THE LOST HISTORY OF TLAXCALLAN

By Lizzie Wade

Excavations of residential areas such as this one have led some archaeologists to conclude that Tlaxcallan had a more equitable society than other Mesoamerican cities.

Archaeologists are investigating a rare and forgotten republic in the mountains of central Mexico.

CLIMBING UP A HILLSIDE away from the heart of Tlaxcala, Mexico, it doesn’t take long to leave behind the well-maintained churches and immaculate plazas of this colonial city. The road grows steep and bumpy, the pavement giving way to cobblestones, and then dirt. Cinderblock houses are replaced by the cornfi elds the local residents plant and tend every summer. Urban life, while still visible in the valley below, seems far away. Just off this dirt road about two dozen people are hard at work unearthing the remains of a remarkable city: Tlaxcallan, the capital of a pre-Columbian state that resisted domination by the powerful Aztec empire and whose leaders were accountable to their people.

On an August afternoon, with the volcano Malinche towering above, archaeologist Lane Fargher with the Mexican research institute Cinvestav strode onto this terrace high above the modern city to check on his team’s progress. Under the terrace’s surface they found stone walls from a 600-year-old

house. It’s a comfortable size, with five or six rooms plus some patio areas—plenty of space for a family of about seven to ten people. “But it’s not spectacular,” Fargher said. “Not by any means a palace.” And that makes what’s next to the house—an enormous two-tiered public plaza, with the remains of low walls and ramps that once allowed people to move between the two levels—highly unusual. Fargher believes the two connected public spaces ensured there was room for everyone in the neighborhood to watch and participate in community rituals. Other than that minimal architecture, the plazas are devoid of artifacts, an indication that they were used for public events and cleaned in between, he said.

In other Mesoamerican cities, this kind of public space would have been in the center of the city, surrounded by palaces, temples, and the sprawling houses of the most elite residents. But in Tlaxcallan, which was occupied from about A.D. 1250 to 1550, this is just one node in a vibrant urban network of more than twenty neighborhood plazas, connected by paved hilltop roads and flanked by the relatively humble homes of the city’s typical citizens.

According to Fargher, this decentralized but carefully designed urban plan is a sign of Tlaxcallan’s unusual form of government. Rather than being ruled by an autocratic king who inherited his power and wealth, Tlaxcallan was governed by a senate of approximately 100 men chosen from the city’s prominent merchants and best warriors. Archaeologists once believed that such pre-modern collective societies did not exist outside of Europe. But armed with a theoretical framework defining the political differences between autocratic and collective states, as well as Spanish chronicles that record undeniably cooperative, and even democratic, features of Tlaxcallan’s government, Fargher and his colleagues are helping determine how to identify and study a collective state using the archaeological record.

FARGHER FIRST GREW INTERESTED in collective societies when he was doing postdoctoral research with Richard Blanton, a Purdue University archaeologist who recently retired. Trained in the 1960s, Blanton was taught that Mesoamerican cultures—like all pre-modern non-European societies—were ruled by despotic kings. In Mesoamerica, signs of all-powerful royalty were particularly clear among the Olmec, who lived along the Gulf Coast between 1200 and 400 B.C. and left behind enormous stone heads archaeologists believe are portraits of rulers, and the Classic Maya, who carefully documented the political intrigues and military clashes of royal dynasties in southern Mexico and parts of Central America between A.D. 250 and 950. Neither of these civilizations occupied Oaxaca, where Blanton did most of his fieldwork. But he still expected to unearth signs of kings, such as monumental palaces, art venerating individual rulers,

The stone walls of one of Tlaxcallan’s centuries-old houses is seen here.

and royal tombs stocked with exotic and expensive goods.

He didn’t find them. “If you open up your eyes a little bit and look around…you’ll see a lot of things that don’t seem to fit that [despotic] pattern very well,” he said. For example, the Zapotec capital of Monte Albán in Oaxaca and the monumental city of Teotihuacan near Mexico City both had pyramids and extensive urban planning, but lacked palaces and artistic representations of kings. The art in these types of societies focused on deities or symbols of rulership— the office, rather than the individual occupying it. In 1996, Blanton co-wrote a seminal article in Current Anthropology proposing a new way to interpret such states. Perhaps they weren’t autocratic at all. Perhaps they were collective, governed by various people or factions working together to provide public goods and services to their citizens. Blanton started to think the conventional wisdom that pre-modern, non-European cultures were despotic was wrong, both factually and ethically. “Why were we saying that only Europeans are somehow the geniuses that invented democracy, and everyone else had to wait around?” he said.

After finishing his work with Blanton, during which he helped analyze the traits of collective states that had been documented ethnographically and historically, Fargher was eager to find the remains of a collective state that he could investigate archaeologically. He ran across Mexican historical documents from the colonial period describing

A fragment of an elaborately designed polychrome vessel.

These bichrome and polychrome pottery sherds were recovered during household excavations.

pre-Columbian Tlaxcallan as a group of four small towns that cooperated politically. “This is perfect,” he remembered thinking. “It was obviously very collective.” But when he arrived in Tlaxcala (the name for the modern city and state) in 2007 for his first survey, he was stunned by the extent of the territory brimming with ceramics. When he used that survey to map the settlement, Fargher saw a continuous urban layout featuring many neighborhood plazas, none of which seemed to be more spectacular or important than any other. It wasn’t four small towns at all, he realized. “It’s a city!”

“Those sixteenth-century sources have been taken at face-value for so long,” said David Carballo, an archaeologist at Boston University who studies collectivity at Teotihuacan. “[Fargher] has made a good case” for a continuous city— and in the process confirmed that archaeology could reveal pieces of Tlaxcallan’s past that colonial history had misinterpreted. “The evidence [of a collective government] from Tlaxcallan is certainly tantalizing,” agreed Michael E. Smith, an archaeologist at Arizona State University who has studied the Aztec empire.

Eventually, Fargher mapped about 1,000 terraces like the one his team excavated this summer. Most seem to hold multiple houses, each large enough for about ten people, and some kind of public space. Fargher estimates that at least 40,000 people lived in Tlaxcallan at its height in the early sixteenth century—making it the second largest city in Mesoamerica after Tenochtitlan, the capital of the Aztec empire, which housed 150,000 people and lay just over the mountains to the west in what is now Mexico City.

The Aztecs and the Tlaxcaltecans shared a language, an ethnicity, and a pantheon of deities, but they were sworn enemies nonetheless. At its height, the Aztec empire controlled almost all of central and southern Mexico. Tlaxcallan was the only place in the region that fended off Aztec domination and remained unconquered. “The Aztecs said they could have conquered Tlaxcalla, but didn’t feel the need. This is the dominant view, but I don’t buy it,” Smith said. He thinks the Aztecs concocted this narrative because they “could not succeed in conquering Tlaxcalla.”

Fargher sees evidence of Tlaxcallan’s independence in its ceramics. “The assemblage of pottery is completely different [from the Aztec empire],” he said. He’s found only a handful of pieces of typical Aztec pottery, which had black designs on an orange background. Tlaxcallan’s ceramics, on the other hand, tend to include at least three colors and much more elaborate designs, some of which represent deities and rituals, but never kings. “We lack representations of individual people,” said Aurelio López Corral, an archaeologist with Mexico’s National Institute of Anthropology and History who is co-directing the excavation with Fargher.

The remnants of a household group consisting of four structures. The square in the foreground was an interior patio.

Germán Ramírez Jiménez (left) excavates a brick inside a structure as Lane Fargher looks on.

“That fits well with what we know about Tlaxcaltecan collectivity.” (López Corral also directs the institute’s Tepeticpac Archaeological Project at Tlaxcallan. Though Fargher’s project is separate from Tepeticpac, the two share their data, and the Tepeticpac team’s discoveries have informed Fargher’s conclusions.)

In the Aztec capital Tenochtitlan, which was ruled by a king who inherited his title and a powerful council of advisors, such colorful and elaborately decorated ceramics are only found in the most elite households, according to Fargher. In Tlaxcallan, everyone had them. Fargher believes this suggests a low degree of economic inequality, a trait he and Blanton detected in many collectively governed states in their historical study. If a state is investing its resources in public goods, it’s “pulling the commoners up,” Blanton said. “You get a narrowing of wealth differences.” According to Blanton and Fargher, limited economic inequality is a common by-product of collective governments in which leaders share power and are accountable to their citizens.

López Corral, however, doesn’t believe life in Tlaxcallan was quite as equitable as Fargher does. He pointed out that there could have been pronounced differences in wealth between the capital city of Tlaxcallan and the state’s hinterlands, which have barely been studied. And he argued that, even in the city, some households have ceramics that look elaborate but were in fact crude copies of the truly fancy objects found in other homes, indicating economic class divisions. Fargher is currently measuring the proportion of elaborately decorated ceramics in different types of households to see if the elites owned more of the highest quality objects, while lower status people could only afford a select few.

But even if further research reveals that fancy ceramics were more or less equally distributed between Tlaxcallan’s different classes, Smith questions the assumption that’s indicative of limited economic inequality as well as the idea that limited inequality indicates a collective government. In the state of Morelos, which was controlled by the Aztecs and governed by local, wealthy lords, Smith found that commoners also owned their share of high-quality goods despite the clear economic distinctions between themselves and the elites. “The presence of fancy ceramics in commoner contexts is a direct measure of the operation of market systems, and only a very indirect measure of inequality,” he said. “That’s not evidence about government.”

ONTHEUPPERLEVEL of the plaza, overlooking the house the archaeologists are excavating, stand the ruins of a Catholic chapel. Today it is barely more than four crumbling stone walls, the roof long gone and the floor overgrown with

grass. But when it was built, in the late 1570s, it marked a political, religious, and social merger with the Spanish that had already transformed Mexico and the world.

While some Tlaxcaltecans were initially wary of the Spanish, who arrived in 1519, most of the city’s leaders welcomed them with open arms, united by their shared desire to defeat the Aztecs. Hernán Cortés and his troops lived under Tlaxcaltecan protection for years, allowing them to prepare for and recover from battle—and giving their priests plenty of time to document the peculiarities of life there.

The Spanish didn’t understand everything they saw, Fargher said, but they recorded Tlaxcallan’s brutal elections—candidates for the senate were beaten by a mob of their neighbors and then isolated in a temple for over a year of training—and the large-scale community bloodletting rituals that the Tlaxcaltecans engaged in. While these practices may seem grisly today, they publicly demonstrated citizens’ commitment to a state that depended on their cooperation, according to Fargher. “These types of collaborative rituals are very important for creating public trust. After all that, you believe that when your neighbor goes home, he’s going to follow the law, he’s going to pay his taxes,” he said.

Tenochtitlan fell to the Spanish and Tlaxcaltecan forces in 1521. While this event is now called the conquest of Mexico, “[the Tlaxcaltecans] didn’t see it as a conquest,” said Fargher. “From their perspective, they defeated the Aztecs.” For hundreds of years afterward, the Tlaxcaltecans received special treatment by the Spanish as compared with other native populations, even receiving honors like royal coats of arms for their families. They also travelled as far south as

The walls of a sixteenth-century Catholic chapel still stand. Central America and as far north as Texas to colonize territory for the Spanish crown. “They were treated very differently than any other indigenous group in Mexico,” he said. Eventually, the city’s people left their hilltop terraces and moved to the new colonial city the Tlaxcaltecans were building under Spanish direction in the valley below. Fargher surmised that Tlaxcallan was completely abandoned around 1550. Within just a few centuries, the pre-Columbian republic had faded from Mexico’s memory. Mexico declared its independence from Spain in 1810 and subsequently, when it began to valorize the fallen Aztec empire, the Tlaxcaltecans were seen as traitors. But dig under the surface of these terraces-turned-cornfields, and the old city is still there, waiting to tell a very different story about Mexico’s past. LIZZIE WADE is a correspondent for Science magazine based in Mexico City.