Labor Mobilization and Cooperation for Urban Construction: Building Apartment Compounds at Teotihuacan

Abstract

Teotihuacan underwent an urban renewal during the Tlamimilolpa phase (AD 250–350) in which more than 2,000 apartment compounds were constructed to accommodate its estimated 100,000 residents. Although the orderly layout and canonical orientation of the city imply top-down planning, growing evidence suggests a bottom-up process of urban transformation. This study combines architectural energetics with archaeometric analysis of nonlocal construction materials (lime plaster and andesitic cut stone blocks) to examine the labor organization behind the construction of the apartment compounds. The results of the energetic analysis suggest that residents relied on labor forces external to their compounds, whereas materials analysis indicates that the procurement, transportation, and production of building material were centrally organized and thus indicative of a state labor tax. Based on these results, I argue that compounds were assembled through corporate group labor exchange or communal (neighborhood-level) labor cooperation/obligation, with differing degrees of support from the state labor tax. Apartment compound construction was not uniform but rather a diverse process in which state labor mobilization, communal labor obligations, and corporate labor exchange were articulated in various ways.