Mesoamerica (Geographic Keyword)
551-575 (2,459 Records)
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.
The Country and the City: Explorations of the Relationship between Río Amarillo and Copan, in the Copan Valley, Honduras (2018)
Cities and the communities in their hinterlands are inextricably linked, and yet the objectives of their inhabitants can be starkly different. The archaeological sites of Río Amarillo and Quebrada Piedras Negras shared a fertile plain along the Río Amarillo and Río Blanco Rivers. Several scholars have suggested that the arable fields here may have acted as a bread basket for the urban center to their west. Research at Rio Amarillo has yielded evidence of strong ties to Copan including...
Craft, Literacy, and Ephemera: Maya Textiles in the Gendered Scribal Tradition (2016)
Although art historians, archaeologists, and epigraphers often decry the poor preservation of certain ephemeral categories of Maya hieroglyphic remains – wooden lintels, codex-style books and plaster facades – the missing corpus of ancient hieroglyphic textiles is rarely discussed. Yet unlike the handful of maddeningly flat, angular, or profile-view representations of codices in Maya art, the "extant" inscribed textiles seen in murals, painted on narrative vessels, incised into stone and molded...
Crafting Houses for the Living and the Dead: Obsidian Production, Multicrafting, and Household Identities at a Classic Maya Center, Chinikihá, Mexico (2015)
Craft production in the Classic Maya world was often carried out within multi-household groups, whose shared practices were passed on from generation to generation and whose social identities were strongly tied to the products they created. Investigations of a residential zone at Chinikihá, a Classic Maya center in the Palenque region, recovered a quantity of obsidian artifacts and evidence for production that is unusual not just at the site, but across the region. Fine-grained excavations have...
Crafting Human/Hieroglyph Relationships in Classic Maya Contexts (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Crafting Culture: Thingselves, Contexts, Meanings" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The study of Classic Maya hieroglyphic writing (ca. AD 250-900, Mexico and Central America) has yielded rich understandings of texts in recent years through increasingly nuanced ways of reading, contextualizing, and interpreting hieroglyphs. Beyond examining hieroglyphic texts as culturally contextualized documentary sources, however,...
CRAFTING THE TENOCHCA IMPERIAL IDENTITY THROUGH MANUFACTURING SHELL OBJECTS (2015)
Recent investigations about the Tenochca objects have shown that the mexica produced many of the pieces that they deposited inside of the offerings they buried in their Great Temple and its surrounding buildings. It seems that it was during the reigned of Axayacatl (1469-1481 A.D.) that the mexica decided to create their own imperial style not only in terms of forms and decorations but also in the technological aspect. In the present paper it is presented new data that supports this hypothesis...
Crafting, Identity, and Power: A Comparative Analysis of Late Postclassic Facial Adornment Use in Central Mexico (2017)
In pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica, individuals from diverse regions and social classes deployed facial adornments, such as ear spools and lip plugs, to materialize concepts of identity. Specifically, recent archaeological research at the Late Postclassic (AD 1250 to 1521) city of Tlaxcallan provides new insights into the role of facial adornments in a highly collective society. Tracing material sources reveals the inter-workings of regional and local economic interactions and local sociopolitical...
Cream Wares of the Southeast Maya Periphery (2017)
Since publication on the compositional analyses of Copan ceramics by Bishop and Beaudry in 2004 several scholars have addressed the manufacture and distribution of cream wares similar to those that are found at Copan. The additional accumulation of data usually results in more insights and better source attributions, but at times the complexities of compositional analysis can mislead interpretation. This paper presents highlights of greatly extended sampling and uses a geochemical perspective...
Creating and Curating a 3D Dataset: Establishing Categories for Ancient Maya Musical Instruments Using 3D Scans (2017)
The Maya Music Project is dedicated to documenting ancient Maya musical instruments throughout the Maya area. Over the past year and a half the project has been documenting instruments housed in both archaeological laboratories and museums in Guatemala, Belize, and the United States in order to better understand the types of musical instruments that were played by the ancient Maya. At the time of writing this abstract, the project has worked with over 250 musical instruments, and has made 3D...
Creating Interactive Landscapes with Multi-Method Modeling (2016)
Digital reconstructions and 3D modeling have become an increasingly frequent application in archaeology for the purposes of preservation and visualization. As part of the MayaCityBuilder Project, we are developing an immersive 3D environment of late eighth century Copan, Honduras that incorporates high-resolution base models and hypothetical reconstructions into an open-world environment. Our goal is to offer users opportunities to freely explore the models in context to their surroundings and...
Creating the Center, Interaction in the Central Karstic Uplands during the Preclassic (2017)
From roughly 800 BCE, evidence supports the development of a widespread regional interaction sphere centered in the Central Karstic Uplands. This paper discusses specific data regarding the origins of this network and the subsequent integration of the Central Karstic Uplands as an economic force in the Maya lowlands. Scholars have long recognized the strong affiliations among the major cities that comprise this network during the Preclassic. Recently artifacts recovered from sites point to...
The Creation, Racialization, and Perpetuation of Aztec and Maya Human Sacrifice Mythology (with a Case Study from Yucatán) (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Misinformation and Misrepresentation Part 1: Reconsidering “Human Sacrifice,” Religion, Slavery, Modernity, and Other European-Derived Concepts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the sixteenth century, European settler-colonists in the Americas developed tropes of barbarity that they applied to Indigenous American populations. Primary among these tropes were allegations of “human sacrifice” performed for millennia in...
Creations of the Lord: New World Slavery and Sacrifice (2018)
In the ancient cities of Ur and Chan Chan, excavations revealed that when a lord died, dozens of servants were sometimes put to death and buried with the lord. Such examples of retainer sacrifice, also mentioned for Aztec kings and documented in Maya tombs, raise questions about slavery, violence, and subjectivity. David Graeber has argued that slavery played a key role in the origin of commercial systems. The transition at issue concerns the melding of human economies (which make and remake...
Creeping Collapse at Copan (2017)
Over the last decade archaeologists have shifted from dramatic accounts of collapse to more nuanced narratives of decline and disruption, resilience and recovery. This shift partly reflects richer archaeological data, and partly fashion. Although Copan has long been a poster-child for the Classic Maya collapse, the history of research there has long prefigured this shift in archaeological perception and contributed importantly to it.
The Critical Zone Revolution from 2016 LiDAR and Two Decades of Multiproxy Geoarchaeology around the Programme for Belize (2017)
Over the last two decades we have studied agroecosystems in the Programme for Belize (PfB), a valuable and privileged reserve for an exceedingly wide array of research efforts. Aspects of the agroecosystems preserved in the PfB include terraces, wetland fields, aguadas, ecology, and curious wall features under the canopy of this tropical forest with some savannas. We based these studies on excavations along multiple transects across this karst region’s uplands, escarpments, bajos, floodplains,...
Critter Caching: Animals in Household Rituals at the Maya Site of Ceibal, Guatemala (2015)
With an occupational history spanning nearly two millennia, the Maya site of Ceibal provides a rare opportunity to study the remains of ritual practices and domestic activities at household groups over a long scale of time. This study examines the zooarchaeological remains, both bones and shells, recovered from household caches, burials, and middens from several peripheral locations around the Ceibal site epicenter. The diversity of household types and extended time frame provides an opportunity...
Crocodiles in the Offerings of the Great Temple: use and symbolism (2017)
The numerous animals placed in the offerings of the Templo Mayor were brought in through tributes, trade, or spoils of war from every corner of the Aztec Empire—from tropical jungles to deserts. Indeed, the largest part of the fauna included in the collection at the Templo Mayor is identified as foreign. Crocodiles are among the exotic animals on display. This presentation explains the process of how these crocodiles were acquired, from their selection, to their hunt or capture, and, later,...
Cross-dressing to Complement the King: Eco-iconography of the Aztec Cihuacoatl’s Costume (2015)
Co-regents led the Aztec state: the principal Tlatoani, "supreme speaker," and his second, the Cihuacoatl, "Woman Snake," also the name of a fearsome goddess. The complementary rulers reflected Aztec notions of cosmic balance between opposites: while the male king directed external military campaigns during the dry season ("the day sun"), the Cihuacoatl managed internal affairs, especially agriculture, during the rainy season, or "night sun." A ruthless and visionary individual named Tlacaelel...
Crosscurrents of Culture: Arts of Africa and the Americas in Alabama Collections (1997)
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.
Crossing Ancient and Modern Borders: Territoriality in the Three Rivers Region (2015)
The lowland jungle environment of the Maya area presents numerous challenges to archaeologists in the study of ancient territoriality. Incomplete settlement survey data and fragmentary textual records hinder attempts to formulate comprehensive hypotheses comparable to those put forth for complex societies in other areas of the world. The Three Rivers Region of northeast Guatemala and northwest Belize is one area where some advancements may be made. Large portions of the region have been surveyed...
Crumbling Walls: Terminal Classic Maya Collapse and Abandonment of Nim Li Punit, Belize (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper will present a synthetic review of the Terminal Classic collapse of the Maya site of Nim li Punit, Belize, based on new data from recent architectural excavations and artifact analysis. These lines of evidence show that around A.D. 800 the site saw the cessation of elite activities, the halting of new constructions, the disrepair of existing...
Crustaceans as part of the Mexica worldview: case study of Offering 125 associated to the Tlaltecuhtli monolith (2017)
Tlaltecuhtli monolith was discovered over offering number 125. It was buried in the sixth stage of construction of Tenochtitlan Sacred Precinct during Ahuítzotl government (1486-1502). The offering was composed of biotic elements from Panamic and Caribbean provinces. A microcosm is reflected due the offering disposition, vertical levels represented biota and elements of underworld, terrestrial and aerial stage. The inferior level as underworld, recorded aquatic biota. Crustacean were identified...
Cuevas Prehistóricas de Yagul y Mitla, procesos de gestión, patrimonio cultural y su construcción como concepto en la población (2016)
A cinco años de la declaratoria de patrimonio cultural de la humanidad por la UNESCO, el sitio Cuevas Prehistóricas de Yagul y Mitla, que alberga elementos naturales y arqueológicos variados (desde los vestigios más tempranos de la agricultura en América, hasta evidencias del México porfiriano), es un ejemplo del arduo trabajo de gestión que se requiere para poder concretar un proyecto de dimensiones tan grandes. Este proceso de construcción no hubiese sido posible sin la participación e...
Cuisine at the Crossroads (2016)
Investigations at sites across Northwestern Honduras-- inside and outside of the Maya area—have uncovered diverse food practices and ingredients. As with other more durable goods, there is evidence of transformation over time, and the movement of elements across the landscape. Some foodways were never adopted in regions where they came to be readily available (considering the general flow of species and materials) while others were quickly adopted but in novel ways. Evidence points toward...
Culinary Arts and Plant Residues of the Ancient Maya Lowlands: Botanical Ingredients beyond Maize and Cacao (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Beyond Maize and Cacao: Reflections on Visual and Textual Representation and Archaeological Evidence of Other Plants in Precolumbian Mesoamerica" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Foraging, home gardening, and large-scale cultivation yielded products consumed at every level of ancient Maya societies, albeit in varying proportions. For decades, researchers have carefully documented miniscule botanical residues, from...