Diamonds in the Rough: What Do the Sculpture Fragments Discovered in the Teotihuacan Mapping Project/Ground Stone Collection Tell Us about the Social Organization of the City?

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Teotihuacan: Multidisciplinary Research on Mesoamerica's Classic Metropolis" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The study of sculpture at Teotihuacan—as at many other sites—has traditionally focused on larger, more elaborate sculptures from civic-ceremonial contexts. As a result, less is known about the distribution, ubiquity, and diversity of the use of sculpture in other contexts and, specifically, what relation it has to the social organization of the city. Using the housing typology classifying high-, intermediate-, and low-status residencies from René Millon’s historic Teotihuacan Mapping Project and recently reconstructed by Dr. Michael E. Smith, we present a typological classification and spatial analysis of the sculpture fragments systematically collected at Teotihuacan. After individually classifying the sculptural fragments from the surface collections by form and stone type, we find the greatest assemblage (66%) originates within the high-, intermediate-, and low-status residency categories, and (34%) have been identified outside of these defined parameters, such as markets, temple platforms, workshops, or streets. In this paper, we will present further analysis of the diverse types of sculpture fragments in relation to specific structures, their distance to socio-religious spaces, such as the Street of the Dead, and what role they play in understanding more about the social organization of the city.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• Teotihuacan: Multidisciplinary Research on Mesoamerica's Classic Metropolis

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32974