Round and Round We Go: Cholula, Rotating Power Structures and Social Stability in Mesoamerica

Summary

Rotating power structures of the mayordomías circulares in Cholula show extreme stability through time. We will analyze how these systems work and why they are so effective using notions of social capital to show how these and other organizations in Cholula build up social capital needed to keep Cholula’s baroquely complicated system of ritual festivals running. In so doing, we will show that the system can be sourced to the early post conquest when it was maintained by the city's merchants and further propose that it was rooted in Postclassic structures that maintained Cholula as a coherent urban entity at the apex of a vast trade network. The extreme social stability of rotating power structures make them a much better model for looking at Mesoamerica’s past than the linear Aztec models so often used for comparative analysis of ceremonial centers.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• Interregional Interaction and Dynamic Cultural Process in Mesoamerica

Keywords

Spatial Coverage