Urban growth and land use at Chicoloapan, an Epiclassic town in the southern Basin of Mexico

Summary

This is an abstract from the "The Legacies of The Basin of Mexico: The Ecological Processes in the Evolution of a Civilization, Part 1" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The extensive surveys of the 1960s that culminated in Sanders, Parsons, and Santley’s pivotal 1979 volume put numerous archaeological sites on the map and advanced knowledge of the changing sociopolitical landscape of the Basin of Mexico through time. Data resulting from this work, including estimates of site size, spatial organization, and environmental context, have been fundamental for reconstructing the rise and fall of states in a region that is among the world’s key ‘laboratories’ for the study of long-term social change. In this paper, we discuss current research in the Chicoloapan-Coatepec valley of the southeastern Basin. Here, sprawling Epiclassic towns, documented by Parsons as part of the Basin of Mexico regional settlement surveys, developed in the years surrounding the decline of Teotihuacan. By the early 600s CE, the settlement at Chicoloapan had grown from a small village of a few hundred people to an urban community of several thousand, featuring civic architecture and new forms of leadership. Drawing from archaeological, geophysical, and paleoethnobotanical data, we consider how local residents modified the surrounding landscape to accommodate rapid population growth and to innovate new modes of sociopolitical interaction.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• The Legacies of The Basin of Mexico: The Ecological Processes in the Evolution of a Civilization, Part 1   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23777