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Introduction

At the time of the Conquest, central Mexican society was characterized by a highly stratified social organization, state-level political structures, interlocking regional market systems, and a tremendous degree of economic specialization. These cultural attributes evolved over thousands of years beginning in the Formative Period (2000 B.C. to A.D. 300), although their early development and the dynamics of their evolution remain poorly understood. The Tepeaca Kiln Project is concerned with the development of two aspects of Mesoamerican economy, the production/distribution of pottery and the processing of lime. Dense prehispanic settlement was documented by the Acatzingo-Tepeaca Project (PAT) in the Tepeaca area from 1994 to 1998 (see Castanzo in prep) in the central Puebla-Tlaxcala Basin (Figure 1, shown above). This region can be described as temperate/semi-arid and has an average annual temperature of 16-17º C (see Aeppli and Schönhals 1975:7). It is characterized principally by ranges of low hills separated by flat expanses that are continuous with the vast plain of the rest of the basin (Castanzo 2002:96-100). Today, many hillsides in the area are heavily eroded and large swaths of tepetate (a hardened calcareous substrate of volcanic origin) are exposed at the surface. Most of the local land is under cultivation, maize being the most common crop (ibid.).

The identification of pottery production in archaeological contexts has generally been based on artifactual evidence such as high densities of ceramics of particular types or forms or the presence of wasters (see Curet 1993; Rice 1987:179-180; Santley et al. 1989). The finding of actual firing facilities themselves is rare in Mesoamerican archaeology. Pit kilns have been found at Middle Formative Puebla-Tlaxcala sites (Abascal 1996[1975]) and at Classic Period Ejutla in the Valley of Oaxaca (Balkansky et al. 1997; Feinman 1999). Updraft kilns dating to the Classic Period have been found at Monte Albán (Feinman and Balkansky 1997; Payne 1982) and at Matacapan, an apparent Teotihuacán enclave in Veracruz (Pool 2000, 1997). Examples of lime production at Mesoamerican archaeological sites are even rarer (see Abrams and Freter 1996; MacKinnon and May 1990; Winter 1984), although the Tepeaca area is known to have paid a portion of its tribute to the Aztec Empire in the form of lime (Berdan and Anawalt 1992:100).

Hundreds of features considered to be the remains of prehispanic kilns were discovered in the PAT survey (see Castanzo 2002:301-308) and the Tepeaca Kiln Project is focused broadly on the investigation of these features. The 2003 season of this project had three major objectives:

1. Locating the features found in the PAT survey and determining if they are, in fact, kilns.

2. Determining the function of these kilns (lime processing, ceramic production, etc.) through excavation and an evaluation of surface remains and artifacts.

3. Characterizing the level of organization of production (household vs. non-household) and the degree of economic specialization.

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