A high number of Mesoamerican practices relate to ideas about how the universe was formed and persists and to the practices humans needed to carry out as a result of those understandings.
Social difference itself was intimately bound up with propositions about the nature of the universe and the relations people had to forces and beings beyond the human. While maize agriculture was not always the single basis of Mesoamerican economies, maize became a defining part of Mesoamerican ideas about the nature of being, or ontology. In oral traditions the survival of maize spirits was attributed to the actions of nobles and the supernatural beings they claimed as their predecessors (Monaghan 1990; Taube 1985, 1989). Narratives about maize formed part of Mesoamerican beliefs and practices concerning the relationship between human beings, supernatural beings, and ancestors, part of the ontologies of Mesoamerican peoples.
Ontologies and cosmologies portrayed the universe as composed of multiple domains, with the world of contemporary human life adjacent to others inhabited by nonhuman entities and ancestors. Access to these otherworlds took place through rituals, using certain pathways, particularly features that pierced boundaries with an underworld (caves, wells) or that rose up into the upperworld (Gillespie 1993). Four world directions defined by the movements of the sun framed this shared geography. The limits of the east and west directions were marked on the horizon by the northern and southern extreme positions of the sun on the solstices in December and June and the midpoint position of the sun on the equinoxes in March and September (see Aveni 1980).
Cities, towns, and villages incorporated buildings that were stages for Mesoamerican rituals: ball courts, temples, and astronomical observatories. These were often juxtaposed with unmodified features of the surrounding countryside, such as the alignment of the Temple of the Moon at Teotihuacan with the mountain Cerro Gordo or the placement of the Pyramid of the Sun over a cave (see Chapter 4). Structures with distinct functions, such as ancestral shrines, could be placed in regular directional relationships to other buildings (see Chapter 7). Site planning embedded the built environment within a cosmological order. Ceremonies and rituals in these places enacted philosophies of being and reproduced them.
The Economy
Adjacent to structures that were dedicated sites of ceremonies and rituals, in villages, towns, and cities, other groups of buildings formed residential spaces, household compounds with associated exterior spaces, courtyards, or patios. Mesoamerican archaeologists in the 1970s and 1980s developed a new focus on life in such settings: household archaeology (Wilk and Ashmore 1988; see Chapters 5, 6, 12, and 14). Residential compounds were the workplaces of the population, not just their private dwellings. Here, people carried out the activities necessary for their subsistence and also engaged in more specialized craft production.
Agriculture was the basis of Mesoamerican society. Farming depended on human labor; there were no large domestic animals. People improved production through irrigation, the construction of terraces on slopes, and raised fields in swampy areas, all based on human labor. They cultivated a variety of plants that left behind burned seeds, pollen, and other detectable residues, including maize (corn), beans, squash, chili peppers, fruits, and tubers. In the dry highlands other seed-bearing plants, amaranth and chenopods, were important. In some parts of the humid lowlands root crops, particularly manioc (or yuca) were important. The primary sources of animal protein suggested by animal bones recovered by archaeologists include land animals such as deer and peccary, hunted with blowguns, snares, and nets. Birds, especially waterfowl such as ducks, and fish were important as well. Domesticated dogs and turkeys provided protein in certain places and times.
Foods and beverages prepared from specific plants were widely used in religious rituals and social ceremonies. Chia, a seed plant, was used by the Mexica (the proper name for the group often called Aztecs) to make images of supernatural beings displayed and consumed in ritual. Cacao drinks were made from the seeds from pods of a tree growing in wet lowlands. An alcoholic drink the Mexica called pulque was made from fermented hearts of maguey, a succulent plant cultivated in drier areas. Honey from native stingless bees was used by the lowland Maya to brew another alcoholic drink, balche, consumed in ritual. Cultivation of these plants and distinctive techniques of food processing, preparation, and serving constituted a distinctive Mesoamerican cuisine (Coe 1994). Through their preparation and consumption, residents in these places reproduced their historical connections to ancestors and nonhuman forces.
Household compounds were also the site of craft production. Production and circulation of goods has been reconstructed using techniques that create a chemical profile of the raw materials used, such as obsidian, iron ore, and jade or the mixtures of clay and other materials that characterize pottery workshops. As a result, scholars know that craft products such as pottery, stone tools, and woven textiles were redistributed within the local community and beyond through a combination of social ties and markets.
Participation in craft production was more than simply a source of economic wealth. Throughout the history of Mesoamerica, it was intimately related to the constitution of personhood. Practice of a craft helped define a person’s place within their society (Hendon 2010). In the most highly stratified Mesoamerican societies, craft specializations were shared by residents of neighboring house compounds or whole communities, contributing to their identification as a group.
Social Identities and Differences
Residential compounds could be large enough to house multiple generations of related families or multiple families related as patrons and clients. The greatest intensity of production, and the most diversity, took place in or near larger and more lavish compounds that are interpreted as residences of rulers and other nobles. These were sites of the structural reproduction of Mesoamerican economies and forms of political structure through the organization of domestic labor (Hendon 1996, 1997). As such, they were also the focus of ceremonies marking changes in the status of members of the group over their life course, through which people’s identities were created and reconstituted.
In the material remains that archaeologists study, one moment of the life course is especially visible, marked by monuments, tombs, and temples: the transformation of living members of the group into ancestors following death. From the Formative period on, in many Mesoamerican societies the remains of the dead were placed near the buildings occupied by the living. Social commemoration of other points in the lives of inhabitants of house compounds is also indicated by residues archaeologists can detect and descriptions in texts from before and after colonization. Experiences of each person during life can be described based on the remains of their bodies (Chapter 14). Events anticipating and accompanying childbirth and marking moments in the maturation of children into adults often involved feasts. Feasting is evident archaeologically in the remains of vessels and residues of foods consumed and through the discarded tools used in such events, notably small-scale clay figurines, some transformed into musical instruments.
Archaeologists argue that caring for the bodies of deceased members of a group and keeping them near the living was a means for Mesoamerican people to create historical continuity between generations, allowing ancestors to remain engaged with their descendants (Gillespie 2001, 2002; Hendon 2000; McAnany 1995). Distinct practices of caring for the dead employed by separate groups would have contributed to differentiation within societies, like that noted between residents of individual household compounds at Teotihuacan (Chapter 5).
A select body of people who claimed legitimacy in exercising powers of governance emerged through exclusive practices in everyday life, including use of distinctive cuisine, dress, and architectural ornamentation. Together, these practices and the materials employed in them constituted a high culture (Joyce 2000c). This involved using more things made by skilled craft workers using rare and valuable materials like jade, rare feathers, fine textiles, and, in the Postclassic period, metal alloys as well as the consumption of distinctive foods that others were restricted from using in everyday life.
Throughout
