The Vibrancy of Ruins in Ancient Mesoamerica

Abstract This article considers people’s relations with ruins in the Mesoamerican past from the perspective of two approaches within the ontological turn. The first examines ruins drawing on Indigenous ontologies, while the second involves the application of a new materialist perspective that incorporates Peircean semiotics. Both approaches view matter as animate and share a relational, nonbinary, and nonessentializing position. Research drawing on ethnographic and ethnohistoric accounts of Native American perspectives considers ruins as living entities often inhabited by divinities, ancestors, or pre-Sunrise beings, which could require propitiation and reverence or provoke denigration and erasure. A new materialist perspective allows archaeologists to better recognize what ruins did beyond holding meanings imposed on them by people. Ruins in ancient Mesoamerica had the vibrancy and power to gather people, offerings, shrines, and the dead in ways that constituted community and temporality, contested or legitimated authority, and invoked the cosmic creation.