Mesoamerica (Geographic Keyword)
476-500 (2,459 Records)
This is an abstract from the "The Movement of People and Ideas in Eastern Mesoamerica during the Ninth and Tenth Centuries CE: A Multidisciplinary Approach Part I" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. La historia de los primeros años del Epiclásico (ca. 750-850 dC) en El Tajín, Veracruz, no es sólo la historia de esta antigua ciudad. Hay toda una serie de factores que participan de ella en distintos momentos de su desarrollo cultural. Varios de ellos se...
The Coming of Kings in the Belize River Valley (2015)
Twenty five years have passed since Linda Schele and David Friedel presented their thoughts on the origins and establishment of the institution of kingship in their book "A Forest of Kings." Their historical reconstruction of Cerros illustrates the steps taken by early rulers to establish and institutionalize a hierarchical social system. Through the empirical data from Cerros, they artfully illuminate how the construction and display of symbols of royal power on monumental buildings coupled...
Commemoration or Termination? Evaluating Early Public Ritual in Yaxuná, Yucatan, Mexico through Ethnography and Ethnohistory (2016)
Through hieroglyphic, historical, and ethnographic documentation, the act of ensouling and cleansing an architectural space is a well documented ritual activity practiced among Mesoamerican cultures. Acts that commemorate space, whether marking renewal or termination, often leave traces. As can be attested archaeologically, the trace evidence commemorative acts are often visible on several surfaces in an architectural sequence, speaking both to the continuity and disjuncture in such practice....
Comments on Some Problems of Oaxaca Archeology (1958)
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.
"Commodification", Exchange, and Changes in Maya Political Economy on the Eve of the Classic Maya Collapse (2016)
Initial hypotheses on the port gateway city of Cancuen envisioned it functioning within a “normal” Classic Maya economy, albeit with a particular emphasis on import/export of sacred goods, (e.g. jade, pyrite, probably quetzal feathers). After 15 years of excavation and intensive lithic and ceramic studies, however, it appears that after 760 A.D. Cancuen shifted to a different form of economy almost entirely based on commodities production and long-distance exchange. Evidence demonstrates massive...
Common and Lima Beans (Phaseolus spp.) from Cerén: Wild and Domesticated Germplasm (2015)
Archaeological investigations at Cerén, a Classic period Maya site in western El Salvador, have unearthed an abundance of carbonized bean remains, both Phaseolus vulgaris and P. lunatus. Surprisingly, the Cerén P. vulgaris bean remains were derived from both wild and domesticated populations. This find reveals that the Late Classic inhabitants continued to draw upon wild food sources even though they had clear access, as seen in the Cerén paleoethnobotanical record, to a full array of...
Commoner Ritual and Ideology in Ancient Mesoamerica (2007)
Were most commoners in ancient Mesoamerica poor? In a material sense, yes, probably so. Were they poor in their beliefs and culture? Certainly not, as Commoner Ritual and Ideology in Ancient Mesoamerica demonstrates. This volume explores the ritual life of Mesoamerica's common citizens, inside and outside of the domestic sphere, from Formative through Postclassic periods. Building from the premise that ritual and ideological expression inhered at all levels of society in Mesoamerica, the...
Commoner-Elite Interactions: Evidence Subroyal Elite Housemound Excavations at Uxul, Campeche, Mexico (2015)
Interactions between commoners and elites is a poorly addressed area of study in the Maya region. Various excavations of ancient Maya palace structures and royal tombs, epigraphic studies of Maya hieroglyphs, and iconographic analyses of ancient Maya art have revealed a copious amount of information about ancient Maya elite. Similarly, excavations of ancient Maya commoner households and burials have revealed a great deal of information about ancient Maya commoners. However, there are...
Communicating Objects and Cultural Preservation Among Contemporary Tz’utujil Ritual Practitioners (2016)
A unique building (Structure 12) excavated during the early 1990’s was interpreted as a divination house serving individuals living in the agricultural community of Cerén, based on its unusual architectural features and enigmatic artifact assemblage. The latter was composed of bits-and-pieces of mostly broken, worn, or repurposed items, some of which showed physical evidence suggesting they were collected from a discard context or dated to an earlier time period. The similarity between this...
Community Archaeology and Ancient Ceramics: Developing an Inclusive Research Design in San Jose Succotz, Belize (2017)
Collaborative archaeology is an approach that promotes the inclusion of modern, indigenous communities in the study of the ancient past. In the Maya area, local communities have recently become more involved with archaeological research at multiple stages, including research design, data collection, and community outreach. At the same time, advances in the qualitative and quantitative study of early ceramics have allowed archaeologists to further elucidate ancient Maya chronology, economy, and...
Community Identity and Social Practice during the Terminal Classic Period at Actuncan, Belize
This research examines the relationship between the ways in which urban families engaged local landscapes and the development of shared identities at the prehispanic Maya city of Actuncan, Belize. Such shared identities would have created deep historical ties to specific urbanized spaces, which enabled and constrained political expansion during the Terminal Classic period (ca. A.D. 800–900), a time when the city experienced rapid population growth as surrounding centers declined. This research...
Community Organization and Urban Dynamics at Copan, Honduras (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For decades, many archaeologists did not consider ancient Maya centers such as Tikal, Palenque, and Copan to be cities. While today most archaeologists would agree that large Maya centers were cities, the nature of Maya urbanism is still little understood. Maya cities seem different, and in attempt to explain these differences, they have been termed "Garden...
Community Resilience in the Río Amarillo East Pocket: Commoner Occupation around Río Amarillo and Quebrada Piedras Negras at the end of Late Classic through Postclassic Periods (2017)
Recent and ongoing research at residential groups at the sites of Río Amarillo and Quebrada Piedras Negras are providing a better understanding of the lives of commoners and of the population dynamics during the Late Classic through the Postclassic period in this area. These sites share the second-widest pocket of the Copan River Valley, and lie in the middle of one of the main trade routes between Copan and Quirigua. The excavations and mapping of the household groups distributed in this...
Community, Territory, and Polity in Postclassic Highland Oaxaca (2017)
In late prehispanic Oaxaca, Mexico, the community was a territorial polity cross-culturally comparable to the city-state. Sixteenth-century native and Spanish sources describe aspects of these communities. Full-coverage archaeological surveys have mapped dozens of cases, providing information on size and internal structure not available in the documents. This study compiled evidence regarding population, territory size, boundary marking, internal complexity, political status, languages,...
Comparative Analysis of Pathological and Ontogenetic Variation within Archaeological Macaw and Turkey Assemblages Using Micro-CT Data (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper presents the utility of computer tomography (CT) data and the VolumeGraphics StudioMax software program for digital reconstruction in aiding zooarchaeological analyses. A wide range of archaeological specimens of captive macaws from the US Southwest and captive turkeys from across central and southern Mexico were selected for CT scanning, with...
A Comparative Analysis of Ritual Architecture in the Northern Maya Lowlands (2016)
In the past as in the present, powerful people used the built environment to display and reinforce their power, so that structures play an important role in the development and maintenance of sociopolitical inequality. Iconography and material culture indicate that ancestor veneration played an important role in Maya society from the Formative period until the Post Classic period. Excavations over the last 15 years in the Ulum Plaza of Kiuic, a site in the Puuc hills, supports the importance of...
A Comparative Analysis of Settlement, Environment, and the Social Landscape at the Ancient Maya Centers of Uxbenká and Ix Kuku'il, Toledo District, Belize (2015)
This paper compares two ancient Maya centers in the Toledo District of Belize, Central America. The two Classic Period (AD 250 – 800) Maya polities of Uxbenká and Ix Kuku'il are located ~ 7 km apart in the southern foothills of the Maya Mountains. Ongoing work at Uxbenká suggests that it is both the earliest established, and longest occupied site in the southern Belize region. Thorough radiocarbon dating and ceramic sequencing by the Uxbenká Archaeological Project has resulted in a detailed...
Comparative Geochemical Analyses of Lime-Plaster from a Cave Site in Belize, C.A. (2016)
The medium-sized Late Classic Maya polity of Las Cuevas, Belize features a heavily-modified cave just below the main plaza, containing 73 platforms, seven staircases, and two sets of terraces. Geochemical analyses of the plastered surfaces were conducted in situ using portable XRF (pXRF) and in the lab using pXRF, XRD, SEM-EDS, and FTIR in order to understand the technology used to create the platforms within the cave. Platforms were sampled by selecting from different areas of the cave...
Comparing Ancient Human-Nature Reslationships at Tikal, Guatemala and Caracol, Belize (2016)
Gordon Willey wrote about the importance of settlement patterns, focusing on the ways that humans distributed themselves over the landscape. While his and other early researchers’ efforts incorporated built features, they did not really research or assess the impact of the human-nature relationship within a given landscape. Vern Scarborough’s work has helped to fill in this gap in the Maya area, particularly relating to Tikal, Guatemala and to northern Belize. This paper builds on Scarborough’s...
Comparing Labor Regimes: Debt Peons in the Northeastern Yucatan versus Free Laborers in British Honduras (2017)
In this paper I compare the working conditions and cultural material found at a cluster of three sites in the northeast corner of the Mexican Yucatán Peninsula, to those at San Pedro Siris in the Cayo District of then British Honduras. The people in both areas contended with more militant Maya groups that were unhappy with improved relations with Mexican and British Honduran authorities respectively. Similar workplace dangers confronted both the lumber workers at San Pedro Siris and the...
Comparison of a Community-Scale Classic Maya Political Adaptive Cycle with a Bimonthly-Resolved Paleoclimate Record from Uxbenká, Belize (2017)
In studies of human-environment interactions, the conceptual framework of panarchy and its associated resilience theory posit that periods of stability and transformation are inevitable in what has been termed an "adaptive cycle". This presentation discusses the reconstruction of a community-level political adaptive cycle for Uxbenká, an ancient agrarian polity in the Maya hinterlands, and explores its linkages with the broader political ideology of divine kingship and climate stress. Employing...
A Comparison of Expediant Tools from Four Sites in Belize (2017)
Small lithic flakes have been recovered from most Maya sites in Belize. They are often viewed as byproducts of the lithic manufacturing process. A closer analysis of small flakes recovered from four sites (Cerros, Chau Hiix, Maax Na and El Pilar) has found that while many of the flakes may have been removed during tool manufacture, the expedient tools themselves were used in a variety of household activities especially those associated with cutting or carving bone or wood. This poster...
A Comparison of Three Chemical Methods for Phosphorus Activity Area Analysis (2016)
This research examines three different analytical methods used in the archaeological studies of soil chemistry for the purpose of uncovering human activities at archaeological sites. The samples used come from a prehispanic urban center at the Formative period site of Tlalancaleca (800 BC- AD 100), located in Puebla, México. Soil samples from Tlalancaleca were analyzed using inductively coupled plasma-optical emission spectrometry (ICP-OES), Mehlich 3 soil phosphorus colorimetry, and portable...
Comparisons and Contrasts of Digital Imaging Technologies in Subterranean Mesoamerica (2017)
Over a period of just a few short years there have been dramatic advancements in digital imaging and scanning technologies. Increasingly, cave archaeologists around the world are utilizing many of these new platforms and techniques to document subterranean artwork. This paper outlines two different approaches to digital imaging of ancient Maya cave art. In Guatemala, a Z+F IMAGER 5010C 3D Laser scanner, mounted on a tripod, was employed in Cueva San Juan and Hun Nal Ye to document both...
Compiling Tikal Report 15 (2015)
Two issues arise in compiling Tikal Report 15 posthumously. Between 1960's field-work and current museum policy illustration formats have changed so that drawings previously inked for photo-reduction are now useless. Secondly, Tikal Report 15 presents data collected under Peter Harrison's direction. But all figure items have been redrawn digitally with inescapable interpretation, so a question of authorship cannot be avoided. SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for...