Manzanilla 1996 La organización económica de Teotihuacan y Tiwanaku (original) (raw)
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Corporate societies with exclusionary social components: the Teotihuacan metropolis
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Few urban developments are as multiethnic, corporate, and, in fact, exceptional as Teotihuacan, in Central Mexico. The city itself covered a surface of 20 square kilometers, with a very strict urban grid, a fact that is only present at that site in Classic Mesoamerica. It housed people from different origins in what may be called “a multiethnic pact”. At the base and summit of this society, traits of a corporate organization may be identified. The apartment compounds housed corporate groups that shared a particular activity. At the summit of this society, a ruling council emerging from the four districts may have been the means to appease coups d’état, in a multiethnic society with various (perhaps conflicting) interests. Nevertheless, in the intermediate level of this society, stand the quasi-autonomous neighborhood centers managed by the dynamic intermediate elite, which display of a wide variety of sumptuary goods coming from different regions, where each neighborhood center promoted alliances. The contradiction between these two element
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2015
In this paper, I address the case of a corporate society in Central Mexico. After volcanic eruptions triggered population displacements in the southern Basin of Mexico during the first and fourth centuries A.D., Teotihuacan became a multiethnic settlement. Groups from different backgrounds settled primarily on the periphery of the metropolis; nevertheless, around the core, intermediate elites actively fostered the movement of sumptuary goods and the arrival of workers from diverse homelands for a range of specialized tasks. Some of these skilled craftsmen acquired status and perhaps economic power as a result of the dynamic competition among neighborhoods to display the most lavish sumptuary goods, as well as to manufacture specific symbols of identity that distinguished one neighborhood from another, such as elaborate garments and headdresses. Cotton attire worn by the Teotihuacan elite may have been one of the goods that granted economic importance to neighborhood centers such as ...
Feast, Famine or Fighting? Multiple Pathways to Social Complexity. Pp. 337-392. Edited by Richard J. Chacon and Ruben G. Mendoza., 2017
Despite its longstanding preeminence as one of the earliest, largest, and most complex urban centers of highland Mexico, Teotihuacan’s pan-regional impact on Mesoamerica remains the subject of intense debate and conflicting models centering on the rise of social complexity in the American hemisphere. Therefore, this study seeks to address the interplay and operationalization of resource concentration, multiethnic mosaics, and corporate interaction and inter-elite conflict within and beyond the context of the preindustrial metropolis of Teotihuacan. Findings from this review predictably indicate that the ancient highland polity was borne of but one of a host of Late Formative compound chiefdoms situated in the Basin of Mexico, albeit on a semiarid plain that necessitated the formation of an incipient managerial elite devoted to the management of the region’s hydraulic resources. While water management per se may be construed an initial stimulus to the formation of sociopolitical complexity in the highlands, the authors contend that this fact alone did not distinguish Teotihuacan, or for that matter, render it a competitive advantage over other early polities of the region. Its uniqueness, they argue, was borne of (a) its strategic location proximate to both major obsidian deposits and a highland transport network to the Gulf lowlands, (b) a pattern of recurrent demographic restructuring occasioned by the cataclysmic eruptions of Popocatépetl, Malinche, and Xitle, (c) the formation of multiethnic mosaics and foreign enclaves both within and beyond the metropolis as a result of the two foregoing conditions, and by extension, (d) the emergence of multiethnic corporate groups dedicated to commerce and industry centered on Teotihuacan. In an effort to fully interrogate the extant evidence for the evolution of social complexity in the Basin of Mexico, the authors extend the analysis to those findings bearing on the troubled times of the Late Middle Classic/Epiclassic decline, collapse, and destruction of the ancient metropolis and its far flung outposts. In the final analysis, a review of that evidence bearing on the question of what ultimately became of Teotihuacan in the wake of its disintegration reveals a pattern of escalating internal conflict, militarization, and a balkanization and recapitulation of the constituent multiethnic mosaics that defined the cosmopolitan and multicultural origins of the metropolis from the outset.