United Mexican States (Country) (Geographic Keyword)
1,876-1,900 (4,948 Records)
This file contains all of the ceramic frequency counts for the excavations that took place on Terrace S19 and S20 of Cerro Danush, Dainzú-Macuilxóchitl in the 2008-2009 field season. Please see project report for 2010 for further information on artifact categories and assignments.
Fringe Identities - Costume in the Mixtec Codices (2017)
The Mixtec codices depict costumes from Postclassic Oaxaca, including clothing, face paint, hairstyles, footwear, and jewelry. Contextualized in religious, military, and other social rituals, costume played an important role in framing the action as well as representing individuals in a variety of social identities. This paper focuses on styles and patterns of clothing as they were used to characterize gender, status, ethnicity, occupation, and religious and political roles. Specifically, we...
From a Cave near Tehuacán? Reconstructing Object Histories of Looted Postclassic Mesoamerican Turquoise Mosaics (2018)
The mid-20th-century market for pre-Columbian antiquities is notoriously opaque. Riddled as this moment in the market is with stories of looting, forgery and deceit, the period between roughly 1950 and 1990 is also the era in which significant parts of today’s best-known museum collections of pre-Columbian art were formed. Because of the practices of art dealers many pieces that once formed part of the same original deposit are now scattered over the globe. Any possible information on the ...
From Archaeology to Ideology in Northwest Mexico: Cerro de Moctezuma in the Casas Grandes Ritual Landscape (2011)
The research presented here explores why a few people left their valley-dwelling neighbors to build and live at El Pueblito on Cerro de Moctezuma, the only hilltop settlement constructed during the Casas Grandes Media period (A.D. 1200-1450) in what is today northwest Chihuahua, Mexico. These people also constructed the only currently recognized trails to a settlement, a massive rock agricultural system and subterranean oven, and an unparalleled crowning hill summit precinct. Comparative...
From Buried Preclassic Villages to the Lexicon for Maya Architecture: The Impact of Architectural Studies in Belize on Maya Scholarship (2024)
This is an abstract from the "“The Center and the Edge”: How the Archaeology of Belize Is Foundational for Understanding the Ancient Maya, Part II" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 1984, Stanley Loten and David Pendergast published “A Lexicon for Maya Architecture” based to a large degree on their observations during excavations at Lamanai and Altun Ha, both major Maya centers in Belize. At 16 brief pages of text and nine of figures, this...
From Carnage to Credentials: An Amerindian Archaeologist’s Journey from Child Laborer to Professor Emeritus (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Hood Archaeologies: Impacts of the School-to-Prison Pipeline on Archaeological Practice and Pedagogy" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. After nine months my mother “broke her water” on 18 June of 1956. Because my father was away, my mother walked the two hours from Stockton through agricultural fields to the hospital in Frenchcamp where I was born. Despite my father’s herculean efforts, we were caught in a seemingly...
From Chichen Itza to Tulum: The Late Postclassic Maya Feathered Serpent of the Northern Maya Lowlands (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. Most representations of the feathered serpent at Chichen Itza depict a plumed rattlesnake, a being of wind and carrier of rain, with Central Mexican origins dating back to Early Classic Teotihuacan. In Classic Maya art, feathered serpents are not rattlesnakes and lack plumage aside from a...
From Clovis to Dalton: Key Differences in Hafted Biface Resharpening (2018)
In order to further understand Paleoindian lithic technological organization, we examined blade and haft elements of Clovis, Gainey, and Dalton hafted bifaces. Samples inspected were from across the Midwest, the Southeast, and the Northeast. Due to the rarity of these hafted bifaces, images of individual bifaces were used to take traditional linear measurements on the hafted bifaces in this study. Results indicate key differences in retouch and resharpening patterns throughout the Paleoindian...
From Collective Government to Communal Inebriation in Ancient Teotihuacan, Central Mexico (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A simulation model of Teotihuacan’s hypothetical collective government has shown that a highly distributed network of leaders could have been effective at ensuring social coordination in the city by means of consensus formation. The model makes a strong prediction: it indicates that this collective mode of government would have been most effective in...
From compass to LiDAR: 40 years of mapping the Tarascan cities of the Malpaís of Zacapu, Northwestern Mexico. (2017)
Since their discovery in the late XIXth century, the large prehispanic urban settlements located close to the modern town of Zacapu (State of Michoacán, Mexico) have confronted the archaeologists to a great challenge: mapping, and understanding 200 hectares of dense and well preserved urban features founded on the Malpaís of Zacapu (a complex formed by ancient lava flows). Interpreted as premises of the Tarascan State (occupation 1250-1450 AD), these cities constitute an unprecedented regional...
From Cooperation to Competition: An Architectural Energetics Analysis of Labor Organization for the Construction of Circle 2 at Los Guachimontones, Jalisco, Mexico (2018)
The Teuchitlán culture is one of many cultures in West Mexico during the Late Formative to Classic periods (300 B.C. – 450/500 AD) that share in the tradition of burying some of their dead in shaft and chamber tombs. The Teuchitlán culture is noteworthy among their contemporaries for the large number of circular ceremonial buildings concentrated around the Tequila volcano and surrounding valleys. Los Guachimontones, located on the southern side of the volcano, is the largest site in the region...
From Dune Stratigraphy to a Model-Based Cultural Sequence for the Marquesas Islands of East Polynesia (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Constructing Chronologies I: Stratification and Correlation" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Marquesas Islands comprise part of East Polynesia, a culture area that also includes Hawai'i, New Zealand, and Tahiti. Calcareous sand dunes are rare in the Marquesas but play an outsized role in Polynesian archaeology. Dune sites yield remarkably rich evidence of human settlement and the preservation of organic remains is...
“From Enslavement to Empowerment” and What Comes After: Plantation Futures on a Palimpsestic Landscape (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Deepening Archaeology's Engagement with Black Studies" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The idea of the landscape as a palimpsest, where traces of a former version can be read under the present one, came out of Paleolithic archaeology, where thousands of years of human activity must be read through low-density artifact scatters. In 2013’s “Plantation Futures,” Black geographer Katherine McKittrick describes the...
From Flame to Flowers: Moths and Butterflies in the Codex Borgia Group (2017)
Butterfly imagery in the Borgia Group shows how these volatiles were classified in Postclassic Central Mexico. They are grouped with birds among the 13 "lords of the day" in the Codex Borgia, and they sometimes seem to be interchangeable with moths, especially in imagery of the Fire God. Another god, Ehecatl-Quetzalcoatl, is associated with images of "army worms" devouring maize, symbolizing the caterpillar stage of a moth that distributes its eggs in the wind. Butterfly symbols are naturally...
From Flowers to Sin: Exploration of Sexuality and Gender in Ancient Mesoamerica (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In modernity, sexuality manifests in a dynamic spectrum of expressions which centers on individual sexual awareness, contesting antiquated sentiments of traditional sexual hegemony. In this presentation, we will journey into ancient Mesoamerica in the attempt to conceptualize Maya and Aztec notions of sex and gender by examining various lines of...
From Household to Polity: (Dis)integration along the Ucí-Cansahcab Causeway in the Northern Maya Lowlands (2017)
Over the past decade, the Ucí-Cansahcab Regional Integration Project (UCRIP) has utilized multiples scales of analysis, from broad household excavations to large swathes of LiDAR collection, to examine the social processes of community (dis)integration of a polity in the northern Maya Lowlands. This polity, headed by Ucí, was integrated by an 18-km-long inter-site causeway system by the Terminal Preclassic and connected the emerging regional capital with three secondary sites. Extensive test...
From Jalisco, Mexico, to Quimistán, Honduras: Analyzing Mesoamerican Metals from the Field Museum (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Twenty Years of Archaeological Science at the Field Museum’s Elemental Analysis Facility" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Copper artifacts were prominent in Mesoamerica during the last precolonial millennium, more widely distributed than silver and gold. Mesoamerican copper was formed into axes, axe-monies, rings, pendants, bells, and needles, among other artifacts. The most used alloy in this region was...
From Margin to Center: Bias and Discrimination in Archaeology (2019)
This is an abstract from the "What Have You Done For Us Lately?: Discrimination, Harassment, and Chilly Climate in Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. That archaeology is welcoming to only a narrow subset of society -- that is, cisgender, heterosexual, able-bodied, white men -- and far less so to most of us is an open secret. #MeToo stories; the blinding whiteness of the academy, the field, and the museum; and the prohibitive costs of many...
From Marginalized to Impactful: Belizean Archaeology and the Classic Period Maya (2024)
This is an abstract from the "“The Center and the Edge”: How the Archaeology of Belize Is Foundational for Understanding the Ancient Maya" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The impact of Belizean centers and settlement on ancient Maya civilization of the Classic period (CE 250–900) has been recognized in the last 50 years of research. Before 1975 Belize was seen as being on the fringes of the Maya world and portrayed as a backwater. Most...
From Narrative Picture Writing Bands to Pseudo Cartographies. How Native Scribes Invented Powerful New Media after the Conquest (2019)
This is an abstract from the "After Cortés: Archaeological Legacies of the European Invasion in Mesoamerica" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Scholars have always believed that maps and cartographiies did exist in preconquest Mesoamerica. The large amount of early colonial Native maps seems to be evidence for such geographic media. But as yet, no pre-Hispanic lienzos and maps have become known. However, the earliest lienzos do show pre-Hispanic...
From Neutral to Mutual: A Long-Term Perspective on Human-Rabbit Relationships in Highland Mexico (2018)
Studies of human-animal relationships provide insights into multiple issues relevant to archaeological research, including changes in human-environmental interactions, subsistence strategies, and socio-cultural dynamics. This presentation investigates the relationship between humans and rabbits (cottontails and jackrabbits), which were among the most commonly consumed animals in pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica. Focusing primarily on the settlement of Teotihuacan in the Basin of Mexico during the...
From Polity to Regimes: Toward Recognizing Diversity in Ancient Maya Political Communities (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Regimes of the Ancient Maya" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this paper, we introduce the notion of “regime” to model and interpret ancient Maya political organization. We have long relied on “the polity” as a primary model to explain ancient Maya politics. However, this largely generalist core concept tends to homogenize—both temporally and geographically—the complex ancient political landscape as one populated by...
From Quelites to Crop Indices: Thinking Through Maya Chenopods (2017)
While chenopod cultivation has been documented extensively in North and South America, evidence for similar practices in the Maya area is lacking. Macrobotanical evidence of Chenopodium recovered from pre-Hispanic Maya archaeological sites is limited to a few seeds. In contrast, the palynological record suggests widespread tolerance across the entirety of the Maya area, if not intensive management or even cultivation of Cheno-am genera in some contexts. It is likely that chenopods are an...
From Quelites to Crop Indices: Thinking Through Maya Chenopods (2017)
While chenopod cultivation has been documented extensively in North and South America, evidence for similar practices in the Maya area is lacking. Macrobotanical evidence of Chenopodium recovered from pre-Hispanic Maya archaeological sites is limited to a few seeds. In contrast, the palynological record minimally suggests widespread tolerance across the entirety of the Maya area, if not intensive management or in some contexts even cultivation of Cheno-am genera. It is likely that chenopods...
From Ritual to Domestic in a Shifting Political Landscape: Excavations in the Coronitas Group at La Corona, Guatemala (2018)
Archaeological and epigraphic evidence from the Coronitas Group at La Corona, Guatemala provides an opportunity to examine responses to changing sociopolitical conditions among the Classic Maya (AD 250-900). Architectural and material evidence suggests that the Coronitas Group was a locus of ritual and ceremonial activities by the royal court throughout the Classic period. Burials of important individuals and other ceremonial activities imply that it was a place of significant ancestral ties. At...