Houses, housing, and inquality in the distant past

When people talk about the relationship of residences--the places where people live--to social inequality and other aspects of society today, they talk about "housing." But when archaeologists talk about residences, we usually talk about "houses," and not "housing." This distinction is on my mind because I just finished reading Mathew Desmond's outstanding book, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City (2016). This is the best book I have read in a long time and there is much to talk about. Go read the book, it's really fantastic; I'll devote a blog post to the book before long. But first I want to use the book as a stimulus to explore the differences between they way archaeologists talk about houses in the past and the way sociologists (and others) talk about housing in the present. One of the questions on my mind is methodological: how can archaeologists get at issues of housing and inequality in our studies of ancient urban houses?

Houses in the past

Aztec commoner house

When archaeologists talk about residences in the past, the focus is on the house, or the physical structure in which people live. We are concerned with how these were built: what were the construction materials and where did they come from? What kind of techniques were used by the builders? How big were houses? How much effort and materials were needed to build a house? Can we estimate the number of people (or at least the number of households) who lived in a specific house? Our focus on these things is natural, given the kind of fragmentary evidence we have about houses in the past.

Size variation in Aztec houses at 2 settlements

Archaeologists have found that the size of houses can be a good measure of inequality in the past. This information can be used for social class analysis (Olson and Smith 2016), or for the study of continuous wealth inequality using measures like the Gini index, based on the assumption that house size was an index of household wealth ( Smith et al. 2014). For the first, time, archaeologists are beginning to accumulate enough cases of inequality in house size, measured with the Gini index, to draw some conclusions about past inequality (Kohler et al. 2017; Kohler and Smith 2018). As more archaeologists quantify their data on houses and settlements, our understanding  of levels of past inequality will continue to improve.

While this is a productive development in the archaeology of social inequality, reading Matthew Desmond's book Evicted makes me wonder if we can do better by using the concept of housing.

Housing today

The study of how housing relates to social inequality today goes far beyond the topics of architecture and house size. Major questions include: Who builds housing units? Who owns them? How do residents get access to housing? And can residents who rent create a stable pattern that avoids frequent moves? These are the issues explored in Evicted through detailed case-study ethnography, coupled with scholarly documentation of patterns in the endnotes. Can archaeologists get at any of this?

My typology of premodern urban house types

When archaeologists use the term "housing," the word is usually used informally and not analytically. That is, we may use the word, but just to talk about the standard issues of ancient house form and size outlined above. I was rooting around for a relevant scholarly definition of "housing," getting frustrated that writers on housing today don't see the need to define the term. Maybe "everybody knows" what it means, but still, it is sloppy practice to not define one's terms. Then I checked my own paper on the topic (Smith 2014a) to see how I defined the term. Oops! No definition! I am guilty here too. In that paper I talk about types of urban house units in the premodern world, but "housing" is not used as a formal concept.

Housing in the past?

Standardized housing in Mexico today

Can archaeologists approach the question of who built housing in cases where we lack written documents? I think that the analysis of standardization in housing can allow us to make reasonable inferences on whether housing was built by the state or another formal institution (e.g., a temple community), or by residents themselves. But standardization of architectural forms is a tricky question. Today, some housing is obviously standardized--such as contemporary Mexican ex-urban developments or mid-twentieth century socialist housing in Europe--and other housing is clearly informal, which usually means non-standardized.

First, precisely what is or is not standardized? It can be the size of a dwelling, principles of layout, materials used, construction methods. Second, who is doing the standardizing? Individual self-builders? While this often leads to variability in house form, when builders deliberately stick to a cultural norm, as in much vernacular architecture, the result can be standardized forms. Or is standardization created by professional builders and architects? By the state? Or by the capitalist market and zoning regulations (as in urban and suburban developments today)?

It turns out that standardized housing is a complex topic, one that is not very well researched in the fields of housing and architecture (and almost never by archaeologists). Drawing on my model of premodern urban planning (Smith 2007), an archaeologist might associate standardization of housing over an entire city, or city sector, with the actions of the state (e.g., Olynthus or Teotihuacan). Standardized housing on the scale of a neighborhood might be created by the state or by professional builders working for clients. And nonstandardized housing suggests auto-construction by house owners (Turner 1991; Ward 1973).

Another domain where archaeologists can begin to approach issues of housing and inequality, parallel to scholars of the modern world, is residential stability.  In another paper (Smith 2014b), I cited contemporary social-science research showing that urban residential stability is associated with higher standards of living, lower levels of crime, and other measures of community well-being (one thread of this research is referred to as social disorganization theory). I drew on sociologists such as Robert Sampson (2012). I argued that similar dynamics (linking residential stability to positive community outcomes) probably characterized premodern cities as well. I presented some evidence from my studies of Aztec communities showing that the houses I excavated in wealthier communities tended to be occupied continuously over long periods, whereas the houses in less well-off communities showed more discontinuity in occupation. I develop this argument in my (award-winning!) popular book, At Home with the Aztecs (Smith 2016). I wish I had been able to read Desmond's Evicted before writing my book. It is the most eloquent (and empirically compelling) discussion of the negative effects of the lack of residential stability, caused by evictions.

Each bar is a house. Yautepec houses had more stability than at Calxitlahuaca

But these efforts are just a beginning. Archaeologists need to take a closer look at research on contemporary cities and housing, and devise creative ways to put that knowledge to work in explaining the past. And scholars of contemporary housing might pay attention to some of the better archaeological research to get an idea of the longevity of patterns and the historical depth of systems of social inequality. But a point I make in Smith (2010) is that unless archaeologists analyze our data in ways that foster comparison and conceptual advance, it won't be comparable at all to the modern world, and any such comparisons will be facile and superficial.

References

Desmond, Matthew  (2016)  Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City. Broadway Books, New York.

Kohler, Timothy and Michael E. Smith (editors)  (2018)  Ten Thousand Years of Inequality: The Archaeology of Wealth Differences. University of Arizona Press (in press), Tucson.

Kohler, Timothy A., Michael E. Smith, Amy Bogaard, Gary M. Feinman, Christina E. Peterson, Aleen Betzenhauser, Matthew C. Pailes, Elizabeth C. Stone, Anna Marie Prentiss, Timothy Dennehy, Laura Ellyson, Linda M. Nicholas, Ronald K. Faulseit, Amy Styring, Jade Whitlam, Mattia Fochesato, Thomas A. Foor and Samuel Bowles  (2017)  Greater Post-Neolithic Wealth Disparities in Eurasia than in North and Mesoamerica. Nature (in press).

Olson, Jan Marie and Michael E. Smith  (2016)  Material Expressions of Wealth and Social Class at Aztec-Period Sites in Morelos, Mexico. Ancient Mesoamerica 27(1):133-147.

Sampson, Robert J.  (2012)  Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

Smith, Michael E.  (2007)  Form and Meaning in the Earliest Cities: A New Approach to Ancient Urban Planning. Journal of Planning History 6(1):3-47.

Smith, Michael E.  (2010)  Sprawl, Squatters, and Sustainable Cities: Can Archaeological Data Shed Light on Modern Urban Issues? Cambridge Archaeological Journal 20:229-253.

Smith, Michael E.  (2014a)  Housing in Premodern Cities: Patterns of Social and Spatial Variation. International Journal of Architectural Research 8(3):207-222.

Smith, Michael E.  (2014b)  Peasant Mobility, Local Migration, and Premodern Urbanization. World Archaeology 46(4):516-533.

Smith, Michael E.  (2016)  At Home with the Aztecs: An Archaeologist Uncovers their Domestic Life. Routledge, New York.

Smith, Michael E., Timothy Dennehy, April Kamp-Whittaker, Emily Colon and Rebecca Harkness  (2014)  Quantitative Measures of Wealth Inequality in Ancient Central Mexican Communities. Advances in Archaeological Practice 2(4):311-323.

Turner, John F. C.  (1991)  Housing by People: Towards Autonomy in Building Environments. Marion Boyars, London.

Ward, Colin  (1973)  We House, You are Housed, They are Homeless (chapter 6). In Anarchy in Action, pp. 67-73. George Allen and Unwin, London.

Burial goods and wealth in urban, state societies

I am looking for comparative and conceptual works related to a project of examining burial goods at Teotihuacan for evidence of wealth or status variation. My needs right how are highly specific; they are set out in numbered bullets below. In brief, I would like to find comparative or analogical cases that provide a justification or warrant for using grave goods to monitor wealth or status in state-level societies. I have had trouble finding anything, so perhaps this does not exist, or perhaps I am just looking in the wrong places and readers can point me in the correct direction.

Let me begin with another, parallel, case to illustrate what I am looking for: the relationship of wealth and house size. I have been involved in using the sizes of houses to monitor wealth for many decades, publishing both empirical studies and conceptual works (Kohler and Smith 2018; Olson and Smith 2016; Smith 1975, 1992, 1993, 2014, 2016; Smith et al. 2014) . If you ask how I justify using the size of houses as a measure of wealth, I can provide many citations to ethnographies, ethnoarchaeological studies, and historical and archaeological works. They show that in many or most cases with quantitative data (and within a given society or settlement system), wealthy households (as measured from documentary or other independent evidence) live in bigger houses. There is strong cross-cultural support for this claim, which justifies using house size to measure wealth in the absence of independent wealth data. We will include a list of such studies when our book on wealth variation in archaeology comes out (Kohler and Smith 2018). If your reaction is, "But I can think of exceptions," then you don't get the point. This is a statistical relationship, not an invariant relationship, so of course there are exceptions. If you think that the exceptions invalidate my claim, then either you have dozens of cases I haven't seen, or else you may want to take a statistics class.

Does such evidence exist for burial goods? I don’t want to get involved in arguments about the Binford-Saxe model, the postprocessual critique, or particularistic claims that this or that ethnographic case don't fit the model that burial goods reflect wealth (Ucko 1969). I want some hard comparative evidence so that I can make an empirical judgment about the likely strength of the relationship between burial goods and wealth in urban, state societies. Here is what I want:

•          Best case: Ethnographic, historical, or archaeological cases (state society, ideally Premodern) with these characteristics:
• a.   There is a good sample of households of known wealth
• b.   There are burials with burial goods that can be linked to those households. That is, either the burials are spatially associated with individual houses, or else there is textual data linking households to burials. The wealth measures should be independent of the burials.
• c.    It would be nice also to have independent data about the extent of wealth and class variation in the society.
•          Second-best case: Ethnographic, historical, or archaeological cases (state society, ideally Premodern) with these characteristics:
• a.   There is a good sample of burials with burial goods
• b.   There is independent data about the extent of wealth and class variation in the society. That is, the burials could be from a cemetery and thus not linked to individual houses or households.
•          Third-best case: Archaeological studies of a sample of burials with burial goods that use quantitative analysis to reach conclusions about the nature and extent of wealth or class variation in the society.

If you can help me out with citations, please email me!  Thanks.

REFERENCES:

Kohler, Timothy and Michael E. Smith (editors)

2018 Ten Thousand Years of Inequality: The Archaeology of Wealth Differences. University of Arizona Press (in press), Tucson.

Olson, Jan Marie and Michael E. Smith

2016 Material Expressions of Wealth and Social Class at Aztec-Period Sites in Morelos, Mexico. Ancient Mesoamerica 27 (1): 133-147.

Smith, Michael E.

1975 Temples, Residences, and Artifacts at Classic Teotihuacan. Senior Honors Thesis, Department of Anthropology, Brandeis University.

1992 Archaeological Research at Aztec-Period Rural Sites in Morelos, Mexico. Volume 1, Excavations and Architecture / Investigaciones arqueológicas en sitios rurales de la época Azteca en Morelos, Tomo 1, excavaciones y arquitectura. Memoirs in Latin American Archaeology, vol. 4. University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh.

1993 New World Complex Societies: Recent Economic, Social, and Political Studies. Journal of Archaeological Research 1: 5-41.

2014 Housing in Premodern Cities: Patterns of Social and Spatial Variation. International Journal of Architectural Research 8 (3): 207-222.

2016 Quality of Life and Prosperity in Ancient Households and Communities. In The Oxford Handbook of Historical Ecology and Applied Archaeology (book in press), edited by Christian Isendahl and Daryl Stump. Oxford University Press, New York.

Smith, Michael E., Timothy Dennehy, April Kamp-Whittaker, Emily Colon, and Rebecca Harkness

2014 Quantitative Measures of Wealth Inequality in Ancient Central Mexican Communities. Advances in Archaeological Practice 2 (4): 311-323.

Ucko, Peter J.

1969 Ethnography and Archaeological Interpretation of Funerary Remains. World Archaeology 1 (2): 262-280.

Were ancient societies more egalitarian than we had thought?

I just got a request from a journalist to comment on the notion that archaeologists are now finding that ancient societies may have been more egalitarian than archaeologists had once thought. Here is a pretty close version of my response:

First, it doesn’t mean much to say that ancient societies were more or less egalitarian than we had thought. For hunter-gatherers and small-scale farmers, the situation is the reverse. Traditional models held them to be egalitarian, and we now know that many cases (but far from all) had significant levels of inequality. Some of the papers in our recent Amerind symposium show this. While this isn’t a particularly new idea, it has taken scholars some time to acknowledge this, and we now have better quantitative data.

For state-level societies, I don’t know of any overall scholarly trend of saying things were more or less unequal than thought previously. We now know that there was tremendous variation in how ancient states were organized. One trend, though, is that scholars (and the public, and certainly the National Geographic Society) used to think all ancient kings were autocratic and despotic, ruled their people with an iron fist, and controlled everyone’s life. Pyramids built by slaves being whipped by overseers was a common image. Few archaeologists will admit to this view, but they dress it up in fancy theoretical terms (Foucaultian power, hegemony, and such) that say the same thing: ancient rulers tried to control everyone's life.

The biggest advance in understanding ancient states in the past few decades is Blanton and Fargher’s 2008 book.They show that premodern states (all of their cases are based on historical or ethnographic data, not archaeological) can be arranged along a continuum from autocratic to collective. They have rigorous methods of measuring their scale in each of 30 societies, and they have a theory that explains the variation. Basically, if you have to tax your subjects, then you must be nice to them, provide public goods and not be too tyrannical; these are more collective regimes. But if your revenue comes from outside (say, from trade or conquest), then you can treat your subjects like dirt, and be despotic. There is a counter-intuitive element here, which is that collective regimes mess with people’s lives to a great degree (to count them, tax them, and keep track of things) than do autocratic regimes. This is what Michael Mann calls infrastructural power. Despots leave people alone, they don’t try to control their lives; they just don’t care what their subjects do. Many archaeologists still have not gotten the word about this, and they still claim that autocratic tyrants in the past were trying to control everyone, which is really quite a silly idea when you have read the literature.

Unforetunately, Blanton and Fargher's model has taken a long time to get established. I don’t fully understand why, although it might be due to the fact that some parts of archaeology has become very post-modern and humanities-oriented, with fashionable social theory being more important than scientific methods and data. Blanton and Fargher are scientific and empirical, so lots of archaeologists ignore their work for that reason alone.

The implication of this for the basic question (about levels of inequality in the past) is that it seems to be the case that more collective regimes are associated with lower levels of social inequality than are more autocratic regimes. This is certainly the case for the modern world (democracies have less inequality than dictatorial regimes, etc.). But for the premodern world, this association has yet to be established conclusively. Unfortuantely, Blanton and Fargher do not address the question of levels of inequality. Our Amerind seminar project may support it – but that will depend on some synthetic data analysis that is only just now starting. So, IF this association of regime type with inequality holds up for ancient times, then the recognition that collective regimes were far more widespread than thought (i.e., collective rule did not begin all of a sudden in Athens), does suggest that many ancient state socieites had lower levels of social inequality. But the proof is in the pudding, and I’m not willing to come out and declare this conclusion until we have analyzed the data.

Also, there is an ideological element to claims of lower inequality in the past. It is true that archaeologists are now working more on houses and households, not just considering kings and pyramids. And one common tendency is to claim that these ancient people we study were more successful and independent and prosperous that we used to think. But given that our old models were completely unrealistic pictures of domination and suppression, the new ideas are due less to new findings than to theoretical fashions and changes.

That said, I do think I have made a case for prosperous Aztec commoners in my book, At Home with the Aztecs. Check out the book’s website for some journalistic articles and publicity that covers some of the content.  http://smithaztecbook.wikispaces.asu.edu/

Blanton, Richard E. and Lane F. Fargher  (2008)  Collective Action in the Formation of Pre-Modern States. Springer, New York.

Mann, Michael  (1984)  The Autonomous Power of the State: Its Origins, Mechanisms and Results. European Journal of Sociology / Archives Européennes de Sociologie 25:185-213.

Mann, Michael  (2008)  Infrastructural Power Revisited. Studies in Comparative International Development 43:355-365.

The big pyramids and the small houses

Most cities -- ancient and modern -- show a big contrast between large civic architecture and the houses of the common people. I've been thinking about this contrast a lot recently. Last week I helped guide a tour of visitors from the Heard Museum to the Aztec Templo Mayor in Mexico City, and then to Teotihuacan. Most of what we saw was the big civic architecture. The Templo Mayor was one of the largest pyramids in ancient Mesoamerica, sitting in the heart of the biggest city of the pre-Columbian past (known as Tenochtitlan in Aztec times). This was a BIG pyramid, and the archaeological ruins are quite impressive, both for the size of the structure and for the richness of the offerings that have been excavated in and around the temple. The visitors were suitably impressed.

On that same short trip to Mexico, I started correcting the proofs of my new book, At Home with the Aztecs: An Archaeologist Uncovers their Domestic Life (due out in February). The topic is the households and communities of Aztec commoners in the provinces, near Cuernavaca. These people didn't build huge pyramids, and they didn't engage in the sensationalist human sacrifices that the Aztecs are known for. They were everyday folks, farmers and traders who strived to make a good life for themselves. Yet their lives were connected to the big pyramids, whether they liked it or not. A painted bowl from Yautepec (site of my second major excavation project) somehow ended up in an offering at the Templo Mayor. Some of the taxes paid by the folks whose houses I excavated went to build the pyramids and support the luxurious lifestyles of the Aztec nobility.

When we got to Teotihuacan, my colleague Saburo Sugiyama led the tour. Saburo has been excavating at Teotihuacan his whole career, and he knows the site like no one else. Most of what we saw on the tour were temples and pyramids, and some houses of the Teotihuacan rich and famous. There wasn't time to go see where the regular folks lived. You have to go outside the official archaeological zone to see the apartment compounds. Yet those residences tell an amazing story. Somehow, the people of Teotihuacan managed to forge a prosperous way of life for themselves. The average Teotihuacano had a far more luxurious life than the average Aztec, a millennium later. In fact, the Teotihuacan commoners had a better quality of life than just about any of the commoners of ancient Mesoamerica. How did they achieve that?  Sounds like the topic for a research project.........Some of the answers are in the artifacts excavated over the years at Teotihuacan, and stored in our laboratory at the site.

How did these ancient urban societies manage to link the commoners who lived in their small houses to the kings and nobles who lived in big palaces and built huge temples? To me, this is one of the key questions in the study of ancient cities, states, and empires. To get an answer we have to know about both kinds of contexts, and we need to have concepts and theories that link them together. Just looking at one kind of setting is not enough. We need a broad perspective, and that is something archaeologists are struggling to come up with. Stay tuned!

Living the good life in Teotihuacan

I have written two articles that contain new information about life in ancient Teotihuacan. These are scheduled to be published in November, but in the meantime I want to talk about some of the new findings and their implications. Teotihuacan had a unique form of urban life and society. I don't mean this in the sense that one can claim that every city is unique. What I mean is that Teotihuacan had several features that are VERY unusual for premodern cities. Here I will mention several of these features:

(1) Most residents lived in a form of housing that is unique among early cities of the world: the apartment compound. 

Apartment compounds.

Zacuala

There are over 2,000 apartment compounds at Teotihuacan. Although each one has a unique layout, most of them share features of their construction and layout. There is usually a single doorway in the stone outer wall. Entrances lead to a central open courtyard, which typically has some kind of temple or shrine or altar. Passages lead out from this to the individual apartments, which usually consist of a small open courtyard surrounded by rooms with porches.The courtyards are built at a lower level than the other rooms, and they are drained to the outside by pipes and channels under the floors. Floors and walls are covered with white lime plaster (technically, a form of concrete). The walls were usually painted with bright colors, with scenes of people, animals, and gods (see the image of Zacuala).

Oztoyahualco

My first article (Smith 2014) reviews the forms of urban housing used around the world before the Industrial Revolution. The various forms of housing are shown in the following typology:

Urban housing typology (Smith 2014)

Among all of the premodern cities of the world, the apartment building is the least common form of housing. Ancient Rome had apartment buildings (called insulae), as did some of the cities in the Ottoman Empire such as Cairo. But in those cases, apartments were small, cramped arrangements built to hold an overabundance of new urban immigrants. The Ottoman apartments often started out as large, spacious single-family houses that were subvided into many small apartments.

(2) Apartment compounds were luxurious and well-built.

The Teotihuacan apartment buildings are unusual (compared to Roman and Ottoman apartments) in

Aztec commoner houses

two ways. First, they are single-story structures. And second, each household had quite a bit of space, including a courtyard and several rooms with porches facing the courtyard. So these do not look like hasty buildings or conversions to accommodate an influx of new urbanites. They are spacious and open dwellings. When Laurette Sejourne excavated one of the first apartment compounds at Teotihuacan, she thought at first she had excavated a palace, and her name "Zacuala palace" is still used sometimes. In comparison with other ancient Mesoamerican patterns of housing, these structures do look like elite houses. Commoners, at other Mesoamerican cities, tended to live in small single-family houses.

In Aztec times, for example, there were a number of forms of commoner house (see the graphic, from the Florentine Codex by Sahagun), and I have excavated many of these structures. If I uncovered a Teotaihuacan-style apartment compound in an Aztec site I was excavating (and if it was indeed an Aztec structure, not an older pre-Aztec structure), I would call it an elite residence. The only Aztec houses this large, with this many rooms, and rooms this large, are elite residences. So while the overall form of a Teotihuacan apartment compound is not unique, it is very strange for a commoner house. Or was it an elite house? But you can't have most of the population as the elite? Or perhaps commoner and elite are not the best labels to use for the residents of Teotihuacan. This, again, is just plain bizarre for a Mesoamerican society. At just about all Mesoamerican urban sites, there are elite and commoner houses (typically at a ratio of ca. 50 commoner houses for every elite house), and it is rarely difficult to distinguish them.

(3) The apartment compounds appear to have been built in a single episode of urban renewal around A.D. 200.

Zacuala

Although we still have relatively few securely dated, excavated apartment compounds at Teotihuacan, it looks like most of them were constructed in a burst of activity around A.D. 200. In some of the excavated examples, there are irrigation canals below the floors, showing that the city expanded to cover former irrigated agricultural fields. We think that the houses before this episode were less regular, perhaps not conforming to the plans of apartment compounds. But in truth we know next to nothing about housing before this time. But why did the people or rulers of the city feel the need to obliterate older housing and agricultural fields to construct two thousand new apartment compounds?

(4) The level of social inequality was very low at Teotihuacan.

Tetitla

The second article that is now in press (Smith et al. 2014) is mainly about social inequality at Aztec sites. We illustrate the use of the Gini index to measure ancient social inequality, based on the sizes of houses. But while we were at it, we decided to try the method out on Teotihuacan. This required figuring out how the apartment compounds were divided into individual household dwellings. Student Rebecca Harkness took on this task, the the graphic shows her results for the Tetitla compound. We had to make some assumptions (e.g., that the excavated apartment compounds are representative of the unexcavated ones), and our result was very surprising.

The Gini index for Teotihuacan is 0.12, a very very low level for an urban settlement. This means that the level of inequality was quite low. All of the Aztec cities have higher values; the only site with a comparable value is a peasant village (Capilco). There are several reasons for such a low Gini index for Teotihuacan: (1) most houses were of a similar size; (2) there are a few smaller structures (probably adobe huts), and a few larger structures, but no huge royal palace. Yes, I know, some colleagues don't agree, and they have tried to identify a royal palace at Teotihuacan. But they can't agree with one another, and if you can't agree about the royal palace, then there probably wasn't one. No one has to scrounge around to find the royal palace at Maya or Aztec cities; they are quite obvious, huge structures that are many times larger than the typical house.

Atetelco

So, what does all this imply about life in ancient Teotihuacan? I think it is still too early to come to firm conclusions here. We need more excavations (several projects are ongoing at Teotihuacan right now, including work by by ASU colleague Saburo Sugiyama, and a project direct directed by David Carballo of Boston University). We need more studies of the already-excavated examples; ASU student Melissa Marklin is working on this now. I am not the first one to suggest that life and society at Teotihuacan were very different from other Mesoamerican societies, and from other cities around the world. Rene Millon and George Cowgill have talked about this, and Esther Pasztory has called Teotihuacan "an experiment in living."

Nevertheless, it seems clear that most people at Teotihuacan had large, spacious dwelling to live in. They had access to a wide range of household goods, for cooking, ritual, crafts, and other activities. There doesn't seem to have been a strong autocratic king ruling things, yet someone has enough clout to carry out a major urban renewal project. We can't find much evidence for a definite elite class. And people lived in a type of housing that was unique in the premodern world. What was going on at Teotihuacan? These facts remain disconnected and tantalizing, and we desperately need more research to figure things out. But I think we can conclude that people there were living the good life as part of the wide urban world.

Some links (ADDED Oct 24):

Prior post:  Teotihuacan: Ancient Mesoamerican Metropolis
Prior post:  Teotihuacan and the Origins of Market Economies

Project: Urbanism, Neighborhood Organization and Domestic Economy at the Tlajinga District, Teotihuacan. (current project by David Carballo, Luis Barba, and Kenneth Hirth)
  
The Teotihuacan Research Laboratory, Arizona State University

References

Carballo, David M.
2013    The Social Organization of Craft Production and Interregional Exchange at Teotihuacan. In Merchants, Markets, and Exchange in the Pre-Columbian World, edited by Kenneth G. Hirth and Joanne Pillsbury, pp. 113-140. Dumbarton Oaks, Washington, DC.

Cowgill, George L.
1997    State and Society at Teotihuacan, Mexico. Annual Review of Anthropology 26: 129-161.

Cowgill, George L.
2008    An Update on Teotihuacan. Antiquity 82: 962-975.

Millon, René
1976    Social Relations in Ancient Teotihuacan. In The Valley of Mexico: Studies of Pre-Hispanic Ecology and Society, edited by Eric R. Wolf, pp. 205-248. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque.

Pasztory, Esther
1997    Teotihuacan: An Experiment in Living. University of Oklahoma Press, Norman.

Smith, Michael E.
2014    Housing in Premodern Cities: Patterns of Social and Spatial Variation. International Journal of Architectural Research 8 (3): in press.

Smith, Michael E., Timothy Dennehy, April Kamp-Whittaker, Emily Colon, and Rebecca Harkness
2014    Quantitative Measures of Wealth Inequality in Ancient Central Mexican Communities. Advances in Archaeological Practice 2 (4): ___.

Sugiyama, Nawa, Saburo Sugiyama, and Alejandro Sarabia G.
2013    Inside the Sun Pyramid at Teotihuacan, Mexico: 2008-2011 Excavations and Preliminary Results. Latin American Antiquity 24 (4): 403-432.