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The Archaeology of Commoner Social Memories and Legitimizing Histories

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Abstract

In recent years, archaeologists have productively exploited historical documents and monuments as evidence for social memory and the selective writing, rewriting, and silencing of history for instrumental purposes. However, for a variety of theoretical and methodological reasons, less consideration has been given to such powerful uses of the past in the past by commoners in domestic contexts. In this article, we present a case study that demonstrates how the household remains of commoners can be used as rich, direct sources of evidence for the conscious manipulation and deployment of social memory. Our case study focuses on multiple lines of evidence from burials interred under a household patio at the pre-Aztec and Aztec site of Xaltocan between C.E. 1290 and 1520. Archaeological burial data, osteological analyses, a fine-grained chronology created with Bayesian statistical modeling of radiocarbon dates, and ancient DNA analyses are combined to reconstruct the household genealogical history inscribed by residents. This history—perhaps motivated by power and claims to land—entailed selective remembering and forgetting and the rewriting of the past of life on this house mound and was enabled by material mnemonics in the form of buried bones. Interestingly, this inscribed, instrumental genealogical history may have been structured by some of the same principles and representational canons that shaped pre-Hispanic pictorial genealogies used as evidence in colonial legal disputes.

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Acknowledgements

This research was conducted with the permission of Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History. The González-Sánchez family graciously allowed excavations on their property, and the project benefited from the support of the Xaltocan Cultural Center, the Xaltocan delegados, and the Gran Señorío de Xaltocan Historical Society. The ancient DNA research was conducted by Jaime Mata-Míguez (JMM) and Deborah Bolnick (DB) at the University of Texas at Austin, as part of a larger collaborative project with archaeologists Enrique Rodríguez-Alegría (ERA) and Lisa Overholtzer (LO). We would like to thank Elizabeth Brumfiel, Rosemary Joyce, Cynthia Robin, Mary Weismantel, Jaime Mata-Míguez, Enrique Rodríguez-Alegría, and Travis Bruce for their feedback and support throughout various stages of the project that led to this publication. We would also like to thank the four anonymous reviewers whose clear and constructive suggestions significantly improved the clarity of our argument. All remaining errors are our own.

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  1. Department of Anthropology, McGill University, 7th floor, Leacock Building, 855 Sherbrooke Street West, Montreal, QC, H3A 2T7, Canada

    Lisa Overholtzer

  2. Department of Anthropology and Population Research Center, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX, 78712, USA

    Deborah A. Bolnick

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  1. Lisa Overholtzer
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Correspondence to Lisa Overholtzer.

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Funding

This project was funded by two Dissertation Fieldwork Grants from the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research (JMM #8773 and LO #7797), two Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grants from the National Science Foundation (JMM #1412501 and LO #0968551), a Senior Research Grant from the National Science Foundation (ERA #0612131), a Young Explorer Grant from the National Geographic Society (LO #8500–08), a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship (LO), two Grants-in-Aid-of-Research from the Sigma Xi Foundation (JMM and LO), a Fellowship from the Pedro Barrié de la Maza Foundation (JMM), a Graduate Research Grant from Northwestern University (LO), a Research Grant from the LeCron Foster and Friends of Anthropology fund (LO), and the University of Texas at Austin (JMM and DB).

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The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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Overholtzer, L., Bolnick, D.A. The Archaeology of Commoner Social Memories and Legitimizing Histories. J Archaeol Method Theory 24, 50–89 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10816-017-9322-6

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