Navigating A Shifting Landscape: Tlaxcallan Trade in the Late Postclasic

Summary

As the political landscape changed continuously in central Mexico during the Late Postclassic, polities of the region had to constantly adjust and adapt, forging new alliances and dispensing old ones. Faced with an increasingly expansive state in the Basin of Mexico, polities in the Puebla-Tlaxcala Valley likewise had to adjust accordingly. Increasingly isolated, Tlaxcallan found alternate ways to integrate into the greater Mesoamerican market system, while resisting political integration in the Triple Alliance sphere of influence. This paper assesses how Postclassic Tlaxcallan maintained this balancing act through an evaluation of ethnohistoric and archaeological evidence about the polity’s interaction with its neighbors in central Mexico by considering different models and scales of interaction between Tlaxcallan and its neighbors.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)   •
• Local Responses to Regional Integration in Postclassic Mesoamerica

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 12169