Reconstructing Land-Use and Socio-environmental Change at Epiclassic Chicoloapan Using Plant Macroremain Analyses

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Central Mexico after Teotihuacan: Everyday Life and the (Re)Making of Epiclassic Communities" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The site of Chicoloapan Viejo represents a long-term occupation that spanned multiple cultural phases, each associated with changes in population size, settlement pattern, and sociopolitical organization. These changes were also accompanied by climatic fluctuations of varying intensity. This socio-environmental evolution through time would have thus necessitated adaptability in subsistence and resource management strategies, which in turn would have produced significant impacts on the landscape in and around the site. In this paper, we present the results of paleoethnobotanical analyses of seed and charcoal remains from several Epiclassic excavation contexts at Chicoloapan. These include potential agricultural zones and various domestic areas associated with both elite and commoner households. Through comparisons among these contexts, we are able to create an inventory of the wild and domesticated plant resources that were used at Epiclassic Chicoloapan and to infer the range of ecological and anthropic zones that were present at this time. We are also able to identify certain practices of plant collection and cultivation, as well as to explore how these activities may have differed throughout the site and according to households’ socioeconomic status.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• Central Mexico after Teotihuacan: Everyday Life and the (Re)Making of Epiclassic Communities

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32169