I have long been fascinated by human nature in general.  I am a voracious reader and prefer nonfiction, and spent years reading books about human evolution.  Once I felt I had a general understanding of how we became “human”, in terms of our latest evolutionary step, I still felt the need to explore details of humanity within the context of human social history.  Due to my LDS past, and due to my familiarity with the current Book of Mormon apologetics which revolve around the Limited Geography Theory, it was inevitable that my interest in human social history began to focus on one particular time and space: ancient Mesoamerica.

 

This is not my career or profession.  I do not possess degrees in archaeology or anthropology.  I do have a master’s degree, but not in this field.   I am simply an intensely interested layperson, with the willingness and persistence required to attain a certain baseline understanding of ancient Mesoamerica necessary to evaluate the claims of LGT. 

 

In my attempt to educate myself on this subject, I concluded that the best approach to understanding the past is what is termed “contextual archaeology”.  The following comments represent my understanding of Ian Hodder’s description of contextual archaeology in Reading the Past.

 

The past can be read, and while no theory is absolute or infallible, given the nature of the beast, certain theories are more coherent and consistent within the larger picture of context.  Hodder states that “the context of an archaeological attribute is the totality of the relevant environment, where ‘relevant’ refers to a significant relationship to the object – that is, a relationship necessary for discerning the object’s meaning.  We have also seen that the context will depend on the operational intention (of past actors and present analysts).” (p 188)

 

The best theories are discovered through a series of questions that are designed to determine whether the “general assumptions are relevant in the particular context.” (p193)  Hodder refers to Gadamer and the primary hermeneutic rule “that we must understand any detail such as an object or word in terms of the whole, and the whole in terms of the detail.” (p195)

 

In his excellent book Frauds, Myths, and Mysteries, Science and Pseudoscience in Archaeology, Kenneth Feder also stresses the importance of questioning. 

 

     “Observation and suggestion and hypotheses, therefore, are only the first steps

     in a scientific investigation.  In science we always need to go beyond observation

     and hypothesizing.  We need to set up a series of “if….then” statements;  “if” our

     hypothesis is true, “then” the following deduced “facts” will also be true.  Our results

     are not always precise and clear-cut, especially in a science like archaeology, but this

     much should be clear – scientists are not just out there collecting a bunch of

     interesting facts.  Facts are always collected within the context of trying to

     explain something or in trying to test a hypothesis.” (p27)

 

Whenever we attempt to understand the past, it is always possible that we have made basic errors in our comprehension.  Our own paradigms and cultures dictate our understandings, after all.  However, it is certainly possible to build a case for which theory is more likely given the context of the information. 

 

In sum, although I am not a professional anthropologist and I encourage anyone interested in the subject to investigate my statements on his or her own, I am attempting to be scrupulous by adhering to the model presented by Feder and Hodder, in asking questions of the Limited Geography Theory, particularly the “if… then” question, and evaluating those answers in terms of the context of what scholars today present as generally accepted information about ancient Mesoamerica.