Neighborhoods on Cerro Amole, Oaxaca: Models for a Mixtec Cabecera

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Checking the Pulse II, Current Research in Oaxaca Part 1" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Intermediate levels of social organization—above the household, but below the entire settlement, city, or polity—are notoriously difficult to pinpoint in archaeological contexts, but they nevertheless represent a crucial frontier for building new archaeological theory to understand daily social life in the past. Ethnographic research demonstrates that informants recognize units such as the “neighborhood” and consider them important. In Mesoamerica, organizational units such as the Mixtec siqui, Aztec calpulli, and Maya cuchcabal were often formally recognized in social, military, and economic (especially tribute) systems. The mountaintop site of Iglesia Gentil on Cerro Amole, above the town of San Pedro Teozacoalco, was the cabecera, or administrative center, of Chiyo Cahnu, an important Postclassic Mixtec polity. Utilizing distributions of architecture and artifacts across the site based on data collected with GPS units from 2013 to 2017, three complimentary GIS-based models are evaluated for their ability to define neighborhoods.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Checking the Pulse II, Current Research in Oaxaca Part 1   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38565.0