Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Anthropological Perspectives on
Mortuary Rituals
Meredith S. Chesson, Editor
Contributions by
Meredith S. Chesson
Sandra E. Hollimon
Rosemary A. Joyce
Ian Kuijt
Susan Kus
Lynn M. Meskell
Victor Raharijaona
Anne Schiller
2001
Archeological Papers of the
American Anthropological Association Number 10
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Rosemary A. Joyce
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Burying the Dead at Tlatilco: Social Memory
and Social Identities
Rosemary A. Joyce
University of California, Berkeley
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Rosemary A. Joyce
Figure 2.1. Burials from Tlatilco Temporada IV. Orientation of head indicated by circle.
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Rosemary A. Joyce
Figure 2.2. Tlatilco Temporada IV burials overlaid with rectangles representing typical local house foundation size, based on
excavations at Coapexco. Only burials oriented east of north (west of south) included. Possible early phase of village?
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Figure 2.3. Tlatilco Temporada IV burials overlaid with rectangles representing typical local house foundation size, based on
excavations at Coapexco. Only burials oriented north-south, east-west, used to align rectangles. Ovals mark extramural burials.
All other burials from possible earlier phase of village.
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Rosemary A. Joyce
vanced by our traditional normative and detached accounts of life and death.
Burying the Dead at Tlatilco
Burial 14A was one of five female burials forming a
single cluster. Aged between seventeen and nineteen
years, this individual exhibited the rarer tabular oblique
cranial deformation, found in only seven burials at the
site. The individual lacked any grave goods.2
The teenaged girl in burial 164 also was buried without any imperishable objects. Unlike the young woman
in Burial 14A, her skull had been formed into the tabular erect shape more common among men and women at
Tlatilco. 3
The person in Burial 29, like Burial 164 the only
female in her cluster, died at the same young age. Beginning in infancy by shaping her head, her family
had labored to ensure that she approximated their ideal
of beauty, and at her young death, she had an elegantly
swept-back forehead. Reflecting the wealth of her
House and her access through it to the choicest foods,
her teeth already showed signs of decay. Surviving
members of her family placed with her a single bowl
and figurine, the most general offerings left with burials at Tlatilco, as well as a grinding stone and chipped
stone scraper. 4
The loss of the nineteen-year-old girl in burial 27
was felt deeply by her House. In life she had been intended to solidify ties between her House and another
from the opposite moiety of Tlatilco. Her mortuary ceremonies were elaborated by her House to establish her
firmly in the memory of both groups. She was dressed in
her fanciest costume, with pendants of jade, shell, and
iron ore from the borders of Guatemala, the Gulf Coast,
and the Oaxaca Valley, the distant ends of the world
known to her House. Multiple bowls, bottles, and figurines were left in her grave as a sign of respect and of
confidence that her death would not represent a permanent setback for her House.5
If all went well, the young woman of burial 27 might
one day be remembered as an important ancestor, like
one of the two teenaged girls whose skulls were gathered with those of two other, older women in a pit in the
courtyard of a neighboring house. The older of these two
girls was accompanied in this relocation by the mandible
of her six-month-old child, whose birth had ended her
life and in turn, through her death, his own.6
Childbirth constituted a major risk for the younger
adult women of the settlement, who often went to the
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Rosemary A. Joyce
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Rosemary A. Joyce
women of Tlatilco was presented in 1994 at the conference Gender in Ancient America, organized by Cheryl
Claassen, at Appalachian State University, Boone, North
Carolina. I appreciate the positive reception given the
presentation by the participants at that conference. Finally, I thank Meredith Chesson and Ian Kuijt for the
invitation to participate in the AAA session in 1997 that
led to the present volume, and the discussants in that
session, Susan Kus, Ken George, and Tom Dillehay, for
the inspiration provided by their comments.
Notes
1. While archaeologists recorded other burials in other
seasons of work at Tlatilco, those from season IV are the
only ones for which full professional osteological examinations have been completed and published. In addition to
the eighty-six burials identified as female, this sample
in cluded seventy-seven burials identified as male (36 percent) and forty-nine (23 percent) of uncertain sex, the majority of these (40 burials, 19 percent) infants and juveniles
(age estimates through 14 years old). (Percentages do not
add up to 100 because of rounding.)
2. When we label the practice of shaping the skull deformation, we project an assessment of value that is almost certainly the opposite of that internal to the society,
where a particular appearance was valued so highly that
steps were taken to produce it in living bodies. The forms
of cranial modification recorded at Tlatilcotabular erect
and tabular obliquehave mainly been treated as evidence
for the existence of different cultural or ethnic groups. Thus,
linking Burial 14A not to the other burials in the local group,
but to a segment of the wider population recovered at the
site follows the traditional practice of treating the burial
population as representative of a uniform cultural group.
The shaping of the skull itself was most likely accomplished
through the use of a cradle board in infancy, but the existence of multiple modes of head shaping strongly suggests
we should consider this a practice of beautification, not simply an unexpected by-product of a technology of child care.
3. While by age she was a member of the same social
cohort as the woman in Burial 14A, these two teenagers
would have presented quite distinct physical appearance.
The public evaluation of individual difference in appearance is one of the forces that I suggest led to the use of
practices of beautification evident in the burials, as well as
in figurines from the site (Joyce In press a).
4. The dental caries recorded for this burial, and others at the site, may be primarily attributable to the consumption of corn-based foods high in sticky carbohydrates
that provide a medium for bacterial growth. For the popu-
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