Sedentism and Social Competition: Archaic and Formative Archaeology in Apizaco, Tlaxcala

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With National Science Foundation support Dr. Richard Lesure will conduct one field season of archaeological and geomorphological survey in the Mexican state of Tlaxcala which is located ca. 80 km. East of Mexico City. From an archaeological perspective, the region is famous because it acquired a sufficient degree of power and centralized social organization to resist Aztec imperialism and eventually allied itself with the Spanish conquistadors in the Aztec conquest. Thus the area bears testimony to the development of complex highly organized society. Dr. Lesure wishes to understand the early phases of this development and in the process gain insight into the factors which lead to a sedentary existence. Preliminary data suggest that a large prehistoric lake once existed in this region and because lakes can provide significant subsistence resources, it is necessary as a first step to reconstruct the past environment. Dr. Lesure and his colleagues will excavate or extract cores from relevant sediments for this purpose. The team will then survey for archaeological sites and select several for test excavation. The data thus collected should permit them to establish a solid cultural chronology for the region and also, through analysis of faunal and floral remains provide insight into subsistence activities.Humans spent much of prehistory as nomadic hunter-gatherers, but during the last 10,000 years people across the globe have shifted to increasingly sedentary lives. Because this occurred independently in many different areas, scientists assume that it reflects a basic underlying process rather than historical happenstance and they wish to understand the underlying principles involved. For many years it was believed that sedentism was simply a consequence of the adoption of agriculture and sedentary lifeways and the emergence of food production seem often to have been closely related. However the relationship is not a simple one because preagricultural sedentism has been documented both archaeologically and historically. Two models have been proposed to explain the origins of sedentism and they invoke very different causal mechanisms. One is based on subsistence productivity and focuses on changing human-environmental relationships. The other envisions a process of social competition and argues that the process is at least fueled by competition for status among individuals and groups. Dr. Lesure believes that the two models would have clearly different signatures in the Tlaxcala region which thus offers an excellent research venue for such a study.This project is important for several reasons. It will provide data of interest to many archaeologists. It will also shed new light on the processes which led to the rise of complex society.