Persistent Technology, Changing Social Relations: Urban Architecture at Teotihuacan

Architecture provides a significant medium through which people negotiate their social relations. Construction quality is determined on the basis of series of technical choices from the procurement of resources, combining of materials, and techniques of production. The architectural structure is the cumulative aesthetic and practical product of complex interactions between material condition, technical choices, skills, and knowledge of producers, and social relations in which construction process is embedded. Using cases from Teotihuacan including the ceremonial precinct and surrounding apartment compounds, I will identify temporal and spatial variability in architectural technology and explore social implications of technological persistence and change.

Tatsuya Murakami received his Ph.D. from Arizona State University and is currently an assistant professor at the Department of Anthropology of Tulane University. His research focuses on the materiality of power relations among different social segments as expressed in labor and material resources in Central Mexico. His research is especially concerned with developing a set of concepts and methodologies to discern the complex social landscapes of power based on practice-based and multidisciplinary approaches, including the application of archaeometric methods. He has conducted construction experiments, materials analysis of lime plaster and cut stone blocks, and an analysis of lapidary objects (especially greenstone) at Teotihuacan. He is currently directing an archaeological project at the Formative site of Tlalancaleca, Puebla, Mexico, which is investigating sociopolitical dynamics in a pre-state society and broader regional processes leading to state formation at Teotihuacan.