Mesoamerica (Geographic Keyword)
1,051-1,075 (2,459 Records)
Offering 141 is one of the numerous deposits found at the Great Temple of Tenochtitlan that contain the remains of decapitated individuals associated with the Mexica practice of human sacrifice. After the immolation of men, women, and children, their heads underwent various cultural treatments in order to be utilized by the city’s priests in specific rituals. Although some of these severed heads were buried shortly after death to consecrate the building, others were transformed into effigies of...
Images represented in the dressed flint knife offerings from the plaza west of Tenochtitlan's Great Temple (2015)
During the seventh field season of the Templo Mayor Project directed by archaeologist Leonardo López Luján, twenty-two ritual deposits were found in the west plaza at the foot of the Great Temple of Tenochtitlan. Eight of the deposits (Offerings 123, 125, 126, 136, 137, 138, 141, and 163, dating to Ahuitzotl’s reign, Stage VI, 1486–1502 CE) contained more than one hundred flint knives that were dressed with garments bearing the attributes of gods and deified warriors. Some of the knives were...
Imitation is the Sincerest Form of Flattery: Gulf Coast Olmec Sex, Gender, and Dress as Reflected in the San Bartolo Murals (2015)
The murals within the Pinturas structure at the site of San Bartolo, Guatemala have provided invaluable information for understanding the Late Formative period Maya, as well as for understanding their emulation, adoption, and adaptation of Epi-Olmec culture, religion, and iconography. As noted by a number of scholars, the figures depicted in the murals have the distinctive, graceful, and relatively naturalistic body forms of early Maya images, but the facial types, clothing, and adornments...
Immersive Augmented and Virtual Reality for Archeological Sites Exploration and Analysis (2018)
Immersive technologies such as virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR), in combination with low cost yet high quality photogrammetry techniques, are beginning to change the way that archaeologists understand space and place. The availability of affordable immersive technologies is dissolving natural boundaries of space and time, and offering new ways of communications. The maturity of existing software environments such as Unity additionally allows for integrating spatial analysis tools...
The Impact of Belizean Archaeological Participation on Aspects of Cultural Identity and Cultural Heritage (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Belize is a country rich in archaeological resources including Paleoindian, Archaic, the Ancient Maya, and colonial. Belize has been and continues to be the focus of archaeological research, largely conducted by foreign researchers that help facilitate archaeological field schools training primarily American, Canadian, and English students. While many...
The Impact of Lawrence Straus on Mesoamerican Cave Studies (2016)
Lawrence Straus’ life work has focused primarily upon European cave archaeology, with most of his time spent in Spain. However his research within cave archaeology has in many ways aided the field of cave archaeology in Central America. Straus has both passively and actively helped in the advancement of Maya cave studies from his many roles in academia. As editor in chief for the Journal of Anthropological Research he aided in the publication of numerous seminal works that contributed to the...
Imperfect beeswax production in the land of honey—Yucatán, Mexico (2017)
Spanish encomenderos and friars demanded beeswax from their subjects in Yucatán, Mexico, during the early Colonial period. This wax was harvested from beehives infrequently used for wax production in pre-Hispanic times—instead the focus throughout the long history of beekeeping in the region was on honey. In fact, indigenous honeybees, from the genus Melipona, make an impure wax in low quantities, which would have made candle production difficult. These candles were important for Catholic...
Implications for Spinning Thread in a Marketplace at the Classic Maya site of Xunantunich, Belize (2017)
The identification of marketplaces among the Classic Maya has contributed to more complex understandings of their economies, but scholars are still working to determine the fundamentals and variations of Maya marketplace exchange across time and space. Recent investigations at the Classic Maya site of Xunantunich, Belize recovered a small assemblage of spindle whorls from the site’s Lost Plaza, a posited marketplace. This the only example among the Classic Maya to directly connect the activity...
The importance of updating information. The "Proyecto de Actualización y Digitalización de las Cédulas del Registro Público" (2017)
In 2010 the "Sistema Único de Registro de Monumentos y Zonas Arqueológicos e Históricos" was developed to face the need of having a modern and strong technological support capable to cover the legal, academic and institutional aspects that the Public Registry required as a fundamental area of the Institution. It has the duty to guarantee information for query and monitoring activities about federal and particular monuments involved in the system. Due to the vast universe of information which...
Imágenes en la Vestimenta de las Figurillas Sonrientes de la Costa del Golfo (2015)
La investigación que realizo actualmente conduce al análisis formal e interpretativo de los glifos cefaloformes de reptiles híbridos representados principalmente en la vestimenta de las Figurillas Sonrientes en custodia del Museo de Antropología de Xalapa, Veracruz. En este sentido, propongo exponer una ficha señalética por cada referente reptil, que incluya los rasgos determinantes, realistas e híbridos, su campo de acción definido por los pictogramas que lo acompañan en la vestimenta, y...
In and Out: Initial Investigations from the Palenque Pool Project (2015)
Emblematic of Palenque’s ancient name, Lakamha’ or Big Water, the city is scattered with natural cascades and uniquely constructed aqueducts, bridges, and pools. In May 2014, the Palenque Pool Project began excavating and consolidating the largest of the three pools in the Picota Group, 1 km west of the site center. Prehispanic construction of the feature required the Maya to excavate through bedrock and below the water table. The main pool is equipped with entrance and exit drains as well as a...
In the Beginning was the Codex (2016)
During excavations at Cerén in the summer of 1989, a flattened expanse of paint – roughly the size of a book, with several colors visible and possibly multiple layers – was found on the floor of a niche located at the base of a bench within one of the domestic buildings (Structure 2). The archaeologists' response was both elation at the prospect that these constituted the remains of a codex (painted bark paper or animal skin "book," depicted on elite Maya ceramics, with only a very few examples...
In the land of the blind, the one eyed man is king: Los Guachimontones, Jalisco (2017)
The site of Los Guachimontones was occupied from the late Middle Formative to the end of the Postclassic period. It had a bimodal history of occupation, with the first peak corresponding to the Late Formative period (100 B.C. – A.D. 200) and the second to the Late Postclassic (A.D. 1400-1600). It had an estimated population of 4000-6000 people in the Late Formative, when most of the public architecture was constructed. This makes it a very modest settlement in comparison to other Mesoamerican...
In the Many Realms of John Pohl: An Introduction to a Double Symposium (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Bringing the Past to Life, Part 1: Papers in Honor of John M. D. Pohl" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This double symposium brings together a select group of archaeologists, ethnohistorians, museum professionals, and social justice advocates who have either collaborated with John M. D. Pohl directly or took inspiration from his remarkable half-century career. A trailblazer in the study of Mixtec, Nahua, and Zapotec...
In the Realm of Lady Six Sky: The Place of Ikil in the Late-Terminal Classic Itza Landscape (2017)
Due to the proximity, contemporaneity, and some architectural and ceramic similarities with Chichén Itzá and Yaxuna, Ikil provides an important opportunity to understand the political and socioeconomic integration present in the Late-Terminal Classic in the region southwest of Chichén Itzá, as the seat of regional power was transferred from Yaxuná to Chichen Itzá. The Proyecto de Interacción Pólitica del Centro de Yucatán (PIPCY) has been investigating the site of Ikil since 2008. Ikil was...
In this Chapel of Ritual: The Life and Death of Temple XIX at Palenque, Chiapas. (2015)
The excavation of Temple XIX at Palenque, Mexico from 1998-2002 garnered considerable attention primarily for the recovery of monuments with preserved inscriptions and iconography carved in stone and modeled in stucco. The fragmented state of several monuments, evidently victims of systematic mayhem in antiquity, preoccupied the excavators constantly as monument fragments were recovered from inside and outside the approximately 9 by 34 meter building. These monuments have now been consolidated...
Incidents of Travel in Yucatan, Volume I (1963)
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 National Archaeological Database Reports Module (NADB-R) and updated. Most NADB-R 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 at comments@tdar.org.
Incidents of Travel in Yucatan, Volume II (1963)
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 National Archaeological Database Reports Module (NADB-R) and updated. Most NADB-R 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 at comments@tdar.org.
Incoherent internationalism: Mayoid elements in the art of South-Central Veracruz (2015)
During the Epiclassic period, several discrete iconographic motifs and technical qualities were adopted by peoples of South-Central Veracruz that have close affinities to art of the greater Maya area. For example, some Rio Blanco modelled-carved bowls mimic the iconography of Tiquisate wares of Escuintla, Guatemala. Nopiloa figurines bare well-known ties to figurines from Campeche, Mexico. Apparently indicating an alternate direction of artistic influence, decorative motifs common on...
Indian Languages of Mexico and Central America: And Their Geographical Distribution (1911)
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 National Archaeological Database Reports Module (NADB-R) and updated. Most NADB-R 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 at comments@tdar.org.
Indicadores arqueológicos de talleres de cerámica en las unidades habitacionales de Cacaxtla-Xochitecatl (2016)
En las excavaciones realizadas en el 2011-2012 de las unidades habitacionales del periodo Formativo en la terraza VII el Proyecto Arqueológico El hombre y sus recursos en el Valle Puebla-Tlaxcala registraron 42 formaciones circulares, 9 hornos y 3 concentraciones de materiales diversos en un área de 802 m². En esta ponencia se van a exponer el análisis de los materiales encontrados en el área y en el interior de dichas formaciones para explicar sus funciones y su relación con los hornos. Con el...
Indigenous Copper Production in Colonial Mexico (1533-1630) (2017)
During the entire colonial period, the South-Central region of Michoacán, Mexico was the main producer of copper in New Spain and one of the most important loci of production in the whole Spanish empire. Copper was a fundamental material for artillery, coinage and silver extraction, not to mention its importance in the manufacture of all sorts of daily life items. However, Spanish colonizers had an almost complete lack of copper extraction knowledge. On the other hand, the region had a natural...
Indigenous Testimony to the Conquest of Mexico: An Osteological Analysis of Violence in Contact-period San Gregorio Atlapulco, Xochimilco (2015)
While ethnohistoric documents offer insights into the physical and structural violence that accompanied the Spanish conquest of Mexico, these accounts are typically written from the perspective of the conquerors. Few native testimonies exist that provide an indigenous perspective of this period of social, economic, and political upheaval; however, human skeletal remains offer a means of directly evaluating the violence of the Conquest and its impact on the native population. The...
Inequality and Gender in Spaces of Craft Production (2017)
This paper explores questions of inequality and gender in the Classic Maya world by examining the spatial relationships between and within local sites of craft activity. Pulling from recent archaeological work at the Classic period site of Xultun, Guatemala, we present research on two contexts that were connected to the production and use of limestone and lime plaster. In presenting this work, we discuss the broader social implications of these spaces as they relate to class and gender through...
Inferreing Markets from Material Remains: Hirth’s Distributional Approach in the Light of Economic Theory (2017)
Hirth 1998 proposed identifying archeologically the operation of mar- kets in ancient societies by looking at the distribution patterns of selected objects across households of different types. This paper revisits criti- cally this so called `distributional approach' and argues that it essentially amounts to a (failed) attempt at `estimating' a (say, Classic Maya) market demand from archeologically recovered consumption data. Such an un- dertaking, besides facing considerable identification...