Ruins, Rubble, Vestiges, Traces...

In modern Western culture, ruins are typically viewed as the damaged and disappearing vestiges of the built environment (Rosado-Ramirez Reference Rosado-Ramirez2021). These are the remains of edifices, monuments, roads, plazas, and other works of infrastructure. Ruins can be originated by sudden destruction, brought about by such events as earthquakes, hurricanes, and intentional erasure. More often, though, infrastructure becomes a ruin by the slow, imperceptible, and constant process of decay driven by gravity, wear, weather, and human disturbance. Because of their decaying state, ruins do not fulfill the purposes for which they were used during their occupation. For this reason, ruins are also characterized by human neglect, and by extension, detachment such that in conventional Western thought ruins are commonly imagined as spaces without people.

This perception of ruins as disconnected from people and the present has its origins in Romanticism, an artistic and intellectual movement popular in Europe from the late eighteenth to the middle of the nineteenth centuries. Architectural ruins were thought of as the materialization of some of the key tenets of Romanticism: the forces of nature overcoming human actions, a melancholic outlook on the passage of time, and a quest for reflection in solitude and silence (Macaulay Reference Macaulay1953). In their works, Romantic artists and intellectuals consciously erased the roles that ruins played in contemporary society. They did so to emphasize the “pastness” of ancient architectural remains, as well as to stress feelings of solitude among the public that consumed representations of rubble (Meltzer Reference Meltzer2019). The Romantic perception of ruins as spaces dominated by human absence and with no importance for contemporary communities has influenced the way that people, including many archaeologists, think of ancient cities in Mesoamerica as abandoned.

More broadly, views of ruins as from a distant past disconnected from the present can be seen as emanating from the progressive and linear temporality of modernity within which Romanticism was embedded (Benjamin Reference Benjamin2002; González-Ruibal Reference González Ruibal2019). A central tenet of modernity is its origins in rupture from a premodern past seen as weighed down by tradition and liberated by modernism’s inexorable commitment to progress. The focus on the rupture from premodern to modern also illustrates another fundamental feature of modernist ontologies, a dependence on Cartesian binaries and essentialism. Yet this desire for constant change and newness in the service of progress leaves in its wake the continuous destruction of people, places, and things viewed as obsolete impediments to progress. Stoler (Reference Stoler2008) termed this constant production of destruction the process of ruination, which can be seen in the crumbling factories and abandoned mining towns that have become the focus of ruination studies. These explorations of recent ruins reveal the failed projects, dead ends, waste, violence, and destruction of modernity that threaten notions of progress, giving ruins a potentially disruptive capacity. Gordillo (Reference Gordillo2014) demonstrates that this disruptive capacity, while complex, can be differentially experienced according to class. Ruins, particularly of the recent past, can be threatening to elites unless they are either ignored or fetishized through heritage reconstruction (González-Ruibal Reference González Ruibal2019:64–67; Gordillo Reference Gordillo2014:6–11). Reconstructed sites typically reify the past as either distant and long dead, as exemplified by Castañeda’s (Reference Castañeda1996) study of Chichen Itza, or as origin points for a stable, authorized present, as in the case of Williamsburg (Leone Reference Leone, Richard and Michael1981). In contrast, Indigenous Mesoamerican peoples approach their cultural heritage as a legacy of their ancestors. Ruins are sacred places inhabited by divinities and ancestors where rituals are carried out (for Maya perspectives on heritage, see May Castillo Reference Crossland and Bauer2017).

Gordillo (Reference Gordillo2014:10) argues that heritage creates a hierarchy of debris in which unreconstructed rubble “is looked down upon as a lesser, inferior type of matter” (italics in original) and urges the use of the term rubble because it deglamorizes Romantic notions of ruins. His usage of the term rubble is more in line with how Indigenous Mesoamericans designate the remains of old buildings by emphasizing their materiality and context. For example, during the colonial period Native Americans referred to decaying architectural features as cúes, a term derived from the Yukatek Maya word kú, meaning “divinity” or “shrine” (Gómez de Silva Reference Gómez de Silva Cano2001:69). More recently, Yukatek Maya speakers use the word múul (mound). People throughout Mesoamerica use Spanish terms for mounds or low hills such as mogote, montículo, and cerro. Because Indigenous Mesoamerican terms for decaying buildings are so varied, we will stick to the term “ruin,” while our focus on the materiality of ruins captures some of the features that Native American terms emphasize. We will use the term “trace” to refer more broadly to the immanence of things that endure from the past rather than the term “vestige” given its associations with linear conceptions of time and Romanticism.

Anthropological Approaches to Ancient Mesoamerican Ruins

Following Alberti (Reference Alberti2016), the anthropological approach to Mesoamerican ruins is one that draws on Native American perspectives to develop a more ontologically contextual approach. Our reading of Alberti (Reference Alberti2016) recognizes two branches within the anthropological approach. Although he argues for the application of Native American ontologies to develop critiques of archaeological practice, the more common approach is to use anthropological accounts of ontologies to consider how other peoples lived in worlds very different than our own. It is the latter that describes research on ancient Mesoamerican encounters with ruins and that we focus on in our review.

We recognize that understandings of the ontological perspectives of ancient, non-Western peoples is challenging. Although ethnographic, ethnohistoric, iconographic, epigraphic, and archaeological data permit inferences about Mesoamerican ontologies and how they varied (Harrison-Buck Reference Harrison-Buck, Meghan and Skousen2015; Joyce Reference Joyce, Kosiba, Janusek and Cummins2020a; Mock Reference Mock1998), these understandings of necessity must be fairly general given that ontologies are complex, multimodal, and situationally variable. In addition, the ethnographic and ethnohistoric evidence that archaeologists partially rely on to understand the Mesoamerican past are often derived from a colonial setting in which Native Americans actively negotiated entanglements between Indigenous and Western ontologies. We also acknowledge our position as privileged outsiders grappling with how to both interrogate our own Western biases and to think about the past in ways that are informed by Native American perspectives (Cipolla Reference Cipolla2023). Despite these challenges, archaeologists across the Americas have been successful in understanding the past through a lens that takes Native American worlds seriously and that lessens the imposition of historically contingent modernist perspectives on non-Western peoples (Harrison-Buck Reference Harrison-Buck, Meghan and Skousen2015; Joyce Reference Joyce, Kosiba, Janusek and Cummins2020a; Pauketat Reference Pauketat2013).

Research on relations between ancient Mesoamericans and ruins that are informed by Native American perspectives include ethnographies, ethnohistoric research primarily using Indigenous documents, and archaeological studies of activities associated with ruins. By the Classic period in many parts of Mesoamerica, landscapes were saturated with ruins and other traces like potsherds and lithics. Although these materials were undoubtedly often recognized as traces, in most cases they were part of the background of everyday life, attracting little attention. In some cases, however, ruins had a saliency, brightness, or vibrancy that was compelling (Bennett Reference Bennett2010; Gordillo Reference Gordillo2014). Benjamin (Reference Benjamin2002:447) captured a sense of this vibrancy when referring to the aura of historical objects as a sense of a distant time and place. An aspect of vibrancy was that in ancient Mesoamerica, ruins were often living entities imbued with life forces or vitality. The vitality of ruins was part of a broader “animic cosmos” (Harrison-Buck Reference Harrison-Buck, Meghan and Skousen2015) populated by a far greater diversity of living beings than is seen in the modern West (Furst Reference Furst1995; López Austin Reference López Austin1988; Monaghan Reference Monaghan and Monaghan2000). Living beings may include people, earth, rain, maize, ancestors, deities, mountains, buildings, time, and numerous other entities, including ruins. Although there exist dualisms in Mesoamerican religion, these are not the oppositional and essentialized dualisms of modernism, and there is broad agreement among scholars that Mesoamerican worlds involve an ontological monism where vitalistic, divine forces animate all life (Monaghan Reference Monaghan and Monaghan2000). Ethnographic research shows the complexity of beings, objects, and actions necessary to transfer vitality and to ensure life (Begel et al. Reference Begel, Chosson, Becquey, Johnson and Joyce2022; Pitrou Reference Pitrou2015). The vitality of ruins could include their own aliveness as well as the presence of living entities in the form of divinities, ancestors, or beings from an earlier creation (Halperin Reference Halperin2014; Hamann Reference Hamann2002; Stanton and Magnoni, eds. Reference Stanton and Magnoni2008). In addition, relations with ruins are also affected by the positionality of people including dimensions of identity like gender, age, status, ethnicity and the material-discursive modalities through which identities are constituted (Magnoni et al. Reference Magnoni, Hutson, Stanton, Travis and Magnoni2008). Yet as discussed in the following text, the broader vibrancy of Mesoamerican ruins goes beyond symbolic notions of vitality to include the materials of which they were constituted, the acts involving their original construction, the ongoing material forces acting on them, their durability and visibility, the material memories that they hold, and the conjunction of their heterotemporalities (Erikson and Vapnarsky Reference Vapnarsky, Erikson and Vapnarsky2022).

Ethnographic and Ethnohistorical Approaches to Ruins

Ethnographic data from Indigenous Mesoamerican communities show a diversity of engagements with ruins (Becquey and Chosson Reference Becquey, Chosson, Erikson and Vapnarsky2022; Redfield and Villa Rojas Reference Redfield and Rojas1934; Vapnarsky Reference Vapnarsky, Erikson and Vapnarsky2022). In many cases, ruins are understood to be living entities inhabited by divinities, ghosts, or beings from an earlier age of creation. Ruins are often ambivalent places that can be simultaneously dangerous or beneficial depending on how one negotiates relations with the beings that inhabit them or with the living ruins. These negotiations usually involve rituals including the making of offerings and sacrifices to petition divine inhabitants for well-being and for permission to use nearby lands. Conversely, interactions with ruins can be dangerous leading to sickness, possession, death, and other forms of misfortune (Leathem Reference Leathem2022; Vapnarsky Reference Vapnarsky, Erikson and Vapnarsky2022). Although most of the ethnographic work on ruins in Mesoamerica has focused on those that are significant to people, it is likely that the majority of ruins are largely ignored, and this seems probable for the past as well (Becquey and Chosson Reference Becquey, Chosson, Erikson and Vapnarsky2022).

One of the most common understandings of ruins in the present day is that they come from an earlier age of creation that was annihilated by the first sunrise of the current creation (Hamann Reference Hamann2002; Lopez Austin Reference López Austin2015:180; Parsons Reference Parsons1936:289; Redfield and Villa Rojas Reference Redfield and Rojas1934:303–331). This earlier era was inhabited by beings that differ from those in the current world, or what Hamann (Reference Hamann2002) refers to as pre-Sunrise beings. In pre-Sunrise narratives these beings can be giants, dwarfs, “night people,” or “ant people,” but regardless of form they are seen as having had great strength such that they were able to build the massive structures visible in ancient cities like Teotihuacan, Cholula, Mitla, and Chichen Itza. Pre-Sunrise beings, however, are described as “uncivilized” and immoral in various ways, including that they did not practice agriculture or properly worship deities (Monaghan Reference Monaghan1990). In many of these creation narratives, pre-Sunrise beings are turned to stone by the heat of the first sunrise of the new age and still lie dormant in the ruins of these ancient cities.

In contrast to the places of creation identified in pre-Sunrise narratives, Vapnarsky (Reference Vapnarsky, Erikson and Vapnarsky2022) identifies another kind of relationship with ruins among today’s Yucatecan Maya. These are more modest, local ruins, typically visible as múul, or low mounds, and inhabited by guardian spirits (yuuntsilo’ob). These kinds of ruins are integrated into the broader landscape of Maya communities and play a more significant role in people’s day-to-day lives than the ruins of pre-Sunrise places like Chichen Itza. For example, if one wishes to plant crops or hunt in the vicinity of a múul, an offering must be made to the guardian spirits lest misfortune befall the intruder. As argued by Vapnarsky (Reference Vapnarsky, Erikson and Vapnarsky2022:85–87), guardian spirits are associated with generic ancestors (pixano’o) from the relatively recent past and hence are historically connected to the living humans with whom they interact. Although the múul are described as having been built in a much more distant past that in some versions resembles a pre-Sunrise place, their yuuntsilo’ob inhabitants are alive and active in the current world such that múul are dynamic places in the landscape of the living. In contrast, the pre-Sunrise beings turned to stone with the creation of the current era at places like Chichen Itza are hidden away, inactive, and associated with a much more distant past related to cosmic cycles of creation and destruction.

The identification of ruins as pre-Sunrise places in broader creation narratives are prominent in the ethnohistoric record including in early colonial period Nahua and Spanish language sources from Central Mexico as well as in the Mixtec codices (Hamann Reference Hamann2002). The Aztec sources describe the ruins of the massive structures at Teotihuacan as having been built by giants during a previous age of creation (López Luján Reference López Luján1989). Early colonial sources further identify Teotihuacan as the place of creation where the sacrifices of Aztec deities brought forth the first sunrise of the new era, which included the first rulers (Sahagún et al. Reference Sahagún, Valeriano, Vegerano, Jacobita, de San Buenaventura, de Grado, Maximiliano, Richter, Alicia Maria, Terraciano, Peterson, Magaloni and Sousa2023 [1577]). The first sunrise is likely depicted in the Códice de Huamantla where a sun is shown rising above the ruins of the pyramids of Teotihuacan (Aguilera Reference Aguilera2005). Aztec rulers performed rituals including human sacrifice at Teotihuacan and during their visits sponsored excavations to reclaim precious objects created and used by deities as they did at other ruins, including those of Tula (Figure 1; López Luján and López Austin Reference López Luján and López Austin2007; Matos Moctezuma and López Luján Reference Matos Moctezuma and López Luján1993; Umberger Reference Umberger1987:62–62). At the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán, there are numerous references to the place of creation in the form of Teotihuacan-style art and architecture.

Figure 1. Ruins depicted in the Florentine Codex: (a) the ruins of Tula; (b) an Aztec excavating to find precious stones (Sahagún et al. Reference Sahagún, Valeriano, Vegerano, Jacobita, de San Buenaventura, de Grado, Maximiliano, Richter, Alicia Maria, Terraciano, Peterson, Magaloni and Sousa2023 [1577]; Courtesy of Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Florence, and by permission of MiBACT).

Elsewhere in Mesoamerica other ruined Classic period cities were identified in Late Postclassic texts as pre-Sunrise places of creation (Hamann Reference Hamann2002; Joyce Reference Joyce, Bowser and Zedeño2009:46–47; Pohl Reference Pohl and Boone2005). Hamann (Reference Hamann and Jeffrey2008) has identified a convention in the Mixtec codices for a ruin, which consists of an architectural platform drawn without a building on top, in contrast to the more common depictions of platforms supporting superstructures (Figure 2). He identifies this codical convention with the sixteenth-century Mixtec term chiyo. Hamann (Reference Hamann and Jeffrey2008:134) has identified more than 60 renditions of chiyo-platforms in the codices. Among these, a chiyo is associated with the two most extensive codical creation narratives, which are found in the codices Vienna and Nuttall. Although not shown as a chiyo, another part of the creation narrative in the Nuttall is associated with the place sign for Yucuñudahui, which was a ruin when the codex was created. In the codical narratives, as well as in twentieth-century Mixtec accounts, the cosmic creation involves the emergence of the first Mixtec lords and conflict between humans and divinities associated with earth and sky, leading to the establishment of a sacred covenant whereby people were required to offer sacrifices to deities in return for agricultural fertility and prosperity (Monaghan Reference Monaghan1990). A Zapotec creation narrative shown on the Late Postclassic lintel paintings of the Arroyo Group at Mitla in the Oaxaca Valley also depicts a First Sunrise emerging between two architectural platforms lacking buildings (Figure 3). The place of creation is likely the Formative and Classic period city of Monte Albán (Hamann Reference Hamann and Jeffrey2008:127–128; Pohl Reference Pohl and Boone2005).

Figure 2. Representations of ruins (chiyo-platforms) identified in Mixtec codices by Hamann; used with permission of the University Press of Colorado, from Hamann (Reference Hamann and Jeffrey2008).

Figure 3. Arroyo Group lintel painting from Mitla (redrawn from Pohl Reference Pohl and Boone2005; used with permission from Middle American Research Institute).

Metaphysical Approaches to Ancient Mesoamerican Ruins

Archaeological research in Mesoamerica over the past 20 years has gone well beyond accounts of squatters and begun to identify the complex and varied ways in which people interacted with ruins. Despite the nuanced understandings that have emerged from these studies, in most cases the ruins are largely seen as passive. People make offerings to ruins; construct residences and shrines on top of them; desecrate, dismantle, or preserve them; and bury the dead within them. Informed by the ethnographic and ethnohistoric record, these activities are viewed as having been carried out because ruins were living beings often inhabited by divinities or ancestors and associated either with past peoples or with pre-Sunrise beings from an earlier creation. Yet ruins are generally seen as unchanging and inert. This perspective contrasts with research on recent ruins that has considered the ways in which ruins make a difference in relations with people (Dawdy Reference Dawdy2016; Gordillo Reference Gordillo2014). These studies are informed by perspectives within the material turn, which Alberti (Reference Alberti2016) identifies as the metaphysical approach to ontology. There are a variety of metaphysical approaches in archaeology as well as significant differences and debate among them, although new materialist perspectives inspired by the work of Giles Deleuze (Deleuze and Guatarri Reference Deleuze, Guattari and Massumi1987) have dominated studies of the nonmodernist past (e.g., Harris Reference Harris2021; Joyce Reference Joyce2020b, Reference Joyce2025). In addition, several scholars have argued that new materialism is more compatible with Native American ontologies because both approach existence as relational, nonbinary, and nonessentializing (Cipolla Reference Cipolla2023; Joyce Reference Joyce2020b). One of the central tenants of new materialism is to overthrow the dualisms of Western modernity, especially that of culture-nature, which both processual and postprocessual traditions are embedded within (Harris and Cipolla Reference Harris and Cipolla2017:27–31). These dualisms are problematic not only because they are particular to the modern, Western world, but also because they simplify and obscure the complexities of existence by dividing it into a series of essentialized oppositions that in addition to culture-nature, include male-female, mind-matter, present-past, and sacred-profane, among others. Binaries therefore exclude things that exist outside of their opposing terms and have difficulty with the fuzzy middle-ground between them.

The implications of new materialism include that we should understand phenomena ranging from atoms to people to planets and beyond as assemblages, which involve flows of matter, energy, and meaning that are temporarily drawn together through relations among different phenomena that are also assemblages (Barad Reference Barad2007; Bennett Reference Bennett2010; Deleuze and Guattari Reference Deleuze, Guattari and Massumi1987). Relations within and among assemblages constitute the properties of the assemblage, which are simultaneously material and expressive and include those of boundedness, spatiality, duration, and semiosis. These properties define what an assemblage can do, but are virtual, until actualized by affective relations within and among assemblages. The notion of virtual capacities recognizes the real capacities of an assemblage that have yet to be manifest. Affect therefore involves the ways in which a phenomenon actualizes virtual capacities of other phenomena when brought into relations as well as the ability in turn to be affected by others. Furthermore, assemblages always have relations that actualize capacities to both bring components together (territorialization) and relations that conversely can drive them apart (deterritorialization). For example, clayey deposits in a floodplain have a very real capacity to be shaped and hardened into an adobe block, but this property is virtual and unexpressed until it is brought into relations with water, grass temper, sunlight, tools, and people, which actualizes the capacity of the clay to be shaped and hardened into a more durable and spatially defined block thereby territorializing an adobe. Adobes in turn can be brought into relations with other blocks through the capacity of mud mortar to bind thereby forming a wall (a broader assemblage); walls, construction fill, and mortar can then be territorialized as a building (a still broader assemblage). The adobe block also has a virtual capacity to decay and become deterritorialized, which can be actualized by relations with rain, wind, and gravity.

Assemblages are therefore multiplicities made up of a diversity of heterogeneous phenomena that should be seen as dynamic processes, rather than stable essences. Humans are not outside of assemblages but are phenomena within them, ontologically equivalent to other entities, which is what new materialists refer to as a “flat ontology.” This means that we must consider not only the actions and dispositions of people in the construction, use, maintenance, and decay of buildings but also what the materials and forces that construct, constitute, and impact buildings can do both materially and semiotically.

In the case of monumental buildings in ancient Mesoamerica, we can consider them not only assemblages territorialized through human labor and knowledge but also through the properties and relations of stone, earth, sun, water, and tools, among other things. Although buildings have a virtual capacity to be deterritorialized through erosion and decay, the maintenance of the building keeps this capacity from being actualized. As long as the building is maintained it will be well-bounded by walls and will endure. When a structure is no longer maintained, relations with rain, wind, gravity, burrowing animals, and vegetation will overcome the capacities of stone, clay, mortar, and people to territorialize the building, thereby actualizing its capacity to erode and collapse, beginning a process of deterritorialization. People might also be drawn to the ruin as a source of building materials for use in new construction projects and so contribute to deterritorialization.

Likewise, we must consider the expressive aspects of ruins and not just what they symbolically represent, but also what the materials have the capacity to express. In this regard, archaeologists have found the semiotics of Charles Sanders Peirce to be useful because it provides an approach to understanding signs and meaning that new materialism otherwise lacks, and which like new materialism, is non-Cartesian and relational (Cipolla Reference Cipolla2023; Crossland and Bauer Reference Crossland and Bauer2017; Joyce Reference Joyce2020b, Reference Joyce2025; Preucel Reference Preucel2006; Swenson Reference Swenson2025). Peircean semiotics goes beyond a focus on symbols that have an arbitrary relation to their objects determined by human convention, making them representational, by identifying materially motivated signs that can be independent of human involvement. The latter include icons, which refer to their objects through relations of resemblance (e.g., a portrait), and indexes, which are motivated by a spatiotemporal contiguity with the objects that they signify, which is typically causal in nature (e.g., smoke indexing fire). The interpretant or the third element of Peirce’s semiotic triad is a translation of a sign into a more developed one through the medium of some sign-interpreting agency. When people are that sign-interpreting agency, the resulting interpretant may vary according to social positionality involving dimensions such as class, age, gender, and ethnicity. Peircean semiotics therefore is more-than-representational in that signs are not restricted to symbols but can instead be materially motivated as icons and indexes. For example, in the case of ruination at Tayasal discussed by Halperin (Reference Halperin2014), the transformation of architecture to rubble and the growth of vegetation actualized the capacity of the ruins of the Cerro Mo’ pyramid to iconically signify a mountain and motivate a chain of interpretants including the ruin as an animate, sacred mountain and the resulting settlement of people in proximity to the ruin. The coming together of these material and meaningful relations can also be seen as the territorialization of an assemblage. Other signs that could identify a ruin as a sacred mountain include the exposure through erosion and collapse of stone used to construct a building where the physical properties of the stone visually index the location from which the stone was quarried as a sacred mountain. For example, at Teotihuacan, basalt slabs used for tablero moldings come from the southern slope of Cerro Gordo (Murakami Reference Murakami2015:268), the sacred mountain to which the Street of the Dead and the Moon Pyramid were aligned. In the case of Monte Albán, the Main Plaza was constructed on the summit of a mountain identified as a mountain of creation and sustenance and a pre-Sunrise place in Late Postclassic lintel paintings (Pohl Reference Pohl and Boone2005); the buildings on the plaza were constructed with stone quarried from the mountain such that the buildings, and their later ruins, merged with the animate mountain.

The capacity of ruins to create meaning through signification means they can also hold a form of material memory (Harris Reference Harris2021; Olivier Reference Olivier2011; Olsen Reference Olsen2010). This is not recollection that looks from the present back to the past and is dependent on human or animal memory, nor a habit memory created through repetitious practices and the things that enable them. Instead, it is a form of memory that emerges from heterotemporality, or the layering of the past in the present (Bergson Reference Bergson2004). This is a form of time as material duration, rather than linear time, resulting from the variable durations of material things that have persisted into the present. This is seen in archaeological sites, which consist of a palimpsest of artifacts, features, and sediment built and deposited at different times in the past that have persisted into the present; hence archaeologists work on the pasts that have endured (Olivier Reference Olivier2011). In the case of sites like Piedras Negras, Nakbe, Tayasal, and Ake discussed in the preceding text, later occupants carried out their daily routines among a palimpsest of buildings and artifacts that had persisted from different times in the past with some continuing in use and others in decay. Material memories are relationally emergent phenomena enabled by properties of enduring matter that are actualized in relations with people (Harris Reference Harris2021). A compelling example of material memory is provided by Tsoraki and colleagues (Reference Tsoraki, Barton, Crellin and Harris2020) who illustrate how microwear on stone tools holds virtual memories of aspects of their manufacture and use that are actualized in relations with archaeologists and the microscope and experimental observations that enable their analysis.

Mesoamerican ruins held material memories and meanings actualized in relations with later people and that in turn affected the ongoing lives of those people. Although Mesoamerican landscapes were replete with ruins, only some appear to have become places of intensive affect through their capacity to gather people, offerings, shrines, and the dead and thereby to constitute communities and assemble power. It was this affective intensity involving people that gave these ruins what various scholars refer to as vibrancy and aura, making them bright objects. Harris (Reference Harris2021), in his discussion of Neolithic monuments, calls this monupower, and the articles in this special section demonstrate that monupower can persist even after monuments fall to ruin. In most of the studies discussed in the preceding text, the ruins that became bright objects were largely those of the ceremonial and royal centers of the past. Although this pattern is probably at least in part a function of archaeological sampling, it seems likely that the visibility, durability, and monumentality of these ruins were elements that attracted people and things. The forces of rain, wind, and gravity on massive, steep-sided structures would generally have had a more destructive impact through erosion, collapse, and decay than on architecture associated with low platforms or on the ground surface. The resulting affective relations would have revealed as well as destroyed, through the exposure and collapse of walls as well as erosion that cut through floors, fill, and other features exposing architecture, burials, tombs, plaster, artworks, and construction materials that indexed past practices, ancestors, divinities, pre-Sunrise beings, building techniques, and labor regimes. These ruins would have become “dialectical objects—those that bring the past and the present into a charged proximity that changes both” (Dawdy Reference Dawdy2016:117) and so were places of intense alterity that drew together the living and the dead and revealed ruptures between past and present (Swenson Reference Swenson2025) that could be emotionally and politically disruptive (Gordillo Reference Gordillo2014; Olsen Reference Olsen2010:166–172). As argued by the research reviewed here and the articles in this special section, the interpretants that mediated these sign relations invoked historical narratives involving dynastic history, deities, ancestors, and cycles of cosmic creation and destruction as well as rituals that celebrated, propitiated, or denigrated the animate ruins and associated divinities and ancestors. These narratives and acts constitute what Keane (Reference Keane2018) terms a semiotic ideology, providing “instructions” on how signs should be recognized and interpreted as well as identifying animate ruins as beings that can act as agents of signification.

In the case of building sequences encapsulated within later structures such as at Copan and Tenochtitlán, or recent ruins within ongoing communities like at Piedras Negras, Nakbe, and Ake, material memories would likely have been actualized by encounters with ruins that invoked recollection, oral history, and authorized histories inscribed in writing and imagery. In these cases, time would have been experienced as linear with building sequences and visible ruins often linked to dynastic history and genealogy (see Farriss [Reference Farriss1987] on dual constructs of time among the Maya). Rituals involving offerings, burials, and shrines carried out on these ruins therefore may have been focused on dynastic ancestors and deities associated with the building. Ruins created following dynastic collapse, however, would have indexed rupture for people who continued to occupy a site. At many sites in the Maya Lowlands including Piedras Negras, Actuncan, Chan Chich, El Perú-Waka’, and Xelha the destruction and denigration of abandoned buildings indexes a severing of relations with the past and especially with dynastic ancestors (Kurnick Reference Kurnick2019; Stanton and Magnoni, eds. Reference Stanton and Magnoni2008), which may have involved distinctly different relations with ruins emanating from the varying positionality of interpretants, especially related to social status or ancestry (Mixter Reference Mixter2017). This variation probably explains the complex mix of reverential and desecratory termination rituals at El Perú-Waka’, including offerings made in attempts to heal and perhaps reanimate the ruins (Navaro Farr et al. Reference Navarro Farr, Freidel, Prera, Travis and Magnoni2008).

In contrast, when people occupied sites after centuries of ruination, especially when they were not descendants of the earlier inhabitants, the memories that emerged would have been largely disconnected (deterritorialized) from recollection and historical representation. Instead, fallen walls, eroding plaster, and scattered bone emerging from the vegetation would have indexed a more distant and unfamiliar past. This would have been especially the case when architecture, construction techniques, ceramic styles, and monumental art had significantly changed over the course of ruination. In these instances, ruins were more likely to have generated interpretants that evoked memories of a more profound and ancient rupture involving a cyclical temporality of long-term cycles of cosmic creation and destruction. These ruins may have iconically signified mountains of creation and sustenance (Halperin Reference Halperin2014) or indexed those mountains through the presence of stone rubble. The offerings placed within these ruins and the shrines built on them therefore likely involved communication with pre-Sunrise beings, deities associated with the cosmic creation, or perhaps generic ancestors from a distant past. In the case of Monte Albán the ruins of the ancient ceremonial center were located on and constructed from an impressive mountain associated with the cosmic creation as far back as the early years of the city, if not before (Joyce Reference Joyce2020b). The mountain greatly enhanced the monumentality, visibility, and durability of the ruins, making them especially bright objects that evoked memories of both a pre-Sunrise place of creation and of more recent ancestors, which drew people to make offerings and leave their revered dead.