Mesoamerica (Geographic Keyword)
2,101-2,125 (2,459 Records)
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Settlement Scaling and Increasing Returns in an Ancient Society (2015)
Main text and SI of published paper in PDF format. The SI includes a series of datasets derived from the Basin of Mexico surveys that are analyzed in the main text.
Settlement Survey of the Rural Mountainous Region of Quiechapa in Southern Mexico (2017)
While extensive research has been conducted in and around well-known sociopolitical centers located in valley and coastal regions of southern Mexico, relatively little work has been done in the rural regions outside these core areas. Specifically, one of the understudied regions of southern Mexico is the mountainous region between the highlands and Pacific coastal lowlands. Recently, El Proyecto Arqueológico de Quiechapa (PAQuie) conducted a Full-coverage pedestrian survey of a 99 sq. km area in...
Seventh Century Star Wars: Reassessing the Role of Warfare in Shaping Classic Period Maya Society in the Southern Lowlands (2015)
At the time that Forest of Kings was written, Mayanists were unsure of how impactful Maya warfare actually was. Did it serve symbolic and ritual purposes like the Aztec flower-wars? Or, was Maya warfare actually waged for territorial gain? Forest of Kings was one of the first books to situate Maya conflict as warfare for territorial control. But, the depth and nature of this control as well as the way in which warfare articulated with and affected broader Maya society could not be answered in...
Shadows of War, Shadows of Peace: Sites from El Salvador’s Civil War (2017)
The Salvadoran civil war, fought from 1980 to 1992, devastated the country and left 75,000 to 100,000 people dead. Much of the worst fighting was in the northeastern department of Morazán. Numerous battles were fought there, where several terrible civilian massacres occurred as well. Through most of the war, northern Morazán was a primary stronghold of the FMLN guerillas. The poster examines two civil war sites in northern Morazán. The first, Cerro Pelón - the northern spur of Cerro Gigante, was...
Shake It Off: The Ancient Sound of Ceramic Vessel Rattles (Maracas) from Tala and Teuchitlan, Jalisco, West Mexico (2016)
In the past 60 years, the presence of musical instruments, musicians, and dancing in West Mexican art has been frequently discussed but largely unanalyzed, limited to comparison and contextualization of individual pieces, or occasional mention tangentially as part of some other narrative. The cursory treatment of this class of material has resulted in many unanswered questions: who, for example, made these instruments? Who played them? How were they made? How and when were they used? What do...
Shared Practices and Identities in the Northern Settlement of Actuncan, Belize (2015)
This poster examines how urban families developed and shared neighborhood identities at the Maya city of Actuncan, Belize, ca. AD 800-900, a time when the city experienced rapid population growth as surrounding centers, including Xunantunich, declined. To investigate household relationships, this research considers the nature and location of activity patterns in and around three commoner households to infer shared practices and the shared identities that those activities both enabled and...
Sharing Wares and Waging Wars: The Politics of Ceramic Exchange at the Classic Maya Site of El Zotz, Guatemala (2017)
The Classic Maya city of El Zotz, relatively small compared to its neighbors, is situated geographically, and at times politically, between El Perú-Waka’ to the west and Tikal to the east. The archaeological site occupies an elevated position within the Buenavista Valley, a southwest to northeast corridor running for some 32 km to the north of the Lake Petén Itza region. The valley connects the northeast and northwest Petén, from Chetumal Bay to the Bay of Campeche, placing the site in a...
Shifting Allegiances at Yaxuna during the Early to Late Classic: Territory and the Loss of Independent Rule (2015)
The site of Yaxuna, Yucatan, Mexico was an independent Maya city from the Formative to Early Classic periods. While the size of its territory during the early periods is unknown due to the lack of regional data on other large early cities in Central Yucatan, the Early Classic dynasty at Yaxuna was violently and abruptly vanquished towards the end of this period. At this time, a 100 kilometer causeway was also constructed connecting Yaxuna to the large metropolis of Coba, which was at its...
Shifting Domestic Economies at Postclassic Period Moxviquil: Insights from Ceramic Petrography (2017)
The Early to Late Postclassic Period transition brought substantial changes to the political and economic organization of many regions of Mesoamerica. For the networked polities of highland Chiapas, these changes included substantial decreases in population at existing monumental centers; the establishment of new political centers in several principal highland valleys, and the establishment of an expansionary Chiapanec state in the Central Depression, centered on the city of Chiapa de Corzo....
Shifting Perceptions of Local Heritage: Community Archaeology in Aguacate village, Toledo district, southern Belize (2015)
The recent expansion of community-based approaches to archaeological research signifies a renegotiation of how, and for whom, historical knowledge is produced. This paper reviews the implementation of a community-based archaeological heritage program in the Toledo district of southern Belize. Research conducted by the Aguacate Community Archaeology Project seeks to understand the degree of social, political, and economic integration of ancient Maya households with regional political centers...
Shifting Practices: Materiality and Mortuary Ritual at Early Classic Charco Redondo (2017)
This paper explores the relationships between the people, objects and practices that created an Early Classic communal mortuary space at the site of Charco Redondo in the lower Río Verde Valley of Oaxaca. The Early Classic follows the collapse of the first Rio Viejo polity, and significant differences in mortuary practices may signify a transformation in how power and authority were constituted. While communal internment continued, burials were generally undisturbed by later internments and...
Shifting Tides along the North Coast of Quintana Roo: Recent Research at Conil and Vista Alegre (2015)
In the northern lowlands, there is strong evidence for a coastal Maya presence since at least the Middle Preclassic, and scholars have long discussed how inland-coastal connections served as a catalyst for the development of social complexity. The scope and scale, however, of maritime commerce and interaction was closely linked to the ever-changing political and economic landscape. The work of the Proyecto Costa Escondida at the neighboring port sites of Conil and Vista Alegre highlight the...
Show Me the Data!: Structuring the MayaArch3D Digital Collections for Research Queries in a 3DWebGIS (2015)
Archaeological projects are increasingly acquiring 3D data sets of individual finds, as well as whole cities. The archaeologist receives the model as a 3D PDF, video, point cloud or object file. Views of the model are published in a journal, shown in an exhibition and the pipeline usually ends here. Typically, archaeologists do not use the 3D model for much more than visualization purposes. The MayaArch3D project is building a 3DWebGIS to enable archaeologists to do more with these models –to...
Show me what you have and I’ll tell you who you stick around with: A model of economical-political interaction in the Upper Usumacinta (2015)
Walking, although commonly seen as a simple activity, represents in fact, a very important aspect of the relationship that develops between human groups and the physical environment on which they live. In this way, the nature of this environment will bestow the singularities of the political, social and economic organization of societies. We can approach human mobility through the application of GIS in terms of the estimation of cost of movement. Various algorithms have been developed that allow...
Sierra Red Ceramics, Identity, and Foodways in the Middle and Late Formative Chiapa de Corzo Polity, Chiapas, Mexico. (2016)
Data from a surface survey of 105 sq km in and around the site of Chiapa de Corzo indicate that over the course of the Late Formative, serving vessels of Sierra Red, a style that originated in the Maya Lowlands, were widely adopted across the Chiapa de Corzo polity. At the capital early Sierra Red serving vessels largely conformed to the size of serving vessels from the Maya Lowlands. In the hinterland, however, the Sierra Red vessels people were using had dimensions that conformed more tightly...
The Sierra Sur in 3D: Benefits of Photogrammetry and 3D Printing for Archaeological Research in Remote Regions (2017)
Researchers working in the Sierra Sur region of Oaxaca, Mexico are often documenting sites that have not yet been studied by western scholars. 3D modeling (via photogrammetry) and 3D printing is a quick and low cost way we can begin sharing this new information with other scholars and the public, while simultaneously enhancing the documentation of archaeological landscapes and artifacts. In the 2016 field season of Proyecto Arqueológico de Quiechapa (PAQuie), we pilot tested the use of low cost...
The Sighing, Bleeding, Feasting Soul: Speech Scrolls in Mesoamerica (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Speech scrolls are common elements of Mesoamerican codices and their frequent use and incorporation into a wide array of human and anthropomorphic entities highlights the need for a formal study of these elements of iconography. The use of speech scrolls is not ubiquitous simply because of their function as a marker of speech in service of a larger motif or...
¿Siluetas o excéntricos? (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Ceremonial Lithics of Mesoamerica: New Understandings of Technology, Distribution, and Symbolism of Eccentrics and Ritual Caches in the Maya World and Beyond" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A partir del estudio del proceso de elaboración de siluetas o excéntricos bifaciales y monofaciales teotihuacanos de las fases Tlamimilolpa y Xolalpan, elaborados en el yacimiento de obsidiana verde de La Sierra de Las Navajas,...
A Simple Fiscal-Demographic Model of the Classic Maya Collapse (2016)
The Classic Maya civilization flourished from approximately 200 A.D. to 800 A.D. in the southern reaches of the Yucatan Peninsula. Population increased throughout the period, accelerating towards the end, finally falling to a small fraction of its former peak level (10% or less) in a relatively short span of time (50-100 years). Even though Maya civilization continued in the northern end of Yucatan Peninsula, the holy kings who had been the protagonists of Classic Maya civilization disappeared...
The Sinkhole as Ch'een: A Closer Look at Ancient Maya Sacred Geography (2015)
During the 2014 field season, the California State University, Los Angeles Cave Research Project focused its investigation on a sinkhole at the site of La Milpa that had been given a cursory examination by the TRAP in 2012. An initial inspection suggested that the feature might well have been considered a ch’een by the ancient Maya. Ch’een is generally translated as cave but the indigenous term includes a large number of earth openings that were recognized as sacred landmarks. Excavations...
Sinking Archaeological Teeth into the Dental Modification Issue: An Examination of Midnight Terror Cave (2015)
Evidence for dental modification practices have been found throughout Mesoamerica since the Early Preclassic Period (Williams and White 2006) and were noted by Diego de Landa in the 16th century. Examples for these practices have been found not only among human remains, but also in iconography and in architecture. Investigations into the aesthetic or ritual purpose for dental modification have yielded a number of possibilities. These possibilities include its use as an indication of social...
The "Sistema 7 Venado", a Little-known Ceremonial Center at Monte Albán, Oaxaca: A Study of Its Architectural and Ritual Implications (2018)
For the past eight years, the French team from the CeRAP (Paris-Sorbonne University and the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in Paris) has carried out research at the Mesoamerican site of 7 Venado, which extends over 4 ha lying 400 m south of the South Platform of Monte Albán. Directed by Christian Duverger and Aliénor Letouzé, with the support of the INAH, the project has been able to date the site, whose chronology spans 800 BC to AD 300, and has also studied its spatial...
Sistemas de almacenamiento en un puerto prehispánico: consideraciones generales (2017)
Un sitio con características portuarias, en el cual se da una dinámica de un flujo constante de bienes, personas, información, etc., no sólo necesita captar y distribuir, sino también cerciorarse de la preservación de dichos bienes. En este panorama, los sistemas de almacenamiento son eje fundamental, ya que preservan los bienes hasta el momento en que son requeridos por el usuario final, lo que implica que los sistemas de almacenamiento deben estar organizados y estructurados para coincidir con...
Site Map Validation and Quantifying Linkages between Multispectral and Lidar Remote Sensing for Settlement Pattern Mapping (2017)
Fifteen years of field survey and image processing of commercial satellite optical data have contributed to robust site maps of San Bartolo and Xultun, among other PROSABA sites in northeastern Peten. The recent acquisition of lidar-derived DSM and DTM data through PACUNAM has made new types of analyses possible, including the validation and enhancement of the site maps. We present recent mapping discoveries in the PROSABA region and research into the validation and extrapolation of settlement...