Saltmaking, Craft, and Community at Late Postclassic and Early Colonial San Bartolome Salinas, Mexico

This dissertation investigates the Postclassic and Colonial saltmaking community of San Bartolome Salinas in the northern Basin of Mexico to learn how saltmaking supported this community under the Aztec and Spanish empires and better understand how the places where people work become sites of community building. Salt was a critical resource in pre-Columbian and Colonial Mexico. This research argues that, within the politically channeled demands for salt, the technology and work of saltmaking provided the social conditions needed to create and sustain communities and that these communities, in turn, affected broader political-economic processes. This dissertation addresses the following questions: how did the work of saltmaking provide an economic basis for communities in the northern Basin of Mexico? How did it bring people together in common places and on a consistent basis to share their knowledge, resources, and interests? How did living and working together enhance or challenge the work of individual saltmakers as they met the demands for salt under the Aztec and Spanish regimes? To answer these questions, this work draws on ethnohistoric and archaeological data. Archival sources document the links among the specialized work of saltmaking, group identity, and the political action of communities. Archaeological surveys and excavations reveal how saltmakers founded discrete settlements during the Late Postclassic, how these settlements grew in tandem with the Aztec empire's expansion and the intensification of saltmaking, and how they disbanded during the Early Colonial period. Formal, stylistic, chemical, and mineralogical analyses of saltmaking pottery provide a complementary perspective on the social dimensions of the technology of saltmaking and show how social groups of saltmakers simultaneously existed at the scales of workshop, settlement, and region. Ultimately, by focusing on the specialized work of saltmaking in these communities, this research challenges top-down models of the political economy and shows how the smallest rural communities were in fact consequential sites of economic specialization, technological innovation, and community organization.