Creation in Termination at Early Formative Etlatongo, Oaxaca: Maize, Sacrifice, and Olmec Imagery

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The emergence of sedentary and socio-politically complex societies represents a fundamental transformation in Mesoamerica. At the highland site of Etlatongo, in the Mixteca Alta of Oaxaca, Mexico, recent excavations have explored later Early Formative (1400 -1000 cal BCE) public space, a ballcourt, recovering a large assemblage of macrobotanical, faunal, and human remains, as well as figurines and ceramics. The termination of Etlatongo’s ballcourt wove together many fundamental emergent Mesoamerican tropes and different ontological understanding of objects and living things. A round of commensal events, featuring a variety of cuisines and objects, marked the ballcourt’s termination, resulting in the depositions of different maize varieties, some of them likely specific to the region, exotic faunal remnants, fragmentary human remains, unique figurines, including ballplayers, and a rich variety of pottery with both local and Olmec-style designs. In its termination, the ballcourt reveals the mutually constitutive animating energies of important Mesoamerican imagery and the subsistence, maize, that was already established as the main staple of the Etlatongo community. In the ballcourt’s termination, we see the generation and establishment of basic elements of Mesoamerican life, politics, and ritual, which contributed to increasing complexities in cosmology, ontologies, and society at Early Formative Etlatongo.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 53281