Mesoamerica (Geographic Keyword)
1,926-1,950 (2,459 Records)
El estudio de los entierros colectivos es una de las vertientes que presentan las prácticas funerarias, y mediante el registro minucioso en campo y el análisis de los materiales arqueológicos en el laboratorio, es posible estudiar de manera integral y multidisciplinaria, un trabajo en conjunto entre la antropología física y la arqueología de dichas expresiones culturales. La investigación que será presentada se enfoca en la distribución y depósito de una serie de esqueletos humanos excavados en...
Representations of fauna in mural paintings of Tenochtitlan (2017)
The accelerated process of deterioration of the murals from the religious buildings of Tenochtitlan has threatened their long-term conservation. This has impulsed different activities including the creation of the project for the graphic documentation of the polychromy in the Mexica capital. It was specifically developed to recover and store, as an accurate witness, all the motives of the paintings, as well as its architectural context. Over the course of twenty years, the development of this...
Representations of the Devil and the Demonic in Sixteenth-Century Mexico (2016)
As the influence of the Spanish Inquisition increased in the decades following the Spanish conquest of Mexico, it became increasingly common for indigenous artist-scribes, or tlacuiloque, to substitute pictographic images of pre-Hispanic deities with iconography related to the Christian devil. Drawing on examples from Mesoamerican painted manuscripts and murals produced in the sixteenth-century, this paper explores the nature of those representations. Distinctions occur between representations...
Representing the Underworld: Manipulation and Reuse of Animal Bones from Offering 126 (2017)
Offering 126 was discovered during the Seventh Field Season of the Templo Mayor Project. This ritual deposit was buried in the West Plaza of the Sacred Precinct, during the reign of Ahuítzotl (AD 1486-1502). Mexica priests deposited inside a box made of stone slabs, more than 9,000 animal bones from 94 individuals, corresponding to wolves, pumas, jaguars, bobcats and birds of prey, among others. These animals were covered with a layer of marine organisms such as corals, shells, snails, starfish...
Repurposing Scale in Three Mesoamerican Centers: Landscape Archaeology and High-Resolution 3D Modeling at Teotihuacan, Altar de Sacrificios, and Los Mogotes (2018)
With the rise of structure from motion (SfM), affordable unmanned aerial vehicles, and other advances in remote sensing, landscape archaeology is at a watershed moment. These new tools allow for the mapping and digital reconstruction of large swaths of land rapidly enough to be reviewed in the field at a spatial, spectral, and temporal resolution that rivals any previous technology. Away from the field, these reconstructions are invaluable datasets that can be used to analyze the landscape at...
Residential Architecture at Caracol, Belize: Conjoined Buildings and Distributed Space (2015)
During the Classic Period (A.D. 550-900), the ancient Maya inhabitants of Caracol resided in formally constructed residential groups comprised of a series of buildings. These residential groups are believed to have been occupied by extended families. Some of the structures constituted formal residences, but other structures served a variety of functions, ranging from cooking to storage. Additionally, over two-thirds of Caracol’s residential groups had at least one eastern building that was...
Residential Trajectories of Commoner, Elite, and Noble Spaces at Actuncan, Belize (2018)
This paper summarizes the archaeological investigations of ten residential units at Actuncan that likely represented three distinct social strata: commoner, elite, and noble. We explore the trajectories of these residences from the Preclassic to the Terminal Classic period. Data suggest that although political authority in the Mopan River valley shifted throughout Actuncan’s long occupation, many commoner residences maintained local identities and residential continuity through time. However,...
Residential Variability and Change Through Time at San Martín Tilcajete (2017)
Social evolutionary transformation involves and affects all levels of human society, including households. The formation of a state-level society at the Tilcajete sites has been documented through extensive horizontal excavations focused on the civic-ceremonial buildings at a two Formative Period sites in the southern branch of the Oaxaca Valley. This paper presents findings from 2 seasons of work in 2014 and 2016 focused on the residential sectors at El Mogote, occupied during the Early Monte...
Residue analysis of ceramic vessels from the Copan sub-stelae cache offerings (2015)
Developing new ways to study collections of archaeological materials housed in storage facilities and museums is a key challenge for the future of archaeological research. Following the contextual re-identification of ceramic objects housed in Copan’s Centro Regional de Investigaciones Arqueológicas in 2013-2014, our team performed residue analysis on several objects that were excavated from sub-stela and altar caches at Copan during the 1930s. With their contexts re-established, these vessels...
Residue Analysis of Plastered Floors and Function of the Rooms at Teopancazco, Teotihuacan (2017)
Teopancazco is a neighborhood center at Teotihuacan. It was excavated in the framework of the project Teopancazco "Teotihuacan. Elite y Gobierno" directed by Linda R. Manzanilla between 1997 and 2005). Samples from the plastered floors of the compound have been analysed at the Laboratorio de Prospección Arqueológica of the UNAM (Mexico) in order to understand the chemical enrichments of floors and the spatial distribution of activities. We show here the results of the analyses of the Xolalpan...
Resignification as a Way in and a Way Out: Power and the Colonial Religious Experience in Tula, Hidalgo (2017)
Archaeological assemblages from two early colonial religious sites at Tula, Hidalgo, are nearly indistinguishable from pre-Columbian assemblages at the same sites. These findings indicate that colonial changes in material culture were much more gradual than we expected, and driven to a surprising degree by Indigenous traditions and aesthetic prerogatives. These data led us to reconsider various models of social change that would adequately account for the observations of material culture at...
Resilience and Regime Shift at the Ancient Maya City of Tikal (2017)
Over the time span of nearly a millennium, the ancient Maya polity of Tikal went through periods of growth, reorganization and adaptive cycles of various connected scales. Recent data show that following the reorganization of the Late Preclassic period, Tikal experienced an extended period of technological innovation and population growth that stretched the carrying capacity of the available landscape. A hydraulic system was constructed that provided water for the community during the dry...
The Resilience of the Maya in Northern Yucatan during the Terminal Classic (2016)
Resilience theory has typically been applied to living people by sociologists or psychologists or to components of the natural world by ecologists. Whatever its application, its scale is that of a community or system, with the focus is often on why particular components are able to persist when the system is inevitably disturbed, transformed, or reorganized, while others fare less well. Such systems move between stability and transformation in an adaptive cycle, with both environmental changes...
Resisting Capitalocentrism: Heterogenous Assemblages of Market and Antimarket Practices in Colonial Guatemala (2017)
The consequences of Spanish colonial/capitalist intrusions into highland Guatemala is an emerging focus of archaeological investigation. While providing insight into the entanglements between colonialism and capitalism and their effects on Maya communities, it is critical to not fixate on finding capitalism and its effects to the exclusion of other patterns of practice and life central to the experience of people in the past. Overemphasizing capitalism in our analyses reifies the suffocating...
Resource Procurement at the Local Level in Classic Maya Chinikihá (AD 600-900) (2015)
Resource procurement is a topic traditionally approached from a geographic macro scale. In the Maya area, this refers to the scale of settlement patterns or the landscape, involving the territory inhabited by a large number of people living in different settlements. What this scale often misses is the role that commoner households play in these processes. This presentation will discuss how geographic setting and access to resources not only shaped the daily lives of Maya commoners but the role...
Restos botánicos del sitio Precerámico de San Gregorio Atlapulco. (2015)
El sitio de San Gregorio Atlapulco (conocido como El Japón) se localiza al sureste de la Cuenca de México en la delegación Xochimilco. Su estudio se inició en la década de los 90´s reportándose montículos ocupacionales y chinampas asociadas al Postclásico Tardío (1450-1521). En años recientes se retoma la investigación en el lugar en el marco del proyecto Poblamiento, Agricultura inicial y Sociedades Aldeanas en la Cuenca de México (PAPIIT IG400513-3). Uno de sus objetivos es aportar nuevos...
Resultados recientes sobre la prospección del Cerro Magoni (2017)
Cerro Magoni es un sitio relativamente desconocido que está ocupando un lugar cada vez más importante en la explicación del origen del Estado tolteca. Crespo y Mastache realizaron los primeros trabajos de prospección a finales del siglo pasado y concluyeron que se trataba de un sitio menor, con una ocupación efímera durante el Epiclásico y una mayor durante los años del esplendor de Tula. Investigaciones más recientes han mostrado que el sitio tiene una extensión mayor a la originalmente...
Results of Recent Investigations at El Tintal, Petén, Guatemala (2017)
El Tintal, located in northern Petén, is part of a group of ancient Maya cities that emerged during the Preclassic period in the central karstic uplands. The El Tintal Archaeological Project is interested in understanding the historical development of the population that inhabited the settlement from the beginning to its abandonment. This paper will focus on the results of our recent investigations at El Tintal that yield information on the origins of the city and its regional interactions,...
Revealing La Milpa: Integrating Residential Data from the Core and Periphery (2017)
The Programme for Belize Archaeological Project represents a regional research program aimed at elucidating the nature of Maya political, social, and economic integration within the northeastern Peten. Toward this end, extensive research is being undertaken at the primary center of La Milpa. Research conducted by the authors has been motivated by numerous objectives. Of specific interest is understanding the role of La Milpa within the changing political landscape of the region. In addition,...
Reverential Termination of the Sun Pyramid Cave, Teotihuacan (2016)
Reverential termination is hypothesized for the human-made cave beneath the Sun Pyramid. While the idea of a mid-third century A.D. termination is not new and is based on radiocarbon dating and construction of blockages in the rear section of the cave and use of concrete, qualifying the termination as reverential is a refinement. The most direct information comes from examination of blockage construction, which is supported by two other lines of evidence. One also lays within the cave and...
Reverential Termination of Sun Pyramid Cave, Teotihuacan - Round 2 (2017)
The predominant view is that the paucity of material remains from the cave under the Sun Pyramid is attributable to looting, often described as exhaustive. This paper disputes that speculation, based on lack of evidence and, more convincingly, on a paucity of material remains from contexts that could not possibly have been looted any time after Teotihuacanos applied concrete to the cave in the mid-third century CE. I present evidence for timing, termination ritual, sealing of termination...
A Review of Human and Natural Changes in Maya Lowlands Wetlands Over the Holocene
In the Maya Lowlands of Mexico, Belize, and Guatemala two main types of wetlands have played important roles in human history: bajos or intermittently wet environments of the upland, interior Yucatán and perennial wetlands of the coastal plains. Many of the most important Maya sites encircle the bajos, though our growing evidence for human-wetland interactions is still sparse. The deposits of these wetlands record two main eras of slope instability and wetland aggradation: the...
A revised Kaminaljuyu chronology and its implications for social processes (2015)
An evaluation of new and existing data indicates that the Middle and Late Preclassic portions of the Kaminaljuyu chronology need to be shifted 300 or 400 years later. This paper primarily examines relevant radiocarbon dates and then discusses the implications of this revision for our understanding of how centralized polities with rulership developed in the southern Maya area and in the Maya lowlands. SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and...
Revisioning the Relationship between Man and Jaguar: A Reassesment of the Olmec Paintings of Oxtotitlán, Guerrero, Mexico (2015)
The rock art of the Oxtotitlán and Juxtlahuaca caves are among the earliest known examples of Mesoamerican figurative wall painting. As part of the recent research initiative examining the Oxtotitlán cave paintings, re-illustration presents new images of the ancient artworks. Detailed field drawings are combined with multispectral imaging data and analysis of painting technology to precisely record the art, even when lines are no longer visible to the naked eye. Increased clarity of the...
Revisiting the Archaeology of Palenque: 25 Years after "The Children of the First Mother" (2015)
As the site of many of the epigraphic breakthroughs that fully brought the Classic Maya into realm of history, Palenque, Chiapas, Mexico holds an important place in Maya studies. In the Forest of Kings, Linda Schele and David Freidel brought together one of the first truly comprehensive descriptions of the history of a Classic period royal family. Perhaps more significantly, they put forth a narrative of dynastic legitimization through writing and monumental construction that has endured and...