Documenting Labor, Land Use, and Settlement at Hacienda del Rincón de Guadalupe, Apaxco, México

Summary

This is a poster submission presented at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Many have argued that the hacienda of colonial Mexico represents the emergence of commercial enterprise through privately owned landed estates. However, these estates were notstrictly economic units, but comprised a diverse social and political institution engaged in a complex interplay with the broader cultural landscape, transforming local environments and drastically reshaping communities and relationships. Internally, haciendas featured their own hierarchical structures organized around class and racial boundaries often with a dominant landowner (hacendado) at the top and various workers comprising the rest, many of whom were fettered to the hacienda via coercive systems of debt. This poster examines these processes at Hacienda del Rincón de Guadalupe, a middle to late colonial mining hacienda located in the contemporary municipality of Apaxco, Mexico. Pulling on both the archival and archaeological record, we present data from an ongoing investigation, examining the interactions between land, labor, and community life at the colonial estate.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2024   •
• 2024 SHA Poster Submissions

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow