Ancient Households of the Americas: Conceptualizing What Households Do

12. Relationships among Households in the Prehispanic Community of Mesitas in San Agustín, Colombia

| 353 IntroductIon In the Alto Magdalena region, in southwestern Colombia, the development of communities at the core of small polities back to around 1000 BC have been traced in regional settlement-pattern surveys. Since that time, groups of households began to cluster together around places that were to become the central mounded funerary sites of the San Agustín chiefdoms during the regional Classic period (AD 1–900). What were the interrelationships among households within such central communities? What kinds of forces shaped and held together these communities while they became the central places of Classic period chiefdoms? This chapter describes the reconstruction of the development of Mesitas, one of the biggest mounded prehispanic communities in the region. Various probable factors in the shaping of the community are evaluated. Resource control, population growth, and craft specialization do not seem to have been important for bringing about change in the sequence at Mesitas. However, the evaluation of these aspects suggests that the development of social differences among households is related to the very early clustering of some households T w e l v e relationships among Households in the Prehispanic community of Mesitas in San Agustín, colombia Víctor González Fernández 354 | Víctor González Fernández around agricultural activities during a period when these activities were not crucial for subsistence. A traditional ritual role that some households held in the community since early times seems to explain in part the shape of the community and the greater differences among households later in the sequence. The term “household” is used in this chapter to denote remains of households as evidenced by clusters of artifacts, features, and architecture. tHe ArcHAeologIcAl Study of tHe MeSItAS coMMunIty This chapter discusses internal dynamics in the long-term development of the prehispanic community of Mesitas from around 1000 BC to AD 900. During this long period the community––located in what is today the rural county of San Agustín, Department of Huila, in the Alto Magdalena region (Figure 12.1) of southwest Colombia––suffered transformations in size and shape but also in the importance of monumental burial mounds and the ritual activities they reflect. Regional settlement-pattern surveys, carried out since 1984 and totaling about 900 square kilometers, have documented the development of a number of similar communities in the Valle de la Plata and in the Isnos and San Agustín areas (Drennan et al. 2000) starting in the Formative 1 period (1000–600 BC). These communities are the first societies to appear in the archaeological record of the Alto Magdalena region and are characterized by the widespread use of ceramic and lithic artifacts, the cultivation of a variety of plants, and a disperse settlement-pattern system featuring small residential households that reflect nuclear families (Blick 1993; Drennan et al. 2000; Jaramillo 1996; Llanos 1988; Quattrin 2001; Sánchez 1991, 2000). A chronology based on numerous radiocarbon dates for a number of ceramic types (Drennan 1993) permits us to divide the prehispanic sequence into five periods of different durations (Figure 12.2). During the regional Classic period, beginning around 1 AD, the communities appear in the survey maps as concentrations of households that cluster together around groups of monumental burial mounds of the San Agustín culture (Drennan 1985; Drennan and Quattrin 1995). The analysis of settlement survey and excavation data from a large number of sites strongly suggests that during Formative times (1000 BC–AD 1) and the regional Classic period (AD 1–900), such communities emerged as the central places of individual chiefdoms or small polities (Drennan and Quattrin 1995), and that the more likely basis of political power of such chiefdoms, at least during the Classic period, was a religious ideology that linked the deceased leaders to supernatural beings in the funerary rituals (Drennan 1995). For understanding various important aspects of the long-term sequence in the region, the reconstruction of the chiefdoms’ development needed to be expanded to cover the social interaction at other levels , including the household and the community. Relationships among Households in the Prehispanic Community of Mesitas | 355 As a way to produce information at the community level and to complement the existing regional- and household-level information on the prehispanic trajectory of the Alto Magdalena, a number of studies1 since 1997 were focused on the Mesitas community, a settlement concentration around the Mesita A, Mesita B, and Mesita C monumental...