Colima (State / Territory) (Geographic Keyword)
76-100 (382 Records)
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. In Northwestern Mesoamerica, polychromy is a characteristic of Chupicuaro pottery during the Late Formative. It is the case for the hollow figures whose decoration is obtained by overlapping geometric motives painted in white and black on a red background. The figurines were also polychrome, even if the paints...
Columbian Mammoth Remains (Proboscidea, *Mammuthus columbi) from Unit UE1, Tocuila Archaeo-Paleontological Site, Mexico (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Current Zooarchaeology: New and Ongoing Approaches" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. From a small excavation unit 5 × 6 m named UE1 in Tocuila, Texcoco Municipality, State of Mexico, Mexico, around 1,300 bone elements were recorded, of which we have analyzed about 80%, being outstanding the remains of Columbian mammoth (*Mammuthus columbi), constituting about 90% of the total. According to the stratigraphic distribution...
Commercialization, Consumption, and Political-Economic Strategies in Late Postclassic Mesoamerica: A Comparative Study of Access to Projectile Points at Tlaxcallan and Santa Rita Corozal (2018)
Over the course of the Postclassic Period (A.D. 950 – 1521), commercialization was on the rise in ancient Mesoamerica, reaching its apex at the time of contact with Europeans. Extant information indicates that both interregional trade and regional market integration increased during this time, especially during the Late Postclassic (A.D. 1250/1300 – 1521). Yet, researchers have little comparative published information on household consumption from well-excavated residential contexts for this...
Comparative Stylistic Analysis of Calixtlahuaca Projectile Points (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper discusses a comparative stylistic analysis of projectile points from the Postclassic (1130 – 1530 AD) Aztec city of Calixtlahuaca, located in the Toluca Valley of Central Mexico. Chemical sourcing of Calixtlahuacan obsidian has illustrated that the site was primarily supplied with obsidian from both West and Central Mexico. However, evidence...
Comparison by Non-Metrical Traits of Xaltocan's Shrine vs. Teotihuacan in Mexico by Using a Non-Metric Multidimensional Scaling Method (2019)
This is an abstract from the "The Legacies of The Basin of Mexico: The Ecological Processes in the Evolution of a Civilization, Part 2" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. There is little information about the biological diversity of the populations that inhabited the Basin of Mexico. In this work we focused on showing the phenotypic differences between 118 skulls of the Xaltocan sanctuary and 44 adult skulls from Teotihuacan. It is not clear how this...
Conquering Aztecs and Resisting Tlaxcaltecas: The Body as a Site of Creating and Challenging State Narratives (2018)
Narratives of Aztec grandeur dominate portrayals of Late Postclassic (AD 1325-1519) Mesoamerica. While imperial influence spread rapidly and thoroughly throughout the central valleys, Tlaxcallan appears as a rift in imperial control, resisting the encircling empire. Aztec narratives relegate Tlaxcallan to the peripheries, downplaying Tlaxcaltecas as one-dimensional barbaric enemies, unconquered by choice. In contrast, ethnohistoric accounts from within Tlaxcallan emphasize a state that...
Considerations Regarding the Sculptures Commonly Called "Standard-Bearers" (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Crossing Boundaries: Interregional Interactions in Pre-Columbian Times" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Many images in the iconographic corpus from Pre-Hispanic Basin of Mexico belong to forms which were created and reproduced either in codices, mural painting, ceramics, and sculpture. Some examples are the attires of deities, specific icons used to represent natural elements, like rain, comets, even the Sun, and...
The Context of Tlatilco Figurines (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Mesoamerican Figurines in Context. New Insights on Tridimensional Representations from Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Analysis around anthropomorphic figurines found in prehispanic sites have been diverse, nevertheless the intrigue and confusion among their interpretations are still remaining. Fortunately figurines typologies for the Mesoamerican Formative are useful to locate them chronologically,...
Contextualizing Ritual Violence: Kinship, Ethnicity, and Human Sacrifice in Epiclassic Central Mexico (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Journeying to the South, from Mimbres (New Mexico) to Malpaso (Zacatecas) and Beyond: Papers in Honor of Ben A. Nelson" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ritual violence has a long time-depth within Mesoamerica. While archaeologists and ethnohistorians have studied the political and cosmological significance of this practice extensively, less is understood about how or why particular individuals were targeted for...
Continuity and Change in Prehispanic and Colonial Pottery Production at Tzintzuntzan (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeology in South Central Michoacán México, Ongoing Studies" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This poster examines continuity and change in prehispanic and colonial pottery production at Tzintzuntzan through a typological and petrographic analysis.
Copper Buckles and Comal Battens: Clothing Indigenous Conquerors at 16th Century Coyotepetl, Tepeticpac, Tlaxcala (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeology and Material Culture of the Spanish Invasion of Mesoamerica and Forging of New Spain" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In October of 1519, the fiercely independent Tlaxcallan state first sent Indigenous warriors to aid Hernán Cortés in his conquest efforts. Such military aid, common for more than a decade, established a community of people who identified as Indigenous conquerors and Spanish allies. Documents...
Corporal Animal Forms as Ritualized Bodies in Burial 5, Moon Pyramid, Teotihuacan (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Multispecies Frameworks in Archaeological Interpretation: Human-Nonhuman Interactions in the Past, Part II" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Applying a relational ontological approach to faunal bones I identify animals, secondary animal by-products, and faunal artifacts as persons—in the corporal animal forms of puma, eagle, wolf, and rattlesnake—whom actively engaged with entangled sociopolitical communities of humans....
Cosmological Practice and Social Complexity in North and Central Mexico (2007)
To our minds the most interesting issue that emerges from juxtaposing the cosmologies of northern and central Mexico is the relationship between cosmology and social complexity. The regions were historically related and shared both broad structures many details of cosmology. Yet Central Mexican societies had undergone an urban transformation that the societies of northern and western Mexico had not experienced. In our view there are scale-dependent regularities in the material expression of...
Cosmologies of Ruins and Ruination: Infrastructures and the Anthropocene (2018)
Scientists debate the Anthropocene as a geological epoch. But as a cultural phenomenon, the Anthropocene is recent. And as a cultural phenomenon, the Anthropocene projects a cosmology across history. This paper specifically examines how this cosmology understands the materiality of infrastructures, the built substrate upon which networks of human and non-human worlds intersect and collide. I argue that this cosmology contrasts infrastructures of the recent past as dangerous and polluting against...
Cosmology in the New World
This project consists of articles written by members of Santa Fe Institute’s cosmology research group. Overall, the goal of this group is to understand the larger relationships between cosmology and society through a theoretically open-ended, comparative examination of the ancient American Southwest, Southeast, and Mesoamerica.
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...
Coyolxauhqui’s Serpents (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. This study focuses on questions about serpents and gender associations in Aztec art--questions raised by a ceramic fragment located in storage in the Brooklyn Museum. On it Coyolxauhqui, the enemy of the Aztecs’ supernatural patron, Huitzilopochtli, is depicted with two different types of imaginary serpents, a...
Creating the Pax Tolteca: Diversity, Autonomy, and Centralization from the Epiclassic to the Early Postclassic Periods in the Northern Basin of Mexico (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Central Mexico after Teotihuacan: Everyday Life and the (Re)Making of Epiclassic Communities" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper studies the role that economic and ecological diversity plays in the establishment of communities, the maintenance of sociopolitical autonomy, and the centralization of regional state power. We focus on the transition from the Epiclassic period in the northern Basin of Mexico, a time...
Creolization and the Zapotec Diaspora: A Classic Period Zapo-Teotihuacano Settlement in Southern Hidalgo, Mexico (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Crossing Boundaries: Interregional Interactions in Pre-Columbian Times" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper will present the results of a multi-faceted research endeavor at the site of El Tesoro, Hidalgo, Mexico. Previous and recent research have shown that the Classic-period settlement at El Tesoro exhibited affiliations to both Teotihuacan and the Zapotec homeland in the Valley of Oaxaca and was likely related...
Culture Change and Shifting Populations in Central Northern Mexico (1982)
The present paper is a preliminary attempt to consider the history and processes of cultural contact of several now-extinct aboriginal groups that inhabited the area of centra northern Mexico during part of the Spanish Colonial period. While the general region comprises roughly the area south of the Rio Grande, east of the Florido River in Chihuahua, north of the town of Parras and the Laguna district (Torreon, Coahuila), and west of the modern highway that runs south from Piedras Negras to...
"A Curious Ambivalence": The Iconography of Long-Distance Trade Goods in Postclassic Mexico (2018)
The Postclassic Mexica maintained what Sophia and Michael Coe (2005) refer to as a "curious ambivalence" regarding cacao: despite its prevalence in everyday life as currency, the plant rarely appears in artistic programs and consumption was highly restricted via sumptuary laws that controlled social behavior. The visual scarcity of this crop extends into divine imagery – for instance, cacao remained an important aspect of Ek’ Chuah, the Postclassic Maya merchant god, but does not appear among...
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...
Damage on the Jicalán Viejo Complex by Land Use from 1970 to 2021: A Modern Mapping Assessment (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Technological Transitions in Prehispanic and Colonial Metallurgy: Recent and Ongoing Research at the Archaeological Site of Jicalán Viejo, in Central Michoacán, West Mexico" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 2003, a field survey at the site of Jicalán Viejo was carried out, inspired by ethnohistorical interpretations of the Lienzo of Jicalán, also known as Lienzo de Jucutacato. One of this site’s most outstanding...
A Dark Horse of the Early Postclassic: The Site of El Cerrito (Querétaro, Mexico) and Its Relationship to Chichen Itza and Tula (2018)
Ever since the first attempts to explain the close correspondences (in iconography, architecture, and writing) between Chichen Itza and Tula in the Early Postclassic it has been assumed that it was mainly between these two cities, sometimes even called "twin Tollans", that the extended and intense contact between Northern Yucatan and central Mexico took place. A tendency among Mesoamericanists not to look further to the north and west, to present states such as Guanajuato and Querétaro, have...
Decapitation and the Vulnerable Nature of Joints among the Aztecs (2021)
This is an abstract from the "New Perspectives on Ritual Violence and Related Human Body Treatments in Ancient Mesoamerica" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Prisoners of war were ritually killed by heart extraction and were often decapitated. Archaeologists at Templo Mayor found skulls with the first cervical vertebrae attached, indicating death by decapitation. Lethal weapons such as flint sacrificial knives were also found near decapitated...