The Neighborhood as a Social and Spatial Unit in Mesoamerican Cities

3. Neighborhoods and Elite “Houses” at Teotihuacan, Central Mexico

55 chapter three Neighborhoods and Elite “Houses” at Teotihuacan, Central Mexico Linda R. Manzanilla Teotihuacan, a city of many faces, the most important of which is that of being an exception in Mesoamerica, built itself as an inclusive corporate society. Exceptional for its size and its urban planning (Millon 1973), its settlement pattern with the highly urbanized capital surrounded by villages and hamlets (Sanders et al. 1979), its corporate organization (Blanton et al. 1996; Manzanilla 1992, 1993, 1997a, 2001, 2006, 2009; Pasztory 1992; Paulinyi 1981), its multiethnic character embedded deep in its structure (Price et al. 2000), Teotihuacan did not resemble any other contemporary site in Mesoamerica (figure 3.1). Without written texts that can give us a glimpse of how this complex culture articulated all the different ethnic groups and social strata, archaeology must rely on very careful observations of how identities are expressed in material traces related to culinary, dressing, funerary, ritual, and social behaviors (Manzanilla 2007a). Also exceptional as they may be in Classic Mesoamerica, Teotihuacan apartment compounds are the residential structures in the city. These multifamily compounds house basic social units that are autonomous with respect to their domestic functions: each household had a dormitory , storeroom, kitchen, portico, service patio, as well as a ritual courtyard where ceremonies to the family patron god were celebrated (Manzanilla 1993, 1996). This characteristic sets this society apart from the Maya solares (Manzanilla and Barba 1990), which house what Kulp (in Blanton 1994) calls “the religious family,” extensive families sharing a common ancestral shrine. Even though most of the Teotihuacan apartment compounds may 56 figure 3.1. The city of Teotihuacan, following René Millon’s map. (© René Millon, 2009) Neighborhoods and Elite “Houses” 57 have housed Teotihuacan households, at Oztoyahualco 15B:N6W3 we have also detected some affiliated members that come from other regions , particularly when evaluating strontium isotopes (Price et al. 2000). Ethnic Neighborhoods Since René Millon and his team (1973) had mapped the city, it became clear that Teotihuacan had sectors where foreign ethnic groups were based (Rattray 1987). The “Oaxaca Barrio” named Tlailotlacan (Rattray 1993; Spence 1990, 1996), the “Merchants’ Barrio” housing people from the Gulf Coast, in Mezquititla and Xocotitla (Rattray 1988, 1989), and the Michoacán sector (Gómez-Chávez 1998) were all set in the periphery of the site, where people coming from their regions first touch the city. These sectors display house forms that contrast clearly with the Teotihuacan standard (as seen in the Merchants’ Barrio), funerary and ritual practices that differ from those that characterize the city, and probably also subtle canonical (Blanton 1994) differences, such as the way they prepare food and the ingredients they use, the attires they wear, and perhaps the composition of the household (Manzanilla 2007a). With strontium isotope analysis (87/86 Sr), we have proposed that the Merchants’ Barrio housed people that came to the city from two sectors of the Gulf Coast and stayed only for some time, moving goods, and returning to their homeland (Price et al. 2000). In contrast, people from the Oaxaca Barrio came originally from the central valleys of Oaxaca, formed a family that reproduced some canonical elements of their culture of origin, but were assimilated to the Teotihuacan diet and form of living. Craft Sectors Crafts intended for intermediate elite use are located in neighborhood centers such as La Ventilla or Teopancazco, under the strict control of the noble “houses” (see below), whereas crafts for the ruling elite seem to be located in specific sectors of the city’s core, such as the western fringe of the Pyramid of the Moon (Carballo 2007), the Xalla compound (Manzanilla and López-Luján 2001; Rosales de la Rosa and Manzanilla 2011), or the northwestern fringe of the Ciudadela (Múnera 1985). Otherwise, most of the craft production sectors for the urban dwellers seem to be placed in the periphery of the city (figure 3.2). There is a large obsidian production sector in the northeastern periphery (San Martín de las Pirámides eastern sector), which may be explained 58 neighborhood as a social and spatial unit when taking into account that the obsidian mines of Otumba and Pachuca lie to the northeast of the city itself. In the eastern periphery lie lapidary production areas, such as the one studied by Turner (1987) in Tecópac (N3E5), where jadeite, serpentine, quartz, quartzite, teccali, shell, and mica are transformed into different small objects, suggesting that most of these raw materials may have...