Toledo (State / Territory) (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Antonieta Rivera.

There exists a vast literature examining every aspect of Aztec culture. Despite this, few studies focus specifically on Aztec architecture and its implications for understanding broader aspects of Aztec cosmology. This paper contributes to our knowledge of Aztec society through an exploration of architectural and urban design principles that guided the building of their cities and ceremonial precincts. By examining ethnohistoric and archaeological sources, and drawing on evidence from several...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lia Kalinkos. Marc Wolf. Timothy Pugh.

This is an abstract from the "Hydro-Ecological System of the Maya in Petén, Guatemala" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent lidar survey of the Tayasal Peninsula in the Petén region of Guatemala revealed a collection of residence groups, situated on ridges of higher ground and separated by possible waterways of lower elevation. These suburb-like communities stand 2 km from Tayasal's urban core. They include structure compounds arranged into a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rubén Morales Forte. Maxime Lamoureux St-Hilaire.

The regal palace of La Corona flanks Plaza A to the west and is the largest construction at the site: a complex of structures sitting atop a sustaining platform extending over ca. 80 x 55m, and 7m in height. This paper describes the architecture of the two northern groups of the regal palace during their two last phases of construction, spanning roughly 750-850 A.D. While the Northeast Group comprised elaborately decorated corbel-vaulted buildings, the Northwest Group featured a mix of sturdy...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lourdes Budar. Gibrann Becerra.

This is an abstract from the "Regional and Intensive Site Survey: Case Studies from Mesoamerica" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Desde el año 2008 arqueólogos de la Universidad Veracruzana han realizado el estudio sistemático del corredor costero que se encuentra en la parte noreste de Los Tuxtlas. Bajo cobertura total del terreno, se ha recorrido una extensión de 300 km2, desde la Laguna de Sontecomapan al norte, hasta la Laguna del Ostión al sur,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Luis Pantoja. Guadalupe Zetina Gutiérrez. Ernesto Becerril Miró.

This is an abstract from the "La Práctica Arqueológica en México en Tiempos de Crisis: Escenarios, Problemáticas Claves, Actores, Acciones y Propuestas" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Son muchos son los riesgos en los que el Patrimonio Arqueológico en México se encuentra expuesto: el crecimiento de asentamientos humanos, las industrias que usan, transforman y reutilizan el territorio, así como el vandalismo, el saqueo y coleccionismo. Desde el...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Claudia Brittenham.

This is an abstract from the "Polychromy, Multimediality, and Visual Complexity in Mesoamerican Art" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Chichen Itza was a city of unprecedented visual complexity in ancient Mesoamerica, a place where innovations in architecture, mural painting, and sculpture, as well as experiments with new media such as gold and turquoise, created an urban landscape unlike any other. In this paper, I will examine the interactions...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Wade Tidwell.

The Actuncan Archaeological Project has conducted ten field seasons of research at this ancient lowland Maya site in Belize, Central America and inventoried all artifact classes including ceramics, lithics, marine shell, jade, daub, etc. from excavation contexts. One of my research goals was to consolidate this information into a relational Access database so that project members could more easily analyze artifacts across contexts and time periods. The database allowed me to construct...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Timothy Pugh. Evelyn Chan Nieto. Jemima Georges. Gabriela Zygadlo.

This is an abstract from the "The Past, Present, and Future of Water Supplies" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent work at Nixtun-Ch’ich’, Petén, Guatemala has revealed several artificial ponds. Many of the pools occurred naturally but were enhanced through the construction of floors and walls and the manipulation of groundwater flow. Some of the pools contained large ritual deposits, including ceramic sherds, animal bones, greenstone objects,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Edgar Ortega. Gustavo Martinez.

This is an abstract from the "Recent Multidisciplinary Investigations in the Mirador Basin, Guatemala" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. En la última década, el Proyecto Cuenca Mirador ha trabajado en el Grupo Cascabel ubicado al norte de la gran plaza principal del sitio El Mirador. Su meta ha sido la investigación arqueológica y consolidación arquitectónica de varios edificios de este grupo para conocer los aspectos constructivos de épocas...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jessica Devio.

Understanding household plant use can provide a wealth of data about subsistence practices, past agricultural systems, and strategies used to mitigate climatic stress. Plant use may also vary between households. By examining this variation, botanical data may yield further information on personal preference and cuisine differences between households. Aside from consumption for subsistence, plants were used for a wide range of activities conducted by individual households. Botanical datasets may...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Walden. Claire Ebert. Julie Hoggarth. Shane Montgomery. Jaime Awe.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Intermediate elites played pivotal roles in the politics of ancient complex societies across the world. In the Classic period (AD 250-900/1000) Maya lowlands, intermediate elites acted as intercessors between apical rulers and commoners. These intermediate elites and the political strategies they employed, however, have rarely taken center stage in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brian Waldo.

This is an abstract from the "Studies in Mesoamerican Subterranean Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Water has long been recognized as a critical but scarce resource in the Yucatan. At Chichen Itza, water resources have not received the attention they deserve. Traditionally, because of the focus on the Sacred Cenote, the Cenote Xtoloc became by default the profane cenote. Clearly, such a simplistic and culture-bound dichotomy tells us...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sara Dalton.

This is an abstract from the "Recent Multidisciplinary Investigations in the Mirador Basin, Guatemala" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Subterranean chambers known as chultuns or chultunob exist in great numbers in sites throughout the Maya world, with over 300 being found in the city site of El Mirador alone. Although seemingly ubiquitous, the function of these structures has yet to be fully understood, with a variety of uses having been proposed...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dmitri Beliaev. Monica De Leon Antillon. Sergey Vepretskiy. Camilo Luin.

This is an abstract from the "At the Interface the Use of Archaeology and Texts in Research" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. El Encanto is a peripherical site (frequently classified as a 'minor center') northeast from the Ancient Maya metropolis of Tikal. It is famous because of the stela with hieroglyphic inscription dated to AD 305-308 and mentioning the king Siyaj Chan K'awil I. Previously Simon Martin suggested that the stela originally stood...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jose Huchim.

This is an abstract from the "La Restauración de Monumentos Prehispánicos en México: Principios, Práctica, y Visión al Futuro" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Sin lugar a duda Uxmal fue el sitio más importante de la región Puuc desde el siglo VIII hasta el X. Cuenta con un área amurallada de 2.6 km2, en los que se distribuyen 11 grupos de arquitectura monumental. A principios del siglo XX la lógica de conservación fue intervenir los edificios que...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cynthia Robin.

This is an abstract from the "Households at Aventura: Life and Community Longevity at an Ancient Maya City" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Urban households anchor the first decade of research at the Maya site of Aventura, Belize, situating the daily lives of the city’s heterogenous residents. They also illuminate social, political, economic, and environmental factors that enhanced life in the community. Summarizing research results of the Aventura...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cynthia Robin.

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. As over half of the world lives in cities today, there is perhaps no more pressing question than: how can people create cities that are sustainable? Archaeology is uniquely suited to answer questions about the longevity of cities, because archaeologists excavate long expanses of human history. The social, political,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kacey Grauer.

This is an abstract from the "Households at Aventura: Life and Community Longevity at an Ancient Maya City" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Water was essential for the longevity of ancient Maya cities, and Aventura was no exception. The site’s watery landscape consists of pocket bajos, defined as karstic depressions less than 2 km2 in area. While they are seasonally inundated today, this paper presents data from excavation, oral histories, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bernadette Cap. M. Kathryn Brown. Whitney Lytle.

The ancient Maya formalized avenues of movement between and within urban centers through the construction of sacbeob that both defined space and connected places on the landscape. In this paper, we discuss the ways in which a formally constructed sacbe at Xunantunich functioned as an axis connecting economic and ritual activities. The architectural arrangement of Classic Xunantunich emphasizes a north/south directionality. The site’s sacbe, however, was constructed on an east/west alignment....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Adam King. Terry Powis. Sheldon Skaggs. Christina Luke. Nilesh Gaikwad.

This is an abstract from the "Adventures in Beekeeping: Recent Studies in Ecology, Archaeology, History, and Ethnography in Yucatán" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this paper we discuss our recent absorbed residue study of a marble Ulúa style vase found at the Pacbitun site in Belize. In that study, we detected evidence for the consumption of the ritual drink balché dating to Terminal Classic period (800–850 CE). Consumption of balché is...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lorraine Williams-Beck.

In the geographic heartlands of the Yucatan Peninsula, academic literature describes the Chenes region as an "archaeological province" with a particular regional cultural character, in which sculpted monuments with glyphs or ballcourts are scarce components in urban systems, and even less frequent in most monumental cores. To date only three ballcourts had been recorded. After field seasons in 2016 and 2017 I confirm another example in Tabasqueño, the only site also to exhibit a free-standing...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dmitri Beliaev. Alexandre Tokovinine. Milan Kovác.

During the 2017 field season of the Uaxactun Archaeological project new monument was excavated at Buena Vista, a minor center at Uaxactun urban periphery. It is a small carved altar or ballcourt marker, which according to its style dates to the Early Classic. High quality of the carving and the hieroglyphic inscription indicates that the altar/marker itself was a part of the monumental corpus of Uaxactun urban core; uncomplete text provides important new information on the dynastic history of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Traci Ardren.

This is an abstract from the "Textile Tools and Technologies as Evidence for the Fiber Arts in Precolumbian Societies" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. While bark cloth and paper are well known in the ethnographic and artistic records of Pacific and African cultures, due to preservation concerns these important plant based products have been challenging to investigate in the precolumbian cultures of the New World. Often our only proxy for bark...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Webster.

BECAN RECONSIDERED -- Joe Ball’s early career centered strongly on Becan, which during the early 1970’s figured prominently in many interpretations of Classic Maya society and culture history. The initial Becan research predated our effective understanding of Maya inscriptions, the large-scale conflicts and alliances that affected the southern lowlands, and also the now-widespread data for climate change and the Classic "collapse". Because of its lack of inscriptions Becan has been...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Angélica Márquez-Osuna.

This is an abstract from the "Adventures in Beekeeping: Recent Studies in Ecology, Archaeology, History, and Ethnography in Yucatán" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper examines the role of the stingless bee Melipona beecheii in nineteenth-century Yucatán and shows how the rise of the hacienda system played a contingent role in reshaping beekeeping practices and human-bee relationships. Using primary sources such as beekeeping manuals and...