Monument 65, thus far the largest sculpture discovered from the almost completely destroyed site of Kaminaljuyu, has much to tell us about the enigma of this ancient city. Carvings on two sides of the flat tablet resonate with the most sacred concepts of the “Miraflores” people of Late Preclassic Kaminaljuyu. Partly because of the highly problematical picture further field archaeology can provide of Kaminaljuyu—a picture already problematical—but also because of the inherent value of a comparative orientation, I employ an explicitly comparative approach in order to speculate about the ideology encoded on the monument. According to such a comparative perspective, the depictions identify Kaminaljuyu rulers as conventional world- or cosmos-creators and sustainers, functions realized by the sacrifices of royal proxy victims or “twins” of the ruler. The captive scenes, shown on Side A, represent the duality of rulership expressed in a twinship of first, immortal “priest” or administrator—the ruler in his religious role—sacrificing a victim representing a first ideal man or “king,” and, by virtue of this, representing the ever-dying or magical fertility of the polity. On Side B, the creation seems to be manifested or metaphorized by the axis mundi.

Ceramic and radiometric data from the three seasons of survey and excavations, 1995–1997, conducted in the coastal districts of Santa Rosa and Jutiapa in southeastern Guatemala are used to construct a chronological sequence for this previously little-known 1000-km2 region. Patterns of local ceramic manufacture and interregional trade are identified through the use of type-variety classification methods coupled with neutron-activation analysis. The resulting 3000-year-long uninterrupted chronological sequence, beginning in the Early Preclassic, shows patterns of continuity in manufacturing techniques, as well as evolving styles and shifting networks of interregional interactions that span much of the Pacific Coast and the highlands and lowlands of southeastern Mesoamerica, from the Gulf of Mexico to Copan, Honduras. These interactions indicate the southeastern Pacific Coast participated in exchange systems that brought together different ethnic groups whose cultural manifestations included Maya ceramics in the Preclassic and Classic periods, and ceramic, architectural, and sculptural evidence suggesting the southeastern Pacific Coast was actively involved in the Cotzumalguapa Nuclear Zone that stretched to the west into Escuintla and to the east into Pacific El Salvador during the Classic period.

The Classic-period households of the Ceren village in the southeastern periphery of the Maya area provisioned themselves by one of three different economies. (1) Household members produced many items for intrahousehold use, including architecture, food, and some artifacts, with no input from outside. (2) Each household produced some commodity in excess of what they needed for their internal consumption, by means of part-time specialization, and they used this for exchange with other households within the village or nearby. This is termed the horizontal or village economy. The commodities included craft items such as groundstone tools and painted gourds as well as agricultural specialities such as agave for fiber. (3) Each household obtained distant exotic items, such as obsidian tools, jade axes, and polychrome serving ceramics, by exchanging their household surplus commodities in elite centers. In this paper, this is called the vertical economy. The choices available to commoner households in negotiating economic transactions in various elite centers gave them economic power and could have the effect of constraining the elite in setting exchange equivalencies. This is quite different from the view from the top of the pyramid which generally depicts commoners as the exploited class at the bottom of a powerful political and economic hierarchy.

Las construcciones que forman parte del asentamiento prehispánico y colonial de Tecoh se encuentran ubicadas parcialmente en el municipio de Sitilpech y también dentro de la hacienda Yokdzonot (Figura 1). En el Atlas Arqueológico de Yucatán (Garza Tarragona y Kurjack 1980:122) aparece identificado con el número 21 dentro de la Hoja 16Q-d(8) y se encuadra dentro de los asentamientos de Rango IV de su tipología. Este grupo viene definido de la siguiente forma: “se caracterizan por una gran variedad. En ellos se encuentran desde conjuntos aislados de dos o tres plataformas hasta asentamientos de amplia extensión y numerosas estructuras, pero con muy poca arquitectura monumental” (Garza Tarragona y Kurjack 1980:37).

This issue's special section is the first of a two-part series on recent research conducted at the Aztec city-state of Otumba and the neighboring polities of Tepeapulco to the east and Teotihuacan to the west. Otumba is an extremely important site for the archaeological study of the Late Aztec period because, as Thomas H. Charlton, Deborah L. Nichols, and Cynthia L. Otis Charlton point out in their introduction, it is one of the few places in the Valley of Mexico where late pre-Columbian remains are not obscured by post-Hispanic occupation. Research directed by Charlton at Otumba began in the early 1960s and continued in the late 1980s under the direction of Charlton and Nichols, followed by laboratory and technical analyses of the archaeological materials as well as ecological and ethnohistoric studies. Charlton and his collaborators have amassed a prodigious amount of data, which allows them to address a wide range of issues revolving around the general question of the processes involved in the origins and development of the city-state in central Mexico during the Early and Middle Postclassic periods. They do so within a theoretical context that engages the two most prevalent general models proposed to account for the rise of Postclassic city-states in central Mexico.

Otumba is one of a few Late Aztec-period city-states in the Basin of Mexico whose central city or town is not obscured by post-Conquest occupation. Long-term research there began in the early 1960s, with more recent fieldwork between 1987 and 1989, and has been complemented by intensive laboratory and technical analyses that are still underway. Traditional typological analyses have been aided by neutron activation analyses providing strong evidence of economic linkages between the Otumba city-state and raw material sources, as well as evidence of tribute and market distribution channels for finished products within and outside the Otumba city-state.

Although textiles were important commodities in the Aztec political economy, it is widely held that textile production did not involve organized workshops. In the late 1960s, Charlton (1971, 1981) found a concentration of large spindle whorls at the Aztec city-state capital of Otumba that he interpreted as remains of a maguey-fiber workshop. A subsequent survey and surface collections made by the Otumba Project discovered additional concentrations of spindle whorls associated with fiber-processing tools and manufacturing debris that provide substantial evidence for organized maguey-fiber workshops at Otumba. An unusually large sample of more than 1,600 spindle whorls was recovered in surface collections from sites in the Aztec city-state of Otumba where both small cotton whorls and large maguey whorls occurred in low densities associated with concentrations of domestic pottery (and in some cases house-mound remnants). In the Aztec capital town of Otumba, maguey spindle whorls were also present in localized dense concentrations within a restricted area of the site. These concentrations also included molds for making spindle whorls, “wasters,” a high density of heavily worn obsidian blades and basalt scrapers used in fiber production, and obsidian scrapers. Based on the quantities and types of associated artifacts we argue that these concentrations represent remains of Late Aztec maguey-fiber workshops that were household based. The workshops processed maguey fibers and made maguey spindle whorls in a range of sizes for spinning thin and thick threads and cordage. Secondary craft activities in one workshop included making cotton spindle whorls and some lapidary and figurine manufacturing. Maguey-fiber processing, spinning, and, presumably, weaving also took place in rural villages, but evidence of organized workshops has only been found at the urban center. The growth of the maguey-fiber industry at Otumba during the Late Postclassic period was part of a broader economic trend of production intensification in the northeastern Basin of Mexico that included xerophytic plant cultivation and craft specialization.

The study of changes in the social organization of maize preparation provides an important opportunity to examine the integration of households into larger systems of social and economic relationships. Spatial analysis of the distribution of manos and metates at Otumba demonstrates a change in maize production from individual, household based to a more specialized system. It is hypothesized that scarcity of firewood for cooking was a causal factor for this change, but more evidence is needed to test this idea.

Obsidian and ceramic artifacts from the Otumba project were analyzed by instrumental neutron-activation analysis. Sources for the obsidian were determined by comparison to a databank of Central Mexican source analyses. Ceramic sources were determined by comparison to a series of reference groups from the Basin of Mexico and by comparison with raw material samples. Obsidian from the lapidary workshop (Operation 11) comes predominantly from the Otumba and Pachuca sources. There is also an unknown compositional profile present among the artifacts. This profile may derive from a not-yet-sampled flow within one of several nearby obsidian-source areas, such as Otumba or Paredon. The majority of Otumba ceramics fall into a large group derived from clays of the Teotihuacan-valley alluvium. Aztec II Black-on-Orange and red-ware samples come from other sources in the eastern basin. Ceramics from sites along the trade route leading northeast toward Tulancingo include figurines derived from Otumba, figurines probably made locally near Tepeapulco and Tulancingo, and long-handle censers probably made in the latter two locations.

This article explores the complex, multidimensional nature of Aztec social organization and, specifically, the concept of “eliteness,” as it applies to the Aztecs. I discuss both why we can speak of Aztec “elites” and how we can monitor them using ceramic data. I argue it is possible to distinguish elites archaeologically by identifying the ceramic attributes and variables that best reflect feasting behavior, one of the primary practices the Aztecs used to socially construct and reproduce unequal relations of power, wealth, and estate. Ceramics thus served as one of the primary media through which politically and socially charged “communication” occurred among the Aztecs. I define and evaluate six ceramic indices of eliteness using Late Aztec ceramic data (ca. a.d. 1350–1520) from Teotihuacan, an Aztec period altepetl (city-state) located in the northeastern Basin of Mexico. I use the most effective eliteness indices to interpret the intrasite spatial patterning of elite residences at Late Aztec Teotihuacan and infer some observations about the social and political organization of the altepetl.