Mobility and Migration in Ancient Mesoamerican Cities
Résumé
In this volume we gather an international group of scholars to present case studies on population movement in ancient Mesoamerica, structured within the general framework of urbanization, and the opposing process of de-urbanization. Large nucleated settlements of the past have too often been studied for specific moments in their development - emergence, apogee, or collapse – and as static phenomena defined by their internal demographics. However, like most if not all pre-industrial urban centers, ancient Mesoamerican cities formed and maintained themselves through immigration more than in situ demographic growth. During their lifetime, their relations with hinterlands and foreign societies incorporated diverse forms of population mobility, and they finally dissolved through emigration, with either gradual dispersals or massive migrations to new settlements. Urban development and transformation thus had much to do with population movement, and we must now acknowledge this in Mesoamerican archaeology and take up the challenge of identifying these processes. While the proposed collection of case studies contributes to current research on past urban contexts, shapes and dynamics, it also aims to open the way to a new archaeology of population movement in ancient Mesoamerica.
We consider frequent and embedded mobility alongside more crisis-induced migrations. For our purposes, the concept of mobility incorporates regular, in some cases cyclical, movements by multi-residence households, customary exogamic marriage, long distance trade, ceremonial circuits, and pilgrimages, many of which are associated with routine socio-economic and religious activities in urban contexts. Migration on the other hand is proposed here to be a more or less definitive move related to a break or disruption in those routines.