Conclusions

This concluding chapter seeks to tie the individual contributions to this volume into a coherent whole. Drawing on points raised in the various chapters, it summarizes critical data and provides a synthesis of the current research presented in constituent chapters that highlight spatial, temporal, and cultural diversity in ancient west Mexico. The author offers comments and observations on all chapters, highlighting common threads and lines of thought or evidence that bind the individual chapters together into a complete dialogue. It emphasizes the significance of the evidence from the west—presented in the volume—in crafting a more complex and nuanced understanding of both the west in particular and Mesoamerica as a whole. The chapter concludes by offering thoughts and suggestions for how future research may enhance archaeological understanding of this vast and understudied region.

Weaving Our Life

This chapter examines the dramatic social transformations that characterized the Postclassic period (AD 900–1521) in the Aztatlán region of far west Mexico. In particular, the author proposes that these changes relate to the onset of a new and non-local political-religious solar and rain complex focused upon the Mesoamerican solar deity Xochipilli and the Flower World. This complex was centered in the Pacific-coastal Aztatlán heartland where cotton spinning, weaving, and finished textiles played a central economic and ideological role in newly burgeoning macroregional economic networks. The chapter critically examines evidence of diverse weaving technologies and related artifacts, as well as complementary comparative ethnoarchaeological data from adjoining regions. It concludes that with the arrival of the Flower World complex in Postclassic Aztatlán, the act of spinning and weaving—whether for household consumption, tribute, or gift and market exchange—was not simply a daily domestic task of women. Instead, these crucial activities positioned women as active participants in the symbolic and literal creation of life itself by enacting cosmological order, ensuring the creation and daily transit of the sun across the sky, and facilitating the arrival of the ancestral clouds and rain to Aztatlán communities.

The Early Postclassic Aztatlán Colonization of the Pacific Coast of Jalisco

The focus of this chapter is a recently discovered archaeological site, Arroyo Piedras Azules, located on the northern Pacific coast of Jalisco, Mexico. Excavated materials provide considerable information about the colonization of this area by Aztatlán groups in the Early Postclassic period, as well as the nature of the expansion of the Aztatlán phenomenon in West Mexico. Based on the data thus far obtained from the site, the authors offer five significant conclusions regarding the development and the spread of the Aztatlán archaeological culture in West Mexico, concerning the timing of development, subsistence strategies of Pacific coastal groups, the nature of Aztatlán expansion, specialized production, and links between the Arroyo Piedras Azules site to the Mixteca-Puebla area.

Architectural Discourse and Sociocultural Structure at Los Guachimontones, Jalisco

Despite the importance of Los Guachimontones within the larger Teuchitlán tradition of ancient west Mexico, little is known of its socio-political organization and underlying sociocultural structure. Departing from a dual–processual framework and utilizing spatial analysis, this chapter analyzes variability in the spatial syntax, formal characteristics, and distribution of architectural groups in the nuclear core and Loma Alta sectors of the site. Variability, in terms of differing degrees of openness and/or connectivity, suggests distinct functions of discrete areas within the site, and demonstrates how the socio–structural organization of the groups that occupied Los Guachimontones was negotiated, reflected, and reified in the built environment. Results of a comparison of architecture in these site sectors suggests that discrete physical spaces were utilized in diverse manners as architectural discourse to communicate distinct messages to different social groups, even when the built environment of these sectors presents a high degree of formal homogeneity and contains the same architectonic elements. This chapter thus adds a new analytic axis and alternate framework that provides insight on both architectural variability at Los Guachimontones and the social structures that gave rise to these architectonic configurations.

Constructing the Pre-Hispanic Landscape in the Santiago Bayacora Basin, Durango

This chapter presents a critical review of the settlement patterns recognized to date in relation to the occupation of Pre-Hispanic groups in the central–west region of the modern state of Durango in northwestern Mexico. It also proposes visualizing settlement patterns in the region through the perspective of landscape archaeology, in which distribution over a given landscape may be viewed as part of a society’s power strategies. To that end, it employs spatial analysis to critically examine a series of settlements that pertain to the Chalchihuites culture between AD 550–1250 in the Santiago Bayacora River Basin. Results suggest that Chalchihuites groups may have shared a system of knowledge–power with the rest of Mesoamerica, but that their physical landscape was distinct, and therefore the ways in which these groups appropriated the landscape differed. The chapter concludes by suggesting that the logic that dominates our interpretations of Mesoamerican settlements needs rethinking in northwestern Mexico.