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Symbolic bones and interethnic violence in a frontier zone, northwest Mexico, ca. 500–900 C.E.

Significance Persistent interethnic violence has affected some global regions for centuries. Recent research reveals that major outbreaks are often prevented or limited by creative social action. In the prehispanic Northern Frontier of Mesoamerica, approximately 500–900 C.E., people of different ethnic backgrounds struggled for standing in a shifting sociopolitical landscape. Evidence is consistent with long-term social violence, but also with the use of the dead to communicate a range of symbolic messages. Complex arrays of human skeletal material commemorated past physical conflicts, possibly discouraging their repetition, while also connecting the living symbolically with a metaphysical realm inhabited by ancestors and deities. This article highlights the postmortem agency of the dead and illustrates their roles in structuring social relations. Although extensive deposits of disarticulated, commingled human bones are common in the prehispanic Northern Frontier of Mesoamerica, detailed bioarchaeological analyses of them are not. To our knowledge, this article provides the first such analysis of bone from a full residential-ceremonial complex and evaluates multiple hypotheses about its significance, concluding that the bones actively represented interethnic violence as well as other relationships among persons living and dead. Description of these practices is important to the discussion of multiethnic societies because the frontier was a context where urbanism and complexity were emerging and groups with the potential to form multiethnic societies were interacting, possibly in the same ways that groups did before the formation of larger multiethnic city-states in the core of Mesoamerica.