly. My main disagreement with the author is the attribution of the site as "Maya" and the discussion of the Ulua River as being the "maya frontier". We don't know the language of the people who lived at Cerro Palenque and made Ulua Polychromes and fine paste ceramics, or how they identified themselves. Its very likely people here, at this time, spoke more than one language, as indicated by their extensive networks of contacts with specific other places. Maya (which of the many maya languages?) Toquegua, Lenca, and Tol are some of the languages that could have been spoken here. The idea of the ulua river as some sort of maya frontier is based on an old fashioned notion of frontiers, now hopefully discarded in maya archaeology. I can update this section with a more nuanced notion of the valley as a series of independent chiefdoms, each with their own set of external connections. Finally I can straighten out the section on the origins of the project (as written it makes it sound like John Henderson was head of IHAH instead of the project in the valley). Rsheptak 03:56, 30 December 2006 (UTC)

Nice work on the recent rewrite, Rsheptak. This, plus a few other Honduran and Salvadoran archaeological articles could do with some more fine delineation and explanation re cultural/linguistic (non-)identification for these sites. If you've more insights on current views of southern peripheral zone archaeological cultures, it would be great to expand on them, and add to/revise such articles as Mesoamerica, Mesoamerican chronology and Geography of Mesoamerica. Cheers, --cjllw | TALK 00:07, 23 January 2007 (UTC)