The Mesoamerican Urban Tradition

William T. Sanders; David Webster

American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 90, No. 3. (Sep., 1988), pp. 521-546.

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WILLIAMT . SANDERS
DAVIDWEBSTER
Pennsylvania State University

The Mesoamerican Urban Tradition

The process of preindustrial urbanization is an important archeological issue because of its as-
sociation with the emergence of early complex societies. There is considerable debate among Meso-
american archeologists concerning both the evolutionary nature of the process itselfand the conjg-
urationr and functions of the centers that might be called "urban." Part of this debate is caused
by the variation that clearly exists among such Mesoamerican centers, as well as the distinctive
nature of urbanization in the culture area, which dzffers in important respectsjom similarpro-
cesses in the Old World. Components of a model proposed by Richard Fox are used to set the
Mesoamerican urban tradition into a wider, multilineal evolutionary framework. Copan, Teoti-
huacan, Tenochtitlan, and other Mesoamerican centers provide comparative examples.

T HE EMERGENCE OF THE CITY AS A COMMUNITY TYPE has long intrigued social sci-
entists, historians, sociologists, economists, geographers, and anthropologists. Ar-
cheologists in particular have been concerned with the evolution of the earliest cities, and
we are only now beginning to understand the factors and processes that led to the "urban
revolution." Part of the problem is definitional-the inability to agree about what con-
stitutes a city as a special community type (see, for example, Wheatley 1972)-while
another difficulty is the variety present even in those settlements that we would all char-
acterize as urban centers. Mesoamerican archeologists have generally been divided in
their conceptions of the attributes of cities, and the processes associated with their emer-
gence, growth, and structures (Marcus 1983; Sanders and Santley 1983; Blanton 1981).
We believe that the Mesoamerican urban tradition was a highly distinctive one compared
to similar Old World traditions, and that Mesoamerican archeology has much to offer to
the comparative study of urbanism.
In this article we will discuss the problem of the nature of the Mesoamerican city in the
context of a general model advanced by Richard Fox in his book Urban Anthropology (1977).
The model postulates and defines a wide variety of urban forms, several of which, we think,
are extremely pertinent to the Mesoamerican urban tradition. Fox's approach is to identify a
series of differentiated functions that define urban places and that distinguish different classes
of them in a manner useful for cross-cultural comparisons. Joyce Marcus (1983) includes a
very brief discussion of the implications of Fox's scheme, which she obviously finds attractive.
We agree with many of her conclusions, and believe that a more complete examination of the
Fox model is warranted. In our own consideration of this model we suggest some alterations
and refinements, as well as some linkages with evolutionary and ecological theory, illustrating
our points with pertinent examples of Mesoamerican urban centers such as C o p k , Tenoch-
titlan, Teotihuacan, and others (Figure 1).

Definitions of the City

In our own research we have relied heavily on a standard sociological definition of the
city, best expressed by Louis Wirth (1938). Wirth defines cities as having three major

WILLIAMT. SANDERSis Evan Pugh Professor, Department ofAnthropology, Pennsylvania State University, University Park,
P A 16802. DAVID WEBSTERis Professor, Department of Anthropology, Pennsylvania State University.

52 1
 Figure 1
Locations of archeological sites mentioned in text: (1) Copdn, (2) Tikal, (3) Kaminaljuyu,
(4) Xicalango, (5) Cholula, (6) Cozumel, (7) Tulum, (8) Naco, (9) Teotihuacan, (10) Tenoch-
titlan, (11) Tula, (12) Monte Alban.

features: (1) large population size, (2) dense population nucleation, and (3) high internal
heterogeneity. Secondary and derivative attributes are secularism, anonymity, and ver-
tical and spatial mobility. Heterogeneity refers to a great range of lifestyles produced by
differences in political power, wealth, group affiliation, and the variable economic sta-
tuses and roles of the population. As archeologists, we are attracted to this definition
because it is inherently quantitative, and hence usable in reconstructing important fea-
tures of prehistoric centers. Archeologists can develop procedures to measure size, den-
sity, and heterogeneity, and although Wirth himself provides no magic numbers marking
levels of urbanism, such demographic and cultural measures may be used to generate
fruitful comparative frameworks for assessing archeological data. Secularism, anonym-
ity, and mobility are, of course, more difficult features to deal with, although the first is
to a certain degree manageable within the limits of archeological methods and tech-
niques.
Weber (1958:54-55, as referred to by Fox [1977:23]) also defines the city but restricts
the definition even more than does Wirth, using the term only for relatively. large,
- dense,
heterogeneous communities with significant economic-and particularly commercial-
functions. He would exclude those centers that functioned primarily as centers ofpolitical
administration. In fact, his definition of a city is a community with its own government
and with relative political autonomy from the state, including the right to establish its
own laws and even maintain a professional army. I t is evident that Weber's concept de-
rives from the historical tradition of Western urbanization and thus his concept is not
directly
.. . appropriate for investigating prehistoric, and especially Mesoamerican, urban
traditions.
Sjoberg (1960) has criticized the use ofjust such ethnocentric sociological definitions
as inapplicable to preindustrial cities, since such cities are usually rather small in size,
Sanders and Webster] THEMESOAMERICAN
URBA.V
TRADITIO.~ 523

lack secularity, and often have strong political and ideological functions, and since many
of them emerged in non-Western cultural settings. He suggests a broader use of the term
"city" and sees a close association of preindustrial cities with the process of state forma-
tion, emphasizing cities as centers of ancient states. He also considers literacy to be an
attribute of urbanization, thus excluding from the definition centers that many archeol-
ogists and anthropologists would identify as urban communities, such as Cuzco and
Chan Chan in the Central Andes and the medieval and contemporary native cities of
West Africa.
The Fox Model
Fox (1977) provides new insights concerning the nature of urbanization and new def-
initions of the city. While we do not agree with all of the details of his analysis, we feel
that his work has particular applicability for studying the Mesoamerican urban tradition.
His model has the advantage of being a product of a distinctly anthropological perspec-
tive, although still strongly oriented toward an Old World set of urban patterns. Selected
portions of it, however, have great promise in the analysis of the genesis and growth of
ancient Mesoamerican cities.
Fox makes an initial and fundamental distinction between small homogeneous socie-
ties-what anthropologists have traditionally referred to as "primitive" societies-and
large heterogeneous ones. Such large heterogeneous societies need to centralize a variety
of activities, and a city is defined simply as a central place where such activities are con-
centrated. These activities may be purely ceremonial or ritual. Frequently, however, rit-
ual activities at such centers are conducted by specialists who reside permanently at the
locus of centralization, and the leaders in ritual also play important political roles. At a
more complex level such places may have secondary economic functions.
What Fox calls a city is basically what geographers would refer to as a central place.
The emergence of cities, then, is basically the process of aggregation that produces central
places: communities more functionally specialized or complex than rural communities.
Because of its breadth, his definition encompasses a variety of centers serving very dif-
ferent functions. The quantitative values that Wirth considers essential to the definition
of a city are peripheral to Fox's model. Furthermore, Fox feels that the variability in func-
tion in urban forms as he defines them clearly relates to the nature of the total society in
which the city is embedded; most particularly, cities occur in the wider context of what
he calls the state, as a general societal type.
Societies on all levels, of course, exhibit some kinds of behavior that are "centralizing"
in the broadest sense of the word. Even hunters and gatherers may have central places
where periodic activities of a ritual, political, or economic nature take place, often in
highly structured and predictable ways. These simple forms of the centralizing process
are not addressed by Fox; he is interested only in central places that are occupied on a
permanent basis by people whose activities are differentiated in function from those of
the bulk of the population, and who exercise unusual amounts of ritual, political, or eco-
nomic decision making.
Fox presents a functional typology of urban centers, although he recognizes that there
are important variations within each type. Three of his types-regal-ritual, administrative,
and mercantile cities-are found in preindustrial societies and are thus of interest to us for
the purposes of this discussion. Colonial and industrial cities, the other two forms, appear
only with the Industrial Revolution and are not considered here.
Regal-Ritual Cities
All preindustrial cities have ideological functions. What particularly characterizes the
regal-ritual city is that ideological functions are extremely obtrusive. As Fox puts it:
The term regal-ritual cities signifies the essential quality of these settlements. Their primary
urban role is ideological. This cultural role emerges from the prestige and status of the state ruler
or the cohesive power of state religion. All cities have this ideological cultural role in varying
524 AMERICAN
A NTHROPOLOGIST [go, 1988

degrees. What makes the regal-ritual urban type distinctive is that its existence depends almost
entirely on ideological functions. [1977:41]
Despite the emphasis here upon ritual and symbolic aspects of culture, it is clear from
his presentation that Fox sees the centralizing process on the level of the regal-ritual cen-
ter as primarily political in nature. What makes the ideological/symbolic dimension so
obtrusive is the mode of governance, in which control of ideology and ritual display are
essential. Wheatley summarizes the process this way:
[The great ceremonial centers] functioned as instruments for the dissemination through all levels
of society of beliefs which, in turn, enabled the wielders of political power to justify their goals
in terms of the basic values of that society, and to present the realization of class-directed aims
as the implementation of collectively desirable policies. [1971:305]
Rappaport (1971:35) makes this point more succinctly with specific regard to religious
ideology: "Sanctity helps to keep subsystems in their places."
The permanent populatjon of regal-ritual cities consists of the political leaders of the
state, their immediate families, and, to a degree, what one might call administrative per-
sonnel. We say to a degree because although some forms of centralized administration
occur in all complex societies, the differentiation of functionally specific administrators
may not be present. We would also add that the establishments of rulers frequently may
be the focal points of courts, in the sense that all manner of people, from the very humble
to the extremely exalted, may gravitate to them to enjoy the advantages of proximity to
the ruler. Since so much of the anthropological literature on early state development has
stressed the emergence of formal bureaucracies, it is worth remembering that the less
formal court dimensions of centralization may also be extremely important.
Leaders almost always have both political and religious functions, although in some
cases such roles may be strictly differentiated. Some economic specialists may be attached
to the elite household, but regal-ritual cities have very limited productive and distributive
functions in a substantive sense, although much economic decision making may be cen-
tralized. Such centers are primarily places for consumption of food, raw materials, and
craft products from the outlying countryside. Because their functions are primarily lim-
ited to political leadership and the ritual/symbolic expression of it, the permanent pop-
ulations of ritual-regal centers tend to be small, ranging from a few hundred to a few
thousand. T h e architectural forms found a t the centers are often identical to those found
in the rural countryside, only writ large, and much of urban architecture consists of the
residences of the rulers and their immediate clients. Structures include actual residences,
storage facilities (often for ritual paraphernalia), shrines and temples where rituals take
place, and, in some cases, barracks-like quarters for unmarried young men. T h e house-
hold of the ruler or chief may be large in size simply because of the frequent practice of
polygyny, but with relatively little functional differentiation when contrasted with rural
households, and urban-rural settlement contrast is minimally developed.
T o state Fox's basic organizational concept in slightly different terms, we think that
the regal-ritual center may fruitfully be conceived of as the expanded household of the
ruler-expanded because so many systemically important ruling functions, with their
attendant personnel, gravitate to the residence of the king or chief. The administration
of the polity is in many respects an extension of household administration.
Fox links the regal-ritual city to the larger political form he calls the segmentary state,
by which he means complex polities with relatively weak, decentralized political systems.
These exhibit what Durkheim called "mechanical solidarity." Typically, there is a su-
preme ruler whose position and exercise of authority are accompanied by impressive
pomp and circumstance, but whose power is circumscribed by lesser but similar mag-
nates, who usually also enjoy inherited status. Fox includes in his definition of the seg-
mentary state those in which the ruling class consists of heads of expanded kin groups,
one of whom monopolizes the position of paramountcy, as well as feudal states, such as
those of western Europe, in which the king's supporters (and potential rivals) consist of
Sanders and Webster] THEMESOAMERICAN
URBA.VTRADITIO.~ 525

nobles with patrimonial domains (i.e., private estates with attached serfs). The illustra-
tive examples he uses-Swazi and Rajput centers and the Carolingian capital-encom-
pass this variety.
A very important feature of what Fox calls the regal-ritual city is the lack of clear dis-
tinction between the urban population and those living in the rural countryside, a point
emphasized by Marcus (1983). This is perhaps especially true of the kinship-integrated
variety just described because leaders of the large expanded kin groups live at the city (in
some polities for only part of the year), but are stewards of lands and other resources held
by the expanded kin groups whose members reside in rural areas. Periodic rituals, often
associated with political status, may involve large-scale participation of people from the
rural countryside who congregate at the regal-ritual center, thus emphasizing the conti-
nuity of the urban-rural populations. A true peasantry probably does not exist in the
segmental states associated with regal-ritual cities, at least those based on kinship. Be-
cause of the greater asymmetry in the economic and political relations, it is probably
appropriate to refer to feudal tenants as peasants.
The Administrative City
Fox's administrative cities are larger, denser, and more heterogeneous urban com-
munities than regal-ritual ones. In fact, his definition of this type fits Wirth's general
definition of an urban center. The primary function of this kind of center is political. Ad-
ministrative cities are the capitals of states, or centers of administration in political sys-
tems that consist of multiple urban centers. Compared to regal-ritual centers they are
larger and more complex, since the political systems for which they provide centralized
services are larger, more bureaucratically structured, and more highly centralized. Be-
cause of the larger territorial base and the size and complexity of the associated bureau-
cratic structure, administrative cities serve as places of residence not only for the ruling
family and hereditary aristocracy, but also for a host ofofficials and their families and for
a professional military class, all supported by taxation from the countryside. Internally
the city is highly stratified, and there is a great gap in terms of ideology and lifestyle
between the rural food producers and the urban population.
Since the urban population is swollen by the presence of numerous bureaucratic and
military personnel, administrative cities constitute expanded potential markets for the
products of craftspeople, service personnel, and professional merchants and traders.
Much of the craft production or trade involves high-status goods, but in the more devel-
oped cases may include a range of more mundane goods and technology as well. The
principal customers, however, are still the inhabitants of the center itself, and such cities
do not produce significant quantities of goods for the rural countryside or for long-dis-
tance exchange. Economic functions therefore remain subsidiary to political ones, espe-
cially since the size of the economically specialized class is limited by the growth of the
politically specialized sector, and the city is still primarily a consuming community. In
some cases trade and production may be heavily regulated by the state.
Because of the complexity and range of functions performed by their inhabitants, ad-
ministrative cities exhibit much sharper internal distinctions of social status and class
than regal-ritual cities. The administrative city is thus much more stratified. Increased
size and heterogeneity may even result in a certain degree of the anonymity that Wirth
includes in his definition of the city, because cities provide supportive and protective set-
tings for various pariah elements, such as professional beggars, thieves, and prostitutes.
The increased economic functions of administrative cities offer considerable social and
spatial mobility to individuals and groups.
Of particular archeological interest is that administrative cities show much greater dif-
ferentiation of architectural functions, including not only the range of functions found at
regal-ritual centers but also workshops for craftspeople, warehouses (both state and pri-
vate), marketplaces, bureaucratic offices, account libraries or archives, and a wide range
of residential facilities.
 The principal examples used by Fox to demonstrate his concept of the administrative
center are Mamluk Cairo and the Japanese castle-towns of the late 16th and 17th cen-
turies. Of these the growth of Edo (the central establishment of the new Tokugawa sho-
guns) is a particularly striking example of the emergence of a n administrative city.
Founded as the stronghold of the Tokugawa family in 1590 on the location of what had
earlier been a small fishing community, it expanded to 1.3 million people by the early
18th century, an extraordinary rate of growth for a preindustrial center. At the core of
Edo were the fortified household facilities of the new shoguns and the elaborate bureau-
cratic apparatus and military personnel needed to administer all ofJapan. Regional lords
were required to maintain houses in Edo, and they or their families resided there per-
manently as political hostages. Such concentrations of elites, administrators, and soldiers
inevitably stimulated the emergence of a complex network of economic specialists which
swelled the size of the city still further, effectively centralizing many forms of production
and commercial exchange (Reischauer and Fairbank 1960).
The Mercantile City
The last of the three preindustrial city forms that Fox describes-the mercantile city-
has, we feel, the least relevance for Mesoamerican archeology, since we see it as very
weakly developed, if present a t all, in pre-Columbian times (see discussion below). In
FOX'Swords,
mercantile cities arise when political hegemony over a region is weak or absent, as during the
periodic decay of bureaucratic states, or when only weakly centralized segmentary states obtain,
and where a source of urban wealth and economic autonomy exists other than control over peas-
ant subsistence agriculture. . . . Whatever the [economic] basis, the mercantile city is the pri-
mary source of wealth, accumulation of which is unhindered by the commercial restraints of a
powerful state ruling elite. The city is a place for the production of riches, notjust a consumption
center where wealth squeezed from peasant labor is expended by state rulers, or where artisans
congregate to service the needs of resident state administrators. [Fox 1977:95, emphasis in the
original]
Fox obviously sees mercantile cities as profiting from the comparative weakness of rul-
ing groups in their administrative centers, which allows dimensions of economic auton-
omy and specialization otherwise impossible. O f course the city may possess its own rul-
ing elite, but if it does it is heavily involved in commercial enterprises as a source of its
wealth, and control over the rural agrarian sector is of secondary importance.
This is not to say that urban populations are independent of rural production. Clearly
this cannot be the case, since raw materials from the countryside are necessary for the
urban economy (as indeed rural labor may be, in the case of cottage industries), and in
all agrarian states urban non-food producers must be provisioned with food energy from
somewhere. The distinction is in the nature of the interaction between urban consumers
and rural producers. In mercantile cities as Fox defines them patrimonial control over
the countryside is weak or lacking altogether, so that rural products and labor may not
be extracted as direct tax (as would be the case in most feudal systems), but rather must
be paid for, either as direct payments or exchanges with the rural producers themselves,
or with the rural land-holding elites who dominate them. Although Fox emphasizes the
city as a center of production as well as consumption, he also recognizes that some mer-
cantile cities thrive on their functions as nodes in shipment and bulking networks.
Mercantile cities can only arise when the volume of craft production and/or trade (or
the value of services such as bulking and transhipment) reaches or exceeds the level that
produces wealth comparable to that generated by the control of agricultural land. I t is
only in this context that urban communities can achieve the kind of semi-autonomy that
Weber stresses in his definition of a city. We would argue that preindustrial mercantile
cities evolved primarily as centers of trade, and not as craft production centers, because
of the relatively limited productivity of basic industries. Often, important commodities
were produced by cottage industries, in which case the technology, workforce, and sched-
Sanders and Webster] THEMESOAMERICAN
URBAN
TRADITION 527

uling of activities were appropriate to the rural domestic household. As Wallerstein

(1974) has pointed out, much trade before the Industrial Revolution was still in the form
of highly valued prestige goods consumed primarily by the privileged strata of society.
What permitted the rise of mercantile cities in the Old World, among other things, was
the greatly enhanced potential of sea transport; large quantities ofgoods of all kinds could
be efficiently distributed over enormous distances, resulting in ever greater expansion of
mercantile economies.
In fairness to Fox, it must be emphasized that our short summary of his model does
not do justice to his contribution. Although he devises a typology of cities, it is evident
that he thinks in processual terms, recognizing the variety present within his categories
and, in some cases, the essential continuities between them. Although he is not primarily
concerned with evolutionary models, he is also aware that through complex metamor-
phoses regal-ritual centers may be transformed into administrative cities, and the latter
into mercantile or even industrial ones (although we do not wish to imply any unilinear
sequence here).
Evaluation
Over the years we have resisted, in our own work, a broad definition of the city, re-
serving that term for the largest and most complex Mesoamerican communities. We have
preferred to use more neutral terms, such as "central place," for the wide range of centers
such as those Fox talks about. The advantage of such an approach is that it emphasizes
major and significant differences in the form and function of such Mesoamerican sites as
Tikal and Teotihuacan. I t does, however, raise the hackles of those among our Mesoam-
erican colleagues who espouse a wider definition ofthe term "city." There is also a certain
danger in our restricted use of the term, in that it tends to suggest, at least, a concern
more with typology of culture than with process, although we have in fact always seen
the evolution of what we have called cities in terms of process. O u r definition is a quan-
titative one, but our position is that certain qualitative changes in human relationships
occur when communities reach a certain critical size, and that there are clear and obvious
differences in site functions that emerge as scale increases. Other Mesoamericanists, par-
ticularly Mayanists, have resisted this notion, and attribute sufficient functional diversity
to Maya centers to warrant the use of the term "city" for them.
T o a great degree Fox presents a solution to this impasse, since he begins with a qual-
itative definition-centralization of a variety of functions-and then uses a quantitative
approach to provide a typology of urban communities. This approach leads one to focus
more on process than on cultural typologies. His second point, that variability in such
centers can be understood in terms of the overall structure of the societies in which they
are embedded, also has considerable value in that it is explanatory and focuses on pro-
cess. What Fox calls cities, then, are places where a variety of functions-political, reli-
gious, residential, and economic-are centralized. His typology is essentially dependent
on the quantitative value of these functions and on their respective ratios, and this is what
makes his approach particularly attractive to archeologists, because most if not all of
these variables are expressed in the archeological record. It is also clear from his discus-
sion that when certain values are achieved, what might be called the lifestyle of the urban
center becomes significantly transformed. Wirth's secondary and derivative features of
urbanization, such as anonymity, mobility, and secularism, reflect the nature of these
changes.
In terms of the discussion that follows, it cannot be too strongly emphasized that de-
spite Fox's occasional overstatement of the ritual/ideological determinants of the regal-
ritual city (such as seen in the quote above [1977:95]), he is not reviving the old "theo-
cratic/ceremonial" perspective that has obfuscated so many discussions of the origins of
complex societies and urban centers (Webster 1976). H e clearly believes that centralized
power and authority derive mainly from control of important resources (especially pro-
prietorial domination of capital resources), not from some manipulation of ritual and ide-
ology disembodied from their material and political underpinnings. This is particularly
apparent in his own detailed discussion of Rajput centers (Fox 1971), which he uses as
major examples of his regal-ritual type. Thus the distinction must constantly be borne in
mind between the centralizing processes that produce the regal-ritual center as a special
kind of place, and the specific modes of governance characteristic of the political influ-
ences emanating from that place. The obtrusive ritual/ideological component of regal-
ritual centers is primarily a manifestation of the latter. Geertz (1980) has recently ad-
vanced the notion of the "theatre state." While public displays may be very important in
emphasizing ideology for purposes of political legitimization, we strongly resist the idea
that the state evolves to satisfy some sort of "need" for this sort of display and that it can
be a powerful explanatory mechanism for the origins ofcomplex societies or urban places.
Ideological display and manipulation, even when it is intense, may or may not be
closely related to religion. Much of the pomp and pageantry of public display in some
societies serves primarily to reinforce sociopolitical and economic ideology more or less
directly. However it is expressed, such display functions to demonstrate the power and
authority of its organizers and to differentiate the regal-ritual center as a special kind of
place as opposed to others in the system.
As we have seen, Fox links the regal-ritual city to the political form he calls the seg-
mentary state. In his conception of this form it is clear that he has lumped together Ser-
vice's (19621 chiefdom and Fried's (1967) ranked society, as well as what both would
define as states. Aside from Service's (1962) broad definition of the state as a political
system with legitimized use of force, we would add that with such legitimization goes a
variety of new social structures which, in the early stages of state formation, are grafted
onto a traditional set ofkinship structures. One should be able to measure the differences
between even a very large chiefdom and a relatively simple state in terms of these new
features. For example, in the case of the Swazi it is true that the household of the local
headman often includes a shrine and a dormitory for young men, and thus mirrors (in-
deed, provides a prototype for) the establishment of the paramount ruler. But the devel-
opment ofa national shrine ofunprecedented dimensions, managed by the queen mother,
and the expansion of the bachelors' quarters into a warriors' barracks represent radically
altered and functionally different institutions at the king's court, and are significant de-
partures from the purely segmentary organization of kin groups.
Fox collapses kin-based societies and those based on feudal land tenure into a single
political type which he refers to as the segmentary state. In our opinion this is a mistake,
since the possession of land, no matter how traditional or paternalistic the relationships
between owner and cultivator, must create political power of an entirely different dimen-
sion than that exercised by those who are essentially stewards of large, corporate, kin-
based land holdings. We would prefer to restrict the definition of the segmentary state to
those centralized political systems in which kinship still plays the dominant role in overall
social and economic organization. Fox himself recognizes this distinction in the examples
he uses, namely the Swazi state of South Africa (the kin-based variety) and the Carolin-
gian state of Charlemagne (the feudal form), since he sees cities associated with these two
variants as significantly different in a number of ways that essentially reflect the greater
complexity of the political structure in the case of the latter-for example, the separation
of church and state, a more differentiated administrative hierarchy, and the presence,
consequently, of more specialized architecture.
A major component missing in Fox's analysis is the concentration of farmers in some
preindustrial cities. In both the archeological and ethnographic literature there are a
number ofvery striking cases in which many food producers (sometimes corporate groups
with direct access to land and sometimes tenants) reside in the cities and may even be
the largest components of the urban population. Considering the fact that the size of an
urban community does have a considerable impact on its structure, the presence of this
component can be a powerful factor affecting the nature of the urban community. T h e
Sanders and Webster] THEMESOAMERICAN
URBANTRADITION 529

absence of a strong rural population necessarily dilutes or eliminates the contrastive ur-
ban-rural relationship that is such a cornerstone of his model.
Fox does not discuss the role of part-time rural specialization in the economies of cities
in his first three types. We are particularly cognizant of this deficiency because of our
involvement with Mesoamerican archeology and ethnography in which this type of spe-
cialization, particularly for the production of peasant utilitarian goods, is a major eco-
nomic feature. We will elaborate on this point in our discussion of Mesoamerican urban-
ism.

The Mesoamerican Urban Tradition

Before discussing the application of Fox's scheme to the origin and growth of cities in
Mesoamerica, we must briefly review a basic structural characteristic of complex Meso-
american culture that we believe constrained the process of centralization in important
ways. Mesoamerican societies of all kinds can be characterized as what we might call
"low-energy societies." By this we mean there were few effective sources of energy apart
from human muscle power. Mesoamerican peoples lacked not only animal transport or
traction, but also technological innovations such as sails, wheels, or metal tools that could
provide alternative sources of energy or increase the efficiency of human muscles. Finally,
many of the most precocious centers in Mesoamerica were not even located on major
waterways, which might have facilitated interregional transportation. I n all of these re-
spects Mesoamerican high cultures differed radically from virtually all of their Old World
counterparts, especially those in which the earliest urban centers arose. We suggest that
the quality and trajectory of Mesoamerican urban development are accordingly quite
distinctive. Specific constraints derived from this set of circumstances include the follow-
ing:
(1) Mesoamerican agriculture was comparatively inefficient compared to most Old
World systems in terms of input:output ratios, especially when population densities were
high.
(2) Per capita production of food surpluses was therefore limited.
(3) Ratios of producers to consumers had to be very high.
(4) Human labor was an exceedingly valuable and expensive resource.
(5) Energetic needs for centers of any kind had to be satisfied by extracting food prod-
ucts and other heavy, bulk products from small hinterlands within which the cost of hu-
man transport was feasible.
Bearing these constraints in mind, let us examine the Mesoamerican urban tradition
in light of Fox's categories.
The Regal-Ritual City in Mesoamerica
Copa'n. We believe that, with very few exceptions, Mesoamerican central places from
Preclassic to Postclassic times are best characterized as regal-ritual cities, although we
recognize the variations in scale and functions that they manifest. T o illustrate this point
we will summarize the major features of a large Maya center-8th-century Cophn-as a
case example. We have chosen Copdn because it is a reasonable representative of the
Classic Maya centers that are such conspicuous products of the Mesoamerican centrali-
zation process, and because such centers have loomed so large in discussions of urbani-
zation. Furthermore, since 1980 we have co-directed a major archeological research effort
at Copdn, and thus possess an unusually rich data set for that site. O u r reconstructions
are based on a variety ofdata, including an extensive regional survey (Webster 1985) and
large-scale horizontal excavations of approximately 110 buildings, mainly in residential
compounds, which represent the full range of social statuses of the Late Classic Cophn
system. These data supplement a century ofexcavation a t the Main Group and intensive
studies of Copdn inscriptions and iconography. Non-archeological data include historical
references to 16th-century Maya institutions, as well as ethnographic analogies to mod-
ern highland Maya populations and comparisons with unrelated but structurally similar
societies, such as the more complex chiefdoms and states of West Africa.
The Main Group at C ~ p f i n , ~ w h i ccan
h be described as a royal compound, possesses
all the features of Fox's regal-ritual city (Figure 2). One of its elements is a huge cere-
monial plaza about 280 m long and 100-200 m wide. Conspicuously associated with this
plaza is a series of stelae, which record the political fortunes and ritual activities of five
rulers, a central temple, and a large ball court. At the south end the plaza is delimited by
the huge platform of the Acropolis, covered with a complex arrangement of buildings,
many of which are embellished with sculpture and inscriptions that include a mixture of
political and ritual themes.
O n the northeastern edge of the Acropolis is the famous Temple of the Hieroglyphic
Stairway, with risers covered with the longest known Maya inscription, much of it filled
with historical information. In front of it stands the stela of Ardilla, the 15th king of Co-
pfin, and the temple may well cover his palace as well as his tomb, analogous with other
Maya centers.
O n the summit of the Acropolis are two major interconnected patios, one with large
temples, including what may be the funerary monument of Rising Sun, the 16th and
probably last of the great kings of CopBn (Str. 16). A sculptured altar or throne sits at
the base of the stairway of this temple, elaborately carved with representations of all of
the putative 16 kings of CopBn. It features Rising Sun accepting a baton or scepter from
the earliest figure in the group, represented as a dead ancestor or predecessor.
The easternmost patio group on the Acropolis was probably the residence of Rising
Sun (the actual palace is the so-called Temple 22 [Trik 19391). It includes a number of
temples that could have been used by the royal family; one of these is Temple 18, which
bears the latest inscription at the site, including the name of Rising Sun. This temple
covers a now-looted tomb, possibly that of Rising Sun himself or a close relative.
O n the northeast corner of the Great Plaza is Group 3, consisting of a pyramid-temple,
a residential building, and two smaller buildings of unknown function. We excavated and
restored much of the residential building, and-interpret this structure to be a bachelors'
house cum school, possibly for members of the royal lineage and noble families at Copfin.
The entire complex clearly has a variety of functions. The Great Plaza provided abun-
dant space for large politico-religious ceremonies and could easily have accommodated
all of the estimated population of the Copfin polity. It was well provided with ritual fa-
cilities such as altars (or outdoor thrones), temples, and a ball court, and was connected
by at least one ceremonial road with nearby residential enclaves. Ball courts are of course
associated in part with public ceremonies and the cosmic concepts of Maya kingship. The
conspicuous display ofpolitical monuments depicting royal persons and celebrating their
activities found on stelae, altars, and buildings both in the plaza and on the Acropolis is
evident political propaganda heavily interwoven with religious concepts. All this, along
with the probable residential functions of some of the Acropolis buildings, we think
clearly shows the Main Group at CopBn to be a classic example of the core of a regal-
ritual city.
Massed on both sides of the Main Group are two heavy concentrations of residences
that are represented archeologically by a great number of mounds of earth and stone of
varying size and shape, most of which are grouped into courtyard complexes-and in the
most elaborate cases, into a series of conjoined complexes (Figure 3). Approximately 15
of these, characterized by unusually large size and high quality of architecture (features
that indicate the high rank of the occupants), are physically attached to the south and
west margins of the Acropolis. These we interpret as the residences of the expanded
household of the ruler himself.
More than 1,000 mounds are located in these two urban wards, and we estimate that
the meandering of the Copfin River has destroyed anywhere from 25-50% of this densely
occupied zone. Recently, Webster and Freter (1989) have calculated that the total orig-
inal population of the zone was between 5,000-10,000 people at A.D. 800-850. Popula-
Sanders and Webster] THEMESOAMERICAN
URBANTRADITION

Figure 2
The Main Group at Cop&: [Adapted from Hasso Hohmann and Annegrete Vogrin, Die
Architekture von Copan, Graz, Austria: Akademische Druck-u. Verlagsanstalt.]
 Figure 3
The Urban Zone at Coph, showing the Main Group flanked by the residential enclaves of
El Bosque (on the southwest) and Las Sepulturas (on the northeast). [Reprinted from Bau-
dez 1983 with permission.]

tion densities would thus have been about 5,000-10,000 per km2. Both figures place the
Copin urban zone, along with the Main Group, at the upper end of the range of regal-
ritual centers in terms of size and nucleation.
The architecture, on the basis of both its surface appearance and our extensive exca-
vated sample, provides clear evidence not only ofresidential functions but ofa wide range
of social statuses. The most elaborate buildings are built of dressed stone masonry, in-
cluding vaulted roofs, and are placed on high substructures. Some have sculptured fa-
cades and internal carved benches or thrones usually associated with Maya royalty. The
simplest buildings have low substructures that supported perishable superstructures of
wattle and daub. This continuum of architectural complexes has been classified accord-
ing to a five-level system devised by Willey and Leventhal (1979) based on the size and
quality of the architecture of the principal building in each group, with Type 4 units hav-
Sanders and Webster] THEMESOAMERICAN
URBAN
TRADITION 533

ing the highest status, and Type 1 units and single mounds at the simplest end of the
range (see Table 1).
In all cases, whether a low- or a high-status household is involved, the most common
buildings are dormitories, kitchens, and storage rooms, and the high-status compounds
differ only slightly from the low-status ones in the character of their basic facilities and
features. In elite compounds we do find evidence for templeslshrines and other ritual
buildings, occasional craft workshops, and evidence for a great range ofdifferential status
within the household, as indicated by the size and quality of rooms and buildings. Many
of the smaller buildings may be housing for retainers or servants. Although the gradation
of types, from the large, complex Type 4 units down to the small, isolated single struc-
tures, may be interpreted as indicating a similar gradation of status for their occupants,
there is what we believe to be a significant "break" in the continuum. All Type 4 and 3
units that have been excavated have yielded sculpture and also entire buildings of con-
spicuously fine construction. We have identified 49 such compounds in the CopAn polit-
ical domain, most of which are residences (although a few Type 3 units seem to be spec-
ialized ritual structures). Twenty-three of these high-ranking units are located in the ur-
ban core, and 19 more are in outlying parts of the Copin pocket quite close (within 3-8
km) to the Main Group. Collectively they comprise a clear-cut elite settlement compo-
nent.
By contrast we lump the Type 2, 1, and single mound groups into a "low-status" cat-
egory. Sculpture is rarely if ever associated with these settlement units, and construction
quality is much lower. More significant, such units are comparatively numerous and
widespread, and in rural areas where elite settlement components are extremely rare all
of the lower types are common.
Within the Copin pocket but outside of the urban core resided an additional 9,000-
11,000 people, and in the balance of the rural parts of the drainage (often 20-30 1'i near
km distant) were another 3,000-4,000. We estimate the total population of the CopAn
polity at 18,000-25,000 people, distributed as shown in Table 2.
Although more than a quarter of the overall population thus lived in elite households,
many such residents were low-status clients, relatives, or retainers; the overall elite pop-

Table 1
Distribution of population among groups of various ranks in the urban
zone (percentages are approximate).

Type 4"

Type 3

Type 2

Type 1 & single mound

"Note that while the elite Type 4 and 3 groups had the bulk of the population,
many of the occupants were of low status.

Table 2
Distribution of population of the Copin polity among groups of var-
ious types.

Main Group

Type 4

Type 3

Type 2

Type 1

Single mound

ulation was probably no more than 1O0/0. This figure, of course, is consistent with the
postulated ratios of consumers to producers typical of Mesoamerican systems.
We have convincing evidence of occupational specialization of two types: craftspeople
who produced elite goods (specifically lapidarians and weavers) and lived in elite com-
pounds, and rural part-time producers who lived in the countryside. The latter produced
most of their own food, but also manufactured mundane items such as manos and me-
tates, possibly on a seasonal basis, analogous to present highland Mesoamerican prac-
tices. In some of our elite courtyards we also seem to have residences of foreigners, some
of whom might have been involved with trade.
Our general model for Cop6n social structure, although still highly inferential at this
point, identifies heads of high-status compounds as heads of expanded lineages whose
support personnel fell into two categories. Some people were directly attached to elite
compounds and performed a variety of administrative, economic, mercantile, and reli-
gious services; these may have been either lower-ranked kinsmen or clients. T h e balance
resided in architecturally isolated households in the urban core and the rural countryside
and produced primarily subsistence crops, along with some part-time craft products.
Lineage heads were important nodes for the redistribution of many of these products, and
also held court titles and participated in significant ritual functions, both in their own
compounds and in the Main Group.
Our reconstructed picture of the urban nucleus ofCop6n closely resembles Fox's regal-
ritual city. It functioned as a residential enclave for the most politically powerful mem-
bers of the polity and their immediate supporters, and as a focus of ritual activity, both
public and private. It was primarily a place of consumption rather than production, and
the population size was at the upper range of this urban type. In our reconstruction the
Copin political regime as a whole approximates what we would call a segmentary state,
or in Fox's terms the kin-based rather than feudal variant of the segmentary state. A
number of specialized features, such as the palace dormitory/school for elite young men
and the greatly enlarged royal household, emerged out of earlier institutions (as in the
Swazi case) but seem to have appeared very late in Cop6n's evolutionary history, perhaps
only during the reign of its last powerful king. The evidence of unusually massive archi-
tectural efforts during this reign, along with the appearance of a distinctive ideology
based on a syncretism of warfare and solar cults that complemented the old ancestral
cults, suggests the rapid crystallization ofa true state, as opposed to a ranked or chiefdom
form of political integration.
Despite these developments, Fox's major point-that regal-ritual centers are embed-
ded in states with relatively weak, decentralized authority at the top-we see as valid for
Copin even in its most mature stage. Lineage heads retained considerable independent
power and substantial resources, including some of the ceremonial and ritual preroga-
tives of royalty, such as inscribed thrones, altars, and the use of symbolic and portrait
sculpture on their houses. We know from both excavation and obsidian hydration dating
that some of these elite establishments long survived the collapse of the royal Copin es-
tablishment around A.D. 800, exactly what we would expect given the segmentary struc-
ture of Maya polities. In our opinion the intense use of royal display found at Copin and
other centers, especially as expressed in stelae, altars, and heavily embellished monu-
mental architecture, is evidence for the essential weakness of Maya centralized rule rather
than its strength.
Virtually all of the features discussed for Copfin-weak, decentralized rule, emphasis
on ritual functions, poorly developed economic institutions, and fairly small popula-
tions-apply to most other Mesoamerican centers. In saying this we remain mindful of
the enormous variety found among such centers and emphasize that another level of
problem is the reason for such variation within any particular general type as defined by
Fox. For example, Tikal, the largest known Classic Maya center, has a core settlement
pattern very different from Copfin's. We believe that major dimensions of such variety
(and this is true for regal-ritual cities and all other types ofcenters as well) are explainable
Sanders and Webster] THEMESOAMERICAN
URBANTRADITION 535

in terms of regional culture histories and basic demographic and subsistence variables
that are locally distinctive, but for the purposes of this article our attention is mainly on
the major set of unifying characteristics with which Fox is concerned.
Mesoamerican Administrative Cities
Tenochtitlan. The Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan is the outstanding Mesoamerican ex-
ample of Fox's administrative city (Figure 4). Unlike CopAn and Teotihuacan (discussed
below). , , which are known to us almost entirelv on the-basis of archeological" evidence
alone, we have many historical accounts of Tenochtitlan, indicating that it clearly fits
Wirth's definition ofa city in terms of its size, density, and heterogeneity. While estimates
about its size vary, we feel that Calnek's (1973) calculation of 160,000-200,000 people is
close to the mark. The city covered from 12-15 km2 so that its density was probably
between 12,000-17,000 per km2. All of the evidence suggests that this huge urban pop-
ulation was almost entirely dependent upon outlying rural food producers, and was very
diverse, its denizens ranging from kings, full-time specialists, and merchants, to prosti-
tutes, beggars, and thieves. Apparently a city of this size provides enough anonymity so
that the latter can thrive, and is also wealthy enough to attract the services of the first
-
two. As did virtually all other Mesoamerican centers, Tenochtitlan had ideological func-
tions as well: it was the center of a state religion whose facilities were concentrated in an
enormous complex of specialized religious structures. Here also lived the Mexica kings
in their huge palaces, which included not only the private quarters of the ruler himself,
along with his-wives and other members ofhis family, but alsb rooms for servants, council
chambers, workshops for royal craftspeople, storage facilities for royal tax and tribute
items, offices and libraries in which scribes kept the accounts of the empire, pleasure gar-
dens, and even zoos and aviaries. The center of the city was crowded with masonry pal-
aces serving as residences for a class of bureaucratic specialists, including administrators,
tax receivers, judges, police, professional warriors, and resident orders of celibate priests
who lived in the ceremonial precincts. The total number of such people in the early 16th
century must have been in the tens of thousands, and government was clearly the biggest
business of Tenochtitlan. In this respect it conforms perfectly to the dominant theme of
Fox's administrative citv.
The sheer size and complexity of the empire called into being a large, privileged bu-
reaucratic/military/ritual urban class, which in turn served as the clientele for an ex-
panded population of merchants and economic specialists. The city was divided into ap-
proximately 100 wards, each ofwhich was a unit of craft specialization; seven such wards
housed professional merchants. That much of this specialization was geared to the sump-
tuary displays of the elite is clear: lapidarians, featherworkers, goldsmiths, sculptors,
painters, and masons all thrived under elite patronage. Virtually all of the goods carried
by the merchants involved in foreign trade were prestige commodities consumed primar-
ilv, bv, the elite.
Judging from early ethnohistoric accounts, many of the pre-conquest specialists dealt
in utilitarian items as well. Sahagun ( 1961) provides us with a list of 40-50 such special-
ized crafts, and many local products may have been handled by retail merchants just as
exotic ones were.
At least some of the producers of luxury items, along with the long-distance traders,
were organized into guilds, each with its own complex internal structures, all of which
were under the control of the state. The city had a huge central market and a great num-
ber of neighborhood
" food markets (one of the clearest indications that most of the urban
population consisted of non-food producers). These markets were also administered by
the state. Sources mention police, government inspectors, and judges who arbitrated dis-
putes, all in frequent or constant attendance. Thousands of buyers and sellers thronged
the great market each day, and as many as 60,000 attended every fifth day, when the
numbers were swelled by the direct participation of the rural population in the urban
exchange network. Sources describe tens of thousands ofcanoes ioaded with merchandise
 Figure 4
Map of Tenochtitlan. [Reprinted from Sanders, Santley, and Parsons 1979 with permis-
sion.]
Sanders and Webster] THEMESOA~MERICAN
URBANTRADITION 537

moving in and out of the city from lakeshore communities. Despite all of this economic
complexity, however, Tenochtitlan was still primarily a consuming center. It depended
upon the constant import offood and other basic commodities, and most ofits own urban
products were consumed by the resident urban population.
Tenochtitlan was clearly unique in the history of Mesoamerica in terms of the scale
and complexity of its urban development. There are, however, a number of other centers
that we think were also administrative cities. These were all capitals of relatively large
polities compared to most Mesoamerican chiefdoms and states, with population in the
hundreds of thousands rather than in the tens of thousands. To a great extent it was the
limitation in state size that constrained the degree of their urban development, most par-
ticularly their economic institutions.
Teotihuacan. The earlier Classic city of Teotihuacan, like Tenochtitlan, had major po-
litical and religious functions (Figure 5). The latter are the most archeologically obtru-
sive. Two of the largest temples ever built in Mesoamerica lie in the heart of the city and
are accompanied by a vast array of lesser religious structures. During the final phase of
its history there was a huge regal compound along the Street of the Dead. Although it
may have served earlier as a palace, the so-called Ciudadela seems to have ultimately
become a religious precinct that had not only temples but monastery-like residences for
sacerdotal personnel. Such priests may also have lived in ancillary buildings on the great
platform of the Sun Pyramid, as well as near the Moon Pyramid. Recent Mexican exca-
vations of what appears to be the final royal palace precinct straddling the Street of the
Dead suggest that a great variety of political and administrative functions were central-
ized at the core of Teotihuacan. The city in this respect far more closely resembles Ten-
ochtitlan than it does Copin. Surveys and test excavations also indicate the presence of
a great marketplace, possibly with associated warehouses and administrative buildings.
The dense concentrations of high-status residences along the Street of the Dead and else-
where suggest the presence of an extensive cadre of high-status personnel, possibly num-
bering in the thousands or tens of thousands. The total population of Teotihuacan at its
peak was approximately 125,000 people in an area of 18 km2 or a density of some 8,000
per km2. Certainly it, like Tenochtitlan, conforms to Wirth's definition.
A major question is the degree of economic heterogeneity present at Teotihuacan. Data
from surface surveys also demonstrate that about one-third of the population had some
craft specialty, including foreign commerce. Besides government and religion, a key in-
dustry of Teotihuacan was obsidian production, and much of this production was prob-
ably under the control of the state. While many of the inhabitants of the city produced
elite craft products, others made more mundane items, such as grinding stones, utilitar-
ian pottery, and a variety ofthings used for household rituals, including figurines, incense
burners, and ritual vessels. Specialists were apparently organized in corporate groups,
probably lineages, and resided in large apartment houses whose patios and shrines sug-
gest that there were important ritual functions attached to these residential units. Such
apartments may have housed 30-100 people. While there is presently no way to deter-
mine how many people in these compounds actually were craft producers, we believe that
most of them engaged in at least part-time if not full-time activities of this sort.
Although many of the inhabitants of Teotihuacan were specialists, there is another
economic feature of the city not dealt with by Fox: the presence of large numbers of food
producers residing in the urban zone. This characteristic of Teotihuacan is unusual,
though by no means unique (e.g., see Adams and Nissen's [1972] discussion of Uruk).
While Teotihuacan is strikingly similar in many respects to Tenochtitlan, a major differ-
ence is the presence of a large class of resident food producers in the former center, or-
ganized like other urban dwellers into corporate groups living in large masonry and
adobe apartments. We believe at least two-thirds of the population were farmers. More
than half the population of the Basin of Mexico and adjacent areas of Hidalgo and Tlax-
cala-the core of the Teotihuacan polity-resided at the city during its major period of
 Figure 5
North-central zone of Teotihuacan, showing civic-ceremonial core and residential com-
pounds. [Courtesy of Ren6 Millon.]
Sanders and Webster] THEMESOAMERICAN
URBAN
TRADITION 539

growth. In contrast, no more than 20°/0 and perhaps as little as 10% of the Mexica pop-
ulation of the same region later lived in Tenochtitlan. This massing of food producers in
the city certainly had enormous repercussions on the urban economy.
An anonymous reviewer of this article suggested that since we do not discuss other
urban centers administered by Teotihuacan it might be regarded as a hypertrophied re-
gal-ritual center. As we pointed out, administrative centers are the centers ofstates; some-
times such states may contain multiple urban nuclei, but these need not be present. The
history of Teotihuacan illustrates both these patterns (Sanders, Parsons, and Santley
1979:105-129). Between 100 B.C. and A.D. 100 a phase of explosive urban growth
largely depopulated the Basin of Mexico, leaving few outlying communities of any size to
administer. This was at least partially a coercive process, testifying to Teotihuacan's ma-
nipulative and administrative power. Later, in the city's mature stage from A.D. 300-
750, Teotihuacan dominated a reconstituted settlement hierarchy in the Basin of Mexico
and probably outside the Basin to the east as well.
In addition to Teotihuacan and Tenochtitlan, a number of other Mesoamerican cen-
ters may be classified as administrative centers, albeit on a somewhat smaller scale. These
include Monte Alban during phase 3B, Tula in Central Mexico, and possibly Cholula in
the late phases of its history.
The Mercantile City
While we do not believe that the mercantile city was ever very important or well de-
veloped in Mesoamerica, at least as conceived by Fox, we realize that many of our col-
leagues will disagree, and so the subject deserves discussion. We begin by emphasizing a
simple but all-important point: the presence of "commercial" activity, even on a large
scale, is not necessarily indicative of the presence of such a city type. Both of the major
highland cities discussed above had complex economic systems that included the pro-
duction and exchange, whether internal or external, of various goods and services. Even
without ethnohistoric documentation (for Tenochtitlan) such commercial activities
would be detectable and even obtrusive in archeological terms. But in both cases, as we
have seen, the cities were dependent upon the agrarian potential of their peasant popu-
lations and were primarily consuming rather than producing places. Both were charac-
terized during their evolution by predominant political/administrative/ritual functions,
and these remained the most important determinants of urban growth and complexity
throughout their respective sequences. We suspect that C o p h may well have been in-
volved in some commercial agriculture, such as the production of tobacco or cacao, es-
pecially during its final Classic phase, although we have no direct evidence for this. Co-
p6n certainly had far-flung trade relations that guaranteed access to foreign goods such
as obsidian. But even when the results of such trade are archeologically recoverable and
quantifiable, as in the case of obsidian, the importance in socioeconomic and sociopolit-
ical terms was minimal (Mallory 1984).
In Fox's model two dominant characteristics ofmercantile cities are that they (1) thrive
outside the effective political orbits of strong, centralized states, or in periods when state
power is weak; and (2) are predominantly dependent for support, and the local elites for
their power, on commercial production, trade, transhipment, or other commercial enter-
prises rather than extraction of goods and services from a rural peasantry. Of these two
the second is, in our opinion, by far the more structurally important feature.
The question essentially is, to what degree do we use a definition derived (as Fox's
primarily is) from a particular historical case, that ofwestern Europe during the medieval
and Renaissance periods? A broader definition might encapsulate any center in which
trade and craft production provided a greater amount of wealth and political power than
taxation or rents collected from a rural peasantry. In this broader model the matter of
political autonomy, and even the evolution of a differentiated merchant class, become
irrelevant. The important feature would be the source of income of the ruling class, re-
gardless of whether the status positions were achieved or ascribed. The major archeolog-
ical problem in identifying such cities would be methodological: how can one quantify
the economic sources of political power?
A number of Mesoamerican centers superficially seem to conform to the mercantile
pattern. Most conspicuous among these is a set of centers in southern Mesoamerica.
Naco, in the Sula Valley of Honduras, is purported to have had a settlement of foreign
merchants in the 16th century. O n the eastern Yucatan coast Tulum and Cozumel may
have been links in seaborne trade around the peninsula, and Xicalango was apparently
an important terminus for the same system. Unfortunately we know virtually nothing
about the functions ofany ofthese centers, and Xicalango remains unlocated. Only Cozu-
me1 has been investigated with an eye to its commercial functions (Sabloff and Rathje
1975); both it and Tulum may have been bulking and transhipment centers for trade
around the Yucatan Peninsula. Tulum, at least, probably derived little support from its
rural hinterland, judging from its fortifications, and seems to have had only a very small
resident population. The dependence of the Cozumel elite on rural peasantry remains
unclear.
Several of the ethnohistorically known Postclassic Maya states in northern Yucatan
appear to have been heavily involved in the salt trade (Roys 1943; Andrews 1980). Cer-
tainly such commercial activity failed to produce centers of conspicuously large size or
complexity, and we cannot assess the degree to which local northern Maya elites de-
pended upon such trade for their wealth and political power, as opposed to the contri-
butions of common food producers. A similar situation exists for the Soconusco, famous
for its cacao production. Quite possibly the incorporation of this region into the Mexica
empire in the Late Postclassic stimulated the demand for cacao to such an extent that
some populations specialized in commercial cropping of the plant to a large degree, and
some centers are developed to facilitate its accumulation and transhipment.
During the Classic period some major sites apart from Teotihuacan were certainly in-
volved in production and trade. Kaminaljuyu has often been singled out as a commercial
site involved heavily in the production and foreign exchange of obsidian, and certainly
had Central Mexican residents who had some specialized mercantile functions. But Ka-
minaljuyu never attained great size and complexity even during the height of the Classic
period (see Murdy 1984), and our own work there convinces us that the primary deter-
minants of its growth were local, based largely upon the traditional Mesoamerican pat-
tern of the domination of an agrarian farming population by local lords.
In her characterization of Fox's model, Marcus makes a potentially confusing com-
ment: "he [Fox] further expects that when the state is strong and the economy is auton-
omous, the mercantile roles are primary" (1983:210), and goes on to cite Teotihuacan,
Tenochtitlan, and Tula as examples. It is unclear from the wording of her comment
whether she would consider such cities as examples of Fox's mercantile type, and it is
here that the confusion arises. As we have seen, Fox associates the mercantile city (as he
defines it) not with situations in which the state is strong, but rather in which it is weak.
Despite the undoubted mercantile activity present at Teotihuacan, Tenochtitlan, or
Tula, according to Fox's models all of these are primarily administrative centers. Because
they were so powerful and so many elitelbureaucratic personnel were congregated in
them, unusual levels of mercantilelcommercia1 activity appeared as well, even involving
considerable foreign exchange. But they all remained primarily political centers that were
basically centers of consumption rather than specialized production, and all were depen-
dent upon food from the surrounding countryside obtained as tax or tribute from a sub-
ordinate peasantry.
T o sum up, those Mesoamerican cities with well-known commercial and mercantile
functions such as Tenochtitlan and Teotihuacan conform much better to Fox's admin-
istrative model than to his mercantile one. Though we cannot rule out the possibility that
other centers may conform more closely to his mercantile type, those that we do have
some information about seem small and poorly developed by contrast with regal-ritual
or administrative urban centers in Mesoamerica.
Sanders and Webster] THEMESOAMERICAN URBAN
TRADITION

Energy and the Development of Mesoamerican Urbanism

A major theoretical problem is the explanation of the special nature of urban devel-
opment in pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica. The basic factor, we feel, lies in the energetics of
food and craft production and particularly transport. As we have indicated above, Meso-
america is clearly the most deprived of all the ancient complex sociocultural traditions in
terms of its technological efficiency. All primary tools were made of wood or stone, thus
severely limiting productivity of both basic agricultural staples and all luxury items as
well. Even more important, all transport of goods of any kind, as well as all production,
was basically powered by human energy.
At the base of the problem is the production and transportation of food. With hand
tools and human labor, nuclear families with only one or two adult males could put into
production only about one or two hectares of land. With maize as a staple, the vast ma-
jority of cultivators had a highly limited capacity for producing surpluses, from little or
none to a maximum of 50%, taking into account various regimes of intensive cultivation,
as well as great variability ofsoil productivity. This calculation does not take into account
ranges in such yields and surpluses due to unpredictable and variable climatic conditions
or other sources of risk.
Systems that are energy-limited in this fashion are certainly capable of supporting a
small class of regal-ritual specialists and their immediate support personnel, including
relatives, servants, administrators, and elite craftspeople, and these may reside in centers
of some size. The principal limitation to the expansion of such urban centers is not so
much productivity but transport. Judging from data from the post-conquest 16th century
(Sanders and Santley 1983:246-249), the average long-distance human porter in Meso-
america carried about 23 kg (or just over 50 lbs.) on his back. For short distances this
load might be increased to 40 kg (88 lbs.), and this is about the load that modern traders
carry to go to local periodic markets. In such cases the orbit from which staple foods could
be moved to provision a given community was very limited-generally a distance of 10-
15 km.
Other products, such as those of specialized craftspeople, were produced at a very low
level of technological efficiency. In order for craft specialization to evolve to the level of
full-time urban specialization, a specialized producer must receive a high enough return
on labor expended to feed his or her family and to provide for general household main-
tenance (see Table 3). This means he or she must be able to service a considerable num-
ber of consumers. Using figures provided by Sanders and Santley (1983:249-256), we
calculate that a single full-time (250 days per year) obsidian knapper could service 2,372
families, or on a part-time basis (100 days per year) 952 families. Such a craftsperson

Table 3
Energetics of craft production in Mesoamerica."

Annual person-days necessary Ratio of numbers of consumer

to provision household families to craftsmen
Full-time: 250 Part-time: 100
days work per year days work per year
Pottery 3.8 65.8:1 26.3:l
Basketry 11.5 21.7:l 8.7:l
Weaving 47.0 5.3:1 2.1:l
Manoslmetates 3.5 71.4:l 28.6: 1
Obsidian blades 0.1 2,372.0:1 952.4:1
Small wooden tools 2.0 125.0:1 50.0:1

"These data were assembled from various ethnographic and ethnohistoric sources during a sem-
inar on craft specialization directed by William Sanders.
could function effectively as a specialist. By contrast a potter working full-time could sup-
ply about 66 families, and about 26 families working part-time. Clearly this specialization
is less feasible. Although we have not quantified it, our impression is that a craftsperson
who practiced weaving, a very time-consuming activity, could supply so few families that
effective specialization would be impossible. The implication is that only clients with un-
usual access to basic resources such as maize-in Mesoamerica, the ruling class-could
purchase or make other kinds of exchanges to obtain many kinds of products. In order
for craft specialists to be fully urban and fully specialized (i.e., produce no food) the ratio
of producers to consumers must be reduced by technological developments to the degree
that even people in the lower and middle ranges of the social hierarchy can purchase the
goods, but Mesoamerican technology was remarkably inflexible in producing such in-
novations. Theoretically, even mundane items could be sold to elite consumers over a
wide geographical area, but the problem here is the excessive cost of transport, which
makes it possible for producers in one area to compete with distant competitors, closer to
elite consumers, who do not have to incur such costs.
It is for precisely this reason that long-distance trade in Mesoamerica generally in-
volved costly high-status items which were restricted in their natural distributions, and
which had relatively low consumption rates and high exchange values. This is also why
most specialized production was probably carried out on a part-time (and often rural)
basis rather than a full-time, urban one. A wealthy nobleman, who enjoyed access to the
surplus productivity of a large number of people (either an expanded kin group as was
probably the case at CopBn or tenants or serfs in the Aztec system), could, on the basis
of his access to this surplus, finance full-time goldsmiths, stoneworkers, or weavers, but
the peasant could not afford these goods. Part-time specialization was made possible be-
cause the craftsperson's household also produced much of its own food, and hence the
ratio of producers to consumers could be quite high, but generally only if the settlement
system remained very rural.
Furthermore, most of the examples of this type of specialization in highland Meso-
america today consist, in essence, of exchanges of technology for technology or for foods
with a high market value and low consumption rates. That is, the potter produces a sur-
plus of pots, sells them (today for cash, in pre-Hispanic times directly for other products),
purchases metates from specialized metate workers who produce surpluses of this item,
and no profit is involved. The energetic costs ofproduction of the various goods and their
consumption rates are roughly equivalent. The purpose of this trade is to achieve access
to processed raw materials, usually highly localized in a highly differentiated geographic
environment.
Many of the products that might have entered into commercial networks as specialized
products were not themselves necessarily products of specialization. For example, we
know that in Late Postclassic times in northern Yucatan rulers and elites were conspic-
uously involved in the trade of goods such as cloth, honey, and cacao. At least the first
two of these commodities could have been routinely derived as tax contributions from the
producer households dominated by the elite trader, that is, as a normal part of the polit-
ical economy which included contributions of maize and labor. Both cloth and honey
were items produced by households within the limits of their domestic capabilities as part
of their domestic economies. The tax contribution simply raised the level of production
to some degree, but this is not even, properly speaking, part-time specialization, and
would probably be invisible archeologically. Yet the effect, when large numbers of house-
holds were so taxed, was that elites could effectively deal in these commodities in a com-
mercial sense.
Basically, then, most Mesoamerican cities fall into the regal-ritual category and had
minor economic functions apart from administering the surpluses produced by the at-
tached rural farmers. It is on the regal-ritual level that we find the least differentiation
between urban and rural communities. The sizes of regal-ritual cities were governed pri-
marily by the sizes of the states that they served and the productive potential of the hin-
Sanders and Webster] THEMESOAMERICAN
URBAN
TRADITION 543

terlands they dominated, and most polities in the pre-Hispanic Mesoamerican tradition
were small in size. Immediately prior to the Spanish Conquest, and before they were
incorporated into the Aztec empire, for example, most Central Mexican states had pop-
ulations ranging from 5,000-30,000 people (Sanders 1976). Mixtec and Zapotec king-
doms were of comparable size (Spores 1967). In northern Yucatan the remnants of the
Lowland Maya were organized in some provinces into batabships or small chiefdoms of
only 2,000-3,000 people. The largest polity in Yucatan at this time was that of Mani,
which had a population of about 60,000 people in the 16th century (Sanders 1962:94).
We feel that this number is just about the upper long-term limit for Classic Maya states.
Our own calculations for CopAn, based on very good settlement and excavation data,
indicate a polity of only 18,000-25,000 people, and we anticipate that the forthcoming
synthetic volume on Lowland Maya demography (Culbert and Rice 1989) will reinforce
this picture of generally small size. T o judge from the size and complexity of architectural
complexes at many Classic Mesoamerican regal-ritual centers, most Mesoamerican pol-
ities fell into this size range. Political groupings during the Middle and Late Preclassic
would be at the lower end of the range.
We find ourselves in fundamental agreement with Fox that cities can be understood
only in terms of the kinds of states in which they are embedded, and that the primary
business of most impressive preindustrial cities was government; some exceptions would
be the mercantile cities and city states of medieval and Renaissance Europe, along with
others in the Near East and eastern Asia. In the few cases where large administrative
centers evolved in Mesoamerica because of unusually large governments, they were cen-
ters of huge states with populations numbering in the hundreds of thousands (Teotihua-
can and Tula, for example, were centers of states that we estimate had populations of
perhaps 500,000; Tenochtitlan dominated 5-6 million people; and Monte Alban and
Cholulu possibly had subject populations numbering in the hundreds of thousands).
With the probable exception of Tenochtitlan, and possibly Tula, the communities in
Central Mexico we are calling administrative centers also had large populations of food
producers resident in the city. In our opinion-and this must be confirmed by expanded
excavations-virtually all of the occupational specialists at Teotihuacan were probably
part-time farmers, and many of the compounds we now believe were occupied by farmers
probably had some as yet undetected specialty as well. What was probably present was
a virtual continuum of economic statuses and roles ranging from compounds occupied by
people who were almost entirely food producers to those that housed full-time craftspeo-
ple (the latter possibly limited to those involved in the long-distance obsidian trade).
Most producers were somewhere in the middle of this range. The average Teotihuacan
compound probably had a mixed economy in which subsistence crops, commercial crops,
trade, and craft production all contributed to the livelihood of the lineage or patronlclient
type corporate groups that resided in them.
Such an economy is found today in Yoruba cities in Nigeria (Galetti, Baldwin, and
Dina 1956) (see Table 4). Yoruba producers are organized into corporate groups that
live in house compounds similar in size to those at Teotihuacan. As at Teotihuacan, the
residential group also has ritual-political functions. We do not suggest that the details of
the Yoruba pattern apply to any Mesoamerican urban center, but rather that Mesoamer-
ican urban dwellers might have exhibited some similar mix of general economic endeav-
ors. What a settlement pattern such as that of the Yoruba or Teotihuacan does is to con-
siderably enhance the level of economic urbanism, since it solves the problem of the lim-
ited capacity of production of Mesoamerican farmers and craft producers. In effect the
rural part-time specialists are living near an urban market (or, more properly, the density
ofoccupation produces an urban market situation), and like the rural producers they can
spend part of the year growing their own food, and part in craft or mercantile activities.
The peasant thus becomes a consumer of urban production.
In the Teotihuacan case the obsidian export industry may be an exception. The obsidi-
an industry of Mesoamerica has a number of distinctive features: low production costs
 Table 4
Occupations in 26 Yoruba township^.^

Occu~ation Males Females

No occupation or housekeeping 1,561 1,268
Farming only 1,055 300
Farming with wage labor
Farming with home industry
Farming with trade only
Farming with processing and trade
Farming with profession
Wage labor with farming
Craft with farming
Processing and trade with farming
Trade with farming
Profession with farming
Wage labor only
Craft only
Processing and trade
Trade only
Profession only

"Adapted from Galetti, Baldwin, and Dina 1956.

due to the corelblade technique, low consumption rates, and relatively low transport
costs. The raw material, moreover, occurs in a few highly localized and thus controllable
places. The evidence from Tula also suggests a highly evolved obsidian industry, but
again government was probably the major business.

Summary
In summary, the vast majority of Mesoamerican centers were classic examples of Fox's
regal-ritual city and had relatively small resident populations. They were primarily po-
litical and religious centers whose leaders ruled relatively small states. The general small
size of the Mesoamerican state, along with constraints on transportation, communica-
tion, and production, limited the size of the associated centers. In a few cases macro-
states emerged in areas where there was unusual potential for the production of certain
goods, especially elite products, and a sufficiently productive agrarian economy to sup-
port numerous specialists. These macro-states were dominated by large elite classes and
required large corps of service personnel for administrative purposes. The concentration
of such nonproducers, along with the other factors just mentioned, stimulated the emer-
gence of the kind of centers Fox calls administrative centers. An additional variable that
Fox does not discuss is the possibility that large numbers of food producers were in resi-
dence in some administrative cities. This development clearly relates to a particular kind
of agrarian economy that has a potential for maximum intensification of land use and an
unusual capacity to generate per capita surpluses and to overcome the constraints of in-
efficient Mesoamerican transport systems. The presence of farmers as urban consumers
of craft products and other services generated an expanded market economy, but ulti-
mately it too was limited by the agricultural potential of the immediate hinterland. U1-
timately the "low-energy" constraints generally characteristic of Mesoamerican societies
frustrated the emergence of large and sophisticated forms of the mercantile city.
Hopefully this consideration of the Fox model will help to circumvent many of the se-
mantic arguments in which Mesoamericanists become involved when considering the
process of urbanization. By broadening the definition of city to include all significant cen-
tral places, we may envision all complex societies as involved in urban development. At
Sanders and Webster] THEMESOAMERICAN
URBANTRADITION 545

one level all cities a r e unique, a n d have characteristics t h a t m u s t b e explained b y varia-

bles t h a t a r e unique, namely, their o w n environmental settings a n d culture histories. B u t
o n another level w e m u s t compare a n d generalize, a n d Fox reminds us t h a t w e c a n d o s o
productively, s o long as we b e a r i n m i n d the fundamental processes t h a t affect u r b a n
development in larger sociocultural settings.

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