Enclosure Without Contact: Distribution, Domination, and the Material Conditions of Land Tenure in Mesoamerica and the Andes

This article argues that the structural dynamic of “enclosure” — the conversion of communally managedland into concentrated elite holdings — occurred independently in two New World civilizations that hadno contact with the Old World or with each other: the Aztec Triple Alliance in Mesoamerica (c. 1430–1521 CE) and the Inca Empire in the Andes (c. 1438–1533 CE). Both civilizations developed communalland tenure systems — the calpolli and the ayllu — that underwent processes of elite land concentrationalready advanced before European contact. In Mesoamerica, the mayeque (landless estate-bound laborers)constituted approximately thirty percent of the population by 1519; in the Andes, the panaca system pro-duced an irreversible ratchet of royal land accumulation. When placed alongside the Japanese evidencepresented in a companion article (Sophia 2026), the convergence across three continents with zero mu-tual contact establishes that enclosure is not a feature of any particular civilization, economic system, orcultural tradition but a structural dynamic driven by material conditions: immobile intensive agriculture(chinampas, andenes, rice paddies), high per-unit productivity, collective infrastructure requirements, andbounded geography that eliminates the exit option for cultivators. Cosmological frameworks structurallyinhospitable to absolute land sovereignty — Nahua teotl monism and Andean Pachamama reciprocity —slowed the concentrative drift but did not prevent it, suggesting that the European theological chain fromGenesis through Locke functioned as post-hoc legitimation rather than as a cause of enclosure. Negativecases — pastoral nomads, swidden agriculturalists, sub-Saharan extensive farmers, and the geographicallyopen Russian mir — confirm the hypothesis by exhibiting the absence of oscillation where the materialconditions are absent. The historical evidence further demonstrates that every sustained distributive institu-tion operated at the local level, optimized for specific ecological conditions, challenging the contemporaryassumption that distribution requires global solutions.