To move mountains: cycles of indigenous mobility and resettlement in highland Mexico

Summary

The quaint and seemingly static Oaxacan Chontal villages, tucked away in the highlands of southern Mexico, conceal behind a long history of population movements and resettlement. For the last five centuries and more, entire communities migrated and changed places as an adaptive response to intricate ecological, economic, political, and social factors. While the dispersed settlement pattern largely ‘fused’ together in the 16th century colonial congregations, many other communities went through a poorly understood process of fission that created new sociopolitical entities. As such, nearly every indigenous community in the region today can trace their ancestral origins to a respective ‘pueblo viejo’- literally ‘old village’- an archaeological site sometimes several miles away from the current location. This presentation will focus on the Chontal community of San Miguel Ecatepec and its environs, where a new interdisciplinary project brings together archaeological, linguistic, historical, ethnographic, and geographical evidence to reconstruct its surprising mobility through space and time. In particular, we argue that in order to fully understand the dynamics of past and present communal mobilities, we must consider regional geopolitics and associated interaction corridors on a broader regional scale.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• E pur si muove: Exploring Mobilities in Latin America

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Spatial Coverage