On the edge of empire? Settlement changes in Chacalapan, southern Veracruz, Mexico, during the Classic and Postclassic periods

This research on the area of Chacalapan in southern Veracruz, Mexico, addresses the social and political development of the region during the Classic and Postclassic periods (AD 300–1520). One of the primary objectives was to study the relations between Chacalapan and the Mexica Empire during Late Postclassic times (AD 1400–1520), and to define the extent of imperial control in these borderlands. Although Early Colonial period documents attest to native population of the area at the time of Spanish contact ca. 1522, no appreciable Postclassic occupation was discovered archaeologically. There is, however, ample evidence for extensive occupation during the earlier Classic period which implies a regional population decrease during the Postclassic.; Chapter 1 presents the rationale for this research including overviews of frontier archaeology in Mesoamerica and prior archaeological research in the Gulf Coast of Mexico. Chapter 2 outlines the research methods and techniques used. Chapters 3 through 7 present the corpus of data utilized in this study: Chapter 3 provides the early colonial ethnohistoric data, most notably from archives in Mexico City and Seville, that were found concerning the town of Chacalapan; Chapter 4 describes the excavations at Chacalapan; and Chapter 5 places these data within the larger Mesoamerican context. Chapter 6 discusses broader aspects of archaeology, such as mortuary practices and obsidian procurement, within a regional framework. Chapter 7 presents the results of specialist studies including paleobotany, soil micromorphology, and geophysical survey. Chapter 8 is an overview of the results of the project, with a discussion of the limitations of the methods used and the implications of these results for the archaeology of southern Veracruz. Simply put, this area during the Classic period was integrated into a hierarchical settlement system, with formal plaza groups that represented civic and ceremonial centers built and used by ruling elites. It is within the Late Classic period that scholars are most likely to elucidate those factors that occasioned the subsequent, apparent large-scale depopulation that this project has documented for the later Postclassic period.