Pacific Coastal Exchange in Postclassic Mexico: Wealth, Rituals, Feasts, and Marriages

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Coastal Connections: Pacific Coastal Links from Mexico to Ecuador" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The pioneering fieldwork of Seler, Lumholtz, Saville, Sauer, Vaillant and Elkholm, the Sociedad Mexicana de Antropología to officially recognize "Mixteca-Puebla" as the fourth and last major cultural horizon of the ancient Mexican World in 1945. By 1960 however, H.B. Nicholson had reduced Mixteca-Puebla to a provincial artistic phenomena spread through Aztec imperial domination. Attractive as this proposal has been to "big" society theorists in Mesoamerica, it has in reality always created more problems than it solved by grossly simplifying the critical role played by the peoples of the Pacific Coast in building the transregional economy on which the Aztec empire was ultimately predicated. We will focus upon a number of significant organizational characteristics including decentralized political systems, the introduction of a new wealth finance economy, and religious ritualism that were shared between the Eastern Nahua, Mixtec, Zapotec, Aztatlan, and the Casas Grandes traditions.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)   •
• Coastal Connections: Pacific Coastal Links from Mexico to Ecuador

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 22938