Persistence in Ruins: Animation, Remembrance, and Rupture at Etlatongo, Oaxaca

Summary

This is an abstract from the "The Vibrancy of Ruins: Ruination Studies in Ancient Mesoamerica" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Rather than static vestiges of the past, we view ruins and material objects from the past as important generative components of communities and human projects. Informed by a relational ontology that views some objects and matter as charged and animate, we situate our research at Etlatongo in broader Mixtec and Mesoamerican perspectives on things and landscapes. Mixtec codical narratives, for example, indicate certain materials and ruined places could be especially potent, imbued with cosmogonic energy from previous eras, and in some cases index ruptures. Such material had animating properties as well as inspiring memorial narratives. Continuously occupied for more than 3,000 years, Etlatongo, in the Nochixtlán Valley of the Mixteca Alta, presents a particularly felicitous locale for our investigations, as generations of residents would have constantly interacted with the materiality of previous occupations. We explore three case studies in the persistence of engagements with past things and ruins: the quarrying of charged soil from the public space of Etlatongo’s Early Formative ballcourts and subsequent memorializations of this space, the selection and deployment of stylistically distinct Early Formative figurine heads in contexts half a millennium later, and ongoing interaction with this space and its adjacent historic era hacienda by contemporary residents.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• The Vibrancy of Ruins: Ruination Studies in Ancient Mesoamerica   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36388.0