On Agrarian Landholdings in Post-Conquest Rural Mesoamerica

In 1983, one of my colleagues at the University of Iowa, with no discernible background in archaeology but with some antipathy toward the subdiscipline, asked me a barbed but unintentionally perceptive question. In a public presentation of my survey and excavation data demonstrating the development of large and elegant haciendas in the Teotihuacán Valley during the nineteenth century with only small and poorly appointed rancho-like structures present between the conquest and independence (Charlton 1986; Jones 1978), I had raised the issue of the apparent lack of fit between the archaeological and historical data. I then noted that, if we were to reread the documents with the archaeological data in mind, the clues that were there would become clear; they just had been missed.

"Why were archaeological studies of the Colonial and Republican periods in the eastern Teotihuacán Valley even necessary since the written documents obviously contained all that was needed to understand these periods? What do we learn from the archaeology that the documents do not tell us?" my colleague queried.

In response I patiently pointed out once again that the archaeological materials provided an independent set of data with which to examine the question of hacienda development as one part of an ever-changing pattern of land tenure with multiple players during the post-conquest period. With knowledge of the archaeological materials it was possible to revisit the documents and to reassess them, a reassessment that indicates that the documentary descriptions of the residential structures are coherent with the archaeological materials. It was through historical archaeology, however, that this had been discovered, having previously been missed due to our preconceptions about what early hacienda buildings looked like based on their late-nineteenth-century apogee.

Obviously the use of concepts based on examples of haciendas from limited times and place—postindependence and prerevolutionary Mexico (Brenner and Leighton 1971: 25; Calderón de la Barca 1966) and applied to the interpretation of documents dealing with their purported periods of formation—the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries—and heyday—the end of the seventeenth century and the beginning of the eighteenth century (Carson 1909: 220–5; Chevalier 1963: 313–4)—to guide our research into systematic changes in landholding during post-conquest periods in Mesoamerica had limited our ability to recognize variations present in the documentary data and the extent to which they modified the classic conception of the hacienda (see also articles by Kyle and Nichols, this issue).

Not only had we been working with preconceived notions of what haciendas should look like physically, and had thus avoided the implications of the documentary data when it came to capital investment in buildings, but we had also assumed that virtually all lands had been lost by the indigenous communities and acquired in various and at times devious ways by the haciendas. However, a close reading of the documents indicates that such "estates" were not based solely on direct acquisition of indigenous lands but also developed through connivance with local indigenous elites, who would rent community lands to the haciendas, rentals that in some cases ultimately culminated in the permanent alienation of community lands in the nineteenth century, at the time the indigenous labor force was increasing (Charlton 1986, 1991). To be sure some lands were purchased, usurped, given as mercedes, or taken as tierras baldías. Interspersed among still extant community lands and hacienda holdings were those held as cacicazgos by indios principales (see articles by Sanders and Price; Chance; and Monaghan, Joyce, and Spores, this issue) and as cofradía lands (see articles by MacLeod and Alexander, this issue).

The sequence of post-conquest land tenure development in the Teotihuacán Valley was neither monolithically simplistic nor unilinear in its evolution. Throughout Mesoamerica the details of land tenure changes were highly variable from period to period and area to area after contact and conquest. Whether this variability was due to differences in market growth and the resultant different...