Nayarit (State / Territory) (Geographic Keyword)
76-100 (439 Records)
At the time of European contact the Lake Pátzcuaro Basin (LPB) was the geopolitical core of the Purépecha (Tarascan) Empire (A.D. 1350-1520), and has long been recognized as a Mesoamerican core region . Cities were an important component of Purépecha statecraft but comparatively little is known about their general characteristics, organization, and evolution. Here I explore the use and division of space within the ancient city of Angamuco to document the development of social complexity, complex...
Chemical Analyses and Activity Areas at Cerro de en Medio: A Multidisciplinary Approach (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This interdisciplinary archaeological study centers on Cerro de en Medio (CDEM), an ancient site in the northern reaches of Mesoamerica during the late Classic period (600-900 CE). Advanced chemical analyses of occupation floors provide insights into CDEM's activities, revealing its intricate social dynamics. The research combines this chemical analysis...
Chemical Analyses of Activity Areas at Cueva de las Varillas in Teotihuacan (2024)
This is an abstract from the "What Happened after the Fall of Teotihuacan?" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. We present the chemical analysis of human activities in a cave occupied during the Epiclassic and Postclassic periods (AD 600–1500) at Teotihuacan. The archaeological context is formed by different cultural occupations within the same space, but during different periods of time. Due to the cultural and temporal diversity, we implemented a...
Chemical Residue Analysis, Foodways, and Ceramic Consumption in Tlajinga, Teotihuacan (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Tlajinga is the southernmost district of Teotihuacan, a cosmopolitan city that thrived in Central Mexico during the Classic Period. Previous research done in Tlajinga includes surface collection associated with the Teotihuacan Mapping Project and the excavation of one apartment compound, during the 70’s. Recent investigations carried out by the Proyecto...
Chronology of the Post-Teotihuacan Occupations in the Teotihuacan Valley (2024)
This is an abstract from the "What Happened after the Fall of Teotihuacan?" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The moment of the collapse of Teotihuacan and the subsequent occupation of the area by other cultures are still subjects of debate concerning this important urban center in Mesoamerica. Understanding what happened after the collapse and dating the different reoccupations of Teotihuacan can be challenging due to different factors, including...
"Closed by Refurbishment": A General Overview of Teotihuacan from Classic to Epiclassic Times (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. The aim of this paper is to do a general overview of the different archaeological processes identified in Teotihuacan in the last years of the Classic to Epiclassic period. In a space between the crisis of the Teotihuacan political and ideological power until the reorganization of new players in...
Coins and Empire in Sixteenth-Century Mexico (2018)
Scholars have asked how empires solidify power when colonizers, the agents of empire-building, often have diverse goals and backgrounds and their actions do not necessarily support the goals of the empire. Two answers to this question have received much attention: that empires promote ideologies that support cohesion among colonizers, and that coercion and violence can promote the expansion of empires. I propose a third answer, in which colonizers create varied material forms that may challenge...
Collective Action, Households, Neighborhoods, and Urban Landscapes: A Multiscalar Perspective on Late Postclassic Urbanism at Tlaxcallan (2021)
This is an abstract from the "The Urban Question: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Investigating the Ancient Mesoamerican City" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Systematic cross-cultural research on premodern cities at the global scale has begun to shed light on the relationships among political-economic strategies at various scales, the sociospatial organization of cities, and the daily lived experience of urban residents and visitors. Drawing on...
Collective Social Identification at La Quemada, Zacatecas, Mexico
This project contains the datasets resulting from my dissertation titled "Social Identification and the Capacity for Collective Action at La Quemada, Zacatecas, Mexico (600-800 CE)," which was successfully defended in November 2018. Dissertation Abstract: Unlike traditional frontier studies that treat the frontier as monolithic and focus on core-periphery interactions involving colonialism and acculturation, this dissertation seeks to characterize the internal social dynamics of frontier...
Colonial Glass Production in Mexico City: A Study on Technology Transfer and Adaptation (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The technology to make glass was brought to Mexico by Spanish glass artisans shortly after the Conquest in the sixteenth century. In the process of transferring their technological knowledge to the New World, these glass artisans encountered several challenges as they established workshops in Mexico City and Puebla, but were able to adapt the technology to the...
Colors in the Chupicuaro Ceramic Tradition: A Diachronic Perspective during the Late Formative (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. 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...
Compositional Analysis of Obsidian Artifacts from the Great Temple of Tenochtitlan Using pXRF (2024)
This is an abstract from the "2024 Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of Luis Barba" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Compositional analyses are fundamental in modern archaeological research. Recently, the introduction of portable X-ray fluorescence (pXRF) equipment has motivated an even greater interest in integrating chemical composition and provenance studies of raw materials as one of the primary objectives in archaeological projects....
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,...
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....