![]() ![]() In a session he and Joyce are organizing at this week’s conference of the Society for American Archaeology (SAA) in Portland, Oregon, researchers will share new findings and ideas about ruins’ roles in ancient Mesoamerican communities. But a growing number are now recognizing that for people in precolonial Mesoamerica, “ruins, ancient objects, and ancestors were active parts of their communities,” says Roberto Rosado-Ramirez, an archaeologist at Northwestern University. Once a site emptied out and started to crumble, archaeologists typically concluded its importance had faded for people in the past. Previous generations of researchers tended to treat the massive ruins that dot Mexico and Central America as “inconsequential” in the lives of the people who lived nearby in later periods, Joyce says. “These new rulers may have been trying to assert control over this thing that by its very existence would have questioned the inevitability and legitimacy of their power,” Joyce says. How would the new leaders manage the threat it posed?Īrthur Joyce, an archaeologist at the University of Colorado (CU), Boulder, has found they did so by putting their stamp on the ruins with a massive offering and portraits of themselves, set on top of the eroded surface of the old buildings. When that government collapsed, the temples and plazas had been ritually burned and left to decay, a reminder that hierarchical rulership had already failed once in Río Viejo. But they had one problem: the ruins of a complex of ceremonial buildings built by Río Viejo’s last centralized government centuries earlier. The new rulers aimed to step into that power vacuum. It was once the largest city in the region, but it had shrunk by half and lost its political authority. Around 500 C.E., a new government arose in the community now called Río Viejo, near the coast of the Mexican state of Oaxaca.
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