Over a little more than thirty years ago, William Sanders and David Webster (1988) published an influential article that drew the attention of scholars towards the variability of Mesoamerican urban centers. While focusing on pigeonholing this variability into neat typological categories, they in passing state an obvious but important fact: all societies exhibit centralizing processes. Their interest at the time, however, was to try to understand those centralizing processes in the context of periods after the first development of urban centers, disassociating the Classic and Postclassic examples they employed from the Preclassic behaviors that gave rise to and shaped the ideas of later cities.