Chapter Six - The Early Postclassic Period Transformation of West Mexico 900–1200 CE

Summary

Two recent edited volumes, The Postclassic Mesoamerican World (Smith and Berdan 2003c) and Twin Tollans: Chichén Itzá, Tula and the Epiclassic to Early Postclassic Mesoamerican World (Kowalski and Kristian-Graham 2011), constitute unique syntheses for a considerable segment of Mesoamerica during the Postclassic period, the former undertaken within a world-systems perspective employing Chase-Dunn and Hall’s nested networks approach (1997). Taken together, the state of knowledge on this period is succinctly brought to the foreground and conceptually updated.

The objective of the present chapter is to fill the geographical void of Central and West Mexico in the Early Postclassic period present in the aforementioned volumes. The reasons for this void are twofold: first, pertaining to the subject of interregional contacts sustained by Tula with the rest of Mesoamerica. The century-old debate on the nature of Tula’s relationship with the distant Maya site of Chichen Itza has dominated attention (Figure 6.1), a complex issue that has seen considerable advances (e.g., Bey and Ringle 2011; Kowalski 2011; Smith 2011b), while Tula’s ties elsewhere have received scant scrutiny (Healan and Cobean 2009). Second, the principal development in western Mesoamerica during this time, the Aztatlan network, has not been the subject of detailed empirical examination to determine evidence for interregional links that Aztatlan may have established during the Early Postclassic period (900–1200 CE) (Mountjoy 1990: 543). Both of these issues are examined within this chapter.