Ancient people lived among ruins too. What did they make of them?

Mesoamerican sites offer insights into how communities in the past viewed their own history

30 MAR 202311:00 AM
BYLIZZIE WADE



Ruins of Maya city
For centuries local people made pilgrimages to the former Maya city of Yaxchilán.

JON G. FULLER/VWPICS VIA AP IMAGES

Around 500 C.E., a new government arose in the community now called Río Viejo, near the coast of the Mexican state of Oaxaca. It was once the largest city in the region, but it had shrunk by half and lost its political authority. The new rulers aimed to step into that power vacuum. But they had one problem: the ruins of a complex of ceremonial buildings built by Río Viejo’s last centralized government centuries earlier. 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. How would the new leaders manage the threat it posed?

Arthur 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. “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.

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. Once a site emptied out and started to crumble, archaeologists typically concluded its importance had faded for people in the past. 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.

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. “People in the past had their own past,” says Christina Halperin, an archaeologist at the University of Montreal. By looking at how people interacted with the ruins around them, archaeologists can get a glimpse of how those communities conceived of their own history.

In Europe, archaeologists and historians have long studied the role of ancient monuments such as Stonehenge in the cultures of later people. But in Mesoamerica and other colonized places, European settlers—and archaeologists—“pretended that the people they were colonizing had no real history, and therefore no claims to their land,” says Shannon Dawdy, an anthropologist at the University of Chicago and a discussant in the SAA session. Studying ruins in the past is a way to center Indigenous perspectives about history that researchers previously ignored or denied, Rosado-Ramirez says.

More:
https://www.science.org/content/article/ancient-people-lived-among-ruins-too-what-did-they-make-them