Animals and the State: The Role of Animals in State-Level Rituals in Mesoamerica

This chapter questions the ways in which human-animal interactions directly contributed to the reification of social hierarchies in the context of state-level rituals in ancient Mesoamerica. Animals were chosen to participate in elaborate rituals, whether as costumes in dances, as military regalia, as powerful icons, or as victims of sacrifice. We focus on a case study from the site of Teotihuacan, a cosmopolitan center that arose in the Basin of Mexico during the Classic period between approximately 100 BC and AD 650. At this site, the Moon Pyramid Project has uncovered a series of five burial offerings (Sugiyama and López