With the collapse of Teotihuacan, the central Mexican highlands were plunged into a period of social restructuration, known as the Epiclassic (AD 650–950). This period saw the emergence of independent city-states, rising in the wake of a highly centralized hegemonic form of governance. There are few empirically informed theoretical models or heuristic approaches to explain the advent of Epiclassic sociopolitical structure(s). Yet, based on the material evidence found at Xochicalco we are now forced to acknowledge that the bulk points to emulations of elite Maya material culture and forms of symbolic expression.
Therefore, far from the superficial stylistic similarities, as long debated among art historians, we now need to consider the presence of eccentrics, censers, architecture and associated sculptures, representations of mythological entities and deities, and most important of all, depictions of idealized rulers, as deriving from contemporaneous canons of Maya art and material culture. This strong resonance of the ideological realm of the Maya speaks of the well-informed translation of foreign forms of governance to a central Mexican setting.
We thereby propose that the rulers of Xochicalco modeled their forms of governance on those that existed at the time, in the monarchical city-states of the Maya, in the east.