Lifeways at the Onset of Urbanization in Central Mexico: Initial Findings from Ceramic Analysis and Residential Excavations at Middle Formative Tlalancaleca, Puebla.

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Tlalancaleca is located in the western reaches of the Puebla-Tlaxcala Valley in Central Mexico and was one of the region's largest urban centers during its apogee in the Terminal Formative period (100 BC - AD 250). The pathway to this urban apogee is less well understood but a promising area of inquiry lies in the process of population aggregation that occurred at Tlalancaleca between 650 and 500 BC. In other world regions, archaeologists have hypothesized that population aggregation was a generative process that expanded inhabitants' consumption opportunities, social networks, and offered novel opportunities for ritual and social differentiation. In this paper, I evaluate to what extent these variables changed through the course of aggregation at Tlalancaleca using ceramic data from a Texoloc phase (650-500 BC) suprahousehold structure at Tlalancaleca. I compare ceramic types and vessel forms between Tlalancaleca and Tetel, a contemporaneous non-aggregated village in the region, as an additional avenue for evaluating changes at Tlalancaleca during aggregation. In doing so, I present preliminary interpretations on inhabitants' lifeways during the aggregation process and their implications for urbanism and conceptualizing the "urban" and "rural."

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 39395.0