The Archaeology of Commoner Social Memories and Legitimizing Histories Lisa Overholtzer 1 & Deborah A. Bolnick 2 # Springer Science+Business Media New York 2017 Abstract In recent years, archaeologists have productively exploited historical docu- ments and monuments as evidence for social memory and the selective writing, rewrit- ing, and silencing of history for instrumental purposes. However, for a variety of theoretical and methodological reasons, less consideration has been given to such powerful uses of the past in the past by commoners in domestic contexts. In this article, we present a case study that demonstrates how the household remains of commoners can be used as rich, direct sources of evidence for the conscious manipulation and deploy- ment of social memory. Our case study focuses on multiple lines of evidence from burials interred under a household patio at the pre-Aztec and Aztec site of Xaltocan between C.E. 1290 and 1520. Archaeological burial data, osteological analyses, a fine- grained chronology created with Bayesian statistical modeling of radiocarbon dates, and ancient DNA analyses are combined to reconstruct the household genealogical history inscribed by residents. This history—perhaps motivated by power and claims to land— entailed selective remembering and forgetting and the rewriting of the past of life on this house mound and was enabled by material mnemonics in the form of buried bones. Interestingly, this inscribed, instrumental genealogical history may have been structured by some of the same principles and representational canons that shaped pre-Hispanic pictorial genealogies used as evidence in colonial legal disputes. Keywords Social memory . History . Power . Household archaeology . Commoners . Ancient DNA . Xaltocan J Archaeol Method Theory DOI 10.1007/s10816-017-9322-6 * Lisa Overholtzer lisa.overholtzer@mcgill.ca 1 Department of Anthropology, McGill University, 7th floor, Leacock Building, 855 Sherbrooke Street West, Montreal, QC H3A 2T7, Canada 2 Department of Anthropology and Population Research Center, University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX 78712, USA