Introduction

Teotihuacan is emblematic of the archaeological imaginary. Its sheer material prominence, evident even from satellite imagery from space (Figure 6.1), gravitationally draws to it a complex mixture of associations.

Figure 6.1: Teotihuacan Mapping Project’s ‘map 1’ with satellite imagery of Teotihuacan with adjacent towns labeled (after Millon 1973).

It has long been so. Chapter 4 weighed the density of these associations, ranging from the scientific to the political to the early historical and prehispanic mythic. More than most other archaeological site in the Americas, there exists an extensive textual record of Teotihuacan in the imagining of the past (Ruiz 1997). Chapter 5 brought these considerations to the ‘cutting edge’ of high-tech and discussed how new media accelerates and broadens participation in the process of linking Teotihuacan to a global, informational network involving the archaeological imaginary.

These historic, ‘prehistoric’ (Boone 2000) and techno-global associations with Teotihuacan underscore how a single archaeological site enables a host of engagements not restricted to a modernist idea of the archaeological as the systematic, scientific study of ‘the past’. The contemporary crowding of Teotihuacan, visually apparent in the satellite imagery of Figure 1, indexes its integration into the everyday life and livelihood of the nearby (indeed within the perimeters of the zone) pueblos. Chapter 1 summarized the building arguments from both within the discipline and from without (the ‘external mandates’) to open archaeology to a consideration of the non-archaeological associations developed with the material of the past. It was argued that this study of heritage, or the links established through archaeological material but necessarily according to archaeological reasoning and methodology, presented an ethics-epistemology dilemma for the discipline. Chapter 2 suggested that an epistemology founded upon representational correspondence accounted for the impasse, and Chapter 3 argued that a pragmatic sensibility, not conditioned by representational accounts of knowledge but instead evaluated according to the satisfaction of specific, value-laden goals, offered a productive manner of integrating archaeology and its publics. It is the focus of this chapter to present the results of a questionnaire survey conducted with Mexican Nationals working at and visiting the site, as well as amongst the residents of the Teotihuacan Valley living adjacent to the site. Specific associations developed through Teotihuacan and the particular goals for archaeology of the site are systematically presented.

As discussed in Chapter 1, there is precedent for undertaking such a broad view analysis of the heritage of an archaeological site. Landmark studies focused upon a singular site include work at Stonehenge (Bender 1998), Catalhöyük (Bartu 2000; Hodder 1999, 2000) and Chichén Itza (Castañeda 1996). These investigations have primarily derived from anthropological models of 'native voice' and post-colonial studies, and, most recently, from the material culture studies model of identity construction through the appropriative consumption of archaeological knowledge (Meskell 2001). Focusing upon engagements anathema to archaeology, these studies have tended to focus upon new age spiritualism, non-Western or local beliefs of the significance of a site or locales, or the socio-political aspects of government administration of archaeological projects. At Teotihuacan itself, the formative work of Manuel Gamio (1922) integrated a large scale excavation within an anthropological (prescient of ‘multidisciplinarian’ strategies) assessment of the valley’s inhabitants and their relationship to the site (Olivé Negrete 1988:15,62). More recently, Richard Diehl (1972) completed a questionnaire survey pertaining to contemporary settlement patterns in the Teotihuacan Valley, and Jaime Delgado has undertaken a study of the influx of Mexico City emigrants to the valley and the commensurate increase in economic reliance upon, as well as developmental threat to, the archaeological zone (Delgado 2005). Finally, non-probabilistic interview data regarding the oral history of the ubiquitous caves of the archaeological zone has been intermittently collected from residents of the valley to supplement archaeological research on the topic (Manzanilla 2006) – though the interviews remain unpublished.

Yet, while these studies are receiving increased attention in the fields of anthropology and archaeology, there has been little effort to compliment the detailed ethnographic and anecdotal sources of information with large-scale surveys and generalizable, quantitative evaluations. Watkins’s (2000:ch.5) study in the United States of attitudes held by archaeologists regarding emergent Native American issues for the discipline, as well Merriman’s (1991) extensive survey – building upon a previous study (Stone 1986) - of British attitudes towards the past, and museums in particular, represent notable exceptions. This chapter builds upon these two examples of two statistical studies concerned with values of the past, but focuses it upon a single ‘archaeological ecosystem'.

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