Architectural conspicuous consumption provides an important basis for elucidating changing power relations, and architectural energetics or labor analysis has been widely employed in the study of early complex societies. However, neither the duration of construction nor the number of laborers is specified in standard labor-time measurements and this needs to be addressed in order to provide meaningful and comparable measurements. This paper presents energetic data for construction derived from replicative experiments and discusses the duration and timing of monumental construction at Teotihuacan. The results suggest that the duration of construction computed using the estimated population in the Teotihuacan Valley is consistent with archaeological evidence. Based on the estimated duration, the phase assignment of monumental structures is revised, and changes in state power are discussed in light of two alternative models of the trajectory of labor expenditure: one based on published chronology and the other based on the revised chronology.
Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 29 citations exist upstream.