Ruins, Traces, and Memory

The active practice of social memory is evident in how Mesoamerican people interacted with materials, entities, and vitalities from past temporalities. While the term “ruins” often references a range of past materials, as we tack between case studies that encompass architectural spaces and things, we use “ruins” for the former and “traces” for the latter, acknowledging that ruins are continuous with a larger rubric of traces, and both are etic concepts deployed by archaeologists that differ from more dynamic Indigenous perceptions (for an explanation of these concepts, see the introduction to this special section Joyce and Rosado-Ramirez Reference Joyce and Rosado-Ramirez2026). As a social process of remembering and forgetting grounded in the materiality of human practice through which people bring the past into their present, social memory is interwoven with relations between people and the world around them (Hendon Reference Hendon2010). Socially constructed memories are performed and inscribed on both objects and architecture at different scales, from ceremonies in public spaces to ritual and habitual practices in houses, through incorporating practices centered on repetitive bodily activity (Connerton Reference Connerton1989:72; Hodder Reference Hodder2012). Engagements with ruins and traces in both public and domestic spaces exhibit myriad affordances, and we provide a case study for each type of context. We recognize the especially potent venue of domestic space and daily practice in remembering and forgetting, with material objects indexing diverse interactions, crucial agents in generating and destabilizing house and local histories (Hendon Reference Hendon2010; Hodder Reference Hodder2012).

Our argument is informed by the relational ontologies found among Native American groups, referred to as the anthropological approach to ontology (Alberti Reference Alberti2016; Joyce and Rosado-Ramirez Reference Joyce and Rosado-Ramirez2026). According to these perspectives, things were understood not just as inert matter but as capable of possessing a life force or vitality that endowed them with the ability to engage with other animate beings (Viveiros de Castro Reference Viveiros de Castro2004; Zedeño Reference Zedeño2009). While we recognize their uniqueness, Mesoamerican relational ontologies resonate with discourses on the social lives of things, where humans and other-than-humans are entangled in a complex web of interactions (Hodder Reference Hodder2012). Humans, other-than-humans, and their respective properties are coconstituted through their various engagements. For example, researchers have proposed that some Mesoamerican public buildings were perceived as agentive members of the community because they were capable of indexing various entities through the interment of ritual deposits and the plethora of activities that took place on them (Brzezinski et al. Reference Brzezinski, Joyce and Barber2017; Joyce and Barber Reference Joyce and Barber2015). Here, we focus on the generative dimensions of ruins and material traces, exploring their potential to (re)articulate in subtle ways with an ever-changing present and promoting acts of remembrance to be socially constitutive.

These threads weave together to inform our understanding of ruins and what they do; how they are both embedded in and generative of social memory (Hendon Reference Hendon2010). Ruins’ vitality affords them a particular potency as they pertain to a past that has not passed but still has action; it percolates into other times by way of present interactions. Histories locked in ruins are made to exist by their positional value based on relations to other objects that actualize history in the present. As such, ruins crystallize specific sensibilities according to their interwovenness with other nodes in social entanglements which attract people, things, memories, and affects around them (Hodder Reference Hodder2012). These nodes are containers, points toward which relations converge and from which they move out to entangle other nodes (Gordillo Reference Gordillo2014). This is how ruins, as nodes of complex entanglements, have constitutive potentials.

Etlatongo

We focus on ruins and traces at the site of Etlatongo, in the Mixteca Alta, in the southern highlands of Mesoamerica (Figure 1). This cultural landscape features a continuous occupation from the earliest villages to a contemporary pueblo, San Mateo Etlatongo (Figure 2).

Figure 1. Location of Etlatongo in Mesoamerica, showing select sites referenced in the text. (Color online)

Figure 2. Calibrated chronology chart for the Nochixtlán Valley and Etlatongo ceramic phases compared with Mesoamerican periods; blurred boundaries between phases indicate their arbitrary nature.

Located close to two rivers’ confluence, Etlatongo grew rapidly in size and complexity during the Cruz B phase. Two projects at Etlatongo, the 1992 Etlatongo Project (ET92) and the Formative Etlatongo Project (FEP) from 2015 to 2017, established that this site extended over 26 ha during the Cruz B phase, sitting atop a reconfigured regional settlement hierarchy. Excavations documented at least one Cruz B area of public space in the site’s southern portion (Figure 3); Mound 1-1 contains the two earliest ballcourts documented in the Mesoamerican highlands (Blomster and Salazar Chávez Reference Blomster and Salazar Chávez2020). A major termination event marked the end of the second ballcourt’s utilization. The ET92 and FEP also recorded higher status Cruz B houses; some villagers participated in extensive interregional interaction, including with the Gulf Olmec. Both projects also exposed substantial Yucuita phase occupations, a time of emerging urbanism at the site, with occupations expanding to encompass parts of a large hill, Cerro Partido, to the north. Recent excavations by the Proyecto Arqueológico Yucunduchi (PAY) focused specifically on the Classic and Postclassic transition on this hill, with monumental architecture centered on a large plaza appearing before the Classic.

Figure 3. Etlatongo with locations of case studies: the Cruz B ballcourts/Mound 1-1, EA-1, and Residence A. The solid white line bounds the Cruz B occupation while the dashed white line indicates the site’s growth during the Late Formative, Classic, and Postclassic occupations. Base image: Google Earth, elaborated by Víctor Salazar Chávez.

Living with Mixtec Ruins and Traces

Recent ethnographies of Indigenous groups’ interactions with the past in the form of “living ruins” emphasizes the great diversity of these responses, although a common thread is ruins’ liminal and intrinsic animacy and the belief they were built by humans from a past or presocial era, who are often conceived of as fundamentally different from modern humans (Erikson and Vapnarsky Reference Erikson, Vapnarsky, Erikson and Vapnarsky2022:3). As materializations in the landscape of a remote past, ruins contribute in myriad ways to political and religious life and a constantly shifting present (Hamann Reference Hamann2008a). For contemporary Santiago Nuyooteco Mixtecs, past people were considered presocial giants who lived in a time of darkness; potent things from distant eras often appear in Mixtec household altars, including strangely shaped rocks (Monaghan Reference Monaghan1995). Ethnohistoric sources document the importance of earlier ruins and the potency of ancient things or traces (Hamann Reference Hamann and Blomster2008b).

An interpretive structure of the long term, fundamental to Mesoamerican societies, extends beyond its extravagant materialization by the Aztecs, who offered thousands of objects from the past (as well as their own archaizing representations) at the Templo Mayor (López Austin and López Luján Reference López Austin and López Luján2009). Mesoamericans conceived of cyclical time, recursive and transformative, with multiple creations and destructions of eras, from the Mixtecs’ First Sunrise to the Aztecs’ Five Suns. Mesoamerican societies connected social memories about the past to social relations and hierarchies in the present by embedding ideas of the sacred covenant, the original debt between humans and divine forces, to the material matrix of daily life and leaders’ interventions into this covenant (Joyce and Barber Reference Joyce and Barber2015).

Mixtecs engaged with a structured and structuring past. Postclassic codical narratives evince the potency of ruined places, illustrating a chiyoyata, or ancient place/foundation, as a platform without a temple atop, interpreted by Hamann (Reference Hamann and Blomster2008b:124) as the still-utilized ruins of past structures, representing physical evidence for the cosmic devastation when the present era’s First Sunrise destroyed a previous creation. Associated with origins, First Sunrises, and dangerous supernatural forces, an architectural chiyo is shown as a platform where ancestors of both past and present ages could be consulted. Objects, often broken, reflected a previous creation and were placed as offerings. Referencing Aztec New Fire ceremonies, with both elite and commoner domestic space hosting rituals where the breakage and disposal of household items reenacted the cosmic destructions of previous Suns, Hamann (Reference Hamann2008a) interprets ruined structures and broken objects as matter out of time and place: tlazolli. A Nahua concept that would have had resonated with contemporaneous Mixtecs who participated in a shared rubric of Postclassic iconography and cosmology, tlazolli encompasses things that lack their original structure, including broken vessels as pot sherds. Reused and reinterpreted, tlazolli, as survivals from a previous creation, crackle with a potent, potentially dangerous but not always undesirable, chthonic energy and animacy (Hamann Reference Hamann2008a).

Thus, pre-Sunrise places pertained to a past that did not pass but continued to have action as liminal spaces where people paid respect to life-death forces and honored their ancestors, with material referents manifesting in myriad forms. In terms of pre-Sunrise objects, in addition to the active creation of tlazolli as things destroyed or banished from the house during the New Fire ceremony, Hamann (Reference Hamann2008a:806) argues that objects simply left in place during this time of transition could passively become tlazolli; both types have agency to act in the world. We argue for similar engagements with past forces and remembrance in Etlatongo’s persistence through time.

Ruins as the Building Blocks of Memory

Ruins at Etlatongo promoted acts of remembrance through the (re)use of building materials from previous structures in new constructions. The FEP documented the selective use of specific kinds of sediments for the construction of building façades and surfaces, primarily the use of bedrock commonly known in the region as “endeque.” The constant use of this material to build structures was significant as buildings in Formative Oaxaca were central to the constitution of communities by bringing together various entities including people, ancestors, other-than-humans, and life-giving forces.

Animacy in the Mixteca appears to be differently conceived and enacted compared with other parts of Oaxaca, where buildings are dedicated and ensouled through offerings and rituals (Joyce and Barber Reference Joyce and Barber2015). In the Mixteca, ritual deposits devoted to animating public buildings are not yet known, suggesting regional nuance compared to their Oaxacan neighbors. We argue that Mixtec ontological particularities may be key in understanding this difference. Ethnographic data from the Mixtecs of Santiago Nuyoo indicates that the sacred force that animates all existence endows everything with vitality, including the earth (Monaghan Reference Monaghan1995:98). Accordingly, contemporary Mixtecs do not enliven structures through dedicatory offerings given that they are perceived as already animated because the building materials come from an alive earth. Nuyoo Mixtecs do, however, make a single offering to the Earth to have permission to build (Monaghan Reference Monaghan and Mock1998:50), and the preparation for building—digging a hole into a hillside—is referred to as cooking a site, transforming it from a wild to a cultural space (Monaghan Reference Monaghan1995:33). Mixtecs enact rituals (prayers, ceremonies) at every construction stage, with a focus on cooking, feeding, and nourishment. Monaghan (Reference Monaghan and Mock1998:49) notes a word for cooking, chiyo, can also mean “altar,” “house site,” or “foundation” (see the preceding text). We interpret this as indicative of a focus on maintaining and potentially transforming vitality rather than enlivening something that was inanimate.

Etlatongo villagers transformed vitality already endowed in objects; the very nature of carving a social landscape from bedrock and constantly reusing it as a building material in new constructions may have afforded them a medium to interact with sacred forces. Beyond obtaining endeque from naturally occurring beds, quarried as soft blocks and left to harden by drying in the sun, they constantly mined past structures. Prior to the construction of the first version of the Cruz B ballcourt, they carved holes into the previous public space to reuse this charged sediment in future constructions; they repeated this activity before building the second ballcourt, carving a large pit into the previous ballcourt to harvest this vibrant material (Figure 4). After the second version of the ballcourt was ritually terminated and partially covered, its materiality was left to ruin but not abandoned, as people visited the space to remove bedrock fills from its façades and excavated additional holes to access its surfaces. Indeed, these materials could have been incorporated into still undocumented post-Cruz B constructions elsewhere at the site.

Figure 4. Photo of the first version of the ballcourt’s alley showing a major pit (Feature 8) dug into it to harvest sediment prior to construction of the second ballcourt. (Color online)

Once the second Cruz B ballcourt was ritually terminated, the area was covered with multiple sediment layers, transforming the space into a prominent mound. The now ruins of the ballcourt, however, remained present in the community’s social memory, as the mound, a chiyoyata, was repurposed for other ceremonies, including funerary practices. From the Middle to Late Formative, the inhabitants buried several adults in this mound; their interment in a communal space may reflect a broader strategy to index a collective identity centered in a strong sense of place. Central to this identity were the memories evoked by the ruins of the ballcourts that became physically present every time a new individual was buried here. Keeping an Indigenous ontology in mind, we interpret the burials as recurrent acts of feeding, or providing sustenance, to maintain the animacy of the mound (Brzezinski et al. Reference Brzezinski, Joyce and Barber2017; Joyce and Barber Reference Joyce and Barber2015). This may indicate that, for precontact Mixtecs, ruins maintained a powerful aura that needed feeding even when they were concealed. By conducting funerals in a communal burial space atop the ruins of previous public space, and participating in subsequent commemorative rites, the community of Etlatongo created a physical and symbolic linkage to the landscape. The mound’s later reuse as the base for a Ramos phase platform attests to its continuing significance in this charged landscape. Due to the colonial-era destruction of the Ramos platform, we cannot determine if it had a temple or other structure atop.

Another important feature that reinforces the previous point is a Las Flores phase offering comprised of significant quantities of burned maize along with fragments of a human skull. While the offering dates to over a millennium after the ballcourts’ utilization, it was located within the fill that covered them; its placement indicates that the mound preserved its powerful vitality within the social memory of the community. The space that was once occupied to play the ballgame, and was later used for burials, continued to be a “bright object” several generations later (Gordillo Reference Gordillo2014:22), this time as the location for an important offering that brought together living people, the remains of ancestors, cosmogonic forces, and the memory of previous occupations, regardless of how it was all remembered. In this way, the mound represented a physical and actual genealogy of Etlatongo’s multiple occupations.

Yucuita Phase Heirlooms, Tlazolli, and Memory in the Extended House

All aspects of Mixtec life invoked some degree of sacrality (Monaghan Reference Monaghan1995), and as loci for domestic actions, rituals, and relations, houses prove foundational to larger sociopolitical processes. Houses inform and materialize social memory, providing contexts for remembering and forgetting a material past that persists through daily practices that both celebrate and dismantle it (see preceding text; Hendon Reference Hendon2010). We recently applied the concept of the “extended house” to sequences of Etlatongo houses spanning over 3,000 years (Vidal Guzmán et al. Reference Vidal Guzmán, Blomster and Chávez2025). Rooted in the Levi-Strauss model of “house society” (Joyce and Gillespie Reference Joyce and Gillespie2000) as a corporate body, constituted by material and immaterial wealth, with membership based on blood or through long-term proximity, we reframe the concept as the extended house to move beyond the frequent economic focus of house society and its structuralist underpinnings. In addition, based on Mixtec ethnohistory and ethnography (Terraciano Reference Terraciano2001), the extended house better aligns with the dynamic ontological orientations that enliven many aspects of quotidian life in Mesoamerican societies, better reflecting Indigenous perspectives on persistence, materiality, and vitality. As an active discourse between past, present, and future members, as well as other-than-humans, the extended house exudes a kind of persistent animacy and a clear physical presence, anchored in the landscape, while accruing different temporal patina. As an ongoing practice, the extended house’s ability to perpetuate itself (Hendon Reference Hendon2010; Vidal Guzmán et al. Reference Vidal Guzmán, Blomster and Chávez2025) manifests in our examples of redeposited and reconceptualized traces. Our second case study encompasses two examples spanning the late Middle Formative to the Terminal Formative / Early Classic.

EA-1: Yucuita Phase Houses

Excavated by the ET92, EA-1 documented a sequence of Yucuita phase houses and associated burials. The continuity and persistence of this extended house’s lineage through time is reflected in engagements with centuries-old traces as well as the corporeal remains of ancestors. The placement on the landscape of the three different iterations (with the earliest referred to here as Occupation 1) of an extended house provides insights as to how Etlatongo people apprehended architectural ruins.

Following what has been called a “corkscrew” pattern for Early Formative Valley of Oaxaca houses (Flannery and Marcus Reference Flannery and Marcus1994:36), when a house was vacated, occupation shifted to land adjacent to it, eventually returning, after generations, above a previous house, in a spiral shape. In this case, EA-1 exposed fragments of three sequential houses, Occupations 1 through 3. The platform or mound-like ruins of an earlier house were ultimately incorporated into the construction of a subsequent house, similar to a Mixtec chiyoyata (see previously mentioned text). Critical to this extended house’s foundation were four burials associated with Occupation 1 (Vidal Guzmán et al. Reference Vidal Guzmán, Blomster and Chávez2025). Burials 1 and 2 were each placed in a small stone and earth chamber atop the actual house floor (Figures 5 and 6). Interpreted as the conjugal ancestral founders of this extended house, their emplacement atop Occupation 1’s living surface precipitated its termination, which was subsequently covered in a thick layer of fill, primarily from a Yucuita phase midden; no Cruz B ceramic sherds were included in this material. An earlier interment (Burial 3) had been deposited in a bell-shaped pit (F7), with an entrance into it from Occupation 1’s floor. During Occupations 2 and 3, access to Occupation 1’s ancestors was maintained by a cylindrical stone and mortar shaft (F4) constructed directly atop F7’s entrance (Figure 6b); F4 conceptually moved through temporal and spatial boundaries, folding time and linking all the individuals emplaced in Occupation 1, particularly the probable extended house founders, Burials 1 and 2, with Occupation 3’s living members (Blomster and Higelin Ponce de León Reference Blomster and Ponce de León2017).

Figure 5. EA-1 showing Burials 1 and 2 on Occupation 1’s surface to the north (viewer’s left), with the stone shaft atop the entrance of F7/Burial 3 exposed to the right. (Color online)

Figure 6. Contexts of figurine heads from EA-1: (a) plan view of Burial 1, with arrow pointing to location of B. 477; (b) lower portion of east profile, with floors relating to Occupations 1 and 3; F7 contains Burial 3, arrow points to approximate location of B. 523-1. F4 connects Occupations 1, 2, and 3.

Four Cruz B figurine heads, traces from 500 to 600 years earlier, were associated with Burials 1 and 3 and exuded chronal vitality, transmitted between extended house agents. Burial 1’s chamber, made of small unworked stones and topped by a series of large lintels (Figure 6a), is oriented 7° to 8° west of north—similar to Etlatongo’s Cruz B ballcourts and reflecting the continuum between domestic and public spaces. Wedged into the stones forming the chamber’s southeast corner, placed face down and pointing north, was B. 477, a worn Cruz B figurine head (Figures 6a and 7a). An additional Cruz B figurine head (B. 470), unusual for the prominent mustache, comes from materials recovered just above Burial 1 (Figure 7b). Two additional Cruz B figurine heads come from Burial 3 in F7, the bell-shaped pit (Figure 6b): a hollow figurine head fragment (B. 523-1) directly atop the Yucuita phase vessel offerings and a solid Cruz B figurine head (B. 523-2) lay among the three bodies (Figure 8).

Figure 7. Figurines associated with Burial 1, EA-1: (a) B. 477; (b) B. 470. (Color online)

Figure 8. Figurines associated with F7/Burial 3: (a) B. 523-2; (b) B. 523-1. (Color online)

Residence A: Late Yucuita / Early Ramos Occupations

Rather than an isolated incident, further evidence across time and space for the incorporation of Cruz B figurine heads into later contexts was documented by excavations at a house (Residence A) occupied continuously from the Late Formative to at least the Early Classic. Located atop Cerro Partido, Residence A is only 30 m directly south of the Classic to Postclassic ballcourt associated with Mound System 4-1 (see Figure 3). The PAY primarily exposed features at Residence A dating to the transition from the Ramos to Las Flores phase, with three carbon dates’ midpoints ranging from 148 to 391 cal AD. The Residence A excavations uncovered two earlier occupations, one from the Ramos phase and the earlier from the late Yucuita to Early Ramos phase transition. A bell-shaped pit (F7) contained materials around 100–200 years later than those from EA-1’s Occupation 1, with no earlier ceramic sherds (Figure 9). This feature probably represents the earliest occupation of an extended house.

Figure 9. Plan view of Residence A excavations, with locations of figurines B. 243 (in F7) and B. 263. (Color online)

Both the ET92 and PAY demonstrated the absence of a Cruz B occupation on Cerro Partido. However, included in F7 was the lower half of a Cruz B figurine head (B.243), with diagnostic elongated head and projecting, trapezoidal mouth (Figure 10a). Additionally, a complete Cruz B head (B. 263) was found nearby, but in construction fill disturbed by recent plowing (Figure 10b); it displays the elongated head shape typical of the most generic style of Cruz B figurines.

Figure 10. Figurines from Residence A: (a) B. 243; (b) B. 263. (Color online)