Abstract
Early urban societies feature specialized processes that integrate disparate populations as part of their social construction. One such process is commensalism and the associated display of exotica from interregional interaction. Hosts of a feast between 400 and 300 bce at the early urban centre of Etlatongo, in the Mixteca Alta of Oaxaca, Mexico, displayed pottery that manifested relationships with urban elites at Monte Albán and other regions of Oaxaca, but also expressed connections with something fundamentally different. The hosts sacrificed a greenstone sculpture in the Mezcala style from Guerrero state, located to the west and previously unknown in Oaxaca aesthetics. The discovery of this figure contributes to reassessing the extent of interaction during a time often marked by regionalism in Oaxaca as well as providing information on the little-known Mezcala civilization. A relational ontology explores how the discovery of this agentive object and the alterity of its aesthetics facilitates understanding perceptions of distant others or imaginaries, and how such entanglements facilitated processes of status differentiation for nascent urban elites, particularly their role as mediators.
Highlights
Urbanism entails a complex interweaving of both earlier and novel social processes and institutions that impact public and quotidian life
Urbanism appears fundamentally different to the northwest in the Mixteca Alta, a mountainous region with less capacious valleys, each with multiple, smaller co-existing cities marked by great architectural heterogeneity
The discovery of the Mezcala-style Etlatongo figure in a context of diacritical feasting dating to 405–300 BCE contributes to issues in Mesoamerican archaeology as well as broader questions regarding interaction, imaginaries, commensalism and early urban processes
Summary
Urbanism entails a complex interweaving of both earlier and novel social processes and institutions that impact public and quotidian life. A newly discovered Yucuita-phase commensal context at Etlatongo manifests these Oaxaca alliances and the Mixtec hosts’ association with something fundamentally different and previously unreported in Oaxaca: a Mezcala-style greenstone sculpture This discovery complicates interpretations of MF to L/TF interaction and urbanism as Mixtec urban elites exhibited more knowable and personalized Oaxacan connections in mimetic forms as well as originative, cosmogonic forces, materialized in an object accentuating alterity. At the Templo Mayor, the late PC Aztecs validated their imperial programme by offering objects that expressed their dominion over time and space, including those representing their central Mexican ancestors: Teotihuacan, Xochicalco and the early PC Toltecs (Matos Moctezuma 1988) They included Mezcala-style sculptures in at least 14 offerings, primarily those dating to CE 1454 and especially CE 1469, marking their empire’s massive expansion and wider interactions with distant realms, such as Guerrero (López Austin & López Luján 2009). While penates have been compared in form and size with the contemporaneous camahuiles tradition of southern Guatemala, L/TF examples have been found archaeologically of the latter, which in contrast to Mezcala figures, generally have flat backs (Love 2010, 171)
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