Mesoamerica (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brigitte Kovacevich. Duncan Cook. Michael Callaghan. Dawn Crawford.

This paper will discuss the various activities that took place on the exterior stone patio floor of the M6-12 domestic structure at Cancuen, Guatemala, and compare it to previously published findings of the M10-4 and M10-7 structures. These structures typically have a low investment in construction and appear to be non-elite in status, characterized by earthen mounds surrounded by limestone flagstone floors and perishable superstructures. These surfaces often appear to be communal activity areas...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christine C. Dixon. Payson Sheets.

The Loma Caldera eruption of c. AD 660 dramatically buried a sophisticated community built by craftspeople, architects, religious specialists, political leaders, and agriculturalists. As people fled for their lives, they left behind belongings and buildings. Results from decades of archaeological research at Cerén, El Salvador and in the surrounding Zapotitán Valley challenges an ethnocentric, over-simplified reconstruction of ancient socio-political organization. Cerén was not in the middle of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lisa DeLance. Jaime Awe.

Mesoamerican archaeologists have traditionally, although not exclusively, viewed artifacts found in the context of construction fill as trash and devoid of primary contextual information, a view that has limited the questions that archaeologists are able to ask of these materials. This paper posits an alternative interpretation to the meaning of material culture used in construction fill, utilizing evidence from Formative period construction fill found at the site of Cahal Pech, Cayo, Belize....

DOCUMENT Citation Only George L. Cowgill.

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 Arlen F. Chase.

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 Katherine South.

Research projects focused on the Middle Preclassic period (1000-350 BC) in the Maya lowlands continue to enhance our understanding of the social, economic, and political lives of early Maya people. The emergence of status differentiation during this time is recognized through different components of the archaeological record, including the presence of prestige goods. While exotic goods such as jade, marine shell, and pyrite mirrors are typically recognized as indicators of social status, the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rosa Flores Ramirez. Marco Zavaleta Lucido.

Una de las principales incógnitas al excavar contextos funerarios en los trabajos de investigación arqueológica, es conocer acerca del sistema de enterramiento y la forma en como los individuos preparaban los restos mortales de las personas fallecidas para su tránsito a su otra vida, si existió un área de enterramiento exclusivo o donde se depositan a los individuos fallecidos, si hay una diferencia por edad y sexo en el área de enterramiento y porque colocan determinados elementos (objetos...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Verenice Heredia Espinoza. Christopher Beekman.

During the Late Postclassic, the Tequila region was home to multiple small, ethnically, and linguistically diverse polities, which both competed and cooperated with one another. This period was highly conflictive due to attempts by the Tarascan Empire to push its way into the valleys, wreaking havoc in several towns along the way. To the north, bellicose, nomadic groups were also a threat to Tequila’s population. Therefore, we hypothesize that Late Postclassic settlement patterns reflect this...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew Vaughan. Dominique Meyer. Jeffrey Glover. Dominique Rissolo. Sebastian Afshari.

The site of Conil is located in the northern part of the state of Quintana Roo, Mexico. Not far removed from the modern shore of Laguna Holbox, Conil appears to have been inhabited at various times between the Preclassic period and the present day. In AD 1528, the conquistador Francisco de Montejo reported that Conil was a large town of 5000 houses.  First investigated by William Sanders in 1954, Conil has seen little in the way of research since that time. Recent research by members of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elisa Mencos.

This paper is about the iconographic analysis of the stucco decoration that is part of the exterior facade of the Joint Trees, which shares certain characteristics with the structure of the site called El Diablo at El Zotz, Guatemala Petén, which is dated to the Early Classic. Likewise Structure 10L-26, whose different layers constitute constructive states within buildings housing royal tombs, shared with El Conjunto Los Árboles iconography and preservation technique by prehispanic Maya. To...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Luis Gomez-Gastelum. Victor Landa-Jaime. Emilio Michel-Morfin.

En el interés de los estudios interdisciplinarios cada una de las partes aporta un conocimiento especializado, lo que tiene como finalidad generar aportes más sólidos en los campos que intervienen. En el caso de la arqueología, el análisis de materiales de concha implica el concurso de especialistas bien entrenados, pues no es lo mismo el estudio de moluscos actuales que el de tiempos pretéritos. Ello obliga a partir de los conocimientos más actualizados tanto en el ámbito de la arqueología como...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ramón Santacruz. Aurelio López Corral.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeology and Material Culture of the Spanish Invasion of Mesoamerica and Forging of New Spain" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. El periodo que corresponde a la conquista, establecimiento e imposición del orden español en México, de 1519 a 1821, se caracterizó por la colisión cultural entre poblaciones nativas y colonizadores europeos. En ese contexto, este trabajo analiza a los artefactos de manufactura...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kristin Landau.

Understanding the growth and dissolution of state entities has long been a topic of anthropological inquiry. More recently, archaeologists are promulgating dynamic and careful conceptions of how leaders acquire power, and whether and why surrounding residents may support them. By turning our attention to the political economic relationship between Maya rulers and the local population, we can identify successful and failed attempts to maintain states. In this paper, I combine political...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Krista Eschbach.

At the beginning of the 18th century, Spain and its American colonies were still steeped in mercantilism with the Spanish Crown and elite merchants struggling to maintain a monopoly over trans-Atlantic trade. Over the next hundred years, this economic system was transformed as a result of political and economic events in Europe and the Spanish colonies. By the end of the 18th century, the Port of Veracruz, once one of the few legal ports in Spain's American colonies, was now one of many ports...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lilia Rivero Weber. Nelly Robles García.

This is an abstract from the "Checking the Pulse: Current Research in Oaxaca Part I" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Enclavado en la entrada de la región de la Sierra de Juárez, Oaxaca, San Pedro Nexicho es una comunidad zapoteca asentada sobre los vestigios arqueológicos de un sitio que data de la época Clásica y Posclásica, en cuya época más tardía constituyó el Señorío de Ixtepeji. A partir del año 2015 la fundación Alfredo Harp Helú se interesó...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Abel Mercado Pérez.

In Tamtoc, an archaeological site, located in the state of San Luis Potosi, Mexico, skeletal remains of a Megatherium sp., commonly called Giant Sloth, were found. One of the objectives of the investigation to be presented is to develop appropriate techniques for the conservation and restoration of these residues. In addition, we aim to slow down the gradual deterioration due to various degradation factors in the region such as temperature, RH, PH, light and biological activity. The conservation...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Adriana Sanroman. Maria Barajas. Valeria Hernandez. Erika Robles.

Throughout the explorations of the Templo Mayor Project, numerous offerings have been surveyed, most of them standing out for the large number of animal remains recovered including a great deal of sawfish, characterized by an anterior long and flat snout that has teeth on both sides. Their skeleton and snouts are chemically composed by hydroxyapatite and collagen in different crystalline arrangements. This causes the stabilization and conservation processes to be a challenge for the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Teegan Boyd. Roxanne Mayoral. James Brady. Michele Bleuze.

This is an abstract from the "Multidisciplinary Approaches to the Subterranean" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Commingled, fragmentary assemblages of skeletal remains present many complications for analysis; however, there is still much information to be gleaned from the study of them. An example of this is the skeletal assemblage from Cueva de Sangre in Guatemala, an extensive, 3.5km long cave system; its use has been ceramically dated from the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Victoria Lyall.

The French sociolinguist Roger Chartier argues that “form produces meaning”: the physical arrangement and presentation of a text will influence a reader’s reception of it (2004). In other words, the process by which a reader assigns a text meaning, consciously or not, depends as much on the material or physical form through which the text was published, distributed and received as on its semantic content (Chartier 2004: 147). Elements such as format, layout, scale, and color give a text status,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cynthia Otis Charlton. Patricia Fournier G..

Beginning with the 16th century opening up of the New World, New Spain was integrated into the complex trade networks of the expanding world system as part of the Spanish Empire in the Indies. Prior to the rise of capitalism in Europe, mercantilism dominated sociopolitical and economic development trends. Indirect contact with the imperial power of China by way of the Philippines led to the establishment of the Manila-Acapulco galleon trade starting in the 1570s. Exotic goods, including...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sheryl Luzzadder-Beach. Timothy Beach. Samantha Krause.

A large wedge of our planet is tropical, and archaeology and natural science have long histories of tropical research. But we still know comparatively little about human interactions in the tropics while rates of land and water use change that expunge ecological and archaeological records are accelerating. In this paper we focus on evidence for ancient wetland management in the Maya World, especially around the evidence for water chemistry in multiple watersheds of northern Belize. Here we...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Jason Barret.

ABSTRACT Constructing Hierarchy through Entitlement: Inequality in Lithic Resource Access among the Ancient Maya of Blue Creek, Belize. (December 2004) Jason Wallace Barrett, B.A., Rhode Island College; M.A., Texas A&M University Chair of Advisory Committee: Dr. Harry J. Shafer This dissertation tests the theory that lithic raw materials were a strategic resource among the ancient Maya of Blue Creek, Belize that markedly influenced the development of socio-economic hierarchies...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Céline Lamb.

The concept of rural complexity acknowledges that social, political, and economic complexity is not limited to large urban centers (Iannone and Connell 2003; Schwartz and Falconer 1994). Like urbanites, hinterland residents are involved in diverse and shifting interactions through which they form, maintain, and reinvent relations of commonality and social differentiation. Chunhuayum, a small settlement located in the Northern Lowlands and occupied from the Late Preclassic through the Late...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Muñiz. Kimberly Sumano.

Northern Mexico has traditionally been underrepresented in received archaeological scholarship on Mesoamerica, and in this sense the Guadiana branch of the Chalchihuites Culture in Durango is no exception. Nonetheless, in recent years archaeological research in the region has produced a body of new data that permits a deeper understanding of the ancient inhabitants of Durango. This paper explores archaeological evidence from the Santiago Bayacora basin, a riverine watershed whose lower portion...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Antonio Martínez Tuñón.

Las excavaciones de Cerro Jazmín se han enfocado en distintos sectores de la ciudad con funciones diferenciadas que nos ayudan a comprender los procesos del urbanismo emergente en la Mixteca Alta de Oaxaca. En esta ponencia me concentraré en una unidad domestica excavada en la Terraza 131. La ocupación de esta terraza se ubica entre 262 AC y 273 DC. En esta terraza los materiales cerámicos indican el acceso a bienes foráneos, en particular de tipos grises característicos de Monte Albán. Además...