Under the supervision of Dr. Elizabeth M. Brumfiel, John Millhauser will conduct an archival and archaeological study of the Aztec village of San Bartolom Salinas, located in the Basin of Mexico less than an hour north Mexico City. San Bartolom Salinas was a center of salt production during the Aztec (1430-1521 A.D.) and early Spanish empires (1521-1650 A.D.). Millhauser's research will identify how changing economic and political conditions affected this community of salt makers and, in turn, how the responses of salt-makers shaped their community. More than documenting how communities resist and accommodate the demands of empires, his study will stress how the daily interactions and practices of salt-makers, from cooperation to competition, shaped and were shaped by village life. Millhauser will record archival data pertaining to the development of the community's legal and political identity. He will also conduct extensive mapping, surface collections, and excavations at San Bartolom Salinas to gather data on the portable artifacts and permanent features of salt-making and domestic life. Artifacts and architecture will provide the means to identify variation in wealth and the organization of salt production among the households of the village. Chemical residue, petrographic, and trace-element analyses of salt-making pottery will allow Millhauser to determine how the production and use of salt varied among households and over time.
Understanding past societies from the perspective of the community is important because the communities in which people live, work, and interact are central to processes of social solidarity and change. This project will enhance the anthropological study of communities through the careful investigation of changes in material culture that reflect the economic interdependence of households within a single village over time. Furthermore, this project will show how competition and cooperation are both inherent in the fabric of any community by focusing on how the daily practices of work act as sources of social identity and solidarity. Finally, this project is poised to make a substantial contribution to the study of empires and states by combining archaeological and archival data that foreground rural villages as sites of significant social and economic complexity, technological innovation, and political salience.
Beyond developing topics of interest to social scientists, this project will enhance public understandings of science, interdisciplinary research between the physical and social sciences, and international communication and cooperation between the United States and Mexico. Collaboration and outreach will involve employing and training crewmembers from the nearby town of Tonanitla, conducting educational tours of ongoing excavations and laboratory work for school groups, and presenting project highlights in a permanent display at a local community museum. This direct community involvement is critical to building a local and long-term commitment to the stewardship of archaeological resources. The project will provide valuable field experience for two student archaeologists from Mexico and the United States. Finally, this research will culminate in Millhauser's dissertation, the findings of which will be disseminated in English and Spanish as scholarly articles, presentations at professional meetings, and lectures geared toward the general public.
This project investigated the Postclassic and Colonial saltmaking community of San Bartolomé Salinas in the northern Basin of Mexico to learn how saltmaking supported this community under the Aztec and Spanish empires. More broadly, it focused on creating a better understanding of how the places where people work become sites of community building. Salt was a critical resource in pre-Columbian and Colonial Mexico. We proposed that within the politically channeled demands for salt, the technology and work of saltmaking provided the social conditions needed to create and sustain communities and that these communities, in turn, influenced broader political-economic processes by changing the value of land, resources, labor, and communities. To test this proposition, our research addressed the following questions: how did the work of saltmaking provide an economic basis for communities in the northern Basin of Mexico? How did it bring people together in common places and on a consistent basis to share their knowledge, resources, and interests? How did living and working together enhance or challenge the work of individual saltmakers as they met the demands for salt under the Aztec and Spanish regimes? To answer these questions, we drew on ethnohistoric and archaeological data. Archival sources documented the links among the specialized work of saltmaking, group identity, and the political action of communities. Archaeological surveys and excavations revealed how saltmakers founded discrete settlements during the Late Postclassic, how these settlements grew in tandem with the Aztec empire’s expansion and the intensification of saltmaking, and how they disbanded during the Early Colonial period. Formal, stylistic, chemical, and mineralogical analyses of saltmaking pottery provided complementary perspectives on the social dimensions of the technology of saltmaking and showed how social groups of saltmakers existed simultaneously at the scales of the workshop, settlement, and region. Ultimately, by taking a critical stance on the links between sites, settlements, and communities, and by focusing on the role of work in forming, sustaining, or challenging social groups, we hope to have contributed to a greater appreciation of the flexibility and innovation of human society, at least within one part of Mexico. By focusing on the smallest scale of rural settlements, we have made explicit the roles and capabilities of, as well as the constraints on, rural populations in the context of developing states and empires. Finally, by focusing on the specialized work of saltmaking, we have challenged top-down models of the political economy that frame rural economic development as primarily or solely an outgrowth of external political and economic intervention. This research has shown, instead, how the smallest rural villages could be sites of considerable social complexity, technological innovation, and political salience.
