A Network Model of Co-Rulership and Community Ritual in Teotihuacan: From Neighborhoods to Districts

Summary

Experts remain divided about the nature of the sociopolitical system of ancient Teotihuacan, which was one of the earliest and largest urban civilizations of the Americas. Excavations hoping to find compelling evidence of a powerful dynasty of rulers, such as a royal tomb, keep coming away empty-handed. However, the alternative possibility of a corporate or collective government, perhaps headed by a small number of co-rulers, also remains poorly understood. A third option is that the city’s collective government begun as a fully decentralized network of neighborhood representatives, but this kind of arrangement seems susceptible to the problems of cooperation and action coordination. Previously we used a computational model to show that in principle this latter worry is unfounded, as long as we assume that the network’s topology could be transformed via community rituals and was not strongly subdivided (Froese, Gershenson, and Manzanilla 2014). Here we extend this model to investigate whether centralized hierarchy could mitigate the negative effects of strong divisions. The new results reveal a peculiar synergy between hierarchy and community ritual in that only their combination improved the extent of coordination, which is consistent with portrayals of the elite as religious specialists serving the public.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

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

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 20964