Playing with Your Food to Feed the Masses: A Zooarchaeological Perspective at Teotihuacan, Mexico

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Cultivating Cities: Perspectives from the New and Old Worlds on Wild Foods, Agriculture, and Urban Subsistence Economies" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Animals are invariably integrated into the intricate makings of human culture, providing material evidence to reconstruct ancient urban foodways that influence and structure sociopolitical identities, practices, and ideologies. We explore the concept of production and how it relates to food acquisition and distribution, using recent zooarchaeological analysis from the Plaza of the Columns Complex (PCC) in Teotihuacan, Mexico. Teotihuacan (150 BCE–550 CE) was a precolumbian metropolis, supporting a population estimate of 100,000 individuals at its height. Without the influence of large domestic livestock, Teotihuacan differs in faunal diversity from its Old World counterparts and other regions of Mesoamerica as well. Despite varied ecosystems characterized by arid and lacustrine environments, the PCC archaeological record shows low species diversity and high concentrations of leporids and quail. This suggests these species have in some effect been cultivated, bred, and habituated in small-scale management for subsistence at a household level and beyond. This shift and adaptation could compensate for alterations in the environment as well as high density living from a growing economy. The PCC faunal assemblage exemplifies the extensive planning and preparation needed to sustain a large population and emphasizes the multiscalar role animals played in transforming the consumptive strategies at Teotihuacan.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• Cultivating Cities: Perspectives from the New and Old Worlds on Wild Foods, Agriculture, and Urban Subsistence Economies

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32477