Teotihuacan pottery as evidence for subsistence practices involving maguey sap
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Teotihuacan pottery as evidence for subsistence practices involving maguey sap Ian G. Robertson 1 & M. Oralia Cabrera Cortés 2
Received: 31 October 2015 / Accepted: 6 October 2016 # Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2016
Abstract As in most other pre-industrial cities, urban life at Teotihuacan was closely intertwined with ceramic technology, perhaps nowhere more so than in the realm of foodways. Here, we use two kinds of information derived from ancient pottery—ceramic residues and intra-site sherd distribution patterns—to shed new light on the city’s subsistence economy. We concentrate in particular on the amphora, a type of vessel that may have been used to contain aguamiel and pulque, liquid foodstuffs made of maguey sap. Distributional data distilled from surface collections of the Teotihuacan Mapping Project are informative about patterned variation in the use of these pots at the scale of the entire city. More focused analyses are aimed at chemical characterization of organic residues preserved in ceramic sherds recovered from recent excavations. Part of a broader project aimed at identifying both animal and plant remains, the results of the residue analysis provide the first direct identification of pulque remains in Teotihuacan pottery. Keywords Teotihuacan . Ceramics . Amphora . Pulque . Local spatial analysis . Residue analysis
Introduction Early pre-industrial cities varied widely in population and density, but a challenge faced by all was providing * Ian G. Robertson [email protected]
1
41183 Circle 5 Estates, Calgary, AB T3Z 2T4, Canada
2
School of Human Evolution and Social Change, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287-2402, USA
adequate nourishment to residents, many of whom may have been involved, at least part-time, in occupations that were not directly related to the production of food. How households of ordinary citizens, intermediate elites, and civic authorities dealt with short- and long-term subsistence challenges was (and is) fundamental to the function and sustainability of urban systems, ancient as well as modern. Whatever other attractions urban life may offer residents, cities that are unable to provide reliable and sufficient supplies of food and water cannot retain populations and fail to survive as viable settlements. It is impossible to grasp the dynamics of urban settlements without significant knowledge of the nature of their foodways. In spite of its theoretical importance, the subsistence economy of the ancient Central Mexican city of Te o t i h u a c a n i s a r e l a t i v e l y u n d e r- s t u d i e d f i e l d archeologically, with current understandings relying heavily on analogies with more recent societies documented through ethnographic and ethnohistoric sources. In this paper, we bring new archeological data to bear on the problem. More specifically, we use ceramic remains from Teotihuacan as evidence for the cultivation of the maguey plant at the city and the use of its sap as a food source. Our approach is two-pronged. First, stati
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