Nayarit (State / Territory) (Geographic Keyword)
351-375 (439 Records)
This is an abstract from the "Place-Making in Indigenous Mesoamerican Communities Past and Present" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the special collections of the Latin American Library at Tulane University is a tracing made by William Spratling of an original *lienzo map centered on the town of Noxtepec, Guerrero. Painted by a *tlacuilo, the *lienzo likely dates to the end of the sixteenth century. This little-known piece exemplifies the...
Sacrifice and the Skeleton: Mortuary Archaeology at Los Guachimontones (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This presentation examines the mortuary practices in excavated burials at Late Formative and Early Classic (300 BCE–400 CE) Los Guachimontones in Jalisco, Mexico. This site, with features such as shaft tombs and circular public architecture, is exemplary of the unusual regional cultural tradition of ancient West Mexico. An analysis of the mortuary remains...
Sacrifice and the Sun: The Aztec Calendar Stone and Its Origins (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Dancing through Iconographic Corpora: A Symposium in Honor of F. Kent Reilly III" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. While many scholars have suggested that the Aztec sacrificed individuals on the Calendar Stone, this paper will not only explore this aspect but also the object’s affiliation with another form of sacrifice, auto-sacrifice. Using ethnohistoric records, connections between the imagery of the stone and acts of...
The Sacrificial Artifacts in the Templo Mayor Offerings (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Sacrificial and Autosacrifice Instruments in Mesoamerica: Symbolism and Technology" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The complex Mesoamerican cosmovisión includes myths about the cultures to try to understand, their history, natural events, and their universe, through narrations and fantastic facts, which gave them an explanation about everything that they did not understand. As a consequence of this, the invention of...
A Sacrificial Graphic Pattern? Analysis of the “Curved Like Obsidian” Pattern in Images of Itztlacoliuhqui and Other Nahua Gods (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Sacrificial and Autosacrifice Instruments in Mesoamerica: Symbolism and Technology" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The aim of this paper is to analyze the meaning encoded in the "curved like obsidian" graphic pattern present in the cap and face of Itztlacoliuhqui, the Nahua god of frost. Though supposedly it is a pattern that encodes "obsidian," the sacrificial obsidian knives are painted in a different way. On the...
Saints as Warriors: Tlaxcalteca and Cholulteca “Smack Talk” during the Siege of Cholula (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Advances in Puebla/Tlaxcala Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the “Historia de Tlaxcala,” mestizo chronicler Diego Muñoz de Camargo commemorates the first significant military endeavor between Tlaxcalan forces and the European soldiers under the command of Hernán Cortés. This study analyzes how Muñoz Camargo constructed the narrative of the siege and battle, and how he framed the Tlaxcalan victory as a...
Santiago Apostol in the Conquest of Nueva Galicia and the Fiesta de los Tastoanes (2019)
This is an abstract from the "The Archaeologies of Contact, Colony, and Resistance" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Festivals and religious beliefs in contemporary Mexico are the product of a cultural synthesis between the Mesoamerican religion and Christianity. In this presentation we expose the survival of a battle scene between Spaniards and indigenous tribes represented in a patronal feast known as Los Tastoanes, in which one of the main...
Sculpting the Landscape: Analyzing the Formative-Classic Period Built Environment at Los Guachimontones, Jalisco (2019)
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. Los Guachimontones is the quintessential and largest archaeological site of the Teuchitlán tradition or culture. Despite this, until recently our understanding of the site has been hampered in part by an overemphasis on excavations in the largest, most monumental guachimontón (or circular architectural groups). However,...
“Serpent Skin” and “Diamond Grid” Motifs on Epiclassic and Postclassic Figurines Skirts (2021)
This is an abstract from the "The Precolumbian Dotted-Diamond-Grid Pattern: References and Techniques" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In Mesoamerica, the wearing of wide belts, skirts, and huipils is characteristic of feminine representations. From the Epiclassic period onward, but more frequently in the Early Postclassic period in Central and Western Mexico, the skirts of certain feminine figurines start to wear what has been called, among many...
The Sets of Figurines in Western Mesoamerica: Contexts and Possible Interpretations During the Formative (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. In Western Mexico, as in Mesoamerica generally, anthropomorphic and zoomorphic figurines are rather often found in groups, either in caches or in funerary context. These particular contexts allow substantial advances in our understanding of their uses and possible meanings, in particular...
Shimmering Gold and Feathers: Strategies for Making Feathered Objects with Metal Applications (2021)
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. The Mexica employed feathers to make lightweight objects utilized by elites and gods in various secular, religious, political, and military contexts. The use of feathers is represented in murals, codices, ceramics, sculpture, metalwork, and even some of these objects that have managed to survive more than five...
Skirts and Scorpions: Female Power and Poisonous Creatures (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. In the Tratado de supersticiones (1626) Hernando Ruíz de Alarcón documented invocations and prayers to pre-Hispanic divinities to assure a good catch/hunt or to protect against poisonous/painful bites/stings. This confirmed that these divinities remained important the local consciousness even 100 years after...
Slow violence and environmental inequality in the Valley of Mexico (2019)
This is an abstract from the "The Legacies of The Basin of Mexico: The Ecological Processes in the Evolution of a Civilization, Part 1" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Valley of Mexico project was unprecedented in its documentation of demographic, social, and environmental processes over millennia. Nevertheless, its findings are limited because participants did not systematically collect archaeological data about settlements after the Spanish...
Social Status and Ritual Practice at a Middle Formative Residential Complex at Tlalancaleca, Puebla (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Fieldwork recently undertaken at Tlalancaleca, Puebla, explored a residential complex dating to the Texoloc phase (650 – 500 BC) of the Middle Formative period. Horizontal excavations exposed a residential platform and several wattle and daub rooms flanking a central patio. This paper presents interpretations regarding: (1) the status of inhabitants; and (2)...
Sociopolitical and Cultural Renewals during Late and Terminal Formative in the Lerma’s Valley: The Post-Chupicuaro Developments (2018)
Chupicuaro reached its cultural and demographic peak between 400 and 100 BCE. This Formative culture was integrated into the western Mesoamerican sphere and was characterized by its homogeneity, with diversified but still poorly understood relationships with Central Mexico, particularly in the sites of Cuicuilco and Cerro de los Tepalcates, and Tlaxcala-Puebla area. The decades before our era underwent both socio-spatial reconfigurations, probably due to rapid environmental change in the...
Soil Micromorphology Applied to Ceramics from Chupícuaro: The Search of Raw Materials in Volcanic Contexts (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Reassessing Chupícuaro–Cuicuilco Relationships in Light of Ceramic Production (Formative Mesoamerica)" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Regional geology affects the mineralogical and geochemical footprints of ceramics components, yet in relative homogeneous areas, the first approximations of ceramic petrogroups can be difficult to define. One approach is to apply concepts derived from soil micromorphology, regarding...
Sonic Places: Preliminary Acoustic Analysis in Early Colonial Tepeticpac, Tlaxcala (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Everyday places that bodies inhabit are rarely without sound. Sound has a material impact in structuring the relations between people and their surroundings through the vibrations that occur as a response to an activity or event in a given space and time. The auditory system receives this structured sensory information and rhythmically encodes the body with...
Sound Practices in Late Postclassic to Early Colonial Tlaxcallan: Applying a Community of Practice Framework to Investigate Sonic Expression (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. In archaeological interpretations of Postclassic period central Mexico, sound practices and related assemblages are often conceptualized as unchanging, standardized, and fixed to a common Mesoamerican religious system under the umbrella of Aztec cultural expression. This neglect of other polities’ sound...
The Southern Neighborhood Center at the Tlajinga District, Teotihuacan (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Life in Teotihuacan's urban neighborhoods revolved around the social infrastructure of local public spaces featuring temples, plazas, and other buildings with civic functions. Recent investigations in the Tlajinga district demonstrate that even on Teotihuacan's outer periphery these spaces could be quite elaborate, with structures elevated on talud-tablero...
Spanish Contact (1982)
The principal institutions of Spanish contact were, as elsewhere on the Spanish frontier, the mission, the mine, the hacienda, and the military. The mission contact situation, handled by the religious arm of Spanish administration, will be discussed more fully in later pages. The few sections that follow immediately here are an attempt to sketch some aspects of the non-mission aspects of seventeenth and eighteenth-century north Mexican society in order to give a more complete picture of the...
Spatial Distribution of Ceramic Sherds at the Plaza of the Columns, Teotihuacan, Mexico (2018)
During the Early Classic period (250-550 CE), Teotihuacan in what is now central Mexico was the largest city in the Western hemisphere. Occupying 76,400 m2 of Teotihuacan’s ceremonial center, the Plaza of the Columns, which consists of three mounds and the surrounding area, has been posited as the site of a palatial-administrative complex. The occupational history of the Plaza of the Columns is interpreted in light of a three-dimensional distribution map of ceramics, organized according to two...
Spatial Distribution of Ceramics and Lithics at the Plaza of the Columns Complex, Teotihuacan, Mexico (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Teotihuacan (150 BCE-550 CE), located in the northeastern Basin of Mexico, was a large urban center that was built of a heterogenous ethnic and socio-economic population. The Plaza of the Columns and the Plaza North of the Sun Pyramid, in Teotihuacan’s core ceremonial zone, are posited as palatial-administrative complexes. The occupants of these two complexes...
Spatial Structure and Ancient Neighbourhoods: A Re-evaluation of Methods and Interpretations at Teotihuacan, Mexico (2018)
In a 2012 article exploring the spatial structure of post-Tlamimilolpa phase Teotihuacan, Mexico, we invoked both a materialist body of method-theory known as space syntax and an interactional theory of community development. Through this framework, we discussed community structure and systems of authority expressed by the architectural masses and spaces of the city. In this paper, the authors revisit this approach, with fresh eyes and in the context of our growing knowledge of ancient urbanism....
Spoiler Alert: Bioarchaeological Study of Cremation Funerary Urns with an Application of Computer Tomography (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. Nine urns from the early Postclassic cemetery in Los Tamarindos (Tierra Caliente, Michoacán, Mexico) containing human cremains have been excavated with the support of a CT scan. Selected examples from this sample will be presented to demonstrate the analytical potential of the methodology that merges bioarchaeological...
Standardization of Apartment Compounds at Teotihuacan, Mexico (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. How standardized were the apartment compounds at Teotihuacan? Some archaeologists have claimed they were highly standardized in size and form, while others have claimed they are all different. How can this question be answered rigorously? We investigate indications of standardization in the apartment compounds of Teotihuacan, Mexico using a geo-referenced...