United Mexican States (Country) (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Petrozza. Jason Yaeger. M. Kathryn Brown. Kit Nelson. Rachel Horowitz.

Archaeologists working in the Maya area frequently find dense deposits of artifacts that are classified ‘terminal deposits,’ ‘final deposits,’ or ‘problematical deposits’. These classifications may accurately reflect a deposit’s stratigraphic placement, but ultimately mask or even misrepresent the diverse social behaviors which led to the creation of such deposits. Excavations in the courtyard in front of Structure B-6 at Xunantunich, Belize, exposed a dense deposit of artifacts. Through...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ana García Barrios.

This is an abstract from the "A Celebration and Critical Assessment of "The Maya Scribe and His World" on its Fiftieth Anniversary" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Grolier exhibition commissioned by M. Coe in 1973 came to researchers as an inescapable reference that remains today. His studies on codex-style vessels, so defined by him, opened the door to new studies from different perspectives and approaches that are reviewed here. This study...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Víctor Emmanuel Salazar Chávez. Jeffrey Blomster.

This is an abstract from the "Beyond Maize and Cacao: Reflections on Visual and Textual Representation and Archaeological Evidence of Other Plants in Precolumbian Mesoamerica" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Whenever we think of Mesoamerican foods, it is easy to imagine maize. It is particularly true during the Early Formative period, when the first sedentary villages appear in the region. Maize has been used almost exclusively to explain and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Aurelio López Corral. Ramón Santacruz.

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. El contacto entre tlaxcaltecas y españoles en 1519 inicio un periodo de cambios fundamentales en las relaciones de poder entre los altepemeh del altiplano central mesoamericano. Para Tlaxcallan, la alianza representó una oportunidad para sortear los problemas políticos, bélicos y económicos...

DOCUMENT Citation Only A. L. van Gijn. S López Varela. L Jacobs.

This resource is a citation record only, the Center for Digital Antiquity does not have a copy of this document. The information in this record has been migrated into tDAR from the EXARC Bibliography, originally compiled by Roeland Paardekooper, and updated. Most of these records consist of a document citation and other metadata but do not have the documents themselves uploaded. If you have a digital copy of the document and would like to have it curated in tDAR, please contact us using the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jenna Domeischel.

This is an abstract from the "Touching the Past: Public Archaeology Engagement through Existing Collections" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological curators struggle with the growing number of collections in our repositories, a phenomenon commonly referred to as the ‘curation crisis.’ Yet ‘crisis’ is an acute term, when the problem is instead chronic. The discipline of archaeology marches on, and so must repositories, even as the quantities...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Daniel Hansen.

Archaeologists have long striven to interpret mortuary rituals as qualitative signs of a living people--indices of sex, gender, age, status, wealth, and craft. Though the doctrine "as in life, so in death" can have some merit for archaeological inquiry, viewing mortuary ritual in this manner ignores the social act itself, which is one of the most intimate, personal, and weighted actions humans produce, serving, among other roles, to return the society to homeostasis in the wake of the loss of a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rosemary Joyce.

Knowledge of Formative Period Mesoamerican archaeological sites often comes from narrow windows into buried sites. One feature has been a partial exception to this rule: burials. Groups of Formative Period burials, often accompanied by objects, have been recovered in many parts of Mesoamerica. Using models of mortuary treatment that saw burials as reflecting individual identity, burials provided one of the first ways researchers could examine the emergence of stratification within these...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew Scherer.

This is an abstract from the "Decipherment, Digs, and Discourse: Honoring Stephen Houston's Contributions to Maya Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Houston’s "The Life Within" is among the most perceptive and nuanced statements on Classic Maya materials and the animate quality of things. Here, I draw inspiration from this future-classic work to more deeply probe Maya understandings of bone – a material most generally treated by...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Danny Zborover.

This is an abstract from the "A Construir Puentes / Building Bridges: Diálogos en Oaxaca Archaeology a través de las Fronteras" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. “Prehistory is passé” write Schmidt and Mrozowski in their 2013 essay "The Death of Prehistory," and this should definitely be the case for Oaxacan archaeology. But although most scholars would agree that Oaxaca may have seen the first literary civilization in the Americas, not all would...

DOCUMENT Citation Only George Kollias.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The notion of debt pervades anthropological discussion of political economy and exchange. Often used as a descriptor of unequal relationships it also embodies notions of reciprocity, expectation, and mutuality. Debt carries with it a charged negativity in many contexts, conveying experiences of precarity and violence, pressure and visibility. However, debt can...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Baquedano.

This is an abstract from the "New Perspectives on Ritual Violence and Related Human Body Treatments in Ancient Mesoamerica" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Prisoners of war were ritually killed by heart extraction and were often decapitated. Archaeologists at Templo Mayor found skulls with the first cervical vertebrae attached, indicating death by decapitation. Lethal weapons such as flint sacrificial knives were also found near decapitated...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lane Fargher. Robert Cook.

This is an abstract from the "Ancient Mesoamerican and Andean Cities: Old Debates, New Perspectives" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The colonialist academic project has long obliterated complexity in the precontact Americas. From the nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, the complexity of Mesoamerican societies was erased; for example, the massive cities encountered by Cortés were deconstructed as simple villages/towns inhabited by tribes. Not...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Bianca Chizzolini.

This resource is an application for the Dissertation Fieldwork Grant from the Wenner-Gren Foundation. This ethnographic project investigates the role that artisanal objects and ornamentation play in the constitution of gendered daily practices and ways of life in Oaxaca de Juárez (Mexico). Hand-made textile production is at the center of the social life of several rural Mexican communities. In this plural cultural context, servilletas are ordinary and richly adorned pieces produced by women...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Josue T. Guzman.

The Fort of San Diego, at Acapulco, was built and garrisoned since the early 17th-century, in order to repel pirates or naval forces of enemy countries. After the 1776 earthquake, the fortress was entirely redesigned, rebuilt and fitted, according to criteria then in use. This new structure was besieged by an insurgent army, leaded by Morelos during the Mexican Independence War in 1813. The fort was continuously occupied by military personnel until 20th-century, when it became the local...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eunice Villasenor Iribe.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Terraced landscapes are the geomorphic remains of dynamic cultural processes. Terraces were constructed in a range of environmental conditions to serve a variety of ecological and social functions. In Mesoamerica, terrace use spans thousands of years and is often associated with agricultural production. This study investigates the utilization of terraced...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrea Torvinen.

Situated in the Malpaso Valley of Zacatecas, Mexico, the site of La Quemada was one of a series of polities that developed along the northern frontier of Mesoamerica during the Epiclassic period (A.D. 500-900). Widely distributed ceramic wares suggest interaction among northern frontier polities, but it remains unknown whether they are the product of widely recognized social categories (i.e., shared style) or direct, face-to-face interaction among individuals (i.e., shared composition)....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eva Lemonnier. Charlotte Arnauld.

Based on the study of two Classic Maya Lowland sites, La Joyanca and Naachtun (Guatemala), this paper explores the topic of rurality through the parameters of potential land use, visible architectural variation, and plausible population mobility. La Joyanca was a medium-sized settlement surrounded by villages and hamlets all of which were recorded by means of conventional surface mapping, whereas Naachtun was a regional capital located amidst extended communities linked by causeways that have...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Miller.

This is an abstract from the "Site Stewardship Matters: Comparing and Contrasting Site Stewardship Programs to Advance Our Practice" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The main work areas of cultural site stewardship are easy to identify: access to authentic sites for assessment, repeat visits to heritage sites, a database to track changes in those sites over time, and volunteer training partnered with professional archaeologists. However, the “why”...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brian Lane.

Territory boundaries can often be difficult to identify archaeologically despite their importance in understanding the larger population process of competition between groups in the past. This analysis tests our ability to define archaeological territories on islands based on geospatial relationships between resources and fortifications. Territories are the result of historical processes of competition between groups. Testing of this method is conducted for the island of Rapa, Austral Islands,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Edwin Harris.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The ancient Purépecha site of Angamuco located in the Lake Patzcuaro Basin of Michoacán, Mexico provides an unrivaled opportunity to study the urban tradition of the Purépecha prior to the formation of the empire in the late postclassic (1350 – 1520 CE). Previously, the understanding of Purépecha urbanism relied upon analysis of the imperial capital...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Roos. Julie Field. John Dudgeon.

This is an abstract from the "Entangled Legacies: Human, Forest, and Tree Dynamics" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Remote islands in the Pacific Ocean experienced dramatic environmental transformations after initial human settlement in the last 3,000 years. Human causality of this environmental degradation has been largely unquestioned, but examination of regional records suggests a role for climate influences. Here we use charcoal and stable...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Karime Castillo. Patricia Fournier. Roberto Junco.

In the viceregal society of New Spain, Chinese porcelain objects were expensive objects consumed primarily by people of high status. The white porcelain objects produced in Dehua, located in the Fujian province of China, were incorporated into the household items of palaces and mansions, as indicated by archaeological evidence from Mexico City, Acapulco, Sinaloa, and some rural sites in the Otumba Valley. The production of this fine porcelain, also known as Blanc de Chine, involved complex...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Xin Lin. Guopeng Chen.

This is an abstract from the "Misinformation and Misrepresentation Part 1: Reconsidering “Human Sacrifice,” Religion, Slavery, Modernity, and Other European-Derived Concepts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The procurement and consumption of jade are conventionally thought to have been under the control of Maya elites. Through cross-cultural comparison with ancient China as a representative jade-using culture, we argue that the multidimensional...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jessica Ratcliffe.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The ancient Maya of the Belize River Valley maintained a strong, spiritual connection with nature, one that can be explored through the layers of religious symbolism imbued into their built environments. In Xunantunich during the Late Classic period, the Maya created a sacred space by incorporating symbols—such as stelae, altars, and cache deposits—into...