Going Up, Coming Down: Ruins, Verticality, and Time in the Postclassic Mixteca

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.

For peoples of the Postclassic Mixtec highlands, ruins of earlier civilizations were often found on mountaintops outside some of the most politically prominent communities in the region. These ruined hilltop sites came to be viewed as places of primordial origin and were sites of religious pilgrimage. In this paper, drawing from archaeological data, iconography from the Mixtec codices, and ethnohistoric information, I argue that the meanings of these places inhered not simply from the materiality of ruins themselves but how people traveled to and from them, by moving up and down the landscape. I suggest that this kind of vertical movement through space could also constitute a means of moving through time, of potentially both engaging with the past and interceding in the future.

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): 36540.0