Central Mexico after Teotihuacan: Everyday Life and the (Re)Making of Epiclassic Communities

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Central Mexico after Teotihuacan: Everyday Life and the (Re)Making of Epiclassic Communities" at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The Epiclassic period, from about 550 to 850 CE, was a time of extraordinary social, political, and economic change in central Mexico. The Teotihuacan state had broken down, its governing institutions dissolved, and the population of its capital diminished to a fraction of its former size. The release of Teotihuacan’s grip over the surrounding region transformed a formerly consolidated subject territory into a fractious sociopolitical landscape coping with instability and conflict. However, this was also a time of remarkable innovation, growth, and resilience, as people moved, formed new communities, restructured networks of exchange, and adopted novel practices and institutions. In this symposium, we present recent and current research that examines these changes through diverse lenses, including everyday practices and material culture, landscape use and modification, and the sociopolitical and spatial organization of communities. Archaeological, biogeochemical, geophysical, and paleoethnobotanical research focusing on settlements near Teotihuacan and in surrounding regions will be discussed.