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At a time if someone is very estimable, wealthy--who always watches his wealth, his riches, or his rulership here on earth, it was said: "he hath reached his season of the green maize ear, of his maize tassel; he is much esteemed, he is praised." Of one such as this it is said that he has achieved his merit [Sahagún 1950-1969 (1578-1580):Book 2:235].
The Teuchitlan tradition was a regional political system of central importance in the Late Formative and Classic periods of western Mexico. But recent discussions of the nature of its political system have begun to flounder in a debate over whether the tradition was a chiefdom (Mountjoy 1998) or a state (Weigand and Beekman 1998). This is not to say that more sophisticated approaches are not being used. Phil C. Weigand has noted a fundamental change in emphasis within central Jalisco, the core of the tradition, from shaft-tomb burials to monumental surface architecture between the Late Formative and Classic periods (Weigand 1985). I have preferred to describe this as a shift from factional competition through mortuary ritual toward a more corporate system in which factions were actively suppressed by the emerging political apparatus (Beekman 2000). I have also noted that the core area established boundary centers with this transition, further underlining this process of consolidation (Beekman 1996).
What is missing here is an understanding of what political authority meant to the people who submitted to it--that is, a more emic approach. Archaeological fieldwork in Mesoamerica from the 1950s through the 1970s tended to focus on reconstructing political complexity through the application of universalist social typologies and methods that were believed to crosscut different culture areas. But research over the past few decades, strongly colored by the growing corpus of hieroglyphic and iconographic material, has tended to emphasize specifically Mesoamerican concepts of rulership (e.g., Houston and Stuart 1996; Schele and Freidel 1990; Schele and Miller 1986; Townsend 1979). The recent research on the Teuchitlan tradition has begun to fulfill the requirements of the earlier approach in that scholars have documented differential access to wealth (Galván 1991; Ramos and López 1996), multi-tiered settlement hierarchies (Ohnersorgen and Varien 1996; Weigand 1985), and monumental architecture (Weigand 1996); sketched a rise-and-fall trajectory (Weigand 1979, 1985); suggested the use...