The Tarascan Landscapes of the City of Tzintzuntzan: Dwelling in the Hillsides and in the Lakes

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Landscapes: Archaeological, Historic, and Ethnographic Perspectives from the New World / Paisajes: Perspectivas arqueológicas, históricas y etnográficas desde el Nuevo Mundo" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The ancient prehispanic city of Tzintzuntzan was a cosmopolitan and highly stratified settlement that is distributed between two great hills, the Tariaqueri and the Yahuarato. Its ancient builders gained flat land on the slopes of the hills to form huge platforms where they built their great temples and palaces, as well as a large number of small terraces that allowed the construction of neighborhoods and houses of several tens of thousands of people who lived in it. On the other hand, the relationship between the hill and the lake were the elements of the landscape that order the city and produced a distinctive pattern of urbanization of what would be the largest prehispanic city in western Mexico upon the arrival of the Spanish in the sixteenth century.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• Landscapes: Archaeological, Historic, and Ethnographic Perspectives from the New World / Paisajes: Perspectivas arqueológicas, históricas y etnográficas desde el Nuevo Mundo

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32341