Mesoamerica: Oaxaca or Southern Highlands (Geographic Keyword)
151-158 (158 Records)
This is an abstract from the "Polychromy, Multimediality, and Visual Complexity in Mesoamerican Art" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Following the arrival of Europeans to the New World, one of the most fascinating early exchanges of knowledge and technology that ensued was the introduction of the silk industry to Mexico. While in some places this was unsuccessful and/or short-lived, particularly in Oaxaca, it flourished for the better part of a...
What Happened on Monte Albán’s Main Plaza? Insights from a Socio-Spatial-Sensory Analysis (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Despite increasing scholarly interest in the role of plazas in prehispanic Mesoamerica, we still have a relatively incomplete understanding of what actually occurred in such places. In this paper, we address this vexing question for the Main Plaza at Monte Albán in Oaxaca, Mexico. Our study draws on data from recent fieldwork on the Main Plaza, including...
Where Text Meets Trowel: Using an Integrative Approach to Consider Internal Sociopolitical Dynamics at Postclassic Etlatongo (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Cholula to Chachoapan: Celebrating the Career of Michael Lind" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Mixteca Alta of Oaxaca is fortunate to have an impressive corpus of pre- and postconquest ethnohistorical sources that have been the focus of intensive academic scrutiny. Yet, emphasis on these sources provides an incomplete picture where only the histories of polities mentioned in the texts are taken as central, often to...
The Work of Feline Bones and Feline Imagery at Early Horizon Etlatongo, Oaxaca, Mexico (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Cholula to Chachoapan: Celebrating the Career of Michael Lind" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Large felines play crucial roles in origin narratives, cosmologies, and political authority in Mesoamerican societies, yet actual faunal remains and feline imagery are uncommon for the Early Horizon, from 1400 to 1000 cal BCE, especially in the highlands. Feline imagery appears in the stone sculptural corpus of the Gulf Olmec...
Yuzanu 36, a Late Archaic Site in the Mixteca Alta (2018)
We report the discovery and excavation of a site radiocarbon-dated to 3000 BC near the village of Yanhuitlan in Oaxaca. The site is buried under alluvium at a depth of 5m. At the time of its occupation it was situated on the floodplain of a large seasonal stream. The excavation of 30m2 revealed several superimposed features, including hearths, small refuse pits, and a bell-shaped pit. Debitage of different varieties of chert is ubiquituous, as is heat-spalled rock of different lithologies....
Yuzanu 50, An Early Paleoindian Site in the Mixteca Alta (2018)
Yuzanu 50 was discovered during a reconnaissance of the headwaters of the Yuzanu River as a scatter of debitage eroding from a barranca cutbank, from a palaeosol formed under wet meadows that lined the stream from the Terminal Pleistocene into the Holocene. Excavations exposed 15m2 of an occupation surface buried 13.5m below modern ground surface. An excavated assemblage consisting almost exclusively of biface reduction debris made of materials that crop out further upstream indicates that this...
Zapotec Funerary Rites as Documented by Alfonso Caso: Mining Archival Materials to Understand Ancient Ritual Behavior at Monte Albán (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The precolumbian site of Monte Albán in Oaxaca, southern Mexico, presents a continuing challenge for scholars because the earliest scientific excavations at the site, conducted in the 1930s by noted archaeologist Alfonso Caso and his collaborators, were only partially published. This is particularly disappointing since many of the tombs of Monte Alban were...
Zapotec Funerary Tradition: A Perspective Between Bioarchaeology and Landscape Archaeology (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Living and Dying in Mountain and Highland Landscapes" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The state of Oaxaca, southern Mexico has a very diverse topography, from highlands to floodplains, where mortuary and funerary patterns have been practiced by the prehispanic indigenous Zapotec for at least 3000 years. From simple graves to very complex and elaborate tombs, the Zapotecs used and reused their mortuary space within the...