Mexico (State / Territory) (Geographic Keyword)
451-461 (461 Records)
Recent applications of LiDAR technology at the Late Postclassic city of Angamuco, located in the heartland of the ancient Purépecha Empire in modern day Michoacan, Mexico are allowing for the identification and analysis of urban features in innovative ways. A complex system of constructed water management features consisting of reservoirs, sunken plazas, and connective canals were a vital form of infrastructure that were required for the movement of water across the dynamic landscape upon which...
Village to City: Formative Period Political Evolution in Central Mexico (2018)
Current research has prompted rethinking about the early development of sedentism, agricultural economies, and complex societies in Central Mexico. We discuss new evidence of significant interconnected changes ca.1000 BC that through multiple trajectories involved intensified maize production, expansion of sedentary villages, expanded interaction networks, and increased social complexity. With the establishment of the first cities, the Late Formative saw corporate political economy strategies...
War Milpas: Wetlands and Institutional Agriculture during the Late Postclassic in Tlaxcallan, 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. The Antigua Cienega de Tlaxcala is an area of wetlands located at the core of the Puebla-Tlaxcala valley in central Mexico. Historically, these marshlands have been exploited agriculturally using drained field...
Wealth and Ownership of Indigenous Goods among Spanish Colonizers (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. Scholars have debated the relationship between ownership of indigenous goods among Spanish colonizers and different economic, cultural, and social variables. Some argue that wealth had a strong impact on consumption patterns, and wealthy colonizers used more European imports and less...
Were-Jaguars, Birdmen, and Community Performance in the Rain Petition Ceremonies in the Caves of the Upper Balsas River, Eastern Guerrero, Mexico (2018)
In this paper, we address the role of leaders and their communities during the performance of ceremonies associated with rain petition in a network of caves located in the Mixtec-Tlapanec-Nahua region of Eastern Guerrero. We present newly discovered archaeological evidence in the caves of Pozo de Muerto, Casa de la Lluvia, Cauadzidziqui, Juxtlahuaca and Gobernadores de Techan, as well as ethnographic analogy to shed new light on the use of caves as arenas of ritual and political performance from...
What Lies between the Dots: Exploring the Archaeology of the Broader Basin of Mexico Landscape (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. The Basin of Mexico survey established a diachronic palette of settlement locations that has served as the baseline for a wide range of studies. But settlements only comprise the nucleus of the most visible form of past human activities. A wide range of activities, agrarian and...
Where is Camaxtli? Assessing the Iconography of Tlaxcallan Collective Government (2018)
Scholars have acknowledged, for many decades, that Late Postclassic Tlaxcalla (n1250/1300-1519 A.D.) was a state level political entity ruled by a form of collective government having Camaxtli as its main patron deity. Both conceptions are constantly reproduced in academic work although they derive explicitly from sixteenth century historical sources. Unfortunately, few works have undertaken the task of contrasting colonial writings against archaeological evidence in order to test if such...
Women Who Create and Feed the Gods: Female Priestly Work in Mesoamerica and the Andean Area (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper aims to study the role played by female characters presented in the Mexica and Inca religious hierarchy in a comparative perspective. In first case, we mention the cihuamocexiuhzauhque, the "women who fast for a year," (Mazzetto 2017, 2020) while in the second we refer to the acllacuna. The activities carried out by these ritual specialists...
Years to Remember: Another Look at Teotihuacan’s Calendrical Signs (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. We offer a new look at a series of carved monuments and examples of rock art from Classic Teotihuacan culture (ca. AD 100–500) of highland central Mexico, all of which bear single calendrical dates in the 260-day calendar. Monuments such as those of Cerro Xoconoch and the Plaza de las Columnas serve as records...
Zapotitlan Earth Ovens and Their Middens: Ethnoarchaeology in Colima, Mexico (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Fire-Cracked Rock: Research in Cooking and Noncooking Contexts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Earth-oven processing of agave food and drink has a time depth in Colima, Mexico, of more than 7,000 years, providing a notable example of localized socioeconomic intensification processes throughout the Holocene. The cultural setting for this research is observant of contemporary Agave Culture, a term used to describe...
Zooarchaeology and Bioarchaeology: Ceremonial Feasts and Human Caches at Plaza of the Columns Complex, Teotihuacan (2018)
Preliminary analyses of the zooarchaeological assemblage from the Plaza of the Columns Complex illustrate a snapshot into past human activities such as specialized ceremonial events and faunal acquisition strategies for food consumption. The fauna from this complex, located just northwest of the Sun Pyramid, add to the database of forty years of archaeofaunal exploration throughout Teotihuacan. Here, we focus upon animal species distributed among four areas to understand the economic and ritual...