United Mexican States (Country) (Geographic Keyword)
126-150 (4,293 Records)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Oral microbial ecologies are shaped by an interaction among environmental and cultural factors, including wealth and status inequalities, which were pervasive throughout ancient Maya society. Few studies have directly integrated the oral microbiome of ancient individuals with a detailed analysis of their status from archaeological contexts. To interrogate...
Ancient Maya Land Use: Water Management and Agricultural Production at Actuncan, Belize (2018)
Research conducted during the 2015-2017 Actuncan Archaeological Project field seasons revealed several land use strategies utilized during the Late and Terminal Classic periods, including terracing, agricultural plots, and cobble mounds. Excavations conducted in the Northern Neighborhood of Actuncan exposed two terracing methods: 1) terraforming, in which earthen berms created to facilitate water drainage and 2) two small agricultural plot systems filled with a large amount of redeposited...
Ancient Maya Mobility: Hinterlands Sacbe Systems (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Ancient Maya Landscapes in Northwestern Belize, Part I" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper will discuss investigations of two sacbeob in the hinterlands in northwestern Belize. These features connect ancient Maya household groups, aguadas, quarries, terraces and ritual features. The study of ancient causeway systems is crucial to the understanding of mobility, sociopolitical, and economic networks in the...
Ancient Maya Placemaking: An Isotopic Assessment of Ancestry, Memory, and Body Partibility (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Migrations are a key feature of human populations past and present, and people moved across landscapes regardless of cultural affiliation, hierarchical structures, or place of birth. But, what does it mean when individuals and/or pieces of their remains are moved elsewhere posthumously? This paper builds upon discourse centered around social memory and...
Ancient Maya Quarries: Limestone, Chert and Lidar (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Lidar has dramatically expanded our view of the ancient Maya landscape. We have used lidar to study the key natural resources of limestone and chert- their location, extent, and relationship to other ancient Maya features. Limestone was a key building material and chert was the source for most chipped stone tools. Lidar-derived imagery and hydrological...
Ancient Maya Salt Making Activities as Revealed Through Underwater Excavations and Sediment Chemistry, Paynes Creek National Park, Belize (2017)
Underwater excavations at Early Classic Chan b’i (A.D. 300-600) and Late Classic Atz’aam Na (A.D. 600-900) ancient Maya salt works in Paynes Creek National Park, Belize, reveal activity areas associated with a substantial salt industry for distribution to the southern Maya inland inhabitants. At these sites, wooden architecture and salt making artifacts are abundantly preserved in a peat bog composed of red mangrove. We describe the excavation methods at this shallow, submerged underwater site,...
Ancient Maya Sustainability at Caracol, Belize: Implications for Past and Future (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Advancing Public Perceptions of Sustainability through Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Long-term archaeological research at Caracol, Belize has revealed a sizeable city with over 100,000 inhabitants at A.D. 650 that practiced intensive agriculture within its urban boundaries. Over 160 square kilometers of the landscape within Caracol was anthropogenic, having been rebuilt to both provide agricultural...
Ancient Maya Use of Fauna from the Wetlands and Beyond (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeology and the History of Human-Environment Interaction in the Lower Belize River Watershed" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Understanding how the ancient Maya interacted with wetland environments has been a topic of research for roughly 50 years. Previous studies suggest these resource-rich environments provided a diverse assortment of flora and fauna for the ancient Maya to utilize. Wetlands provide an ideal...
Ancient Maya Water Control, Wetlands, and the Fiery Pool (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Decipherment, Digs, and Discourse: Honoring Stephen Houston's Contributions to Maya Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. One of Steve Houston’s sublime volumes is The Fiery Pool, which was also a groundbreaking exhibit. These explored the themes of the Maya and their relationships with water. Here we consider the themes from The Fiery Pool from the perspectives of ancient Maya Wetland fields, "creatures", and...
Ancient Mesoamerican mortars, plasters, and stuccos: the composition and origin of sascab (1958)
This resource is a citation record only, the Center for Digital Antiquity does not have a copy of this document. The information in this record has been migrated into tDAR from the EXARC Bibliography, originally compiled by Roeland Paardekooper, and updated. Most of these records consist of a document citation and other metadata but do not have the documents themselves uploaded. If you have a digital copy of the document and would like to have it curated in tDAR, please contact us using the...
Ancient Mesoamerican Rain Cloud Iconography and Early Rain Entities (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Cloud iconography has been present on Mesoamerican material culture since the Formative Period and often appears with iconography that is associated with water rituals and rain entities. This paper will present new perspectives on the relationships between ancient Mesoamerican rain deities through a study of rain cloud iconography. I trace the appearance...
Ancient Metal Routs in the Tarascan Señorío: Mining, Smelting, Smiting (2017)
At the Tarascan Señorío, all the metal work aspects were controlled by the uacúsecha (most important clan) leaders, from their central cities of Pátzcuaro, Ihuatzio and specially Tzintzuntzan by the Pátzcuaro Lake in central Michoacán. In this paper we present the different aspects of the metal work, and the control that the uacúsecha nobles imposed, expressed in the architecture and their most relevant adornments like metal earplugs and lip-plugs, from the mining sites in the Tierra Caliente,...
Ancient Migrations in the Aztatlán Region: aDNA Analyses (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. While mounting evidence suggests that the Aztatlán tradition in west Mexico was a major cosmopolitan region during the Postclassic period (AD 900-1521), archaeologists have characterized items and beliefs as being culturally distinct from the rest of Mesoamerica. Recently, endogenous and exogenous material culture distribution has been interpreted as the...
Ancient Oaxaca beyond Zapotecs and Mixtecs (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. I contend that the major gulf in Oaxaca archaeology is between Zapotec and Mixtec archaeology on the one hand and the archaeology of other regions and other language speakers on the other. The early focus on Zapotec and Mixtec archaeology stems from having codices written in these languages...
Ancient Pathogen Genomes from Pre- and Early Colonial Epidemics in Mesoamerica and the Evolution of Parathyphi C (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Ancient DNA in Service of Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Genome wide data from ancient microbes may help to understand mechanisms of pathogen evolution and adaptation for emerging and re-emerging infectious disease. Ancient pathogen genomes provide furthermore the possibility to identify causative agents of past pandemics and therefore elucidate mortality crisis such as the early contact period in the New...
Ancient Zapotec Material Culture and the Antiquities Market (2017)
While the growth of the Internet market in pre-Columbian antiquities is of great concern to the countries of origin and law enforcement, we should also recognize that the Internet is a crucial tool in the fight to protect cultural materials. In particular, online databases that were once created for purely scholarly purposes, can be effectively used to track stolen, lost or exchanged artefacts. This talk will focus on my own experience, for over a decade now, of managing a database that...
And here’s the NEWS from Xnoha! Understanding Maya settlement and Early Anthropocene Landscape Modifications at a small Maya center. (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Ancient Maya Landscapes in Northwestern Belize, Part I" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Xnoha is a small Maya center in northwestern Belize that has seen two phases of investigation since it was recorded in 1990. While current research is largely focused on the Central Precinct or kawik, we have also invested much energy in the outlying groups of monumental architecture and settlement. Xnoha is located in a heavily...
"... and his wife Sally": The Binford Legacy and Uncredited Work in Archaeology (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Sins of Our Ancestors (and of Ourselves): Confronting Archaeological Legacies" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Often mentioned as an afterthought in sentences about her more famous husband, Sally R. Binford has long been a topic of discussion for those interested in 20th century female archaeologists. Her foundational work in the early endeavors of the ‘New Archaeology’ set the stage for an academic revolution,...
Animal Husbandry at Pimería Alta Missions: El Ganado en el Sudoeste de Norteamérica (2010)
Documentary evidence from the southwestern region of North America indicates that Spanish missionaries attempted to alter the daily lives of native peoples through the introduction of Eurasian domesticated animals and animal husbandry practices. However, our understanding of the degree to which these efforts were successful is hindered by a dearth of zooarchaeological evidence. Excavations at 18th-century missions in present-day northern Sonora and southern Arizona provide an opportunity to...
Animal Imagery in the Postclassic Yearbearer Pages of the Codex Borgia (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Animal Symbolism in Postclassic Mesoamerica: Papers in Honor of Cecelia Klein" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Animals are prominent in annual rituals performed at the end of the year, as seen on page 49-52 of the Codex Borgia. Animals attacking each other and scenes of struggle involving animals and anthropomorphic gods are related to sequences in the yearbearer cycle that define the Calendar Round. Yearbearer...
An Animal Kingdom at Chichen Itza, Yucatan, Mexico (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Animal Symbolism in Postclassic Mesoamerica: Papers in Honor of Cecelia Klein" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. At the Postclassic Maya city of Chichen Itza, buildings, planned spaces, and imagery blend with the landscape to form meta-narratives. One instance is the Sacred Cenote, a limestone sinkhole that was a major focus of rituals. The cenote rim features frogs/toads carved from the living rock, and at one time...
Animal Management of the Late Classic Maya at Copán, Honduras, Using Stable Isotope Analysis (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the late nineteenth century, Harvard Peabody Museum excavations at the Classic Maya site of Copán, Honduras, identified a large deposit of animal bones in structure 10L-36, a platform located in the El Cementerio area of Copán’s Late Classic Palace Complex. Primarily associated with the eighth–ninth-century CE reign of Yax Pahsaj, 10L-36 is thought to...
Animal Manifestations of the Creator Deities in the Maya Codices and the Popol Vuh (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Animal Symbolism in Postclassic Mesoamerica: Papers in Honor of Cecelia Klein" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Scholars have long recognized that certain Mesoamerican deities appear in animal as well as anthropomorphic form. The Maya creator Itzamna, for example, has aspects corresponding to a bird, a turtle, and an alligator, while the aged "God L" may be linked to the opossum in its anthropomorphic form (Pawah-Ooch),...
Animal Use in Ancient Maya Terminal Deposits: Examining Faunal Remains from sites in the Belize Valley to Identify Ritual Activities (2017)
Zooarchaeological materials from terminal deposits in the Belize Valley have the potential to assist archaeologists with understanding if terminal deposits represent ritual activities. This poster presents the results of zooarchaeological investigations of terminal deposits at the sites of Lower Dover and Baking Pot. While archaeologists from the Belize Valley Archaeological Reconnaissance Project (BVAR) have focused on the pottery and lithic materials in these deposits a thorough comparative...
Animal Use in the Last Maya Kingdom (2018)
The archaeological site of Flores is a small, lacustrine island located in Northern Guatemala. Despite lacking in physical size, the island has a lengthy occupational history, dating from the Preclassic Maya period through the present. Flores, which became a provincial capital during the late Postclassic, was able to resist Spanish rule until 1697 AD, making it the last Maya holdout. Given this distinction, the island has been under much archaeological scrutiny and the subject of many...