Michoacan (State / Territory) (Geographic Keyword)
101-125 (477 Records)
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,...
Contexts and Meanings of Prehispanic Underwater Offerings Discovered in the Volcanic Lakes of Nevado de Toluca, Mexico (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Underwater and Coastal Archaeology in Latin America" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Nevado de Toluca is a volcano located in the central region of Mexico. At 4,200 m above sea level, there are two lakes inside its crater with evidence of rituals and prehispanic offerings. Archaeological evidence, recorded by both underwater and terrestrial archaeological practices, indicates a close symbolic relationship between...
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...
Cords of Restraint and Authority: Teotihuacan’s Net Jaguars and Technologies of Ensnarement (2024)
This is an abstract from the "The Ties That Bind: Cordage, Its Sources, and the Artifacts of Its Creation and Use" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent excavations at the Moon Pyramid in Teotihuacan, Mexico, have uncovered fierce predators—including eagles, pumas, wolves, and rattlesnakes—buried inside. Analysis indicates that many were alive at the time of sacrifice: some in cages, and others bound. Some show evidence of long captivity,...
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...
Daily Life Rhythms of the Mexican Mountains: Narrating Milpa and Coffee Landscapes in Baxtla and Mixtla de Altamirano (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Within the Mesoamerican worldview, maize is synonymous with the body and represents the primary food of the human being, accompanied by a complex planting system known as milpa. Said system, we believe, celebrates the interrelation between the diversity of species, serving, in this way, as a metaphor to understand our social construction. In this metaphor,...
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...
Defining the Urbanism of the Ancient Purépecha Site of Angamuco (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The ancient Purépecha site of Angamuco located in the Lake Patzcuaro Basin of Michoacán, Mexico provides an unrivaled opportunity to study the urban tradition of the Purépecha prior to the formation of the empire in the late postclassic (1350 – 1520 CE). Previously, the understanding of Purépecha urbanism relied upon analysis of the imperial capital...
Desarrollo del sistema agrícola de terrazas en el Paisaje del sureste de la Cuenca de México (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Landscapes: Archaeological, Historic, and Ethnographic Perspectives from the New World / Paisajes: Perspectivas arqueológicas, históricas y etnográficas desde el Nuevo Mundo" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. El uso de un enfoque con carácter holístico, como lo es el concepto de Paisaje, ha permitido una visión y análisis integral en el estudio de las características sobre uno de los sistemas agrícolas tradicionales más...
Diagnóstico, registro y conservación interdisciplinaria en el Occidente de México: El caso del Ixtépete, Jalisco (2019)
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. Esta ponencia abordará las distintas exploraciones e intervenciones realizadas en el sitio arqueológico del Ixtépete, Jalisco, a lo largo del siglo XX; mismas que, si bien permitieron entender las técnicas y etapas constructivas, así como la cronología del lugar y sus monumentos, también...
Diamonds in the Rough: What Do the Sculpture Fragments Discovered in the Teotihuacan Mapping Project/Ground Stone Collection Tell Us about the Social Organization of the City? (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Teotihuacan: Multidisciplinary Research on Mesoamerica's Classic Metropolis" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The study of sculpture at Teotihuacan—as at many other sites—has traditionally focused on larger, more elaborate sculptures from civic-ceremonial contexts. As a result, less is known about the distribution, ubiquity, and diversity of the use of sculpture in other contexts and, specifically, what relation it has...