Where We Live: Houses, Households, Barrios, and Towns in Postclassic Oaxaca

Summary

Greater La Amontonada, a cluster of Postclassic period sites in the Nejapa region of Oaxaca, Mexico, is an ideal location for investigating the ways in which people would have negotiated their roles as members of households, neighborhoods, and larger communities. Group members enact their relationships through everyday choices, habits, and routines that are materialized through daily action. The practices enacted in one community, the learning and doing, may be materialized differently than those learned in other communities. These practices are physically manifested in the learned methods of production that are passed down from generation to generation, and can be seen in technological choices, production methods, and raw materials. Through an analysis of the production technologies of artifacts recovered from excavated residential structures, primarily ceramics and lithics, this paper will consider how the residents of greater La Amontonada would have been linked to various spatially defined groups including, but not limited to, households and communities. Maintaining these group ties was important, as people of greater La Amontonada reacted to various foreigners traversing through Nejapa on trade and conquest campaigns between the politically powerful Oaxaca Valley and the resource rich Tehuantepec coast.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• From Households to Communities: Bridging Scales in Search of Conflict, Coalescence, and Communitas

Keywords

Spatial Coverage