Round and Round We Go: Cholula, Rotating Power Structures and Social Stability in Mesoamerica
Author(s): Timothy Knab; John Pohl
Year: 2015
Summary
Rotating power structures of the mayordomías circulares in Cholula show extreme stability through time. We will analyze how these systems work and why they are so effective using notions of social capital to show how these and other organizations in Cholula build up social capital needed to keep Cholula’s baroquely complicated system of ritual festivals running. In so doing, we will show that the system can be sourced to the early post conquest when it was maintained by the city's merchants and further propose that it was rooted in Postclassic structures that maintained Cholula as a coherent urban entity at the apex of a vast trade network. The extreme social stability of rotating power structures make them a much better model for looking at Mesoamerica’s past than the linear Aztec models so often used for comparative analysis of ceremonial centers.
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Cite this Record
Round and Round We Go: Cholula, Rotating Power Structures and Social Stability in Mesoamerica. Timothy Knab, John Pohl. Presented at The 80th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, San Francisco, California. 2015 ( tDAR id: 396374)
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Keywords
General
Cholula
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Mesoamerican Polities
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Power Structures
Geographic Keywords
Mesoamerica
Spatial Coverage
min long: -107.271; min lat: 12.383 ; max long: -86.353; max lat: 23.08 ;