Chapter 13: TOLLAN TEOTIHUACAN: Multiethnic Mosaics, Corporate Interaction, and Social Complexity in Mesoamerica [2017] (original) (raw)

2017, Feast, Famine or Fighting? Multiple Pathways to Social Complexity. Pp. 337-392. Edited by Richard J. Chacon and Ruben G. Mendoza.

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.