Where Text Meets Trowel: Using an Integrative Approach to Consider Internal Sociopolitical Dynamics at Postclassic Etlatongo

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Cholula to Chachoapan: Celebrating the Career of Michael Lind" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The Mixteca Alta of Oaxaca is fortunate to have an impressive corpus of pre- and postconquest ethnohistorical sources that have been the focus of intensive academic scrutiny. Yet, emphasis on these sources provides an incomplete picture where only the histories of polities mentioned in the texts are taken as central, often to the detriment of lesser-known sites around the area. Such is the case of Etlatongo, a polity located at the center of the Nochixtlán valley but in the periphery of postclassic Mixtec academic discourse. In this paper, I highlight one of the many important contributions of Michel Lind to the field of Mesoamerican studies by employing an approach that he championed throughout his entire career: the critical blending of ethnohistorical and archaeological data to fill the crevices left by using one source of information over the other. I discuss how such an approach forces us to rethink the internal sociopolitical dynamics of Postclassic Etlatongo, and in doing so, reconsider the importance that sites barely mentioned in the codices can play to advance our knowledge of Mixtec history.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)   •
• Cholula to Chachoapan: Celebrating the Career of Michael Lind

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 33068