The Mexican Connection: Another Look at “Perishable” Relationships between Mexico and Points North

Abstract

For more than three decades, it has been clearly possible to distinguish a series of prehistoric basket making “traditions” in western North America, specifically including Mexico. While the exact nature of these traditions remains controversial, virtually no one would deny the existence of distinctive and long-lived regional perishable manufacturing trajectories with unique suites of signature artifacts and definite frontiers. Perhaps some of the most intriguing aspects of these entities are their interrelationships both in time and through time. This article reexamines the relationships between basketry production and basket making populations in Mexico, the American Southwest, and points farther afield, and concludes that certain technologies of Mexican genesis are introduced into the Southwest and elsewhere precisely at the time that a package of domesticates of Mesoamerican origin are also spreading northward. The nature of both dispersals is defined and examined and several scenarios are offered to explain these interrelated processes.