Mesoamerica (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rosamund Fitzmaurice.

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. This presentation reconsiders what has conventionally been described as Mesoamerican “slavery.” Slavery is but one form of forced labor within various informal and institutionalized practices. Thus far, the majority of Mesoamerican forced labor...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stephanie Lozano.

This is an abstract from the "Teotihuacan: Multidisciplinary Research on Mesoamerica's Classic Metropolis" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Foreign influence was a major component at Teotihuacan from very early on and throughout Teotihuacan’s history. Extensive archaeological research notes Teotihuacan as a religious center and the largest Classic Mesoamerican city with multiethnic apartment compounds and neighborhoods. However, the impact of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Olivia Navarro-Farr. Francisco Castaneda. Griselda Perez. Juan Carlos Perez.

In 2012 archaeologists discovered Waka’s main civic-ceremonial temple was enshrined by numerous offerings as well as the construction of a monumental hearth and the placement of various fragments of carved stelae adorning the final platform phase. These fragments included previously unknown Stela 43 mentioning an ancestress and royal woman of Calakmul origin, Lady Ikoom. Excavations in the interior of the fronting platform revealed the tomb of Waka’s renowned Late Classic queen, Lady K’abel,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nancy Kelker.

Why forgery? "Because," as Willie Sutton once said, referring to why he robbed banks, "that’s where the money is." Forgery is a common problem in the art market with works by contemporary living artists as well as "old masters" having been and, continuing to be, faked. Some segments of the market, specifically pre-Columbian antiquities, are worse than others in the sheer number of forged and faked works being offered for sale in upscale galleries, online, and by independent,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicholas Hearth.

Scott's body of multidisciplinary and collaborative research resists categorization to a single rubric, even in ones as broad as historical ecology or cultural geography. However, many archaeologists I've met who haven't worked directly with him only understand his long-term research projects within these two paradigms. Few remember or realize that Scott began his graduate school career examining the lithic economy of the Tikal-Yaxha survey transect and that he has continued to facilitate and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David M. Hyde. Nadine Gray.

The chultun from Group H at the Medicinal Trail Community in northwestern Belize was an unsealed, dual chambered feature filled with lithic debitage and sparse ceramic evidence. The chultun was located on the southern side of the dual level Structure H-1. The chambers had doomed roofs and walls with a sill leading into the largest chamber, the western chamber. The eastern chamber was small and was more of a niche than a chamber to be entered. Although storage is suggested by the small size of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cynthia Kristan-Graham.

The council house (popol nah or nim ja in Maya languages) is found from North Mexico to southern Mesoamerica. With roots in Classic-period architecture and enduring until after the Conquest in some regions, the council house typically was located in central areas of civic-ceremonial centers and featured a rectangular colonnade and built-in benches. In situ glyphs and ethnohistory indicate that lineages used these buildings for ritual-administrative purposes, and perhaps also as dwellings. This...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alexandra Norwood.

The lack of large plazas at Teotihuacan has led archaeologists to claim that Teotihuacan was a city with very little public open space. There are, however, many smaller assembly areas distributed around the city. The Teotihuacan Mapping Project identified a large number of "plazas" in the city but the criteria were subjective and the data were never analyzed. I have filtered these data by applying a more formal definition of plaza than the initial field criteria used by the Mapping Project....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Shayna Lindquist.

Obsidian studies are capable of articulating spatial-temporal and economic trends at particular sites with those at regional and interregional scales. Recent obsidian data acquired through stratigraphic excavations at the site of Matacanela, centrally located within the Tuxtla Mountains, reaffirm patterning previously identified through systematic survey and further enable the temporal refinement of lithic technological shifts throughout the settlement’s sequence. This paper examines the site’s...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tiffany Cain.

How can we study political violence in the archaeological record? How does it impact civilian spaces and how can we rethink its consequences for everyday life? This paper argues for the interpretive value of civilian landscapes for the study of violent conflict. The tendency to treat political violence as an event (e.g. the Caste War of Yucatan) in archaeology, rather than a prolonged sociopolitical episode or process, impoverishes our archaeological theorization of violence: violence is forced...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joshua Englehardt. Michael Carrasco.

Interregional interaction often serves as a catalyst for cultural innovation. This paper explores the effects of interaction on the development of Mesoamerican scripts during the Formative period. Current models suggest that the transition from iconography to phonetic writing involved the recontextualization of visual symbols: motifs were excised from the pictorial frameworks in which they were usually contextualized and enclosed within the emergent textual–linguistic conventions and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only William T. Sanders. Michael West. Charles Fletcher. Joseph Marino.

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 William T. Sanders. Michael West. Charles Fletcher. Joseph Marino.

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 Michelle Goman. Arthur Joyce. Jessica Hedgepeth Balkin.

We provide a summary of the past ~15 years of paleoecological and paleoenvironmental analysis in the Lower Río Verde Valley. Ten lacustrine, wetland and estuarine sites throughout the valley and coastal zone were selected for sediment coring. The sediments were intensively sampled for a suite of biological and sedimentary analyses chosen to provide insight into changes in local and regional landuse. Our findings indicate initial land clearance and incipient agriculture occurred during the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert Rosenswig.

Mesoamerica is one of the cradles of civilization where the first kingdoms and states emerged during the latter part of the first millennium BCE. Recent lidar mapping and pedestrian survey documents the extent and internal political structure of the Izapa kingdom from its emergence at 700 BCE through its collapse after 100 BCE. At its peak, a four-tiered political hierarchy maintained internal cohesion and the distribution of large centers around the kingdom’s perimeter established external...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Vera Tiesler.

This paper explores some of the forms, occasions, and meanings of human fire exposure among the Northern Lowland Maya during the Classic period. Conceptual points of departure are native concepts of heat, smoke and fire, together with their transformative powers in human beings, ritual enactment, and physicality. These notions provide blueprints for the spectrum of treatments documented in the area’s mortuary record, spanning veneration, profanation and/or sacrifice. Combining forensic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Toni Gonzalez. Helen R. Haines.

During three field seasons, chultuns were investigated at three small groups representing the settlement zone, public space, and core near the main plaza of Ka’Kabish. Puleston asserted that chultuns must have a utilitarian function because they are overwhelmingly found in rural, domestic contexts. This very processualist logic denies the possibility of domestic ritual that is so prevalent in Maya ethnography. Furthermore, at Ka’Kabish, Uaxactun, Nakum and other sites, chultuns are regularly...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marion C. Barlett. Elso Barghoorn.

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 Elso S. Barghoorn.

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 Loa Traxler.

Historical and archaeological data support interpretation of Classic Maya polities as centralized states—strongly integrated organizations with stratified and hierarchical political structures led by rulers wielding coercive power. Yet archaeology is often hard pressed to identify changes instigated by individuals or events, or define watershed moments when particular sites or regions coalesced as states. By the early sixth century CE, the kingdom of Copan had established itself as a dominant...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Deborah Nichols.

Frances F. Berdan and Patricia Rieff Anawalt begin their magnificent four-volume edition of the Codez Mendoza by offering the following words to Mesoamerican scholars, "ce qualli obtli." "May you find the good road." Frances Berdan’s road to understanding the Aztec world crosses subfields of anthropology, ethnography, ethnohistory, archaeology and linguistics. As one of the most influential and productive scholars of the Aztecs, her road runs opposite the trend in anthropology of increasing...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Richard Blanton.

We all know of Frannie Berdan’s many contributions to historical scholarship, archaeology, art history, and Aztec studies, but my goal in this paper is to assess Frannie’s influence on the growth of economic anthropology during a time when the discipline was just beginning to rethink the anti-market theories of Karl Polanyi. The principal institutional context of change was the Society for Economic Anthropology, of which Frannie was a founding member and a founding board member. In the...

DATASET Ronald Faulseit.

Frequency data for all ceramic materials collected on Terrace O8 during the 2015 excavations. See project report 2015 for more information

DATASET Ronald Faulseit.

This file contains all of the frequency counts for ceramic categories from the excavated units on Terrace S25. It does not include the frequency data from other excavated contexts (elements, burials, features), unless otherwise noted in the comments. For more information on the ceramic categories, please see the project report for 2015

DATASET Ronald Faulseit.

This file contains all of the ceramic frequency counts for the excavations that took place on Terrace S19 and S20 of Cerro Danush, Dainzú-Macuilxóchitl in the 2008-2009 field season. Please see project report for 2010 for further information on artifact categories and assignments.