Mesoamerica (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Richard George. Claire E. Ebert. Sarah B. McClure. Barbara Voorhies. Douglas J. Kennett.

Long-distance trade of obsidian formed an essential part of inter-regional Archaic and Formative Period Mesoamerican economies (~3,500 BC-AD 250). We analyzed obsidian artifacts (n=522) from Late Archaic through Late Formative Period deposits at the sites of Puerto Marques and La Zanja in the Acapulco Bay region of Guerrero, Mexico using X-ray fluorescence spectrometry to assess the economic importance of different obsidian sources through time. The presence of obsidian artifacts at Puerto...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Luis Barba.

During field seasons 2008 – 2011 a large set of archaeological prospection techniques were applied in large areas surrounding present town of Coixtlahuaca, Oaxaca in a joint project carried on by University of Georgia and the National University of Mexico. This project attempted to put together the large experience of Kowalewski in archaeological survey in Oaxaca’s valleys and the experience of the Archaeological Prospection Laboratory using geophysical techniques in Mexico. These approaches are...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ignacio Bernal.

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.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Toni Gonzalez. Samantha Lorenz.

Chultunes, man-made subterranean chambers excavated into limestone bedrock, are ubiquitous features encountered throughout the Maya cultural region. Although studies in the Northern Lowlands have demonstrated that chultunes in that locale functioned as water cisterns, the ascription of them as purely utilitarian within the Southern Lowlands is under much debate. One issue that hinders dialogue is lack of a commonly accepted understanding of what constitutes a chultun. The first aim of this paper...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jon Spenard.

Archaeological investigations of the Nohoch Tunich Bedrock Outcrop Complex (NTC) located near the pre-Hispanic Maya site of Pacbitun, Belize, revealed a karst landscape that was heavily, yet subtly modified during the Terminal Classic period (A.D. 700-900). Analysis of construction techniques reveal that the modifications were made to conform to a purposefully crude aesthetic aimed at maintaining and enhancing the wilderness essence of the outcrop, while transforming it into a cultural space....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mario Giron-Ábrego.

Natural and man-made caves are clearly attested to in myth, iconography and the glyphic corpus as powerful features for the ancient and contemporary Maya. Caves are paramount for they function as entrances into the sacred earth, the most powerful entity of the sacred Maya universe. A third and less explicit category of these subterranean features, although extensively documented (Brady 2011; Rivera Dorado 1993; Tate 1992) in the Maya area, are architectural caves. This latter category, due to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kimberly Sumano. Joshua Englehardt.

The site of Los Guachimontones, in central Jalisco state, Mexico, has long been the subject of intensive archaeological research, beginning in the 1970s with Weigand’s investigations of the site’s unique circular architectonic configurations. Nonetheless, a detailed understanding of intra–site architectonic variability eludes adequate explanation and obscures our comprehension of the internal sociopolitical dynamics of the site. To address these lacunae, this paper compares two distinct areas of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anthony DeLuca.

During the Late Formative to Classic period (300 BC – 550 AD) in the highland lakes region of Jalisco, Mexico, a number of concentric circular ceremonial monuments known as guachimontones were built by the shaft tomb culture. The largest site in the region is Los Guachimontones near the town of Teuchitlan. The site is thought to have been governed by competing familial groups within a corporate framework rather than a single powerful ruler. The platforms that are a part of a guachimonton are...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rafael Guerra. Claire Ebert. Jaime Awe.

The presence of shared architectural elements and configurations between major ancient Maya centers has often been attributed to socio-political affiliation and/or emulation of influential centers by their neighbors. In this paper, we examine the site plans and settlement systems for the monumental centers of Cahal Pech and Lower Dover in the Belize Valley to identify parallel trends of the growth of monumental architecture through time. Cahal Pech is one of the earliest permanently settled...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Pool. Michael Loughlin. Manuel Melgarejo Pérez. Gabriela Montero Mejía. Kyle Mullen.

A combined program of aerial LiDAR mapping and pedestrian survey is documenting significant intra-regional variation in pre-Hispanic architectural plans in the Eastern Lower Papaloapan Basin of southern Veracruz, Mexico, reflecting the interplay of ecological adaptation, political integration, factionalism, and extra-regional influences. Consistent association of domestic mounds with small bajos in low-lying areas suggests intentional (as opposed to accretional) mounding and landscape...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Adriana Aguero Reyes.

Terracotta figurine offerings as part of construction deposits are one of the traits that characterize the Classic period Central Veracruz culture. They are recurrent in both modest and monumental architecture, in sites of all ranks. In this they differ from ceramic figurine use in contemporary cultures, where they belong to the domestic and/or funerary sphere. This paper presents a case study on a series of figurine deposits of a palatial residence of the archaeological site of La Joya, showing...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Annick Daneels.

Investigations at several of the thousands of pre-Columbian mounded sites along the southern Gulf coast of Mexico revealed the existence of monumental earthen architecture. These supposedly "simple mounds" resulted to be sunken plazas, pyramids, palaces, ball-courts, tombs and altars that were part of an urban layout. In high-ranking sites, buildings are recurrently associated with deposits reflecting several distinct rituals involving human sacrifice. Such findings bring added evidence for the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Victoria Poston.

Architecture shapes the subjective experience of those living in it as well as those simply interacting with it. The Maya continuously changed their environments to fit their needs and desires, thus these spaces mirror their everyday practices. This paper compares the overall architectural arrangement of Xultun to other Classic Period Lowland Maya urban centers, such as Tikal and Palenque, to determine how the reciprocal relationship between urban populations and their built environments reflect...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tatsuya Murakami. Shigeru Kabata. Julieta López.

Tlalancaleca was one of the largest settlements before the rise of Teotihuacan in Central Mexico and likely provided cultural and historical settings for the creation of Central Mexican urban traditions during later periods. Yet its urbanization process and architectural traditions remain poorly understood. Our research over the last five field seasons indicates that Tlalancaleca was urbanized during the Middle Formative period (ca. 650-500 BC) and experienced large-scale urban transformations...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tatiana Zelenetskaya Young.

Political leaders among the ancient Maya were actors performing for an audience with the intent to receive the people’s support to govern. These actors often used specific architecture as stages for their performances; therefore, this architecture serves as a source of information on various aspects of political organization. Architecture embodies political symbolism and has the potential to communicate type of political institution. This paper examines the distribution of architecture that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jeffrey Dobereiner.

For half a century, scholars have listed Mesoamerica and South America alongside the Near East, Egypt, China, and India as independent loci of emergent social complexity. Yet, recent scholarship has placed an increasing emphasis on the role of multi-regionalism and mobility in the emergence of world civilizations. These theoretical shifts, alongside suggestive findings of agricultural, material, and ideological unity in the Formative Americas, require us to ask: were pathways to complexity in...

IMAGE Antonio Martínez Tuñón. Veronica Perez Rodriguez.

imagenes de areas de excavacion PACJ 2013-15

DOCUMENT Citation Only W. French Anderson.

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.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jesper Nielsen.

In no other culture in ancient Mesoamerica do we find butterflies represented as frequently as in the iconography of the central Mexican metropolis of Teotihuacan (c. 0-600). Appearing in mural art, painted on stuccoed tripod vessels and in the shape of clay adornos attached to incense burners, these winged creatures undoubtedly held a special place in Teotihuacan worldview and religion. Interpretations of butterfly symbolism at Teotihuacan is often based on analogies with Late Postclassic Aztec...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alex Kara. Antonia Foias. Kitty Emery.

Here I present "Arqueologos", a new plugin for the QGIS desktop GIS software designed for archaeologists. While there have recently been many applications of 3d graphics for the digital reconstruction of archaeological features and artifacts, 3D technology has yet to significantly impact how archaeologists interpret their excavation data. This is especially true for individually insignificant ceramic, lithic, and other small artifacts that, when aggregated and studied across space, arguably form...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anabella Coronado. Adriana Linares.

Esta ponencia detalla la reciente investigación participativa en las comunidades de Santa María Nebaj, San Juan Cotzal y San Gaspar Chajul, localizadas en el Departamento de El Quiché, Guatemala. La investigación socialmente comprometida comienza con la elaboración de un atlas regional que reconozca y actualice el listado "oficial" de sitios arqueológicos para su protección. Entre las herramientas metodológicas más valiosas destacan los datos provenientes de historias orales que sobreviven...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rogelio Rascón.

El área geográfica denominada Sierra Sur es una de las 8 regiones que comprende el estado de Oaxaca. Desde épocas muy antiguas, las sociedades aquí establecidas han presentado un desarrollo paralelo a los demás grupos culturales que caracterizaron la superárea denominada Mesoamérica. Hasta hace algunas décadas, se pensaba que dichos grupos estuvieron aislados, lejos de la influencia de grandes centros rectores como Teotihuacán, o en su caso Monte Albán. Durante el desarrollo correspondiente a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jorge Rios.

La zona arqueológica de Mitla ha sido en los últimos años una fuente de información arqueológica y paradigma de la conservación y manejo. Su desarrollo paralelo a las políticas publicas culturales del Estado Mexicano ha derivado no solo en un sitio arqueológico abierto al público sino una serie de eventos sociales y culturales registrados en libros y artículos, que hablan de una interacción de la comunidad local de manera profunda con su patrimonio. Este trabajo pretende mostrar el desarrollo de...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paola Michel Flores.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. El abordaje de los vestigios arquitectónicos que escapan a la temporalidad mesoamericana suelen estar a cargo de múltiples disciplinas como la Historia del Arte o desde la Arquitectura, en particular desde su vertiente de Restauración, sin embargo, la Arqueología con sus herramientas teórico – metodológicas también tiene aportaciones qué hacer sobre ese...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kim Richter.

The Huasteca has long been portrayed as an isolated, peripheral culture of pre-Columbian Mesoamerica. However, recent archaeological and art-historical research challenge this view. The artistic evidence from the Huasteca points to a prolonged cultural dialogue with neighbors along the Gulf Coast, as well as to stylistic and iconographic affinities with Central Mexico, Oaxaca, and the Maya region. Archaeological excavations, especially at the site of Tamtoc, in San Luis Potosi, have revealed a...