16 MAY 2014 VOL 344 SCIENCE www.sciencemag.org 684 CREDIT: BJORN HOLLAND/GETTY IMAGES TAPACHULA, MEXICO—Kneeling in the cacao tree–shaded ruins of a 2000-year- old house, Rebecca Mendelsohn carefully scrapes soil off the fractured edge of a red ceramic plate and into a plastic bag. The archaeology graduate student from the Uni- versity at Albany, State University of New York (SUNY), will bring hundreds of such samples to a lab in the mountain city of San Cristóbal de las Casas, where she will analyze them for traces of the food that the mysterious residents of Izapa, one of Meso- america’s earliest cities, prepared and ate. Izapa, 10 kilometers outside of the modern city of Tapachula in the Soconusco region of Chiapas state, arose around 850 B.C.E., possibly as people moved north from the Guatemalan coast to take advantage of a better climate for growing maize. Over at least the next 800 years, Izapa became the major economic and cultural hub along a trade route linking Olmec cities of the Gulf Coast and Maya strongholds in Central America. Why Izapa flowered and who its inhab- itants were are riddles that Mendelsohn hopes to solve from the bottom up. By excavating in several places around Izapa’s periphery, she aims to compare the jobs, possessions, diet, and economic well-being of the city’s residents, and how those patterns changed over time. And by plotting that information on a map that she and her adviser, Robert Rosenswig, created by surveying the site with an airborne laser, Mendelsohn hopes to uncover something that past archaeologists never expected to find in the region’s ancient settlements: neighborhoods. Studying pyramids and deciphering cryptic writing systems have helped archae- ologists piece together the political, cultural, and religious characteristics of many Mesoamerican civilizations. But ceremonial architecture and official records may not reveal how societies actually work. “Tell me what the normal people were doing,” Mendelsohn says. “That won’t be on your monuments.” Mapping lost neighborhoods can help archaeologists see an ancient city through the eyes of its residents, rather than through its leaders. What Mendelsohn and others are discovering through their Beyond the Temples Turning their backs on spectacular monuments, archaeologists are studying ordinary households to uncover the daily rhythms of long-lost cities NEWSFOCUS Published by AAAS on May 19, 2014 www.sciencemag.org Downloaded from on May 19, 2014 www.sciencemag.org Downloaded from on May 19, 2014 www.sciencemag.org Downloaded from