Tlaxcala (State / Territory) (Geographic Keyword)
351-375 (497 Records)
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. Scant attention has been paid to the past of the current border of the states of Michoacán and Estado de México, though there has been a proposed local archaeological traditions for the region in order to understand archaeological contexts. There are archaeological data about large carved stone sculptures which can lay the...
Postclassic Communities and Colonial Reconfigurations in the Eastern Lower Papaloapan Basin, Veracruz, Mexico (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Previous investigations in the region known as the Eastern Lower Papaloapan Basin, in the state of Veracruz, Mexico, have proposed the existence of a "Postclassic Paradox" in which Late Postclassic prehispanic communities identified in 16th century historic documents cannot be identified archaeologically. In this poster, I expand on this idea and propose that...
Postclassic Huastec Art and the Cult of the Feathered Serpent (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Tales of the Feathered Serpent: Refining Our Understanding of an Enigmatic Mesoamerican Being" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Feathered Serpent was one of the principal Mesoamerican deities before the Spanish Conquest. During the Epiclassic and Postclassic periods, the cult dedicated to this ancient deity, associated with wind, fertility, and rulership, became firmly established within an international elite...
The Power of Blade Stones in Postclassic Mesoamerica (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. In the present discussion, I will focus on mutually constitutive relationships between people and the material world, specifically on gestational dynamics, suggesting that by stone flaking and stone chipping, children (of stone) were fabricated. From the womb of the earth, which is very much a stony...
Preceramic Cultures of the Basin of Mexico (2018)
The period from early peopling until the appearance of pottery in the basin of Mexico is poorly known despite its importance to know the emergence of the early sedentary communities and the development of the first political centers in the area. This study summarizes the state of knowledge about hunter-gatherer communities in the basin and presents recent studies that have allowed us to expand our knowledge of this period, particularly for the so-called Archaic period. We highlight the profusion...
Prehispanic chinampas at El Japón, Xochimilco: Structure and Chronology (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. El Japón in San Gregorio Atlapulco, Xochimilco (Mexico City) was a Postclassic-Early Colonial chinampa community, previously reported and partially surveyed by Lechuga (1977), Parsons et al. (1982, 1985), Ávila López (1995) and González (1996). In 2013, investigators from the...
A Preliminary Chronology of Settlement and Subsistence Patterns in Cabo Pulmo National Park, Baja California Sur, Mexico (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. We present the results of our preliminary analysis of the archaeological resources in Cabo Pulmo National Park (CPNP), Baja California Sur, Mexico. Since 1995, CPNP has yielded evidence for ecological recovery of marine resources, although long-term prospects are still in question. As important are the cultural resources in the park and surrounding area,...
A Preliminary Recontextualization of Lithic and Exchange Chronology of Coxcatlan Cave within the Tehuacan Valley, Mexico (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In recent years, Coxcatlan Cave has drawn renewed attention for its early regional chronology and centralized location as a nexus point for interregional exchange. However, its importance for understanding shifting patterns of exchange and resource acquisition within the Valley of Tehuacan has yet to be explored. This research draws upon the data gathered...
A Preliminary Study of Epiclassic Human Mobility at Cerro Magoni in Tula, Mexico Using Stable and Radiometric Isotope Analyses (2018)
In this poster, we present preliminary mobility data for ten individuals recovered from the summit of Cerro Magoni, an Epiclassic (ca. AD 600-900) hilltop settlement in Tula, Mexico. For decades it has been hypothesized that the Tula area may have experienced an influx of immigrants from northwestern Mexico during the Epiclassic period, and that these newcomers played an important role in the rise Tula Grande. Results presented here provide an important step forward towards testing the long-held...
A Preliminary Study of Epiclassic Human Mobility at La Mesa in Tula, Mexico Using Stable and Radiometric Isotope Analyses and Radiocarbon Dating (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this poster, we present preliminary mobility data for individuals recovered from La Mesa, an Epiclassic hilltop settlement in Tula, Mexico. For decades it has been hypothesized that the Tula area may have experienced an influx of immigrants from northwestern Mexico during the Epiclassic period, and that these newcomers played an important role in the rise...
Preservation, Degradation, and Contamination: The Chemical Identification of Cochineal in Archaeological Environments (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Although cochineal has played an important role in Mesoamerican societies, a lack of suitable methods has hampered its investigation by archaeologists. Luckily, recent developments in organic residue analysis suggest the possibility that cochineal production may be identified in the archaeological record through identification of carminic acid, its primary...
Previous Material Entanglements and the Rise of the Aztec Empire (2018)
Precisely dated household middens at the Aztec site of Xaltocan suggest that Aztec imperial matter—decorated serving vessels imported from Tenochtitlan and small spindle whorls used to produce tribute cloth, for example—often predates imperial formation and expansion by nearly a century. In this paper, I consider the analytical purchase we might get in explaining this puzzling finding by considering literature from the material turn; Khatchadourian, Bauer, Kosiba, and others have recently...
Production and Exchange of the Earliest Ceramics in central Mexico (2018)
Compositional studies in central Mexico have largely focused on serving wares of the later Teotihuacan and Postclassic periods. Studies of the region’s earliest ceramics of the Formative period have been almost completely ignored. The earliest ceramics made in the region tend to be much coarser than the later serving wares, so we cannot use the existing reference databases to source them. Here we build the Formative reference database with a large sample of chemical and petrographic data...
Production in Urban Spaces: Lithic Production and Economic Organization at La Corona, Guatemala (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. Studies of urban spaces have often relied on specialized production as a marker of urbanism. More recently, our understandings of production activities in urban environments have been used to understand the variety of activities that occurred within these spaces and the ways in which they...
Provenance Analysis of Tempering Materials using Quantitative Petrography in the Formative Basin of Mexico (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Cross-Cultural Petrographic Studies of Ceramic Traditions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ceramics sourcing studies in the Basin of Mexico suffer from the interior drainage problem. Sediment erodes from the mountains and mixes as it drains inward toward the lake at the center. Material composition, and the ceramics made from them, grades subtly over space as a result, making provenance analysis difficult. In a prior...
Pueblo de Indios: Syncretic Art and Architecture in the Negotiation of Indigenous Identity (2018)
In the years immediately following the conquest of the Aztec empire by the Spanish crown, there was a period of transition in which acculturation, adaptation, and/or adoption of new configurations of political powers, religion, and social structures ushered in the Colonial period in Mexico. One of the results of the encounter between indigenous and Spanish cultures is the syncretism that developed in the art and religious architecture of this region. Studies of syncretic art in colonial Mexico...
Pumas and Vultures and Wolves, Oh My! The Appropriation and Alteration of Teotihuacan Processing Predators at Tula (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 paper examines the predatory animals on the relief friezes of Pyramid B at Tula, clearly based on Teotihuacan models originally expressed in different media and contexts--murals in interior spaces--and the possible reasons for both Tula's borrowing of this imagery and its redeployment in sculpture in the...
Quail in the Religious Life of the Ancient Nahuas (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 documentary sources recording Nahuatl culture of the Late Postclassic period, a bird called zollin, identified as a quail (Cyrtonyx montezumae) is especially prominent. Indeed, these small birds were often chosen to be sacrificed before the divine effigies and, in some cases, to be consumed during ritual...
Quetzalcoatl in Late Aztec Sculptures (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Tales of the Feathered Serpent: Refining Our Understanding of an Enigmatic Mesoamerican Being" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Quetzalcoatl (Feathered Serpent) is often characterized as a wind god, but in Aztec sculptures, the traits of the wind god Ehecatl, principally the buccal mouth mask, are not found mixed with feathered serpent imagery. The mix is found in pictorial manuscripts, and alluded to in written...
Reading Power from Above: Subsistence, Monumentality, and Water Ritual in Ancient Teotihuacan (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. Proponents of collective and autocratic models of Teotihuacan’s sociopolitical organization relate the control and ritual of water to the development of complex society, but how such institutions materialize on the landscape remains poorly understood. We present evidence from six years of archaeological survey,...
REAP in El Tajin: Looking towards Social Participation in a World Heritage Site (2018)
The Pre-Hispanic city of El Tajin (Mexico) was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1992. Late on in the same decade UNESCO encouraged State Parties to foster "informed awareness on the part of the population… whose active participation [in conservation]…is essential". Using the Rapid Ethnographic Assessment Procedures method (REAP) on fieldwork in Mexico, this paper aims to contrast global and local policies to improve participation of local communities generally and in particular of...
Reaping the Rewards of Incipient Agriculture from the Land to the Sea and the Mangroves In Between (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the Archaic to Early Formative transition, the Soconusco populations began adopting more sedentary subsistence strategies and investing more in their local environments. Evidence from sediment cores demonstrates that during the Archaic, populations were burning inland landscapes and starting to grow maize. The environmental effects of incipient...
A Reassessment of Obsidian Procurement Networks on Guatemala's Pacific Slope (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Networks of long-distance exchange in quotidian commodities are essential aspects of prehistoric economies. On the Pacific Slope of Guatemala, there was no more important commodity than obsidian, which accounts for almost all cutting edges found in archaeological contexts. Obsidian sourcing studies on the Pacific Slope have been limited, relied on very...
Recent Advances of the Tlalancaleca Archaeological Project, Puebla, Central Mexico. (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Tlalancaleca was one of the largest settlements before the rise of Teotihuacan in Central Mexico and likely provided cultural and historical settings for the creation of Central Mexican urban traditions during later periods. Yet its urbanization process as well as socio-spatial organization remain poorly understood. The Proyecto Arqueologico Tlalancaleca,...
Recent Research at the Neighborhood Center of Tlajinga, Teotihuacan (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. Investigations of the Proyecto Arqueológico Tlajinga Teotihuacan (PATT) in 2019 focused on the southern neighborhood center of this cluster of non-elite residences in the southern periphery of the ancient Mexican metropolis. Research objectives included understanding the social infrastructure of public space...