Mapping agricultural assemblages in ancient Oaxaca from the domestication of maize to the collapse of Monte Albán

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines the religious and political significance of human involvements with maize in ancient Oaxaca using an approach that merges assemblage theory with Peircean semiotics. The article maps changes in an agricultural assemblage involving linked material and semiotic flows among rain, sun, earth, maize, and people from the adoption of domesticates in Oaxaca at about 4000 BCE to after the collapse of the city of Monte Albán at ca. 800 CE. The article examines changes in this assemblage through the emergence of overlapping component assemblages involving ecology, farming, and religion. Drawing on Peircean semiotics, changes in the religious component are explored, especially its overcoding and stratification of the overall agricultural assemblage, centered first at San José Mogote and later at Monte Albán. Changing relations among rain, sun, earth, maize, and humans had broader affects that transformed political life from the Formative period to the Postclassic.