Producing Community and Communal Production: Examining Evidence for Collective Practices at Complex B, Cerro de la Virgen, Oaxaca, Mexico

Summary

Recent research in the lower Río Verde Valley of Pacific coastal Oaxaca, Mexico has indicated that, during the Terminal Formative Period (150 BC - AD 250), public buildings were loci of communal practices such as feasting, collective labor, cemetery burial, and object caching. Idiosyncrasies in these practices among Terminal Formative sites in the valley suggest that political authority and community identity was constituted on the local level. While the best evidence for these practices comes from ceremonial features, recent research at the secondary center of Cerro de la Virgen suggests that public buildings were also the setting for economic production. This poster examines evidence from Complex B, a public building located in the ceremonial center at Cerro de la Virgen. Research conducted in 2016 indicates that Complex B was the location of a "masonry workshop," where residents produced large, faced granite stones to be used in building foundations and terrace walls. The complex also exhibits evidence for mortuary ceremonialism and the use, maintenance, and discard of obsidian prismatic blades and groundstone axes. Overall, the evidence from Complex B suggests that the communal practices that defined local communities extended beyond the ceremonial to include those that were economic in nature.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 21947