ABSTRACT
During Mesoamerica’s initial Early Formative period (1900–1300 B.C.), the establishment of villages in the Chiapan Soconusco created new spaces at which people could encounter animate, other-than-human beings. Houses afforded the exercise of authority and the generation of inequality in novel ways that had profound implications for subsequent historical processes. Intimate, domestic encounters with the divine shifted over time to public and increasingly impersonal spaces and scales of engagement. Concomitant with this spatial relocation was an expansion in the reach of authority and in the kinds of things through which social distinction was generated. By the beginning of the thirteenth century B.C., the divine had left home to become distant and exotic. Rather than making decisions directly in the mundane world in intimate settings, divine beings became remote – leaving the exercise of authority to living people whose unique status was also translated into the use and display of valued things.
