The ancient societies of western Mexico have long been understudied and misunderstood. Focusing on recent archaeological data, Ancient West Mexicos highlights the diversity and complexity of the region's pre-Hispanic cultures and argues that western Mexico was more similar to the rest of the Mesoamerican world than many researchers have believed. Chapters that treat investigations in Durango, Colima, Jalisco, Nayarit, Aguascalientes, and Michoacan draw on new evidence dating from across millennia, spanning different periods in the history of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica. Contributors analyze materials including ceramics, architectural remains, textiles, and weaving tools to discern the settlement patterns, political structures, and cosmologies of the people who lived at these sites. Featuring intriguing case studies that point to unexpected pathways to sociopolitical complexity in these and other ancient societies, these essays illustrate that the region's archaeological record can contribute meaningfully to a more nuanced picture of Mesoamerica as a whole.

Combining older findings with new data on 1,000 previously undescribed archaeological sites, this book presents the cultural evolution of the Mixteca Alta in an up-to-date chronological framework. The nuu - the kingdoms of the famous Mixtec codices - are traced back through the Post-Classic and Classic periods to their beginnings in the first states of the Terminal Formative, revealing their origin, evolution, and persistence through two cycles of growth and collapse. Challenging assumptions that the Mixtec were peripheral to better-known people such as the Aztecs or Maya, the book asserts that the nuu were a major demographic and economic power in their own right. Older explanations of multiregional or macroregional systems often portrayed civilisations as rising in a cradle or hearth and spreading outward. New macroregional studies show that civilisations are products of more complex interactions between regions, in which peripheries are not simply shaped by cores but by their interactions with multiple societies at varying distances from major centres. This book is a significant contribution to this emerging area of archaeological research.

In this work the author focuses on the nature of the political organization of the lower-level centres of the Early Classic Period (A.D. 200- 500) in the Mixteca Alta, Oaxaca, Mexico. A previous comparative analysis of architectural arrangements at secondary centers between the Valley of Oaxaca and the Mixteca Alta indicated that single plaza groups were the major form of public architecture. The focus of the research is on four secondary centres of the Mixteca Alta. Using intensive site survey and systematic random collection as the main methods of data recovery, the author has collected artefacts over whole site areas in relation to public buildings. By comparing the distribution of various artefactcategories within the site limits, including costly goods, in relation to zones of the site containing public architecture, the author evaluates the degree of political centralization.