Ingredients for Resistance: Foodways in Prehispanic and Colonial Tlaxcallan

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Approaches to Cultural and Biological Complexity in Mexico at the Time of Spanish Conquest" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Known as the "traitors to Mexico" for their fateful alliance with the Spanish, the Tlaxcalteca are often denigrated in Aztec-influenced versions of Mexican history. In these accounts, Tlaxcallan’s alliance with the Spanish was assumed to be a sign of the population’s political and economic weakness; an escape plan from impending Aztec conquest. An examination of the state’s chronology points to a far more intentional resistance: settled in AD 1380, in less than 200 years, the Tlaxcalteca faced both Aztec (AD 1460-1519) and Spanish (AD 1519) colonial pressures, maintaining a measure of sovereignty not seen in other populations faced with the same fate. I argue that when confronted by Aztec and Spanish colonialism, the Tlaxcalteca maintained a sense of autonomy through political, economic and social structures that interacted to create a fiercely patriotic state, strengthened by internal cohesion. In this presentation, I support this hypothesis through the bioarchaeological analysis of food practices (dietary isotopes and phytoliths) from human burials at Tepeticpac, the urban core of Tlaxcala. The comparison between these bioarchaeological results and modern local food practices will demonstrate that food continues to play a central role in maintaining a sense of local cohesion and unique cultural identity in Tlaxcala.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)   •
• Approaches to Cultural and Biological Complexity in Mexico at the Time of Spanish Conquest

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 25595