Neighborhoods at Mesoamerican Hilltop Cities

How does Calixtlahuaca compare to other Mesoamerican hilltop cities? We have written about this in a couple of places. In a paper from the SAA meetings in 2010, I compared Calixtlahuaca, Xochicalco, and a few other examples Smith (2010). If you want a copy of the paper, email me. One interesting difference is in the configuration of the terraces, and houses on terraces. This schematic diagram is from that paper:

 (This drawing is by Miriam Cox, ASU student)

• Smith, Michael E.
  2010    Xochicalco and Calixtlahuaca as Mesoamerican Hilltop Political Capitals. Paper presented at the 75th Annual Meeting, Society for American Archaeology, St. Louis.

Julie and I have also make a very brief comparison of Calixtlahuaca to other hilltop cities in terms of their neighborhood organization. The passage below is from our book chapter, now under review:

• Smith, Michael E. and Juliana Novic
• n.d.    Neighborhoods and Districts in Ancient Mesoamerica. In Neighborhoods in Mesoamerican Archaeology: The Assessment of Intermediate Units of Spatial and Social Analysis, edited by Linda Manzanilla and Charlotte Arnauld, (book in preparation).

"The hilltop capital city was a common urban form in ancient Mesoamerica, and researchers have investigated neighborhoods and districts at several of these settlements. In one of the first studies of residential zones at a Mesoamerican city, Richard Blanton (1978:66-93) analyzed districts for both early and late periods at Monte Alban. In early Monte Alban three zones had subtle differences in the ceramic assemblage suggesting that neighborhoods or districts may have had distinctive patterns of shared material culture, possibly signaling some form of spatially based identity. Later periods saw an increase in urban division to fifteen architecturally visible districts. These areas were of mixed social class, with elite and commoners living near one another. Few craft activities were identified at the level of the district, although, Blanton (1978:95) did identify zones of obsidian and groundstone production. In a more recent study, González Licón (2009) discusses inequality among households at Monte Albán, with a consideration of the role of neighborhoods.

            At the Oaxaca site of El Palmillo in the Classic period, residential zones were topographically distinguished and shared some economic and ritual activities (Feinman and Nicholas, chapter 7). Residents of nearby houses most likely engaged in joint work activities on common facilities such as terraces and stairs, which Feinman and Nicholas interpret in terms of collective action.

            On the basis of a program of intensive surface collection and mapping at the Epiclassic period (AD 600-800) hilltop city of Xochicalco, Kenneth Hirth (2000:234-239) identified fourteen residential zones that he calls “wards” and “ward subdivisions” (figure 3). These were identified on the basis of features of the natural and built environments that impeded movement within the city, such as ravines, ditches, defensive walls, walled causeways, and steep terrace walls. When Hirth plotted the distribution of civic architecture outside of the hilltop epicenter, he found that all but one of his fourteen zones contained one or more temples or civic structures. These units correspond to districts as defined in this paper. In a recent paper, Hirth (2009) compared the distribution of obsidian tool workshops to his map of districts, and found a lack of spatial association between the two. This suggests to him that “(1) artisans did not collaborate in corporate craft activities outside the household, and (2) a craft guild did not exist at the barrio [ward or district] level” (Hirth 2009:58). In both of these works, Hirth compares the Xochicalco data to the Aztec calpolli as described in documentary sources.

            Fieldwork by the authors at the hilltop city of Calixtlahuaca (Smith et al. 2009) suggests a division of the city into two districts based on topological considerations. On the basis of surface artifact densities, Novic identified twenty-four smaller zones—most likely neighborhoods—at Calixtlahuaca. The nature and dynamics of these spatial units is the focus of ongoing research (Novic 2008)."

Blanton, Richard E.

1978    Monte Alban: Settlement Patterns at the Ancient Zapotec Capitol. Academic Press, New York.

González Licón, Ernesto

2009    Ritual and Social Stratification at Monte Albán, Oaxaca: Strategies from a Household Perspective. In Domestic Life in Prehispanic Capitals: A Study of Specialization, Hierarchy, and Ethnicity, edited by Linda Manzanilla and Claude Chapdelaine, pp. 7-20. Memoirs, vol. 46. University of Michigan, Museum of Anthropology, Ann Arbor.

Hirth, Kenneth G.

2000    Public Architecture, Site Planning, and Urban community Organization. In Archaeological Research at Xochicalco. Volume 1, Ancient Urbanism at Xochicalco: The Evolution and Organization of a Pre-Hispanic Society, edited by Kenneth G. Hirth, pp. 210-243. University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City.

2009    Household, Workshop, Guild, and Barrio: The Organization of Obsidian Craft Production in a Prehispanic Urban Center. In Domestic Life in Prehispanic Capitals: A Study of Specialization, Hierarchy, and Ethnicity, edited by Linda Manzanilla and Claude Chapdelaine, pp. 43-66. Memoirs, vol. 46. University of Michigan, Museum of Anthropology, Ann Arbor.

Novic, Juliana

2008    Reaching the City Limits: Identifying Settlement Boundaries at Calixtlahuaca, Toluca, Mexico. Paper presented at the 2008 Annual Meeting, Society for American Archaeology, Vancouver.

Smith, Michael E., Juliana Novic, Angela Huster, and Peter C. Kroefges

2009    Reconocimiento Superficial y Mapeo en Calixtlahuaca. Expresión Antropológica 36:39-55.

Why Build a City on a Mountain?

Why was the city of Calixtlahuaca (3 square km of occupation, probably 10,000+ inhabitants) built on a mountain? Most Mesoamerican cities built on mountains (think of Monte Alban or Xochicalco) were placed there for reasons of defense. Images of mountaintop cities in Mesoamerican codices (see my earlier blog entry on these) tend to show battles and defensive walls. But for several reasons, we don't think that defense was a major factor in the layout of Calixtlahuaca:

1. We did not find any defensive walls or ditches.
2. The largest civic buildings were not built in a protected location.

The second factor is quite striking. The royal palace was at the base of the hill, completley unprotected, as was a large unexcavated platform (a possible ballcourt). The two largest temples, structure 3 (circular temple, dedicated to Ehecatl) and structure 4 (rectangular temple, dedicated to Tlaloc) were built part-way up the hill, but closer to the base. Again, these were relatively unprotected. When defense is an issue, the main civic buildings are almost always built at the top of the mountain or hill (again, think Monte Alban or Xochicalco).

Well, what is so surprising about building a city on a mountain if defense was NOT a major consideration? The answer is the effort required to build the site. Every house that was built had to be accompanied by the construction (and constant maintenance) of stone terraces. Temples 3 and 4 required massive platforms and large excavations into the hillside to build level areas for these temples and their groups.

I have some hunches about why Calixtlahuaca may have been built on a mountain, but I will refrain from saying them now. One thing I am doing is looking for other ancient cities around the world whose residential zones were built on mountainsides, with the civic architecture at the base of the hill. Ephesis (the Roman occupation) is one example (see photo), and I am looking for others. If you have suggestions, let me know.

Workshop on the Calixtlahuaca project

Today we held a workshop on the project at the Colegio Mexiquense. It was called, "Mesa de trabajo: Los artefactos de Calixtlahuaca y las interpretaciones sociales.” Here is the program:

Presentación

Mtro. Raymundo C. Martínez García/ El Colegio Mexiquense

Introducción a la ciudad antigua de Matlatzinco (Calixtlahuaca), y al Proyecto Arqueológico Calixtlahuaca

Dr. Michael E. Smith / Arizona State University

Artefactos de superficie y reconstrucción de la forma y organización urbana

Mtra. Juliana Novic / Arizona State University

Tecnología de la producción de herramientas de obsidiana e implicaciones para la economía de Calixtlahuaca

Dr. Bradford Andrews / Pacific Lutheran University

Raspadores, malacates y el uso económico de maguey en Calixtlahuaca

Mtra. Angela Huster /Arizona State University

La producción e intercambio de cerámica en el Valle de Toluca y Guerrero

Dr. Jennifer Meanwell / Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Las terrazas agrícolas y habitacionales de Calixtlahuaca

Dr. Aleksander Borejsza / Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México

La cerámica de Calixtlahuaca y las actividades domésticas: alimentos, artesanías, e ritual

Dr. Michael E. Smith / Arizona State University

Comentarios finales

Arqlgo. Víctor Osorio Ogarrio/ Instituto Mexiquense de Cultura

Mtro. Rubén Nieto / Universidad Autónoma del Estado de México

Dr. Xavier Noguez / El Colegio Mexiquense

This was an interesting session, and we all learned something from it. Thanks go to the Colegio Mexiquense for organizing and hosting the event.

31 bags of sherds

We have just finished classifying the second-largest collection of sherds from a single excavated level. We got through the largest batch, 34 bags of sherds, in 2008. But here is the next-largest collection, 31 bags of sherds from a single 20-cm level in unit 323.


The photo shows four of our experienced "tepalcateros" (tepalcate is the Nahuatl term for potsherds, used frequently in modern central Mexican Spanish). These women are from San Francisco Calixtlahuaca, and they have become very proficient at ceramic classification and other analytical tasks. All of these sherds arefrom this one level. The big pile are undecorated jar sherds (always the biggest category). the women are holding up some of the partial vessels they were able to fit together.

This summer we are working our way through ceramics from some of the deposits that are important for chronological purposes. Unit 323 consisted of some trenches on a terrace quite high on the hill. We have some good stratigraphy, with Early Aztec sherds at the base and what we think are late markers at the top. But deep in the trench, in the final days of the field season, we hit the edge of a burned house associated with a rich artifact deposit. Most of the house went into the side wall, and at nearly 2 meters deep at the end of the field season we did not have time to expose it further. But we did get some rich floats full of seeds or beans or something (these are being processed by Emily McClung at UNAM in Mexico City), a bunch of burned daub, and nice dense trash deposits with the kinds of sherds shown here.

Terraced Hill Cities in Postclassic Codices

Calixtlahuaca covered the top and most of the slopes of Cerro Tenismo (see photo). There were a number of other terrace hill cities in ancient Mesoamerica. The best known are from the Classic and Epiclassic periods: Monte Alban and Xochicalco. Both were large complex cities with abundant public architecture on top of the hill and residential areas on terraces on the hillslopes. The site of El Palmillo in Oaxaca has less spectacular public architecture, but the residential preservation is good and recent fieldwork by Gary Feinman and Linda Nicholas is providing important new information (Feinman, and Nicholas 2004; Feinman, et al. 2002; Feinman, et al. 2006).

The terraced hill cities of the Late Postclassic period are less well known, but this was a major settlement type. Just 15 km south of Calixtlahuaca is Tlacotepec, another Postclassic terraced hill city. It was damaged severely by Frederick Starr by his “excavations” around 1900, and today we know little about the site beyond the several thousand objects that Starr sold to the Field Museum of Natural History (McVicker 1992).

There are a number of representations of terraced hill cities in the codices. One such image from a Cuicatec codex, the Códice Fernéndez Leal (f. 13-14), is shown here (van Doesburg 2001: v.2, f.13-14). There is a battle in progress, with warriors standing on all of the terraces and fending off attackers at the base. Another Oaxacan example (see photo) is from the Relación Geográfica of Texupan (Acuña 1984-88: v.2, p222). The terraced site, on a hill looming above the Spanish colonial town, may have been the Postclassic citey of Texupan.

One final example is provided in the Historia Tolteca-Chichimeca (Kirchhoff, et al. 1976:f. 42v), which is also the scene of a battle. The fact that two out of three codex images show battles suggests that military defense may have been important in the decision to build cities on hills in the Postclassic period. This is the interpretation of Gerardo Gutiérrez, whose 2005 article pointed me toward these images (Gutiérrez 2005).

For Calixtlahuaca, however, the defensive argument has less to support it. It is always difficult to argue from archaeological remains whether features such as city walls were built for defense or for symbolic reasons (there is a big literature on this, I won’t cite sources here). At Calixtlahuaca, two public buildings were built on the flat land at the base of the hill—the royal palace and a ceremonial platform that may have been a ballcourt. If defense were of paramount importance in the design of the site, one would expect that the royal palace would be built on the slopes, or perhaps on top of the cerro.

As far as we can tell from the native historical sources, Calixtlahuaca had no rivals as a political capital early in its history (this is from a paper by Brian Tomaszewski and me that is now in preparation), so perhaps its rulers did not worry about defense in laying out their city. But had they thought more of defense, perhaps they could have held off Axayacatl and the invading Mexica army a bit longer in the 1470s.

I wish someone would write a paper synthesizing what we know about terraced hill cities in Postclassic Mesoamerica.

REFERENCES:

Acuña, René (1984-88) Relaciones geográficas del siglo XVI. 10 vols. Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, Mexico City.

Feinman, Gary M. and Linda M. Nicholas (2004) Hilltop Terrace Sites of Oaxaca, Mexico: Intensive Surface Survey at Guirún, El Palmillo, and the Mitla Fortress. Fieldiana, Anthropology vol. 37. Field Museum of Natural History, Chicago.

Feinman, Gary M., Linda M. Nicholas and Helen R. Haines (2002) Houses on a Hill: Classic Period Domestic Life at El Palmillo, Oaxaca, Mexico. Latin American Antiquity 13:251-278.

Feinman, Gary M., Linda M. Nicholas and Helen R. Haines (2006) Socioeconomic Inequality and the Consumption of Chipped Stone at El Palmillo, Oaxaca, Mexico. Latin American Antiquity 17:151-176.

Gutiérrez, Gerardo (2005) Jardines defensivos: un acercamiento histórica-arqueológico al use de la vegetación en la guerra antigua. Anales de Antropología 39(1):51-78.

Kirchhoff, Paul, Lina Odena Güemes and Luis Reyes García (editors) (1976) Historia tolteca-chichimeca. Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia, Mexico City.

McVicker, Donald (1992) México: La Visión del Cosmos: Three Thousand Years of Creativity. The Mexican Fine Arts Center Museum, Chicago.

van Doesburg, Sebastian (2001) Códices Cuicatecos Porfirio Díaz y Fernández Leal. 2 vols. Grupo Editorial Miguel Angel Porrúa, Mexico City.