Republic of Guatemala (Country) (Geographic Keyword)
51-75 (2,537 Records)
Interpreting the evolutionary history of bacterial communities within the human body (microbiota) is key to understanding the origin of many modern diseases. The link between humans and their microbiota can also be exploited to examine and track the extent and severity of human adaptation to the environment and impacts on health. Here, we utilize a shotgun sequencing approach to examine ancient DNA preserved within dental calculus from a wide range of ancient South Americans (n=162)....
Altica and the Role of Middlemen in Formative Obsidian Exchange (2017)
Altica’s location, in the Patlachique Range 10 km away from the Otumba obsidian source, suggests a potentially significant role in the distribution of Otumba obsidian. Altica may have served as an important middleman and processing site in Formative obsidian exchange, but a greater understanding of the nature of these exchange relationships is required to define this role. This paper combines geochemical sourcing and technological data from obsidian from nine Early and Middle Formative sites,...
Altica ceramics and figurines: Stylistic and chronological analyses (2017)
Craft specialization and exchange feature prominently in explanations for the development of the first complex societies in Mesoamerica. It is clear from analyses of surface collections at Altica that during the Early and early Middle Formative periods (c. 1300-850 B.C.) its inhabitants exported obsidian tools and imported pottery from long distances, including the southern Gulf Coast. Altica is one of the few early agricultural settlements located in the northern Basin of Mexico from which we...
The Altica Project: Reframing the Formative Basin of Mexico (2017)
The Altica Project, that began in 2014, is an important step in addressing the limited problem-oriented research at Formative sites in the Basin of Mexico for over two decades. Altica is the earliest-known settled village in the Teotihuacan Valley and one of the only first-farming village sites in the Basin of Mexico that has not been engulfed by the urban sprawl of Mexico City. Despite its small size and remote location, Altica was an important piece in Early and Middle Formative exchange...
Altmexikanische Wurfbretter (1890)
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...
An Amazing Deposit of Obsidian Blades in a Sector of Kaminaljuyu, Guatemala (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In recent years the rescues carried out in Guatemala City, specifically between zones 7 and 11, have uncovered several deposits containing huge amounts of obsidian artifacts. During the excavations of the Lake Miraflores project located on the San Juan causeway, zone 7, a huge deposit containing thousands of obsidian artifacts was uncovered. This deposit...
American Pompeii: Old evidence on Late Classic ties between the Pacific Coast and the Antigua valley (2017)
An archaeological collection from finca Pompeya in the Antigua Guatemala valley provides significant information about Late Classic interaction with the adjacent Pacific coast. Excavated in 1893, the collection was eventually scattered to several museums in Germany, the United States, and Guatemala. However, it can be reconstructed from a photograph made not long after the discovery, and from newspaper reports that provide rough descriptions of the excavations. The objects themselves are still...
The anahuatl pectorals from the offerings of the Great Temple of Tenochtitlan (2017)
The anahuatl pectoral is one of the shell ornaments that have been found in the offerings of the great temple of Tenochtitlan. In paintings and sculptures, it is worn by Tezcatlipoca and deities that are stars and warriors, as Tlahuizcalpantecuhtli and Mixcoatl. Inside the offerings, the anahuatl are associated to items related to the underworld, sacrifice and war. This has led to propose that these pectorals represented the stars, which were the warriors during the night. The presence of the...
Analysis of Anatomical Dissection at Point San Jose Hospital, Fort Mason, San Francisco (2018)
During a 2010 National Park Service project to remove lead contaminated soils from behind a historic hospital at Point San Jose (now Fort Mason), San Francisco, a medical waste pit containing commingled human and faunal remains was discovered. From 1864-1903, several military surgeons were posted at the Point San Jose Hospital to treat military personnel. Analysis of the human remains revealed evidence of anatomical dissection indicated by numerous incised cut marks, saw cut marks, and other...
Analysis of Culturally Derived Speleothem ny INAA: An Analytic Approach to Sourcing (2017)
The occurrence of "foreign" ceramic materials as well as the breakage and transport of speleothems during ancient Maya cave visitations have become an increasingly well-documented phenomenon (Brady et al. 1997). This phenomenon has raised several questions such as the spatial and temporal extent of these interactions, practices, meaning and specifically what does all this tell us about the relationship between Maya polities and proximal or distant caves. Geochemical analysis of geological...
Analysis of Debitage from an Intentionally Burned House at the Greenbrier Site (3IN1), a Late Mississippian Town in the White River Valley of Arkansas (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Debitage Analysis: Case Studies, Successes, and Cautionary Tales" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Located at the eastern edge of the Ozarks, the Greenbrier site is in a unique ecotonal location in close proximity to a diversity of lithic resources in the middle White River Basin. Ceramics at Greenbrier indicate that people here were closely connected to towns on the upper and lower White River and also to occupants in...
Analysis of elasmobranches from offerings 126, 141 and 165 found at the Great Temple of Tenochtitlan (2017)
Numerous fish from diverse species have been found inside the Great Temple offerings. These were transported from the coast to Tenochtitlan. During the seventh field season of the Templo Mayor Project, five sawfish rostra were found inside three offerings. By analyzing macro and microscopic structures, and through the comparison with modern specimens from the Ichthyology Collection of the Institute of Marine Sciences and Limnology, at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, these animals...
Analysis of Human Skeletal Remains from Late Postclassic Iximché, Guatemala (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Innovations and Transformations in Mesoamerican Research: Recent and Revised Insights of Ancestral Lifeways" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Analysis of human skeletal remains from the Postclassic Kaqchikel Maya capital of Iximché, Guatemala, supports the interpretation that many of the partial skeletal remains were trophies taken in war or were from war captives sacrificed at the site. Other, more complete, remains...
Analysis of Marine Sediment by Chemical Signatures to Discover Evidence of Ancient Maya Activities at Site 74, Paynes Creek Salt Works, Belize (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This poster examines multi-element chemical analysis on sediment at the underwater Site 74 in Paynes Creek Salt Works, Belize. Site 74 was once an ancient Maya salt work. Due to sea-level rise, sea water and mangrove peat now cover the site. Sediment from the site was exported under permit to the Louisiana State University Laboratory for inductively coupled...
Analysis of Marine Sediment of Ancient Maya Saltworks in Paynes Creek National Park, Southern Belize. (2017)
In this paper we present the results of archaeological research at two Classic period Maya salt works currently submerged in a shallow salt-water lagoon in Paynes Creek National Park, Southern Belize. These two contexts are part of the more than 100 locations so far identified in the area where salt was produced by boiling brine over fires near wooden structures. Through the study of marine sediment recovered at excavations from sites 24 and 35, we were able to document environmental and...
Analysis of microbotanical remains from dental calculus: a new approach for ancient diet studies. (2017)
Paleodiet analysis from individuals found inside the Great Temple ritual deposits have been succesfully conducted by analyzing carbon and nitrogen isotopes, with the aim of distinguishing between marine and terrestrial diets. Recently, we incorporated microbotanical analysis of dental calculus to these studies in order to search for plants remains, with the goal of having a broad picture of ancient diet and paramasticatory use of the oral cavity. For this purpose we selected individuals with...
An Analysis of Obsidian Consumption in the Postclassic Coatlan del Rio Valley (2018)
This poster presents a technological analysis of obsidian artifacts from two Aztec-period surface collections in the Coatlan del Rio Valley, located in what is now the modern state of Morelos, Mexico. The deposits are from residential terraces collected in 4 x 4 m units. Designs on ceramics collected with the lithics indicate primary occupation after 1400 CE. This study has two primary objectives: first, we technologically classify the artifacts in the collections; second, we evaluate whether...
Anarchy in the Trenches: Perspectives on Buen Suceso (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Finding Community in the Past and Present through the 2022 PARCC Field School at Buen Suceso, Ecuador" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In many ways, Buen Suceso is a unique archaeological site. Not only is it a multicomponent site, with evidence for occupation throughout almost the entirety of the ~2,200-year Valdivia sequence and specialized use by the much later Manteño culture, but it exhibits an occupational...
Anatomy of a notch. An in-depth experimental investigation and interpretation of combat traces on Bronze Age swords (2019)
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...
Ancestors, Agency, and Formation Processes: Interpreting Problematical "Smash and Trash Deposits" at Ka’Kabish, Belize (2017)
Maya archaeologists commonly discover "smash-and-trash" deposits, collections consisting of large quantities of broken sherds, lithics, faunal materials, and other remains, in varying contexts on Maya sites. Interpretations of these deposits vary from simple trash or midden deposits, to remains of feasting, to termination and other rituals. These interpretations are often strongly influenced by the theoretical and analytical approaches taken by the excavators. At Ka’Kabish, Belize, a series of...
Ancestral Pathways of Fiji: Using GIS to Analyze Landscapes of Movement and Lineages within the Sigatoka River Valley (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Geospatial Studies in the Archaeology of Oceania" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The concept of landscapes of movement establishes the theoretical basis for understanding meaning behind the creation and use of roads, trails, and pathways. This meaning can be categorized by "prioritized relationships" (i.e., social, political, religious, economic) which ultimately stimulate the existence of landscapes of movement. This...
Ancient Andean Scalarity (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Beyond the Round House: Spatial Logic and Settlement Organization across the Late Andean Highlands" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Scholars of the Andes often assume that the social units they study—residence, community, and region—are monotonically scaled, nested from smaller to larger. This suggests universal correspondences between the analytical and observational objects through which social units are known; hence...
ANCIENT CACAO GROVES IN YUCATAN: A PALYNOLOGICAL APPROACH (2017)
Cacao had a transcendental role in the life of prehistoric people of Mesoamerica, becoming part of their economic, ideological and social system. Due to the morphological and environmental characteristics necessary for the growth of cacao tree, the main producers were concentrated in places like southern Mexico and Central America. However, written sources of the first colonizers in Yucatan disclose that the indigenous nobility of that time had at their disposal cacao orchards in different...
The Ancient City of Dos Hombres: Material Expressions of Power (2017)
Investigations at the ancient Maya city of Dos Hombres have been guided by an interest in social, political and economic organization, based on architecture and material culture remains. Excavations in the civic ceremonial center of Dos Hombres have been focused in the northern plaza, a very public space that likely was a place of commerce, public ritual and sacred space, thereby the prime backdrop for publicly legitimizing authority. Newly excavated data, especially architectural exposures as...
Ancient DNA from Campeche, Mexico, Reveals a Socially Segregated Population in the First Two Centuries after Hispanic Contact (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Increasing the Accessibility of Ancient DNA within Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The colonial period in Mexico was an unprecedented time when previously disparate populations began living together under Hispanic leadership and Catholic faith, often unwillingly. Immediately after the conquest, Spanish colonists established urban strongholds, often bringing African slaves and servants with them. In these...