Ranchoapan: The "New Obsidian" City of the Tuxtlas?

The origin of cities is a subject of major interest to geographers, economic historians, and archaeologists. One view of their development stipulates that cities are built on a rural economic base. In other words, the process is from the bottom up, with centers ultimately emerging to provide a variety of goods and services to a population of rural consumers distributed around them. An alternative view is that the development was from the top down. Centers emerged for any num~er of social and political, but once present nascient craft specialists manipulated the economic environment, making the rural countryside increasingly dependent on their goods. This paper utilizes information from the Tuxtla Mountains in southern Veracruz, Meiico, as a basis for looking at early city development. In particular, evidence on obsidian working from the archaeological site of Ranchoapan is applied to evaluate the "countryside first" and "city first" hypotheses. In the Tuxtlas Region it appears that the specialized obsidian working arose from a substratum involving the generalized manufacture of tools by households situated at small sites. The countryside first hypothesis thus has greater explanatory utility in the Tuxtlas than its conceptual alternative. Other crafts such as ceramics production, however, show a better fit to the city first model.The Latin American and Iberian Institute of the University of New Mexic

Final Field Report of the Matacapan Archaeological Project: The 1982 Season

In 1982 we initiated a program of archaeological fieldwork at the site of Matacapan, a large Classic Period urban center in the Tuxtlas Region of the South Gulf Coast of Veracruz, Mexico (see Figure 1). Our working hypothesis was that Matacapan contained an encl ave of merchants from the the city of Teotihuacan in Central Mexico. That research had two principal objectives: (1) to define the structure of the Teotihuacan barrio, that portion of Matacapan where past research indicated that Teotihuacan materials were most highly concentrated; and (2) to establish the context of the barrio within the urban center of Matacapan. The following is a report of that research. Our presentation is divided into several parts. First, we discuss a general model describing Teotihuacan influence throughout Mesoamerica. We then summarize the methods we employed during surface survey and excavation, review the settlement history of the site, as defined by the survey, and discuss the evidence we retrieved from a series of excavations conducted in the Teotihuacan barrio. Next, we present an analysis of the obsidian assemblage, outlining major sources of variability across space and through time. Obsidian, we believe, was an important commodity traded to the Tuxtlas by Teotihuacan. We close with a prospectus for future research