Papers by John Millhauser
World Archaeology, 2024
This article examines relationships between the production of salt in the Basin of Mexico and the... more This article examines relationships between the production of salt in the Basin of Mexico and the emergence of salt-making settlements during the Late Postclassic (ca. 1350-1521 CE) and Early Colonial (ca. 1521-1650 CE) periods. In archaeological practice, the veil that hides producers behind commodities becomes more difficult to pierce when the commodities themselves are invisible today, as is the case with an ephemeral good like salt. Nevertheless, archaeological and ethnohistoric data show how locally produced salt became a widely traded commodity in the expanding economy of the Triple Alliance and how its uses diversified within the early capitalist economy of New Spain. Contrary to the expectation that commodification leads to alienation, I find evidence that the work of producing salt also produced communities. In fact, these communities endured for centuries, adapting and adjusting to new demands and new consumers in the context of decreasing control of production and knowledge of markets.
Economic Anthropology, 2024
The articles that compose this special issue of Economic Anthropology represent a sample of the w... more The articles that compose this special issue of Economic Anthropology represent a sample of the work presented and discussed at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Economic Anthropology on the topic of well-being and the common good. I trace the roots of this conference theme in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic and its connections to the literature on the "anthropologies of the good." I then unpack three themes that emerge across the articles in this special issue: the value of tacking between objective measures and subjective meanings, the productive tension produced by investigating across scales, and patterned variation from which we can build an anthropological theory of the good. K E Y W O R D S anthropologies of the good, common good, hard choices, multiscalar analysis, objective measures, subjective values, well-being
Biological Conservation, 2022
We review human effects on biodiversity using archaeological and ethnographic cases with contrast... more We review human effects on biodiversity using archaeological and ethnographic cases with contrasting ecologies, population densities, and economies. Relevant trends include increasing human populations, settlement sizes, and permanence; intensification of subsistence and political economies; world colonization; and changing environmental values. Although humans have always transformed ecosystems, many pre-industrial societies maintained diverse and stable environments that are now considered natural. Disastrous strategies have resulted from values associated with colonization, market economies, property systems, resource extraction and production technologies, and the isolation of decision-makers from environmental consequences. Present-day solutions should engage decision-making by local communities, especially Indigenous and traditional societies, empowering them to shape policies and achieve conservation goals.
Imaging and spatial analysis technologies are revolutionizing archaeological methods and archaeol... more Imaging and spatial analysis technologies are revolutionizing archaeological methods and archaeologists' perceptions of space. Rather than view these innovations as inevitable refinements and expansions of the archaeological toolkit, it is useful to critically assess their impacts on theory and practice. In this chapter, we consider what spatial data—data that appear to represent an objective reality— tell us about past and present human experiences of the physical world in terms of abstraction, temporality, and power. We draw on archaeological cases from Mesoamerica to illustrate how these subjective perspectives on space are revealed through technological innovations and how historical and current efforts to map this region play out in the political sphere.
This article demonstrates the accuracy of non-destructive portable X-ray fluorescence (pXRF) for ... more This article demonstrates the accuracy of non-destructive portable X-ray fluorescence (pXRF) for the study of obsidian in central Mexico. Obsidian sources were identified for a sample of 103 artifacts from the site of Xaltocan, which spanned the rise and fall of the Aztec empire and the first centuries of Spanish colonial rule (AD 900–1700). Sources were assigned by comparing pXRF
Journal of Anthropological Archaeology
Beginning in the last century, archaeologists became interested in the development of social comp... more Beginning in the last century, archaeologists became interested in the development of social complexity. Since that time, the basic concept of states and complex societies has been defined by rigid social stratification, extreme wealth inequality, and political centralization. However, recently, landscape approaches, household archaeology, city-states, and “alternative pathways to complexity” have begun to make inroads in developing a more robust approach to premodern states. Specifically, anthropological theory has advanced significantly with the incorporation of Collective Action, yet theoretical and empirically based studies of wealth inequality, social stratification, and the built environment in the archaeological literature are still limited. Therefore, in this paper, we seek to test the traditional definition of the state and complex societies using cases from Middle-Late Postclassic Highland Mexico (Central Mexico and Oaxaca), especially the case of Tlaxcallan. Using a comparative approach, we find that a stark division between public and private architecture and a compression of wealth inequality and social stratification, especially the absence of palaces, and a comparatively high degree of political centralization, marked the Tlaxcaltecan state. Accordingly, we conclude that theoretical approaches in archaeology must incorporate Collective Action Theory or other comparable approaches to effectively deal with real empirical variation in the past.
Journal of Archaeological Research
This paper applies the interdisciplinary approaches of commodity chain, commodity circuit, and co... more This paper applies the interdisciplinary approaches of commodity chain, commodity circuit, and commodity network analyses—common in sociology, anthropology, and geography—to cotton cloth in the Aztec economy to demonstrate how these techniques can enrich archaeological understandings of ancient economies. Commodity chain analysis draws attention to social and economic dependencies that link people and processes along a production sequence and across wide geographic areas. Commodity circuits and commodity networks highlight the bundling of goods and knowledge in nonlinear and multidirectional flows, the relationships that link participants through these flows, and the flexible meanings and values of goods for participants. By applying these approaches to the archaeological study of cotton cloth in the Aztec economy, we show how they provide a holistic framework for studying goods that bridges the microscale (household) and macroscale (world system).
Cambridge Archaeological Journal
Archeological Papers of the American Anthropological Association
Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History
ABSTRACT In Trade, Tribute, and Transportation, Ross Hassig argues that indigenous towns in the n... more ABSTRACT In Trade, Tribute, and Transportation, Ross Hassig argues that indigenous towns in the northern Basin of Mexico during the colonial period were largely self-sufficient. They traded with Mexico City mostly in elite goods, but for the most part they produced for their own subsistence or traded with nearby towns. Chemical characterization by instrumental neutron activation analysis (INAA) and portable X-ray fluorescence (pXRF) of ceramics and obsidian from post-conquest contexts in Xaltocan, a site in the northern Basin of Mexico, reveals that Hassig’s model is partly correct for describing Xaltocan. The town focused on trade with nearby towns and it produced some ceramics for local consumption. However, Xaltocan was hardly isolated and self-sufficient in the post-conquest period. Instead, the data suggest that the people of Xaltocan also obtained ceramics and obsidian from a greater variety of sources than under Aztec domination. Rather than being an isolated rural site, Xaltocan either increased its external connections and number of trading partners after the Spanish conquest, or it managed to obtain a greater variety of products than before through a bustling market system.
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Papers by John Millhauser