Historical Archaeology at the Hacienda San Miguel Acocotla, Puebla, Mexico

Abstract

Since 2004, archaeological, ethnographic, and archival investigations at the ex-hacienda San Miguel Acocotla in Atlixco, Puebla, Mexico, have explored the lives of indigenous workers who toiled at the hacienda from 1577 through the twentieth-century Mexican Revolution. The aim of this project is to understand the ways in which incorporation into an industrial capitalist system impacted individual and community identity. This report presents a summary of the archaeological components of the project. Research focused on the area of worker housing, the calpanería, in an effort to expand our understandings of the conditions of daily life of the hacienda's indigenous workers. I describe the completed fieldwork and summarize the results of studies of nineteenth-century domestic architecture andfoodways. These data challenge assumptions about the quotidian experiences of hacienda laborers, often made using incomplete historical records, and allow us to connect the ethnographic present with the prehispanic past by illuminating the transformative processes at work in rural Mexico during the last quarter of the nineteenth century.