7Inside and Outside: Residential Burial at Formative Period Chalcatzingo, Mexico

At Chalcatzingo, Mexico, an early regional center, the common location for burials was under house floors, but some high-status burials occurred in more open spaces. These latter were also residential burials, interred within the landed domain of social units. Although both “inside” and “outside” burials drew on claims of ancestral continuity, it is important to explore the differences they entailed. Investigating how repeated mortuary practices at Chalcatzingo evoked referential networks—endowing those practices with intelligibility and enabling identity formation over time—can broaden understandings of residential burial practices and bridge various classificatory separations imposed by archaeologists, including those between public and private mortuary spaces. [mortuary practices, citation, social houses, complex society, Mesoamerica] A on residential burial conforms to a recent trend in mortuary analyses to examine the “landscape of the dead” (Parker Pearson 1999:124), part of the growing interest since the 1990s in the anthropology of place (Low and Lawrence-Zúñiga 2003:1). Treating residential burial, typically subfloor intermentswithin a domicile, as a separate category of mortuary practice presumes that certain conditions and implications derive from burial location in direct spatial juxtaposition with the habitation activities of living individuals. The potential for making interpretations of social organization and political economy, as well as religion and ritual, is therefore substantial. This potential is augmented by cross-cultural studies of residential burial practices archaeologically and ethnographically. Nevertheless, isolating residential burial as a classificatory category introduces or reifies certain parameters in archaeological assumptions and inferences. Both the potential and the limitations of this categorizing warrant further elucidation. The analysis of residential burials as a class of mortuary practices is both an update to an earlier perspective in mortuary archaeology—characterized as the “SaxeBinford approach” of the 1970s (Brown 1995; Chapman and Randsborg 1981)—and a shift to more contemporary interests—the “ancestral-descendant approach” (Rakita and Buikstra 2005:8; see also McAnany 1995, 1998; McAnany et al. 1999:129) concerned with issues of identity and social memory (e.g., Chesson 2001). Binford (1971) had proposed that systematic differences in disposal of the dead cross-culturally can be correlated with subsistence behaviors and by extension with sociopolitical complexity (Brown 1995:10). Similarly, Saxe’s (1970) well-known “Hypothesis 8” linked the presence of formal disposal areas of the dead to territoriality. However, many of these earlier studies dealt with cemeteries distant from the living areas of foraging populations, and the spatial patterning within cemeteries was somewhat neglected (Chapman and Randsborg 1981:14; Goldstein 1981:57). Nevertheless, similar ideas should apply to the territoriality claimed by agricultural societies in putting their dead within or near their residences. As Parker Pearson observed, “the fixing of the dead in the land is a social and political act which ensures access and rights over natural resources” (Parker Pearson 1999:141). The inferential shift to the ancestral-descendant approach is reflected in a greater ARCHEOLOGICAL PAPERS OF THE AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGICAL ASSOCIATION, Vol. 20, Issue 1, pp. 98–120, ISSN 1551-823X, online ISSN 1551-8248. C © 2011 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/j.1551-8248.2011.01030.x. Residential Burial at Formative Period Chalcatzingo 99 concern for “mortuary space” and the location of the dead “relative to landscape and construction and location relative to other decedents” (Ashmore and Geller 2005:84; see also Silverman and Small 2002). The important difference with residential burial, of course, is the close proximity of the dead to the most intimate spaces of the living, in many cases with minimal physical barriers separating the two. The cohabitation of the living and dead in the same space implies the continued role playing of the dead, usually as ancestors (rather than as ghosts), in the social practices that forge the identities, statuses, and property rights of the living. Residential burials suggest property claims to the land where the residences are situated and to the structures themselves, with rights grounded in appeals to precedence strengthened by the physical presence of predecessors. Sequential burials in the same location manifest the strategic linking of identities of the living inhabitants to the deceased over time (Ashmore and Geller 2005:84; Gillespie 2002; McAnany 1995). Another important characteristic of residential burial is that interment within the walls of a private residence is less visible than burial in the open spaces of cemeteries or public structures. The dead are thus assumed to become entwined in salient social memories of burial acts within the social field of a household. The knowledge of the placement of the dead shared by, even limited to, household members would contribute to the maintenance of their specific group identity in contrast with parallel identities of other households (Hendon 2000:47–49;Mizoguchi 1993:231). Thus Joyce observed that “burial practices within residential compounds provide the ground against which nonresidential burial practices were distinguished” (Joyce 1999:41). Her analysis of burial practices from Formative period Mesoamerican sites contrasted the marking and emergence of personal and group identities between corporate group-oriented residential burial and the wider social contexts informed by burials within public architecture, notably platform mounds (Joyce 1999:41). The development of the latter out of the former coincided with the rise of complex societies in the Middle Formative period (see Barrett 1990 for a similar British case study). In sum, substantial inferences derived from residential burial practices have proven useful in archaeological interpretations, but these implications are also being challenged. I use the case study of Formative period Chalcatzingo, Mexico, to comment on some of these embedded assumptions and to explore other ways of treating residential burial, moving beyond categories of mortuary space to examine the shaping of social and material relationships iterated through mortuary practices. By investigating repeated practices that evoke referential networks endowing those practices with intelligibility and allowing for the reproduction of memory, my aim is to broaden understandings of residential burial and to bridge the classificatory distinctions between public and private mortuary spaces. In so doing, I also challenge the classification of “mortuary space” as distinct from other types of spaces (see also Joyce, chapter 3, this volume).