Commoner Ritual and Ideology in Ancient Mesoamerica

2: Tradition and Transformation

Tradition and Transformation 33 Introduction Fifty years ago Robert Redfield divided the educated elite and the illiterate peasants into two categories when he wrote of the “great tradition of the reflective few, and [the] . . . little tradition of the largely unreflective many” (1956:41–42). Although he perhaps envisioned more of a continuum than an opposition, during the past few decades anthropological thought has favored a paradigm rooted in the interaction between these extremes, an intricate and complex interplay between local village religiosity and the more formal and grandiose manifestations of citified state religion (McAnany 2002; Smith 2002). In this chapter, we explore this relationship by contrasting data from the rural setting of Tetimpa in southwestern Puebla, Mexico, with that from the urban context of Teotihuacan, Mexico (Figures 0.1 and 2.1). Although Tetimpa was not divided into classes of commoners and elites, its Late and Terminal Formative occupation coincided with the GABRIELA URUÑUELA AND PATRICIA PLUNKET C h a p t e r t w o Village Ritual at Tetimpa as a Template for Early Teotihuacan Tradition and Transformation 33 Gabriela Uruñuela and Patricia Plunket 34 emergence of stratified societies in centers like Cholula and Teotihuacan (Figure 0.2). Many of the original founders and subsequent immigrants who constituted these cities’ populations probably came from settlements similar to Tetimpa, and thus we should expect to find significant patterns of rural life and belief embedded in the urban social and political structures . As Catherine Bell (1997:210) has observed, the continuity of ritual traditions under circumstances of shifting social realities provides the illusion of an enduring community and the legitimacy of age. Our study focuses on how and why certain elements of Formative village ritual served 2.1. Map showing sites mentioned in Chapter 2. Tradition and Transformation 35 as the conceptual basis for generating both state and domestic canons at Classic period Teotihuacan. At many Formative sites in the Central Highlands of Mesoamerica, later occupations significantly altered earlier archaeological deposits. At Tetimpa, however, a first century a.d. Plinian eruption of the Popocatépetl volcano covered the area with pumitic ash, which preserved the evidence of the contemporary setting and also protected earlier contexts from further human disturbance (Plunket and Uruñuela 1998a), thus providing a unique opportunity to study Late and Terminal Formative village life. Over the past ten years we have accumulated information on thirty-one different building compounds—which include household units, detached kitchens, and ritual structures—in addition to the surrounding agricultural fields, providing an ample database that allows us to solidly identify patterns of ritual behavior. The evidence from Tetimpa’s houses provides fertile ground for exploring the roots of commoner ritual and ideology in later state societies since it affords a backdrop of beliefs, activities, and structures that must have played a significant part in the creation of the emergent ritual systems of class-structured urban societies. The houses of Tetimpa consist of three wattle-and-daub rooms, each built on top of its own individual talud-tablero platform arranged around a patio (Figure 2.2). Detached kitchens use the same modular system (Flannery 2002) but are limited to one or two structures. The smaller, lateral buildings of the tripartite houses were probably used as kitchens and sleeping spaces, but the center room appears to have had a primarily ritual function: it is always the largest; its doorway is substantially wider, providing a view of the inside from the courtyard; and when ritual items, like censers and altars, are found outside the patio, they always occur here (Uruñuela and Plunket 1998:12). The majority of the burials, and in particular the most important interments, were placed under the floor of the central room, although occasionally they were deposited in the other platforms. Ritual was also conducted at the center of the patio, which is at least marked minimally by a large rounded cobble, although more often a formal shrine is present. To illustrate their pattern and variation within the village, as well as their articulation with data from Teotihuacan, we have chosen three aspects of Tetimpa’s domestic ritual and ideology: the talud-tablero platform , the mortuary pattern, and the patio shrines. At Tetimpa, these three elements coexisted as coherent parts of a single system; however, their incorporation into both private commoner and public state contexts at Gabriela Uruñuela and Patricia Plunket 36 Teotihuacan reveals a separate...