Oaxaca (State / Territory) (Geographic Keyword)
26-50 (218 Records)
In this paper I present findings from recent excavations of a high-status indigenous residence at the site of San Miguel Achiutla, Oaxaca, Mexico. The data show that, contrary to typical expectations, frequencies of elaborate indigenous Mixtec polychrome serving wares rise considerably from the Postclassic to the Early Colonial period, rather than these ceramics being replaced by European style ceramics. Nevertheless, residents of Achiutla did indeed have access to European glazed wares, and...
Comparing Isotopic Data for Diet and Mobility of Males and Females in the Lower Río Verde Valley, Oaxaca, Mexico (2018)
This poster presents a comparison of the isotopic data from male and female individuals interred in the lower Río Verde Valley of coastal Oaxaca, Mexico from the Early Formative period, beginning in 2000 BC, to the Early Postclassic period, ending in AD 1100. Our previous work in this region has focused primarily on broad dietary changes through time, focusing little attention on comparisons by sex. Our sample for the present study includes 54 individuals: 31 males and 23 females. These...
Connecting Dead, Living, and Supernatural through Plants: Botanical Mortuary Offerings at Monte Albán (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Checking the Pulse: Current Research in Oaxaca Part I" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper examines the plants used as mortuary offerings at the Zapotec city of Monte Albán (500 BCE–900 CE). After their passing, the deceased became Ancestors able to offer protection to their descendants. I explore the possibility that food (specifically plants) might have helped to provide and strengthen a bridge between the...
Constituting the Divine: Coastal Cuisine and Public Places in the Formative-period Lower Río Verde Valley (2019)
This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Oaxacan Cuisine" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Food was central to the constitution of sacred public spaces during the Formative period in the lower Río Verde valley on Oaxaca’s Pacific coast. Public facilities at small sites and at the region’s largest precolumbian architectural complex, the Río Viejo acropolis, were the location not only of collective food consumption but also of food...
The Corn That We Eat: Feasting on Maize and Maize Diversity in the Early Formative Community of Etlatongo, in the Mixteca Alta of Oaxaca (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Checking the Pulse: Current Research in Oaxaca Part II" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent excavations at Etlatongo recovered one of the largest analyzed macrobotanical samples for Early Formative Mesoamerica. We have explored the significant richness of species identified at the site, asserting that full-time agriculture was in place in the Highlands as early as the fourteenth century BCE. Here we turn...
Cotzumalguapa's Lithic Industry: Procurement, Production, and Distribution of Obsidian Artifacts of a Late Classic Mesoamerican Polity (2018)
Procurement, production, and distribution of raw materials loom large in discussions of prehistoric economies. Over the past three decades surface survey and excavations in and around the Late Classic polity of Cotzumalguapa revealed the presence of several obsidian dumps, the result of a large-scale lithic industry. These deposits contain production debitage from most phases of blade-core reduction but no nodules and relatively very little cortex, suggesting that obsidian came into...
Cuisine Choices in Mundane and Ceremonial Contexts at a Late Classic Palace Compound in the Valley of Oaxaca, Mexico (2019)
This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Oaxacan Cuisine" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the Late Classic (CE 500 – 900), elite families in the Oaxaca Valley maintained and reinforced their elevated status through calendrical rites, where they acted as intermediaries between the community and supernatural entities associated with the agricultural cycle. These rituals served as the key components of broader festivals that likely involved...
Cultural Pluralism and Persistence in the Colonial Sierra Sur of Oaxaca, Mexico: Three Case Studies (2018)
This paper explores the interactions between multiple groups of people in the Sierra Sur region of Nejapa and Tavela, Oaxaca in trans-conquest and Colonial Mexico. Bringing together ethnohistoric accounts, oral histories, and archaeological data in Nejapa and Tavela, I highlight three case studies to show that migration, conquest, and interregional trade created a complex, dynamic, pluralistic ethnic landscape prior to the arrival of the Spanish. As such, when the Spanish colonial regime took...
The Curious Pacific Coast Distribution of Tightly Wrapped Bundle Burials in the Middle Formative (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Coastal Connections: Pacific Coastal Links from Mexico to Ecuador" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Highly unusual tightly wrapped bundle burials of previously cleaned and carefully arranged disarticulated human bones dating to the Middle Formative have been discovered by archaeologists at three sites in western Jalisco, Mexico, one site on the Pacific coastal plain in far northern Sinaloa, Mexico and eroding out of the...
Daily Life Past and Present: The Role of Relationships and Strategies in Structural Change (2021)
This is an abstract from the "A Construir Puentes / Building Bridges: Diálogos en Oaxaca Archaeology a través de las Fronteras" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The long history of research in Oaxaca, Mexico, has influenced archaeological method and theory far beyond the region. Specifically, the archaeology of Oaxaca has contributed significantly to the study of households, daily life, and transformative social change. My work at the Tilcajete...
Dainzú-Macuilxóchitl Archaeological Project
This archive contains all of the data derived from field research at the site of Dainzú-Macuilxóchitl in the Oaxaca Valley of Mexico. This is a multi-year project consisting of intensive survey and mapping, as well as comprehensive excavations. The mapping and survey are designed to provide a detailed topographic map of the site and provide a basic temporal and spatial settlement description. Intensive excavations are focused on residential areas. This project has been financially supported...
Death and Identity at Monte Albán (2018)
Archaeologists have long striven to interpret mortuary rituals as qualitative signs of a living people--indices of sex, gender, age, status, wealth, and craft. Though the doctrine "as in life, so in death" can have some merit for archaeological inquiry, viewing mortuary ritual in this manner ignores the social act itself, which is one of the most intimate, personal, and weighted actions humans produce, serving, among other roles, to return the society to homeostasis in the wake of the loss of a...
Debating Oaxaca Historical Archaeology (2021)
This is an abstract from the "A Construir Puentes / Building Bridges: Diálogos en Oaxaca Archaeology a través de las Fronteras" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. “Prehistory is passé” write Schmidt and Mrozowski in their 2013 essay "The Death of Prehistory," and this should definitely be the case for Oaxacan archaeology. But although most scholars would agree that Oaxaca may have seen the first literary civilization in the Americas, not all would...
Deep Weft: Hand-Made Textile Making in Oaxaca (WGF - Dissertation Fieldwork Grant) (2022)
This resource is an application for the Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. This ethnographic project investigates the role that artisanal objects and ornamentation play in the constitution of gendered daily practices and ways of life in Oaxaca de Juárez (Mexico). Hand-made textile production is at the center of the social life of several rural Mexican communities. In this plural cultural context, servilletas are ordinary and richly adorned pieces produced by women...
Demostracion de hacer comal por Dominga (2018)
Demostración de hacer comal, Dominga, Santo Domingo Tonaltepec, Oaxaca, 2018
Designing Influence: Aesthetic Choices and Group Identity in Decorated Ceramics of Late Postclassic Etlatongo, Oaxaca, Mexico (2018)
During the Late Postclassic (A.D. 1200-1520) in the Mixteca Alta of Oaxaca, Mexico, aesthetic qualities of ceramics were utilized as both decorative values and tools for negotiating the creation of group identities and ideologies within communities. Through a stylistic analysis of Yanhuitlan Red on Cream type ceramics recovered from excavations at the site of Etlatongo, in the Nochixtlán Valley, I explore how these vessels and the motifs depicted on them were used during the creation of...
The Discovery of a New Buried Building on Monte Albán's Main Plaza (2018)
Large-scale geophysical survey was conducted at Monte Albán’s Main Plaza during the summer of 2017. The results suggest the presence of a substantial, but previously unknown, building with associated features located in the west-central portion of the plaza near Building H. In this paper, we describe our findings and present our preliminary interpretation of the geophysical data.
Dogs, Diners, and Deposition: The Social Role of Canis lupus familiaris in Cruz B Households in Etlatongo, Nochixtlán, Oaxaca (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Checking the Pulse: Current Research in Oaxaca Part II" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper presents a comparative faunal analysis from two distinct Early Formative households from Etlatongo, a multicomponent site located within the Nochixtlán Valley of the Mixteca Alta in Oaxaca. The faunal remains from several different contexts were analyzed; these contexts represent routine domestic refuse and those from a...
Early Mixtec Urbanization at Etlatongo, Oaxaca, Mexico (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Past studies of early urbanism in Formative Oaxaca, Mexico, have highlighted evidence of the construction of monumental architecture, increased population densities, and the expansion of Middle to Late Formative period occupations onto defensive hilltops. In the Mixteca Alta of Oaxaca, investigations at urban centers, such as Cerro Jazmín, Monte Negro, and...
Early Postclassic Copper Objects from the Lower Rio Verde Valley, Oaxaca, Mexico (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Some of the earliest examples of metallurgy in Mesoamerica come from sites in the West Mexican region where metalworking, especially of copper objects, was introduced by Ecuadorian traders in the 600s-700s C.E. The recent discovery of copper items including bells and hammered copper sheets from Early Postclassic contexts (800-1100 C.E.) in the Lower Rio Verde...
Early/Middle Formative Pottery Production and Exchange in the Emergence of Social Complexity in the Mixteca Alta, Oaxaca (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Checking the Pulse: Current Research in Oaxaca Part I" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Multiple lines of evidence, including pottery production, multicrafting, goods and routes of exchange, architecture, and funerary practices, support the idea that Tayata in the Mixteca Alta was immersed in social transformations observed across different regions during the Early/Middle Formative (ca. 1400–350 BC). Changes at this...
El manejo del agua en Monte Albán-Atzompa (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. La recolección y almacenamiento de agua pluvial es una de las prácticas más antiguas en Mesoamérica. La investigación arqueológica en diversos sitios ha permitido la identificación y documentación de sistemas de canales, depósitos subterráneos, galerías filtrantes y almacenamiento en recipientes, el sistema de desagües y el más común que son los depósitos...
El paisaje del Yuvui Tayu de Ñuu Ndaya, Mixteca Alta, Oaxaca, México (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. El yuvui tayu (reinado) de Ñuu Ndaya o Chalcatongo fue uno de los más importantes durante la época precolonial en la Mixteca Alta de Oaxaca. Esto lo sabemos gracias a los códices precoloniales y a los documentos coloniales. En el 2008 y 2016 realizamos dos recorridos arqueológicos de superficie en la parte norte de esta región, estos nos permitieron...
El sistema de desagües del Juego de Pelota de Monte Albán (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Avances en los estudios de la arquitectura de Monte Albán" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. La recolección y almacenamiento de agua pluvial es una de las prácticas más antiguas en Mesoamérica. La investigación arqueológica en diversos sitios ha permitido la identificación y documentación de depósitos subterráneos, depósitos a cielo abierto, almacenamiento en recipientes y más común el sistema de desagües. En Monte Albán...
Environment of the Valley of Oaxaca, Past and Present (1967)
Discusses the physiography, phytogeography and botany of the Valley of Oaxaca today; how effective moisture level variations are reflected in surface sample pollen records; and how prehistoric effective moisture variations are reflected in archaeological-context pollen records. Includes a supplemental report on economic pollen types observed in Archaic Period archaeological-context samples.