Mesoamerica: Southern (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Charles Cheek.

Dress is an object made up of other objects. I combine a practice approach with the chaîne opératoire and behavior chains methods to analyze technical and social acts involving dress objects. The analysis starts with one segment of the actions involving dress—the actual act of dressing. The study includes only court scenes that appear to memorialize historic events, although some of the observations and conclusions can be applied to other kinds of scenes and other media. After identifying the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kathryn Sampeck.

This is an abstract from the "Postclassic Mesoamerica: The View from the Southern Frontier" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A significant amount of archaeological evidence demonstrates that Late Postclassic Mesoamericans exchanged cacao intensively and over long distances. A reason for high-volume cacao commerce in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was the expansion of its use from a ritual offering and the ingredient in socially important...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paul Amaroli.

This is an abstract from the "Reconstructing the Political Organization of Pre-Columbian Nicaragua" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Since half a century ago, it has been recognized that the Early Postclassic in the territory of western El Salvador represents a sweeping departure from its Classic period antecedents, as seen in the type site of Cihuatán. Its nature has been variously described as generically Mexican, or central Mexican and Gulf...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Clifford Brown.

The quantitative model of diffusion traditionally studied in archaeology uses Gaussian statistics and Brownian motion to envisage a slow wave of advance. It originates from Fisher’s model for the diffusion of advantageous alleles across the landscape, but was then applied in archaeology to the diffusion of agriculture from the Near East into Europe. More recently, Lévy flights, which are random walks with step lengths derived from power-law distributions, have been proposed as models for human...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ana Luisa Izquierdo. Virginia Arieta.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Hay cierto acuerdo entre los arqueólogos que los olmecas integraron verdaderos estados. Aunque se sostiene que eran sistemas centralizados, la naturaleza política de esta organización permanece todavía poco clara, así como sus mecanismos de funcionamiento. Por ahora, los significativos avances en el conocimiento de la más antigua capital olmeca, San...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lucha Martínez De Luna. Juan Ignacio Macias Quintero.

This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Trade and Exchange" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Preliminary explorations at the previously unknown Zoque site of O’na Tök reveals within a mid-montane wet forest, a multifaceted archaeological landscape containing an early ceremonial center, an expansive area of long architectural platforms, and nearby caves used for ritual purposes. Artifacts recovered on the surface suggest occupation during...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lucha Martinez De Luna. Juan Ignacio Macias Quintero. Blanca Salazar Corzo.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In June of 2016, the archaeological site designated O'na Tök was recorded as a primary center in the western portion of the Central Depression of Chiapas, Mexico. Preliminary studies of cultural material recovered on the surface and test pits suggest the Zoque of O'na Tök participated in an exchange network with contemporary centers during the Early...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dolores Piperno.

The development of agricultural societies, one of the most transformative events in human and ecological history, began independently in a number of world regions including the American tropics during a period of profound environmental change at the Pleistocene-Holocene transition. Plant domestication is at its core an evolutionary process involving both natural and human selection for traits favorable for harvesting and consumption. Scientists from a number of disciplines have long sought to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Milley. Armando Anaya-Hernández. Nicholas P. Dunning. Kathryn Reese-Taylor. Debra S. Walker.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Yaxnohcah is a large site in Campeche, Mexico with evidence of continual occupation from the early Middle Preclassic into the Postclassic. In 2014, the Yaxnohcah Archaeological Project commissioned a high resolution lidar scan of the region, which has allowed for accurate modeling of surface hydrology and significantly contributed to our understanding of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Arthur Joyce.

This is an abstract from the "The Vibrancy of Ruins: Ruination Studies in Ancient Mesoamerica" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper examines the materiality of two ruined monumental architectural complexes in prehispanic Oaxaca: the Main Plaza of the mountaintop city of Monte Albán in the Oaxaca Valley and the acropolis of Río Viejo located on the Río Verde’s coastal floodplain. Both of these impressive complexes were important political and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Pedro Ramon Celis.

El proyecto arqueológico "Cerro del Gallo", se desprende de los trabajos de investigación realizados en el Conjunto Monumental de Atzompa, dentro del sitio arqueológico de Monte Albán. La participación de diversos actores de la población civil, gubernamentales y de la iniciativa privada ha podido concatenarse de tal forma que, se ha podido construir de manera satisfactoria un ambicioso proyecto de investigación, que involucra además de un objetivo académico como lo es el discernir los procesos...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Whittaker Schroder.

This is an abstract from the "Dynamic Frontiers in the Archaeology of Chiapas" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Maya have inhabited diverse environments in southern Mesoamerica, typified by marked seasonal contrasts between wet and dry periods. Access to water as a resource for agriculture and transportation varied spatially and seasonally for Maya communities, with scholarly and public attention often focusing on the challenges posed by...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Joel Palka. Fabiola Sánchez.

This is an abstract from the "Dynamic Frontiers in the Archaeology of Chiapas" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A small rural stopover site in the frontier along overland Late Postclassic (ca. 1300–1500 CE) Maya and Aztec trade and travel routes was identified at Mensabak, Chiapas, Mexico. This site is similar in function to rural Old World and Andean caravan stop overs, such as caravanserai and way stations, where travelers and traders obtained...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Laura Brodie.

Analyses of settlement locations (such as hamlets and farmsteads) within the Volcán Barú region of Panama and their associated periods of occupation suggest that during certain times, such as the Chiriquí Period, soil fertility was an important factor in determining the location. However, during other periods, it does not seem to have been significant. There also is a centralization of the population during the late formative, or Late Bugaga Phase, which correlates with previous findings of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mauricio Díaz García. Cameron L. McNeil. Agapito Carballo. Samuel Pinto. Reina Hernández.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The site of Río Amarillo, on the far eastern side of the Copan Valley, was integrated into the economy of the Copan polity during the Classic period. However, the groups surrounding the core of Río Amarillo long outlasted both Copan’s center and the secondary center of Río Amarillo. This paper will explore the ceramic evidence from the hinterlands to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Edy Barrios. Cameron L. McNeil. Mauricio Diaz Garcia. Antolín Velásquez.

This is an abstract from the "The Pre-Columbian Cultures of Honduras after AD 900" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent and ongoing research at residential groups at the sites of Río Amarillo and Quebrada Piedras Negras is providing a better understanding of the lives of commoners and of the population dynamics during the latter part of the Late Classic through the Postclassic Period. These sites share the second-widest pocket of the Copan River...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Shanti Morell-Hart.

This is an abstract from the "Fryxell Symposium in Honor of Dolores Piperno" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over the past several decades, Dolores Piperno has made broad contributions to archaeology and deep contributions to paleoethnobotany. Her published work includes studies on the origins of agriculture in the Neotropics, the presence of cooked plants in Neanderthal diets, the process of domestication, the use of wild cereals in the Upper...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Laura Matthew. William Fowler.

The first Spanish foothold in Guatemala took root during the first invasion of Guatemala led by Pedro de Alvarado in 1524 at the Kaqchikel city of Iximche. Historians regard this as the first capital of Santiago de los Caballeros de Guatemala. After its location at Iximche, Santiago had two sequential locations near Olintepeque and in Chimaltenango. The ruins of the first permanent Santiago de Guatemala, founded in 1527 in the Valley of Almolonga and destroyed in 1541, lie beneath the modern...