We’ve previously talked about the
amount of burned daub we found at Calixtlahuaca, and how it was probably
related to the intentional destruction of houses there. Based on experimental
work, it’s unlikely to get that much of a house burning at a high enough
temperature to fire the clay of the walls without an intentional effort (Karabowicz 2009). However, that still leaves several different
options for why the houses at Calixtlahuaca burned, and who did the burning.
Our first thought was that the
houses had been burned during the Aztec conquest of the site. The standard
Mesoamerican glyph for the conquest of a town is a drawing of a burning temple.
Later, when we realized that some of the burned structures were from excavations
that also included Colonial period figurines, I thought that they might have
been burned when the residents of Calixtlahuaca were moved into Toluca as part
of the process of congregación. People were sometimes required to burn their
houses behind them when they were moved, to prevent them from going back to
their old village. Another option is that people regularly burned their own houses,
either through accidental kitchen fires, or intentionally, as a way to control
insects and rodents.
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| The depiction of the Aztec conquest of Toluca in the Codex Mendoza, showing the burning-temple glyph |
A couple of ways of separating these
hypotheses are to look at the timing of the burning, and the degree of primary
refuse left behind (Cameron and Tomka 1993; Inomata and Webb 2003). First, do all of the burned
structures date to a single phase? If they do, this would suggest that they
were burned as part of an event affecting the whole site, such as the Aztec
conquest or the Spanish congregación policy. In fact, the three most severely burned
structures at the site (in Units 315, 316, and 317) each dates to a different
phase, which means that house burning was an ongoing activity throughout the
site’s history. Second, how cleaned out were the houses before they burned? If
burning is a planned, scheduled activity (such as for pest control, or congregación),
people have time to remove all of their things from the house beforehand and
there won’t be many artifacts left on the floor. In contrast, if the burning is
unexpected (such as for conquest, or an accidental fire), the contents of the
house are likely to burn with it and many of them may not be salvageable after
the fire. One of the things we noticed during excavation at Calixtlahuaca was
how few artifacts were found on floors, or in other primary contexts. Compared
to many other projects, we found few whole or reconstructable pots (only 32),
and only one of those, Vessel 2, was found on a floor, rather than in a burial
or broken in a trash pit. Taken together, these two lines of evidence would suggest
intentional, regular, planning burning, likely by the occupants of the houses themselves.
 |
| Vessel 2, a locally-produced version of Aztec Orangeware, found on the floor of the house in Unit 309 |
References:
Cameron, Catherine M. and Steve A. Tomka
(editors)
1993 Abandonment of
Settlement and Regions: Ethnoarchaeological and Archaeological Approaches.
Cambridge University Press, New York.
Inomata, Takeshi and
Ronald W. Webb
2003 Archaeological Studies of Abandonment in Middle America. . In The
Archaeology of Settlement Abandonment in Middle America, edited by T.
Inomata and R. W. Webb, pp. 1-12. Foundations in Archaeological Inquiry, J. M.
Skibo, general editor. The University of Utah Press, Salt Lake City.
Karabowicz, Amy
2009 Wattle and Daub Architecture at Calixtlahuaca, Mexico:
Experimental Analyses and a Comparative Study with Europe. Senior Honors Thesis, Barrett Honor's College, Arizona State
University, Tempe, AZ.
