ââOur slogan is civil war. All arguments to the effect that this slogan is unworkable, etc., etc., are pure sophism. We cannot âmakeâ it, but we propagate for it and work in this direction. In every country one must struggle first of all against oneâs own proper chauvinism, awaken hatred for oneâs own regime, call (repeatedly, persistently, ever again, tirelessly) for solidarity among the workers of the warring nations. No one is proposing to guarantee when and to what degree this work will prove practicable or justified: This is not what is at issue⊠Only such work is socialist and not chauvinist. And it alone will bear socialist fruit, revolutionary fruitââ
Archaeologists once assumed TeotihuacĂĄn was the work of a powerful despotic king. Now, most see something more extraordinary.
View from the Moon Pyramid to the Road of the Dead in the ancient TeotihuacĂĄn Pyramids in Mexico.Tais Policanti
This story was originally published in Spanish by HuffPost Mexico. A version of it has been adapted and republished here in English with permission from HuffPost Mexico.
Millions of tourists visit the ruins of TeotihuacĂĄn every year. They climb the pyramids, walk the Avenue of the Dead, and learn about the spectacular artifacts recovered from the ancient Mesoamerican city. Looking across the vast and remarkably well-preserved stone complex, built by hand by a pre-Aztec civilization, many likely assume that only a powerful despotic kingâdirecting hordes of slave or serf laborersâcould have orchestrated the construction of such a carefully planned city. Indeed, this is what archaeologists once believed. If tourists make the effort to visit some of the excavated residential compounds outside the main archaeological zone, however, they may start to understand why such assumptions about TeotihuacĂĄn society are changing. For these structures lie at the heart of our shifting perspective of the ancient city: namely, that it was far more egalitarian than we had previously imagined possible.
I began my archaeological career in the 1970s as an undergraduate examining artifacts at TeotihuacĂĄn. That first trip to Mexico cemented my love not only for the archaeology, but also for Mexican life and culture. In the decades since, I moved on to excavating Aztec-period sites in the provinces of that civilizationâs empire. In 2015, when I was appointed director of Arizona State Universityâs archaeological lab in San Juan TeotihuacĂĄn, I got to return to my first love among Mexican sites, armed with new ideas about ancient cities and urban life. But after just a few years of work, I began to see TeotihuacĂĄn in a very different light.
Compared with the Aztec sites I have studied, TeotihuacĂĄn seems very strange, and not just because of its huge size (100,000 people, living in an area of close to 20 square kilometers). For one, itâs the only pre-modern Mexican city completely planned with a grid layout. For another, its residents lived in a form of housingâapartmentlike multifamily compounds with white lime-plaster floors, ornamented roofs, and porchesâremarkably spacious and luxurious for the ancient world. These complexes are key to the conclusion of many researchers, including myself, that the cityâs residents lived far more economically equal lives than any other known Mesoamerican society.
Now that everyone is reblogging that meme about anthropology a bunch of Tumblr Experts who have never read an ethnography in their lives are probably going to unreflexively condemn it while not interrogating the fact that every discipline has an imperial/colonial past. Anthropology is just the most glaring example but congrats on figuring out that power relations necessarily enter one obvious faucet of knowledge production while overlooking this very process everywhere else I guess
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