Mesoamerica (Geographic Keyword)
901-925 (2,459 Records)
A recent mapping and excavation project in the Copan Valley is taking a second view of communities outside of the Copan Pocket. The goal of this project is two-fold, one, to understand the environmental context of these sites, and two, to understand the relationship between them and the powerful leaders of the Copan Acropolis. It is unlikely that the kingdom of Copan could have reached its apogee without the support and subordination of its closest neighbors, a diversity of towns, villages and...
Fringe Benefits?: Historical Household Investigations at Rancho Kiuic, Yucatan, Mexico (2016)
This paper presents preliminary findings from recent research at Rancho Kiuic, an 18th- 20th century landed estate in the Puuc region of Yucatán, México. Occupied by generations of Maya-speaking landowners and laborers during the Colonial and Republican eras, the Rancho represents a site type with that has seen little archaeological or ethnohistoric investigation. Drawing on household-level excavation data, oral histories among the Rancho’s descendant community, and archival research,...
Fringe Identities - Costume in the Mixtec Codices (2017)
The Mixtec codices depict costumes from Postclassic Oaxaca, including clothing, face paint, hairstyles, footwear, and jewelry. Contextualized in religious, military, and other social rituals, costume played an important role in framing the action as well as representing individuals in a variety of social identities. This paper focuses on styles and patterns of clothing as they were used to characterize gender, status, ethnicity, occupation, and religious and political roles. Specifically, we...
From "Star Wars" to Attack of the Kaan (2015)
Over the past 25 years, epigraphic research on the Classic Maya has demonstrated that political alliances and warfare were not only widespread but also structured in such a manner to suggest a greater degree of political centralization than originally contemplated. Texts carved on ancient monuments suggest that lowland Maya society of the Classic period (AD 250-850) was characterized by a rivalry between two major capital cities, Calakmul and Tikal, who sought to dominate the Maya lowlands....
From A Forest of Kings to the Forests of Petén: The Mirador Group at El Perú-Waka’ (2015)
More than 10 years of research at El Perú-Waka’, carried out under the co-direction of David Freidel and several Guatemalan collaborators, has resulted in a wealth of information about this ancient city and the role its rulers and residents played in the Classic Maya world. Enhanced through his work with Linda Schele, Freidel’s persistent focus on the interplay between ancient history and archaeology—on stelae, buildings, and people—has shaped research at Waka’, located in Guatemala’s Laguna del...
From Clay Survey to Ceramic Provenance: Establishing a Ceramic Geography for the Late Classic Valley of Oaxaca (2015)
As an overall introduction to this session, this paper introduces our methodology for establishing ceramic provenance within the geologically complex Valley of Oaxaca. Natural clays have now been sampled from more than 300 locations throughout the valley, and their chemistry analyzed via INAA. Spatial averaging was used to create a series of smoothed contour maps showing how clay composition varies over space, and to generate a continuous reference grid of element concentrations against which...
From Coast to Coast: Trade Routes and Commerce of Northwest Yucatán’s Mayapán (2015)
Late Postclassic Mayapán formed the nucleus of a complex system of trade routes in northwest Yucatán, some of which endured into the Contact Period. The importance of ports and overland trade routes to commerce in late Maya history has long been acknowledged, but landlocked Mayapan’s specific connections to towns and exchange facilities has not been systematically considered from an archaeological perspective. Our analysis draws on Postclassic-to-Contact Period historical and archaeological data...
From compass to LiDAR: 40 years of mapping the Tarascan cities of the Malpaís of Zacapu, Northwestern Mexico. (2017)
Since their discovery in the late XIXth century, the large prehispanic urban settlements located close to the modern town of Zacapu (State of Michoacán, Mexico) have confronted the archaeologists to a great challenge: mapping, and understanding 200 hectares of dense and well preserved urban features founded on the Malpaís of Zacapu (a complex formed by ancient lava flows). Interpreted as premises of the Tarascan State (occupation 1250-1450 AD), these cities constitute an unprecedented regional...
From Flame to Flowers: Moths and Butterflies in the Codex Borgia Group (2017)
Butterfly imagery in the Borgia Group shows how these volatiles were classified in Postclassic Central Mexico. They are grouped with birds among the 13 "lords of the day" in the Codex Borgia, and they sometimes seem to be interchangeable with moths, especially in imagery of the Fire God. Another god, Ehecatl-Quetzalcoatl, is associated with images of "army worms" devouring maize, symbolizing the caterpillar stage of a moth that distributes its eggs in the wind. Butterfly symbols are naturally...
From Flowers to Sin: Exploration of Sexuality and Gender in Ancient Mesoamerica (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In modernity, sexuality manifests in a dynamic spectrum of expressions which centers on individual sexual awareness, contesting antiquated sentiments of traditional sexual hegemony. In this presentation, we will journey into ancient Mesoamerica in the attempt to conceptualize Maya and Aztec notions of sex and gender by examining various lines of...
From hero objects to foam blocks: Contextualizing the archaeological record in Maya: Hidden Worlds Revealed (2016)
Maya: Hidden Worlds Revealed is a 10,000- to 15,000-square-foot traveling exhibition created through multi-national, multi-institutional partnerships and intended to appeal to museum visitors of all ages. The core of the exhibition is a collection of more than 200 stunning and thought-provoking archaeological artifacts and ethnographic objects from throughout the Maya world. These objects provide visitors opportunities to engage with the authentic Maya past, the Maya today, and the work of...
From Household to Polity: (Dis)integration along the Ucí-Cansahcab Causeway in the Northern Maya Lowlands (2017)
Over the past decade, the Ucí-Cansahcab Regional Integration Project (UCRIP) has utilized multiples scales of analysis, from broad household excavations to large swathes of LiDAR collection, to examine the social processes of community (dis)integration of a polity in the northern Maya Lowlands. This polity, headed by Ucí, was integrated by an 18-km-long inter-site causeway system by the Terminal Preclassic and connected the emerging regional capital with three secondary sites. Extensive test...
From Jalisco, Mexico, to Quimistán, Honduras: Analyzing Mesoamerican Metals from the Field Museum (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Twenty Years of Archaeological Science at the Field Museum’s Elemental Analysis Facility" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Copper artifacts were prominent in Mesoamerica during the last precolonial millennium, more widely distributed than silver and gold. Mesoamerican copper was formed into axes, axe-monies, rings, pendants, bells, and needles, among other artifacts. The most used alloy in this region was...
From Narrative Picture Writing Bands to Pseudo Cartographies. How Native Scribes Invented Powerful New Media after the Conquest (2019)
This is an abstract from the "After Cortés: Archaeological Legacies of the European Invasion in Mesoamerica" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Scholars have always believed that maps and cartographiies did exist in preconquest Mesoamerica. The large amount of early colonial Native maps seems to be evidence for such geographic media. But as yet, no pre-Hispanic lienzos and maps have become known. However, the earliest lienzos do show pre-Hispanic...
From Quarry to Household: The Economics of Limestone Bifaces among the Classic Maya of Buenavista del Cayo, Belize (2015)
Limestone is one of the most abundant stone resources over much of the Maya lowlands and scholarly research has been focused on its use as a construction material. Limestone was also used to create a variety of portable items, such as manos, metates, bark beaters, and bifaces. In this paper we examine the evidence for production, exchange, and consumption of limestone general utlity bifaces in the Bueanvista del Cayo zone, Belize during the Classic period. Although chert bifaces are more...
From Quelites to Crop Indices: Thinking Through Maya Chenopods (2017)
While chenopod cultivation has been documented extensively in North and South America, evidence for similar practices in the Maya area is lacking. Macrobotanical evidence of Chenopodium recovered from pre-Hispanic Maya archaeological sites is limited to a few seeds. In contrast, the palynological record suggests widespread tolerance across the entirety of the Maya area, if not intensive management or even cultivation of Cheno-am genera in some contexts. It is likely that chenopods are an...
From Quelites to Crop Indices: Thinking Through Maya Chenopods (2017)
While chenopod cultivation has been documented extensively in North and South America, evidence for similar practices in the Maya area is lacking. Macrobotanical evidence of Chenopodium recovered from pre-Hispanic Maya archaeological sites is limited to a few seeds. In contrast, the palynological record minimally suggests widespread tolerance across the entirety of the Maya area, if not intensive management or in some contexts even cultivation of Cheno-am genera. It is likely that chenopods...
From Rags to Riches: The Class, Status, and Power of Clothing Among Ancient Maya Women (2015)
Analysis of Maya female imagery has generally centered on the role of women as depicted on monumental architecture. While we understand these depictions to be tools of propaganda, they are often used to make assertions about the lived experience of ancient Maya women. In contrast to the analysis of highly politicized and highly public imagery depicted on monumental architecture, this paper examines depictions of feminine performance on a personalized medium: Maya painted vases. More...
From Second Tier to First Tier: Cerro Topiltepec in light of new research (2016)
Recent excavations at Cerro Jazmín, a first tier center in the Mixteca Alta, Oaxaca, indicate that this center´s main occupations were during the Early and Late Ramos phases and not during the Early Las Flores phase as it was previously established. These new data change our perspective on Cerro Topiltepec, a putative secondary center in the Nochixtlán valley, and its role in the region during the Early Las Flores phase. In this paper, we analyze the changing political landscape in the...
From Teotihuacan To Tenochtitlan: the Early Period Revisited (1975)
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.
From the Known to the Unknown: Exposing a Middle Preclassic Maya Power Structure at Pacbitun, Belize (2017)
The Middle Preclassic (900-300 BC) is known as a time for developing complexity in Maya society. The most perceptible evidence of this development is exhibited in the construction of the earliest forms of monumental architecture. However, for areas like the Belize River Valley, these structures are uncommon and poorly understood. Now, with the discovery of a large Middle Preclassic platform at the site of Pacbitun, we have the opportunity to increase our understanding of early monumental...
FROM TULA CHICO TO CHICHEN ITZA: IMPLICATIONS OF THE EPICLASSIC SCULPTURE OF TULA FOR THE NATURE AND TIMING OF TULA-CHICHEN CONTACT (2015)
Although most scholars now reject hypotheses of a Toltec invasion of Yucatan to explain similarities between the art of Tula and Chichen Itza in favor of models involving economic, political, and religious interaction between the two centers, questions remain concerning the nature and timing of this exchange. Some archaeologists and art historians posit a 9th-10th century florescence for "Toltec" Chichen, and argue that since this makes the "Toltec" style in Yucatan older than the Tollan Phase...
Full-coverage survey techniques in the mountains of the Sierra Sur, Oaxaca, Mexico. (2015)
This poster presents full-coverage mountain survey methodologies in light of the development of GPS technologies and GIS software and data during the last decade. Oaxaca, Mexico is a well-known area for settlement pattern research as various successful full-coverage regional survey projects have been done there. Settlement data of the Oaxaca region, gathered using full-coverage survey methods, have produced large continuous datasets of the spatial distribution of archaeological remains....
The Function of Candeleros and the Enigmatic Relationship between Teotihuacan and Honduras (2017)
The ceramic vessel known as Candeleros, which is commonly associated with Teotihuacan, is problematic for several reasons. Candeleros are generally small ovoid vessels with one or more chambers, often associated with domestic use and believed to be a type of incense burner. However, residue analysis that has been conducted to date does not always find materials associated with burning. Candeleros are most often associated with Teotihuacan, but are also found in Northern Honduras at sights such...
Function-based Processing Decisions in the Middle Balsas Region of Guerrero, Mexico (2015)
Petrography has long been recognized as a powerful way to understand pottery provenience and production decisions. Despite this, few studies focus on production decisions made by potters working in a single community, especially potters who practice household-level production. In this paper, I investigate decisions made by potters at the site of La Queseria, Guerrero, Mexico during the Classic Period (AD 200-900). Petrographic analysis of their vessels suggests that two major clay sources were...