Michoacan (State / Territory) (Geographic Keyword)
326-350 (377 Records)
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. The ancient prehispanic city of Tzintzuntzan was a cosmopolitan and highly stratified settlement that is distributed between two great hills, the Tariaqueri and the Yahuarato. Its ancient builders gained flat land...
Tarascan Presence in Central South Michoacan. New Researches (2018)
For the last five years the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia set up an archaeological project in the central south portion of the state of Michoacan in the Zirahuen and Balsas river basins. A systematic survey had been made in a large area identifying dozens of sites never previously recorded, some of them with a clear Tarascan component. In spite of, in this paper we will present the results of the research made at the Tarascan sites in the limits of the highlands and the Tierra...
Technical Examination of Mural Painting Fragments from Plaza of the Columns Complex of Teotihuacan: A Comparative Study (2018)
The discovery of numerous Maya-style mural painting fragments during the archaeological excavations in the Plaza of the Columns Complex of Teotihuacan, sprouted debates concerning if these murals were drawn by a Maya artist. In order to compare the pigments composition and the pictorial technique of these paintings with mural paintings from the Maya area from the Classic Period, a non-invasive characterization of the thin ground layer of stucco and the pigments used in the painting discovered...
The Technical Study of Two 16th Century Mexican Pictographic Documents in the NMAI Collection (2019)
This is an abstract from the "From Materials to Materiality: Analysis and Interpretation of Archaeological and Historical Artifacts Using Non-destructive and Micro/Nano-sampling Scientific Methods" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Two mid-16th century Mexican pictographic documents in the collection of the National Museum of the American Indian, a codex on amate paper from the Valley of Mexico and a lienzo on a large cotton textile from Puebla, have...
A Technological Approach of Textile Production in Late Postclassic Tlaxcallan (2018)
Textile production had a pivotal role among Late Postclassic societies including ancient Tlaxcallan, a prominent altepetl of the Puebla-Tlaxcala region. Several scholars have studied prehispanic cloth and garments production based on 16th century historical sources, but using little archaeological evidence. In particular, poor attention has been paid on the technology of textile production based on archaeological artifacts, especially in relation to spinning techniques and the different fibers...
A Technological Reconstruction of Preindustrial Copper Smelting in Central Michoacan, Mexico (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. The earliest evidence for copper metallurgy in Mesoamerica comes from West Mexico, dating to ca. AD 800. Over a period of approximately 700 years, a wide variety of artifacts was manufactured, typically decorations and other valuable non-utilitarian items from several contexts....
Templo Mayor and Representations of the Flower World: agriculture, fire, sacrifice, death, rebirth, and imperialistic agendas (2019)
This is an abstract from the "The Flower World: Religion, Aesthetics, and Ideology in Mesoamerica and the American Southwest" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. One of our primary sources of descriptive information about the Flower World comes from Central Mexican colonial historical documents. While ethnohistorical accounts have portrayed this world with shared beliefs of the floral paradise, this paper provides a complementary scenario, by...
Teotihuacan Sound Mapping: Exploring the Sonic Sphere of the City of the Gods (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Music Archaeology's Paradox: Contextual Dependency and Contextual Expressivity" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Teotihuacan Sound Mapping Project explores the role that sound and music played in the ancient urban environment of the site. The sound tools and musical instruments of Teotihuacan are re-created and played in different architectural settings, and the instrumental and architectural acoustics subsequently...
Tephrostratigraphic Correlation and Ceramic Seriation in Bayesian Calibration: A Case Study from Coastal Ecuador (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Constructing Chronologies II: The Big Picture with Bayes and Beyond" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The radiocarbon record from sustained archaeological field research in the Jama Valley of coastal Ecuador has provided a robust dataset for Bayesian chronological modeling using multiple archaeological sites from a valley-wide landscape. This paper delves into greater detail on the development of the model’s prior...
Territory and Ritual Landscape in the Colombino Codex: Oaxaca Coast, Mexico (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. Through a geographical and historical analysis, we propose to interpret the territorial and ritual organization of the landscapes in the Colombino Codex, which alludes mainly to the heroic feats of Lord 8 Venado...
"They came to loot our treasures": Indigenous, Pirates, and Indigenous-Pirates on the Mexican Pacific Coast (2019)
This is an abstract from the "After Cortés: Archaeological Legacies of the European Invasion in Mesoamerica" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent studies show that the Spanish conquest of the Oaxacan Pacific Coast was shaped, and even orchestrated, by indigenous kingdoms (Zapotecs, Mixtecs) and allied groups (Pochutecs, Chontal) that vied for control over key trading ports. These same indigenous players continued their cycles of conflicts,...
Thirty Years Later. Revisiting the Tarascan City of Las Milpillas and Its Environment, Malpaís de Zacapu, Michoacán (2018)
Thirty years ago, investigations in the city of Las Milpillas in the Malpaís of Zacapu, provided unprecedented insights on the origins of Late Postclassic tarascan social organization. One was the highlighting of a unique kind of urban organization upon lava flows ; as in all four tarascan cities of the Malpaís. Yet, unlike its counterparts, Las Milpillas specificity resides in the fact that a site portion lies upon older volcanics, providing arable lands at hand for the city dwellers to use....
Thread Production in Ocotelulco, Tlaxcallan, Mexico (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Tlaxcallan: Mesoamerica's Bizarro World" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological excavations undertaken by the Tlaxcallan Archaeological Project have recovered an important sample of spindle whorls from Late Postclassic – Early Colonial (1420 -1540 A.D.) domestic contexts in Ocotelulco, a subsection of the urban site of Tlaxcallan, Mexico. In this paper, we present the results of the analysis of identified whorl...
Tlalancaleca: Ceramics and Interregional Interactions in Formative Central Mexico (2018)
Using ceramics as a proxy for social contact, we discuss a long history of interregional interactions of Tlalancaleca with other areas during the Formative Period. We have observed some clear changes of ceramic assemblages in the transitions between the Middle, Late, and Terminal Formative (or between the Texoloc, Tezoquipan, and Late Tezoquipan phases). While we do not imply that the presence or absence of certain ceramic traditions serves as direct indicators for political control, it is...
Tlaloques, Tiemperos, and Trees: Cultural Models of Nature in Central Mexico (2018)
Abundant water-related art and architecture produced by Teotihuacanos and Mexica-Aztecs in the central Mexican highlands coupled with the rhetoric of today’s farmers from the same region regarding the catastrophic impacts of changes in local seasonal rainfall patterns make it clear that access to rainwater has always been a crucial factor for agricultural success in the semi-arid highlands of central Mexico, especially in communities that lack a reliable water source for irrigation. We collect a...
Tlatilco Revisited (2018)
Since Tlatilco was discovered in the 1930s by Miguel Covarrubias, our understanding of the Early Formative site has changed with a steady flow over the last 80 years. During the 1940s, 50s, and 60s Tlatilco was excavated revealing the dynamic of the site, with the objective to establish the chronology and preserve the many burials. There seems to be extensive evidence that Tlatilco in fact was more than a burial site. The established (calibrated) dates for Tlatilco to be between 1200-900 BCE...
Tlaxcallan Pottery Manufacture and Restricted Networks (2018)
The debate whether pottery sherds equal people or just their ideas has been ongoing since the days of pioneers such as Ford and Spaulding. The advent of new technologies has given a new wind to old debates in which the questions surrounding pottery styles are examined more closely to determine their origin. Compositional analysis has been especially helpful in shedding new light on the relations between artifacts and people. Compositional analysis carried out on Postclassic Tlaxcallan pottery...
Toward an Archaeology of Indigenous Conquerors: Household Ritual Life at Tepeticpac, Tlaxcala (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Advances in Puebla/Tlaxcala Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over the course of its two excavation field seasons in 2017 and 2022, the community-collaborative Proyecto de Arqueología Cotidiana de Tepeticpac has shifted its focus from the Postclassic period, when the Tlaxcallans formed a state that maintained its independence from the Aztec empire, to the early colonial period, when residents allied with...
Towards a More Systematic Approach to Analyzing Artistic Influences: A View from the Pacific Coast of Southeastern Mesoamerica (2018)
Artistic evidence of interactions is among the most salient and most debated in terms of the relationships that it represents between different polities and regions. Traditionally, the focus of analysis is on stylistic and iconographic influences and a discussion of retention of original meanings or evidences of disjunctions. Based on my research on the topic of Classic Period interactions from the Pacific Coast of Chiapas, I have come to the conclusion that our perspectives are much too...
Towards a Social Paleoethnobotany of Urbanization: Integrating Macrobotanical and Microbotanical Data to Explore Foodways at La Blanca, Guatemala (2018)
This paper uses macrobotanical and microbotanical remains to investigate the impacts of developing sociopolitical complexity on the foodways of Middle Preclassic inhabitants of the Pacific coast of Guatemala. I use these datasets to explore how urbanization affected food-related practices of residents of La Blanca (900-600 BCE). Macrobotanical remains from house floors facilitate comparisons between elite and commoner foodways, while starch grains and phytoliths extracted from grinding...
Trabajos de recorrido de superficie y excavación en el sitio Santa Lucía 1, resultados preliminares de un hueco regional en la arqueología del noroeste de la cuenca de México (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Aproximaciones arqueológicas y paleontológicas en Santa Lucía, México" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Se hará una revisión de los antecedentes arqueológicos en la zona, dónde el principal asentamiento corresponde al islote artificial de Xaltocan, de filiación otomí, y cuya fundación data del periodo Posclásico temprano y se reconoce por la presencia de cerámica azteca I y II, sin embargo, en el Proyecto de Salvamento...
Traces of Integration: A Study of Early Colonial Ware by Imagenology Methods (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Tzintzuntzan, Capital of the Tarascan Empire: New Perspectives" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The capital of the Tarascan empire was located in Tzintzuntzan (Michoacán, Mexico), which reached its peak during the Late Postclassic (AD 1350–1525). At the time of contact, there was an almost unique continuous transition, showing a historical process of long duration, where different traditions converged. Among the...
Traces of Prehispanic Primary Smelting in Present Traditional Copper Work from Santa Clara del Cobre, Mexico: Historical and Ethnographical Evidence (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. The Tarascan Empire had become the most important prehispanic metallurgical center in Mesoamerica by around 1450 CE, with copper being the most commonly used metal to manufacture a variety of sumptuary objects. These...
Tracing Mobility in Pacific Coast and Highlands of Southern Mexico during the Classic Period (2018)
This study presents the strontium isotopic analysis of enamel, dentine and bones of four individuals recovered from two sites (Miguel Aleman and PIN7), dating respectively from the Early and Late Classic period, both located the Pacific coast of Chiapas. The enamel samples of the four individuals have a Sr isotopic composition that varies between 0.70540 and 0.70631 for the 87Sr/86Sr ratio. The results were compared to data available for human bones and teeth, as well as rock, plant, water, and...
Transportation or Transformation?: Road Depictions in Relaciones Geográficas of 16th-Century New Spain (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Manifesting Movement Materially: Broadening the Mesoamerican View" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The 16th century was a time of extraordinary cultural exchange in Central Mexico. The heterogeneous indigenous populations interacted with recently arrived Spanish and the Creole populations. In this paper, I examine one manifestation of these peoples’ concepts of place, space, and movement as visually represented in...