Households and Political Transformation: Daily Life During State Formation at Tilcajete, Oaxaca, Mexico

Abstract

I examine a dramatic sociopolitical transformation, the emergence of the earliest state in the western hemisphere. The emergence of state-level societies is a political phenomenon that fundamentally changed the way leaders and subjects interact and the way governments extract and redistribute resources. In Mesoamerica, several polities of unprecedented size emerged by the Late Formative period (300-100 B.C.). Previous research has focused on leaders and their strategies of control and conquest. Rulers, however, are dependent on the population. My dissertation examines how this new political system, the state, developed and how ordinary households participated in this transformation and reacted to the consequences. Leaders play an important role in political change but states could not exist without the population that supports them. My research examines the diversity of this population and the many ways people have participated in social and political change throughout human history.

Households are good places to look for the seeds of large-scale change and for people’s responses. Houses are the locus of family life and are an ideal place to study the decisions and strategies used by people in the past. They ways people divide labor, share responsibilities, and provide for their children and dependents on a daily basis shape the structure of society. Household members interact with and depend on other families, neighborhoods, and communities to survive. The hierarchical scaling of social organization makes household strategies for their own survival and reproduction important to understanding social organization at more encompassing scales like the neighborhood, community, and region. Household members have to be flexible, adjusting plans, activities, and alliances to suit the changing political, economic, and social climate. Their decisions can influence the direction of societal changes, making certain changes possible while limiting others.

My research questions address two sets if questions about the relationship between households and state formation: (1) How were families and households organized in the period before state formation? Did their organization create favorable conditions for the emergence of this new political system? (2) Following the rise of state-level government, did the new demands (e.g., taxes paid in labor and goods) and opportunities (e.g., access to more extensive trade networks) for households result in any changes to household make-up, organization, and activities?

The results from my excavations and subsequent analyses, demonstrate that house construction and layout changed dramatically at the same time that the community’s civic-ceremonial buildings were being redesigned and rebuilt. Along with changes to house layout, I have observed changes in access to resources, the symbols represented on pottery, and burial practices. These findings indicate that changes to household organization were dramatic and far-reaching. Rather than merely reacting to political changes, household members modified their composition, configuration, subsistence and other productive strategies.

My dissertation research addresses questions about how people participate in political transformations and subsequently react to this systemic change. I investigate this topic archaeologically through excavations of houses, the centers of daily activities and family life. Through my research, I explore how people from different backgrounds were able to influence their political system and how the consequences of systemic change affected their daily lives, privileging some and marginalizing others.