Capital, Craft, and Consumption in Mesoamerica after the Spanish Invasion

The contributors to this session examine the archaeological consequences of uneven capitalist development for urban and rural communities in Mesoamerica over the last 500 years. As Thomas Piketty has claimed, industrial capitalism generally widens the gulf between reach and poor. Yet, natural disasters, economic depression, and warfare often diminish available capital and disrupt its accumulation, thus leveling economic disparities in some periods. In Spain's former American colonies the periodic economic upturns and downturns of the global economy severely affected generation of wealth, the development of monetary and debt instruments, market growth, and the organization of commodity chains from the sixteenth century down to the present day. These vicissitudes created uneven trajectories of local and regional development as Spain's American colonies became severely undercapitalized in the wake of the European invasion and again following the wars of independence. The papers in this session focus on the archaeological consequences of shifts in capital, commodity and craft production, and consumption at regional, local, and household scales. Shifts in the social construction of class, identity, and place are manifest in the archaeological record - in landscape configurations, architecture, ceramics, tools and technology, zooarchaeological and paleoethnobotanical remains, and mortuary patterns and ritual practices.