Popis: |
This paper examines the role of caches, burials, and mortuary offerings as forms of inalienable wealth in the lower Rio Verde valley of Pacific coastal Oaxaca, Mexico. Interred in socially meaningful places, bodies and objects were removed from circulation but remained integral to interactions among the living, acquiring “situational” inalienability. Tracing the history of caching and burial practices over the course of the later Formative period (400 B.C.E.–C.E. 250), we argue that these buried inalienable possessions were important elements of identity creation and also served both to establish and to undermine hierarchical social relations during the process of political centralization. |