Tlaxcallan: Mesoamerica's Bizarro World

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Tlaxcallan: Mesoamerica's Bizarro World," at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Anthropological theory has expanded the parameters of study, including alternative schemes of social complexity and the formation of states that allow research on political units at a regional level for which collective action and cooperation were key sociopolitical strategies that penetrated local social units and, therefore, were reflected in urban organization. We know from historical research, systematic archaeological prospecting, and recent excavations that the pre-Hispanic settlement of Tlaxcallan was organized in neighborhoods each centered on an open plaza accessible by well-constructed roads and residential areas located on terraces, with the absence of any central complex of civic-ceremonial buildings, especially palaces. The foregoing indicates a particular settlement pattern for Tlaxcallan during the Postclassic period, offering an opportunity to conduct research into the degree to which collective government impacted the daily lives of citizens in the ancient state. The project's research hypothesis focuses on documenting to what extent the collective policies instituted by Tlaxcaltecan political architects influenced daily life in the Postclassic city of Tlaxcallan, and shaped its settlement pattern as well as the form of its buildings. To evaluate the hypothesis, excavations on a sample of the site's residential terraces were carried out. This session reports on the initial results of this research.