Collective Action, Households, Neighborhoods, and Urban Landscapes: A Multiscalar Perspective on Late Postclassic Urbanism at Tlaxcallan

Summary

This is an abstract from the "The Urban Question: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Investigating the Ancient Mesoamerican City" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Systematic cross-cultural research on premodern cities at the global scale has begun to shed light on the relationships among political-economic strategies at various scales, the sociospatial organization of cities, and the daily lived experience of urban residents and visitors. Drawing on these insights, we examine the construction of, and the daily-lived experience in the Late Postclassic city of Tlaxcallan from the household, the neighborhood, and the settlement scales. In order to do this, we look, first, at the spatial organization and construction of the city from a top-down perspective, starting with the central political apparatus. We, then, repeat this analytical process, but work from the bottom-up, starting at the household scale using various geostatistical techniques. This approach allows us to understand (1) how urban planners confronted the intersection of collective political-economic strategies with the undulating topography of a hilltop setting; (2) how Tlaxcaltecans engaged with and participated with this vision in the construction of residential terraces, public spaces, and neighborhood; and (3) how the resultant urban landscape affected life in the city.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• The Urban Question: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Investigating the Ancient Mesoamerican City   •
• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32532