Santa Cruz Tayata and Emergent Social Complexity in the Mixteca Alta

Southern Illinois University At Carbondale, Carbondale IL

Investigators

Abstract

In 2003 and 2004, the National Science Foundation will support archaeological field research in the Mixteca Alta of Oaxaca, a mountainous area in southern Mexico. Recent NSF-sponsored research suggests that this little known area had some of the highest population densities, and most politically complex societies, anywhere in Mexico during the Formative Period (ca. 1500 B.C. to A.D. 200). One important site in the Mixteca Alta, called Santa Cruz Tayata, was the apparent political center for a chiefly society lasting more than 1,000 years. By about 300 B.C., however, this center was abandoned and a new urban capital and state-level society established nearby. This project, directed by Dr. Andrew Balkansky from George Washington University, will examine the beginnings of social inequality at Santa Cruz Tayata, the relationship of this site to its contemporaries in ancient Mexico, and the reasons for this site's abandonment at the dawn of the urban era. These research questions are regional in scope, and derive from earlier regional surveys encompassing several thousand square kilometers of highland Oaxaca, including Santa Cruz Tayata and many of its contemporary centers. The field methods for this new project will involve controlled mapping and surface collection of artifacts from Santa Cruz Tayata, using a total station and systematic sampling procedure. The map and surface data will then be used to identify the changing site boundaries through time, detect intra-site variation, and select promising excavation contexts. Excavations will follow, designed to uncover both public structures and private residences. The household will be the basic unit of analysis, providing links between individual features through the household, residential ward, site-level organization, and finally the regional settlement pattern. It is anticipated that relationships among households, in terms of status, wealth, and exchange patterns will change over time, as will the political organization of the site and it relationships with neighboring centers. These results will answer specific questions about how social hierarchies formed in the Mixteca Alta, and how interregional dynamics among competing centers (including exchange patterns, belief systems, and warfare) shaped these developments. We will also have a better understanding of the urban transition by examining the context from which the first cities formed. This project will also have broader impacts, including the training of a new generation of students for archaeological research. The collaboration with colleagues and students from Mexico also contributes to the emerging "global archaeology" and the preservation of this important site for the future.