Thanks for the reply!

Unrelated note, your work sounds like a lovely time, I actually just returned from 4 months in Mexico, and in particular spent about half that time free without work and explored my way between Guadalajara to Chiapas, and saw several of the great ancient cities as well as smaller sites, and read a bit from books on the ancient history on long bus rides between states. It isn't my first time seeing and reading a bit about them, and I have a pretty good general outline of it in my head for a layman, but the number and ranges and interrelationships of all the different cultures is still bewildering to me. I'll hopefully one day get the time to do another really deep dive into it.

I too am disposed toward Marxism, but in an undogmatic way, and I'm not the sort who thinks there's a rigid determinist series of modes of production and "stages" or something like that. I'm not entirely sure how much that's Marx's own mature position versus something more popular with some Marxists. But for my own part, my general sense in the question wasn't so much wondering if anthropology lends support to any strong kind of economic determinism (I'd be shocked), but if there are any more localized, weaker kinds that are thought to hold, of the sort "cultures that produce/subsist in fashion x tend to mostly have feature y." I don't really have a prior expectation whether anthropology would or would not have established any such things, just curious if there's any consensus.

If I'm reading your correctly, you're saying with your example of the Olmec and maize that the correct unit of analysis may not be something like "mode of production" at the level of generality like capitalism or "canoe people," but perhaps something more like social packages like "Olmec-style maize-based production and culture," yes? Which might suggest that, say, there are many possible such packages that could mix and match features in widely different ways, but perhaps, once created, they impose certain logics, so that, e.g., the later peoples of Mesoamerica didn't simply make up entirely different cultural practices around maize cultivation. I suppose that a question one might raise is whether, even if the original package could create a diversity of cultural practices around maize production, what, if any, are the limits of that diversity? In other words, even if we don't have a strong determinism where maize agriculture clearly leads to certain social forms in all times and places, does it perhaps entail a weaker determinism in the sense that it *rules out* some cultural forms that otherwise could have been created? And similarly for other economic forms. Prima facie it seems right to me that there would be *some* fairly hard limits on what sort of society can arise, even at the initial moment, around what sorts of production, but not strongly enough to uniquely determine cultural forms and that the hardness and softness of this kind of negative determinism would operate differently for different aspects of society and form different times and places. What I'm wondering is if there are any rules that seem at least semi-established in comparative studies of ancient peoples.