Abstract
In the field of Mesoamerican studies, the archaeological investigation of political institutions and processes based on the analysis of material culture has been approached from a number of perspectives (Inomata and Tsukamoto, this volume). These include, but are not limited to, the form of architectural units and their distributional patterns (Hirth 1995), performativity (Inomata 2006a), textuality (Sugiyama 1993), and the cultural biographical approach (Ashmore and Sabloff 2002). In this chapter we attempt to combine simultaneously some of these approaches, bearing in mind the ever-present problem of evidentiary scarcity. The nature of our data calls for the detection of patterns, but