Tlaxcala (State / Territory) (Geographic Keyword)
401-425 (497 Records)
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...
Salt and Plumbate: Late Classic Multi-crafting in Eastern Soconusco, Chiapas, Mexico (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Ceramics and Archaeological Sciences" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological mounds within the mangrove zone west of the Rio Cahuacan, in far-southern Chiapas, Mexico, have dense surface remains of broken Plumbate pottery, solid ceramic cylinders, and various other kinds of pyro-technological evidence. Clays from the region match Tohil Plumbate chemical composition, thus solidifying the inference that the...
“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...
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...
Situating a Cached Ballgame Yoke from Matacanela, Veracruz (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Sculpture of the Ancient Mexican Gulf Coast, Part 2" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The ballgame complex was an important component of the Classic Veracruz style that spanned the Late or Epiclassic period (AD 600–900) and that was concentrated along the Mesoamerican Gulf lowlands and extended into adjacent regions. The ballgame, however, has early roots, both in Mesoamerica in general and in Veracruz in particular. In...
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 and Geographic Associations of Cotton-sized Spindle Whorls in South-central Veracruz, Mexico (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Textile Tools and Technologies as Evidence for the Fiber Arts in Precolumbian Societies" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The western lower Papaloapan basin in south-central Veracruz was subject to systematic survey and surface collection in several blocks of terrain. An initial analysis of spindle whorls from one survey block showed cotton-sized whorls were relatively abundant during the Classic and Postclassic...
Social Reactors Project datasets
Datasets from various publications of the Social Reactors Project
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)...
Society’s Cutting-Edge Crafters: Lithic Commodity Production at Cotzumalhuapa (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Lithic artisans were critical to society throughout the Americas prior to the introduction of iron by Europeans. On the Pacific Coast of Guatemala, where no local sources of chipped-stone imported obsidian was available, obsidian was used to meet social demand for cutting edges. Throughout time this demand was met by a mixture of importing finished tools...
Some Temporal Markers in Olmec Pottery from Los Soldados (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Los Soldados has been considered by many to be a secondary center with respect to La Venta due to its proximity to the capital; however, in the absence of a tuned ceramic chronology for the Middle Preclassic, this cannot be corroborated. Over a number of seasons, the Arroyo Pesquero Archaeological Project has carried out excavations at Los Soldados, and among...
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...
Source Analysis of Obsidian from the Late Olmec Site of Los Soldados (2018)
Recent compositional analyses of obsidian from Formative Period Mesoamerican sites have been used to trace obsidian to a number of Highland Mexican and Guatemalan sources, and documented shifts in sources through time. In this presentation, we report the results of a study that analyzed 401 obsidian samples excavated from the Middle/Late Formative period habitation site of Los Soldados, located 11 km from the Olmec capital of La Venta. Using three high precision techniques (LA-ICP-MS, XRF, and...
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....
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...
State of Conservation of the La Venta Stone Sculpture Corpus (2018)
The stone sculpture corpus originally found in La Venta is one of the most important collections of Olmec art in Mexico. It is currently exhibited in five different museums in Tabasco and Mexico City. The state of conservation of the almost 50 sculptures (whole and fragments) at the Parque Museo La Venta in Villahermosa are of particular interest because they have been exhibited in an open air museum for the last six decades. A summary of a recent and detailed study of the state of conservation...
Stepping Out: The Maya Underworld and the Red Temple at Cacaxtla (2018)
The murals of Cacaxtla, Tlaxcala, have long thrown the issue of Central Mexico-Maya interaction into high relief. There we find the richest evidence of interaction between these two cultural zones, though whether this amounts to citation, appropriation, fusion, or immigration is open to debate and contestation. This paper re-examines the stairway murals of the Red Temple for what they tell us about a Maya world seen through a Central Mexican lens. A particular focus falls on the link between...
Summit Camp (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Heritage Sites at the Intersection of Landscape, Memory, and Place: Archaeology, Heritage Commemoration, and Practice" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Summit Camp was occupied by Chinese railroad workers from 1864 to 1869. It was the longest occupied camp associated with the building of the transcontinental railroad. Workers from the camp excavated a series of tunnels through the granite bedrock of the Sierra Nevada...