House Abandonment and Destruction

We’ve previously talked about the amount of burned daub we found at Calixtlahuaca, and how it was probably related to the intentional destruction of houses there. Based on experimental work, it’s unlikely to get that much of a house burning at a high enough temperature to fire the clay of the walls without an intentional effort (Karabowicz 2009). However, that still leaves several different options for why the houses at Calixtlahuaca burned, and who did the burning.

Our first thought was that the houses had been burned during the Aztec conquest of the site. The standard Mesoamerican glyph for the conquest of a town is a drawing of a burning temple. Later, when we realized that some of the burned structures were from excavations that also included Colonial period figurines, I thought that they might have been burned when the residents of Calixtlahuaca were moved into Toluca as part of the process of congregación. People were sometimes required to burn their houses behind them when they were moved, to prevent them from going back to their old village. Another option is that people regularly burned their own houses, either through accidental kitchen fires, or intentionally, as a way to control insects and rodents. 

The depiction of the Aztec conquest of Toluca in the Codex Mendoza, showing the burning-temple glyph

A couple of ways of separating these hypotheses are to look at the timing of the burning, and the degree of primary refuse left behind (Cameron and Tomka 1993; Inomata and Webb 2003). First, do all of the burned structures date to a single phase? If they do, this would suggest that they were burned as part of an event affecting the whole site, such as the Aztec conquest or the Spanish congregación policy. In fact, the three most severely burned structures at the site (in Units 315, 316, and 317) each dates to a different phase, which means that house burning was an ongoing activity throughout the site’s history. Second, how cleaned out were the houses before they burned? If burning is a planned, scheduled activity (such as for pest control, or congregación), people have time to remove all of their things from the house beforehand and there won’t be many artifacts left on the floor. In contrast, if the burning is unexpected (such as for conquest, or an accidental fire), the contents of the house are likely to burn with it and many of them may not be salvageable after the fire. One of the things we noticed during excavation at Calixtlahuaca was how few artifacts were found on floors, or in other primary contexts. Compared to many other projects, we found few whole or reconstructable pots (only 32), and only one of those, Vessel 2, was found on a floor, rather than in a burial or broken in a trash pit. Taken together, these two lines of evidence would suggest intentional, regular, planning burning, likely by the occupants of the houses themselves.

Vessel 2, a locally-produced version of Aztec Orangeware, found on the floor of the house in Unit 309

References:

Cameron, Catherine M. and Steve A. Tomka (editors)

                1993       Abandonment of Settlement and Regions: Ethnoarchaeological and Archaeological Approaches. Cambridge University Press, New York.

Inomata, Takeshi and Ronald W. Webb

                2003       Archaeological Studies of Abandonment in Middle America. . In The Archaeology of Settlement Abandonment in Middle America, edited by T. Inomata and R. W. Webb, pp. 1-12. Foundations in Archaeological Inquiry, J. M. Skibo, general editor. The University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City.

Karabowicz, Amy

                2009       Wattle and Daub Architecture at Calixtlahuaca, Mexico: Experimental Analyses and a Comparative Study with Europe. Senior Honors Thesis, Barrett Honor's College, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ.

What's new for Calixtlahuaca ??

It's a new year --  2014  --  and our analysis of the findings from our fieldwork at Calixtlahuaca continues.

We will try to get some new material posted soon. But in the meantime, check out some of our past posts. These cover several years, from our initial excavations in 2007 up to our current analyses at ASU:

The life and times of Burial 4 (written by anthropology major Kea Warren)

Sounds from the past: The bird-whistle from Calixtlahuaca  (have you ever heard an Aztec musical instrument, 500 years old, played?)

Gambling, tortillas, and Spaniards in hats

Using an artistic touch to bring Calixtlahuaca back to life

The 1563 calendrical relief

Working on ceramics in Toluca

No calpollis in the Toluca Valley?

Aztec calpolli temple

The calpolli was an important social institution in Aztec central Mexico. It was a group of households living in proximity who shared economic and other resources. In the countryside, calpollis were villages and in cities calpollis were neighborhoods. There were two sizes or levels of calpolli - a small calpolli (ca. 20 households), several of which were grouped together into a large calpolli (ca. 150 households). Calpollis typically had a temple and a market. They were made up of commoner households, who selected a council to made decisions and run the organization (e.g., to assign plots of land among the farming families).

In the State of Morelos, where I worked prior to Calixtlahuaca, there is abundant documentation of the presence and importance of calpollis. A series of detailed census lists (house-by-house interviews)  were recorded in Nahuatl in six communities in Morelos, and these provide the most detailed accounts of calpolli organization from anywhere in central Mexico. The sites I excavated in Morelos matched up very closely to the size and structure of calpollis in these documents. In my current book, I identify the calpolli as a major source of the stability, success, and prosperity of the communities I excavated in Morelos.

Calpollis at Cuexcomate, in Morelos

When we started working at Calixtlahuaca, many of us assumed that calpollis were present in this area as well. Some historians talk about calpollis in the Toluca Valley, although there are no detailed  descriptions of them. Last week I started wondering if perhaps the people of Calixtlahuaca and the Toluca Valley lacked calpolli organization, and that this fact (if true) might help explain some of our findings. I have now almost convinced myself that this was indeed the case. Here is my reasoning so far.

First I checked the major books and article on social organization in the Toluca Valley at the time of the Spanish conquest. If calpollis were present, these historians would mention it. But the only time calpollis were mentioned in these works was when authors were talking about general patterns of social organization in central Mexico, not about specific places in the Toluca Valley.

Then it occurred to me (this afternoon) that perhaps if we did not have the Morelos census data, it might be harder to identify calpollis in Morelos. If that were the case, then the missing calpollis in the Toluca histories might not mean very much. So I took a spin through the major works on 16th century social organization in Morelos. I found that these authors regularly talked about calpollis, even when they were not drawing on the census documents. I found a few quotes from documents that mentioned calpollis. So, unlike the Toluca Valley, many historical studies of Morelos had identified calpollis, independently of the census documents. This strengthens the argument that if calpollis had been present and important, there would be more discussion of them in the 16th century documents.

Then I realized that I needed to check the major literature on the Aztec calpolli in general. Sources like Lockhart and Carrasco had surprisingly little to say about specific calpolli apart from the Morelos census data. But a major paper by Luis Reyes García (1996) listed lots of examples of the use of the term calpolli. In fact, he has a whole list and discussion of mentions of the calpolli in central Mexico outside of Mexico City. The towns are scattered all over Morelos, Puebla, and Tlaxcalla, with a single occurrence in Toluca (in 1533). But it turns out that the lone Toluca calpolli reference describes communities of commoners who moved into the Toluca Valley from the Basin of Mexico after the Valley was conquered by the Mexica emperor Axayacatl. Not surprisingly, these migrants kept their native calpolli organization when they settled in Toluca. That leaves only one possible mention of a calpolli in the Toluca Valley, from a document from Zinacantepec in 1574, cited in an article by Megged. The context is not clear from his article, however.

On the basis of this quick review, it looks to me like the calpolli was not a regular unit of social organization in the Toluca Valley and Calixtlahuaca in Postclassic or early colonial times. This is by no means a firmly-established finding, and I will keep trying to test it; my next step is probably to talk to some of the historians who know the Toluca documents well.

But if this finding holds up, what does it mean? Right now I will only say that the lack of calpollis would suggest that local social organization at Calixtlahuaca was very different from the patterns I found in Morelos. And now it is time for all of us project members to think about the possible implications of this for our understanding of Calixtlahuaca.

Some sources on the calpolli

Carrasco, Pedro  (1972)  La casa y hacienda de un señor tlahuica. Estudios de Cultura Náhuatl 10:235-244.

Hicks, Frederic  (2010)  Labor Squads, Noble Houses, and Other Things called "Barrios" in Aztec Mexico. Nahua Newsletter 49:13-21.

Lockhart, James  (1992)  The Nahuas After the Conquest: A Social and Cultural History of the Indians of Central Mexico, Sixteenth Through Eighteenth Centuries. Stanford University Press, Stanford.

Reyes García, Luis  (1996)  El término calpulli en documentos del siglo XVI. In Documentos nahas de la Ciudad de México del siglo XVI, edited by Luis Reyes García, Celestino Eustaquio Solís, Armando Valencia Ríos, Constantino Medina Lima and Gregorio Guerrero Días, pp. 21-68. CIESAS, Mexico City.

Smith, Michael E.  (1993)  Houses and the Settlement Hierarchy in Late Postclassic Morelos: A Comparison of Archaeology and Ethnohistory. In Prehispanic Domestic Units in Western Mesoamerica: Studies of the Household, Compound, and Residence, edited by Robert S. Santley and Kenneth G. Hirth, pp. 191-206. CRC Press, Boca Raton.