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Beyond the Temples Turning their backs on spectacular monuments, archaeologists are studying ordinary households to uncover the daily rhythms of long-lost cities

TAPACHULA, —Kneeling in the Guatemalan coast to take advantage of a uncover something that past archaeologists cacao tree–shaded ruins of a 2000-year- better climate for growing maize. Over at least never expected to fi nd in the region’s ancient old house, Rebecca Mendelsohn carefully the next 800 years, Izapa became the major settlements: neighborhoods. scrapes soil off the fractured edge of a red economic and cultural hub along a trade route Studying pyramids and deciphering ceramic plate and into a plastic bag. The linking Olmec cities of the Gulf Coast and cryptic writing systems have helped archae- graduate student from the Uni- Maya strongholds in Central America. ologists piece together the political, cultural, versity at Albany, State University of New Why Izapa fl owered and who its inhab- and religious characteristics of many York (SUNY), will bring hundreds of such itants were are riddles that Mendelsohn hopes Mesoamerican civilizations. But ceremonial samples to a lab in the mountain city of to solve from the bottom up. By excavating architecture and official records may not San Cristóbal de las Casas, where she will in several places around Izapa’s periphery, reveal how societies actually work. “Tell analyze them for traces of the food that the she aims to compare the jobs, possessions, me what the normal people were doing,” mysterious residents of Izapa, one of Meso- diet, and economic well-being of the city’s Mendelsohn says. “That won’t be on your america’s earliest cities, prepared and ate. residents, and how those patterns changed monuments.” Mapping lost neighborhoods Izapa, 10 kilometers outside of the modern over time. And by plotting that information can help archaeologists see an ancient city city of in the region on a map that she and her adviser, Robert through the eyes of its residents, rather of state, arose around 850 B.C.E., Rosenswig, created by surveying the site than through its leaders. What Mendelsohn

possibly as people moved north from the with an airborne laser, Mendelsohn hopes to and others are discovering through their HOLLAND/GETTYBJORN IMAGES CREDIT:

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Heart of the city. Mexico’s had distinct Some archaeologists believe Teotihuacan’s neighborhoods outside its majestic downtown. economic mosaic offers a clue to its political structure. Based on 8 years of excavations But many other settlements in the ancient in the center of an economically diverse world don’t fi t the high-density, modern sense neighborhood dubbed Teopancazco, Linda of a city. The Maya capitals and Copán, Manzanilla, an archaeologist at the National for example, were long thought to consist Autonomous University of Mexico in Mexico of unoccupied temples and administrative City, has proposed that Teotihuacan operated buildings surrounded by a haphazard as a collection of “house societies,” in which smattering of villages spread across vast neighborhood leaders commanded the labor swaths of landscape. But as archaeologists and loyalty of nearby lower status residents. studied sprawling ancient cities in Africa This relationship resembled the feudal system and in Southeast Asia, including Cambodia’s of medieval Europe, she explains. Angkor Wat, they developed a concept of If it holds up under future excavations, low-density urbanism, which defi nes a city the house society model may explain not by size or density, but by what Smith calls how Teotihuacan first formed, Robertson its “urban function”: the economic, political, says. “Compared to most other cities, or religious effect it has on a hinterland, or what is today known as a metropolitan area. A city, in other words, casts a spell over an entire region. This idea raised a tantalizing possibility for Mayanists and other Mesoamerican archaeologists working at sites other than Teotihuacan: What if the landscape around a ceremonial center were not wasteland, but hinterland? What if the clusters of house- holds weren’t independent, self-governing villages, but rather interconnected nodes in a complex network of neighborhoods— one that was just as urban as high-density Teotihuacan?

Hidden patterns At Izapa, Mendelsohn is looking for signs of bottom-up approach to places like Izapa those neighborhoods. On a map, she points are cities that look like nothing found in the to a cluster of small structures near a larger modern world. mound far to the southeast of downtown. These are the households she’s excavating in The new urbanism the cacao fi eld. Another of her fi eld teams is Cities, and therefore neighborhoods, were excavating a mound a few hundred meters once considered a rarity in ancient Meso- to the west. Mendelsohn hopes to discern, america. Scholars have long defi ned cities 2000 years later, whether these were sepa- as places with large, densely packed popula- rate neighborhoods. tions, intertwined economic activities—trades Preliminary findings hint at a major such as tailors, jewelers, soldiers, or man- lifestyle gap. The ceramics and grinding ual laborers—and, often, a splash of cultural stones found in the cacao-shaded dwellings Neighborhood watch. Clusters of houses are being diversity, says Michael Smith, an archaeolo- suggest an abode of commoners. The pits at excavated far from Izapa’s city center. gist at Arizona State University, Tempe. “That the mound to the west have yielded valuable defi nition makes sense because it fi ts our pre- jade beads, imported obsidian, and high- [Teotihuacan] was there very fast”—faster conceptions of what cities are like today.” status pottery. Quite simply, Mendelsohn than the city’s birthrate could account for. Teotihuacan, which lies 50 kilometers says, it “seems like rich people were here.” That means that people must have been northeast of and was occupied That may not mean, however, that all their migrating to the new city in droves. “I from roughly 100 B.C.E. to 650 C.E., was neighbors were well-to-do. In Teotihuacan, for imagine that sometimes what you had were one of the few Mesoamerican cities that example, neighborhoods were economically whole towns pulling up stakes, moving into conformed to those expectations. Centered mixed, says Ian Robertson, an archaeologist Teotihuacan, and reproducing their own on the imposing Pyramids of the Sun and who studied Teotihuacan at Stanford social structure in the new urban center,” he the Moon, it was laid out on a grid, and its University in California. Elite residences, proposes. As time went on, those uprooted more than 100,000 residents, many living in temples, and administrative buildings were towns likely morphed into neighborhoods. apartment buildings, were crammed into just scattered throughout the ancient city, and the Marilyn Masson, an archaeologist at the

CREDIT: LIZZIE WADE LIZZIE CREDIT: 20 square kilometers. poor lived alongside the wealthy. University at Albany, SUNY, sees a similar

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But farther out—and especially in low- density areas beyond the city’s defensive wall—the buildings tend to be oriented toward complexes of elite residences and smaller ritual buildings. According to Masson, those secondary centers probably played a role in knitting the surrounding households into neighborhood communities, and perhaps served as landmarks to help residents navigate the city.

Ethnic diversity Back in the caca