Blocks, Bricks, and Material Practices of Inter-Subjectification at La Venta, Mexico

Summary

La Venta, the Middle Formative Olmec capital, is famous for its unique structured deposits composed of thousands of serpentine blocks. The discovery of these "massive offerings" along with caches of fine jade artifacts was taken as evidence of a powerful ruling class who controlled this wealth and commanded the labor of countless commoners to bring the serpentine to La Venta, shape it into standardized forms, and bury it in a ritual precinct. This paper challenges that conventional interpretation, arguing that specific practices involving certain materials and the places of their use positioned some individuals as particular kinds of subjects in relation to other subject roles. Default categories of social difference, such as "elite" or "craftsman," are insufficient. A community of serpentine block-makers, engaged in hypertrophic production, emerged in relationship with both the stewards of the ritual precinct and with the producers of the more routine objects with which the blocks were juxtaposed: adobe bricks. The physical and design properties of these objects brought to bear in the bodily dispositions of their making made and reinforced subject positions, but these cannot be understood apart from each other or from the historical, material, and political contexts in which they played out.

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This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• Archaeological Approaches to Subjectification

Keywords

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