Aztec period houses and terraces at Calixtlahuaca: The changing morphology of a Mesoamerican hilltop urban center

Abstract

Calixtlahuaca, a Middle-Late Postclassic site in the Toluca Valley of central Mexico, was occupied ca. A.D. 1100-1530. Our excavations reveal some of the processes involved in the creation, functions, and decay of a large hilltop urban center. At its height, the majority of the site's surface (264 ha) was covered with residential-agricultural terraces supported by a complex water management system. House construction techniques included the use of adobe brick, wattle-and-daub, and stone pavements. Our fieldwork contributes to a growing body of research on hilltop political capitals in Mesoamerica. Using a refined chronology, we illuminate the processes by which people constructed the residential zones of this ancient hilltop city.

Village and field abandonment in post-Conquest Tlaxcala: A geoarchaeological perspective

“…The most important geoarchaeological contribution is to bring out the importance of terrace collapse. In this respect the Tlaxcalan evidence points the same way as recent studies in the Basins of Mexico (Có rdova, 1997;Frederick, 1996) and Patzcuaro (Fisher et al, 2003, but see Metcalfe et al, 2007), the Toluca Valley (Smith et al, 2013), and the Mixteca Alta (Pé rez Rodríguez et al, 2011;Rincó n Mautner, 1999), all more densely populated than the Mezquital or Bajío that figured prominently in the debates of the 1990s.…”

“…By virtue of the arguments developed above for sites such as Concepció n, it is likely attributable to the wave of early Colonial abandonments. Similar sandy overburdens are known in the Teotihuacan valley (McClung de Tapia et al, 2003), at Olopa (Có rdova, 1997Có rdova and Parsons, 1997), and Calixtlahuaca (Smith et al, 2013). At the two latter sites they are explicitly identified as part of Postclassic and younger terrace fills.…”

Sexual dimorphism among Mesoamerican turkeys: A key for understanding past husbandry

“…Calixtlahuaca (Cal) is a Postclassic city located in the Toluca valley, considered from various evidence to be the regional capital of Matlazinco, the most powerful city of the valley until the Aztec Conquest in 1478 (Smith et al, 2013;Tomaszewski and Smith, 2011). The site was occupied during the Middle and Late Postclassic (Huster and Smith, 2015).…”

Matlatzinco Before the Aztecs: José García Payón and the Sculptural Corpus of Calixtlahuaca

“…Recent archaeology, in the form of ceramic analysis and carbon 14 dating, however, has debunked the basis of García Payón's argument. According to Smith and colleagues (2013), there is no evidence of Toltec presence or influence at Calixtlahuaca. No Toltec ceramics were found at the site and radiocarbon readings suggest the establishment of the settlement in about a.d. 1100 (Smith et al 2013; Michael Smith, personal communication 2007), in other words, near the end of Tollan's existence (see also Sugiura 2005).…”