Mexico - Barajas

The Barajas project focuses on a group of some fifteen sites located on a small volcanic range found in the heart of the Bajío. The region is a vast alluvial plain drained by the Lerma River and its affluents. It occupies the current State of Guanajuato (northern central Mexico) and is a natural circulation path between central, western and north-western Mexico.

The Barajas sites (Municipality of Pénjamo) form one of the most expansive and best-preserved archaeological units in the region. The monumental complexes of Nogales, the main site in the zone, hold the vestiges of imposing buildings with dry stone wells that stand several metres high (see photo below). Above and beyond the relatively exceptional condition they are in for the region, we were struck by the question of the chronocultural setting in which the sites lie: located north of the Lerma River, in a sector occupied, when the Spaniards came, by groups of nomadic hunter-gatherers, the sites of the Barajas cannot be attributed to these later occupants. Their characteristics show that these are sedentary establishments with a way of life and social organisation in line with the Meso-American model. Their occupants had deserted the range well before the arrival of the first Europeans. Within this environment, our research is aimed at achieving two complementary objectives:

  understanding the social organisation of the sedentary populations that occupied the range during the second half of the first millennium AD;
  attempting to shed light on the reasons that might have led them to leave the site around the year 1000.