Mesoamerica: Pacific Coast (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ryan Anderson. Christopher Jazwa.

This is an abstract from the "Palaeoeconomic and Environmental Reconstructions in Island and Coastal Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Changes to coastal environments from natural and anthropogenic factors have influenced human subsistence and settlement patterns throughout the Baja California peninsula. These changes are visible both in the archaeological record and present-day human settlements. We discuss long-term human-environment...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Oswaldo Chinchilla.

The Pacific coast of Guatemala has long been regarded as a natural corridor that facilitated travel and trade, and served as a route of migration and invasion, connecting eastern Mexico, the Guatemalan highlands, and El Salvador, with further regions of Mexico and Central America. At first glance, the natural configuration of the coast seems to provide unobstructed passage, especially when compared with the rugged terrain of the adjacent highlands. The maps in many publications feature vague...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mikael Fauvelle.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Fracción Mujular is a small domestic settlement located on the slopes of Cerro Bernal near the Pacific Coast of Chiapas, Mexico. Founded under the auspices of the Early Classic center of Los Horcones, Fracción Mujular was occupied for nearly one thousand years, persisting through the Collapse of Los Horcones and entering into a period of rapid expansion during...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jason Paling. Justin Lowry.

This is an abstract from the "Centralizing Central America: New Evidence, Fresh Perspectives, and Working on New Paradigms" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The emergence of social complexity often incorporates social, political, and economic inter- and intra-regional interactions. In this paper we examine the emerging social spheres and exchange networks that developed during the Tempisque period (500 BC–AD 300) among small prehistoric agrarian...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Pohl. Michael Mathiowetz.

This is an abstract from the "Coastal Connections: Pacific Coastal Links from Mexico to Ecuador" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The pioneering fieldwork of Seler, Lumholtz, Saville, Sauer, Vaillant and Elkholm, the Sociedad Mexicana de Antropología to officially recognize "Mixteca-Puebla" as the fourth and last major cultural horizon of the ancient Mexican World in 1945. By 1960 however, H.B. Nicholson had reduced Mixteca-Puebla to a provincial...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Jazwa. Amira Ainis. Ryan Anderson. Karim Bulhusen Muñoz. Harumi Fujita.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. We present the results of our preliminary analysis of the archaeological resources in Cabo Pulmo National Park (CPNP), Baja California Sur, Mexico. Since 1995, CPNP has yielded evidence for ecological recovery of marine resources, although long-term prospects are still in question. As important are the cultural resources in the park and surrounding area,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Daniels. Hector Neff. Heather Thakar.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the Archaic to Early Formative transition, the Soconusco populations began adopting more sedentary subsistence strategies and investing more in their local environments. Evidence from sediment cores demonstrates that during the Archaic, populations were burning inland landscapes and starting to grow maize. The environmental effects of incipient...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Rafael McCormick Alcorta.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Networks of long-distance exchange in quotidian commodities are essential aspects of prehistoric economies. On the Pacific Slope of Guatemala, there was no more important commodity than obsidian, which accounts for almost all cutting edges found in archaeological contexts. Obsidian sourcing studies on the Pacific Slope have been limited, relied on very...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rebecca Mendelsohn.

In southern Mesoamerica, the transition from the Formative period to Classic period (100 B.C.- A.D. 400) was a time of population decline, cessation of monumental construction, and the abandonment of many sites. Environmental explanations such as drought and volcanic activity have been proposed as potential trigger factors for the widespread collapse at the close of the Formative period. Current evidence suggests that residents of the early capital of Izapa, located on a piedmont environmental...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Hector Neff.

This is an abstract from the "Ceramics and Archaeological Sciences" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological mounds within the mangrove zone west of the Rio Cahuacan, in far-southern Chiapas, Mexico, have dense surface remains of broken Plumbate pottery, solid ceramic cylinders, and various other kinds of pyro-technological evidence. Clays from the region match Tohil Plumbate chemical composition, thus solidifying the inference that the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Rafael McCormick Alcorta.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Lithic artisans were critical to society throughout the Americas prior to the introduction of iron by Europeans. On the Pacific Coast of Guatemala, where no local sources of chipped-stone imported obsidian was available, obsidian was used to meet social demand for cutting edges. Throughout time this demand was met by a mixture of importing finished tools...

DOCUMENT Citation Only R. Scott Baxter.

This is an abstract from the "Heritage Sites at the Intersection of Landscape, Memory, and Place: Archaeology, Heritage Commemoration, and Practice" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Summit Camp was occupied by Chinese railroad workers from 1864 to 1869. It was the longest occupied camp associated with the building of the transcontinental railroad. Workers from the camp excavated a series of tunnels through the granite bedrock of the Sierra Nevada...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Juan Sereno-Uribe.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent surveying and excavation works on the coast of the state of Guerrero and Oaxaca has shown that this is a region with ample archaeological potential. Dr. Román Piña Chan who made several visits during the sixties in that area, already indicated that the systematic study of the coast, would allow us to understand the development of various groups located...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mikael Fauvelle.

Fracción Mujular is a modest residential site located on the Pacific Coast of Chiapas, Mexico. Long known for the Central Mexican iconography found on its carved stelae, investigations conducted during the winter of 2017 represent the first excavations of the site. This paper presents the results of these excavations, as well as subsequent laboratory analysis. We now know that Fracción Mujular has a history that covers over one thousand years of occupation, from the Early Classic to the Late...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Caitlin Buck. James Zeidler.

This is an abstract from the "Constructing Chronologies II: The Big Picture with Bayes and Beyond" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The radiocarbon record from sustained archaeological field research in the Jama Valley of coastal Ecuador has provided a robust dataset for Bayesian chronological modeling using multiple archaeological sites from a valley-wide landscape. This paper delves into greater detail on the development of the model’s prior...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Pedro Urquijo.

This is an abstract from the "Landscapes: Archaeological, Historic, and Ethnographic Perspectives from the New World / Paisajes: Perspectivas arqueológicas, históricas y etnográficas desde el Nuevo Mundo" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Through a geographical and historical analysis, we propose to interpret the territorial and ritual organization of the landscapes in the Colombino Codex, which alludes mainly to the heroic feats of Lord 8 Venado...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Danny Zborover. John Pohl.

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. Recent studies show that the Spanish conquest of the Oaxacan Pacific Coast was shaped, and even orchestrated, by indigenous kingdoms (Zapotecs, Mixtecs) and allied groups (Pochutecs, Chontal) that vied for control over key trading ports. These same indigenous players continued their cycles of conflicts,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Claudia Garcia-Des Lauriers.

This is an abstract from the "Mountains, Rain, and Techniques of Governance in Mesoamerica" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Located on the Pacific Coast of Chiapas, the Early Classic site of Los Horcones is known for being an important gateway community where goods and ideas are distributed. Teotihuacano merchants established a strong presence that included exchanges of commodities and ideas. In this presentation, I would like to look more closely...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Claudia Garcia-Des Lauriers.

Artistic evidence of interactions is among the most salient and most debated in terms of the relationships that it represents between different polities and regions. Traditionally, the focus of analysis is on stylistic and iconographic influences and a discussion of retention of original meanings or evidences of disjunctions. Based on my research on the topic of Classic Period interactions from the Pacific Coast of Chiapas, I have come to the conclusion that our perspectives are much too...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mallory Melton.

This paper uses macrobotanical and microbotanical remains to investigate the impacts of developing sociopolitical complexity on the foodways of Middle Preclassic inhabitants of the Pacific coast of Guatemala. I use these datasets to explore how urbanization affected food-related practices of residents of La Blanca (900-600 BCE). Macrobotanical remains from house floors facilitate comparisons between elite and commoner foodways, while starch grains and phytoliths extracted from grinding...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Virginie Renson. Marx Navarro Castillo. Andrea Cucina. Brendan J. Culleton. Hector Neff.

This study presents the strontium isotopic analysis of enamel, dentine and bones of four individuals recovered from two sites (Miguel Aleman and PIN7), dating respectively from the Early and Late Classic period, both located the Pacific coast of Chiapas. The enamel samples of the four individuals have a Sr isotopic composition that varies between 0.70540 and 0.70631 for the 87Sr/86Sr ratio. The results were compared to data available for human bones and teeth, as well as rock, plant, water, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marimar Becerra Alvarez. Marcie Venter.

This is an abstract from the "Olmec Manifestations and Ongoing Societal Transformations in the Tuxtlas Uplands: A View from Matacanela" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Matacanela es componente esencia de la historia regional de Los Tuxtlas, su estudio es fundamental para la comprensión de la dinámica social diacrónica y sincrónica que se dio en la región. El sitio cuenta con una secuencia ocupacional desde el Formativo Medio hasta el Clásico Tardío...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nobuyuki Ito.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. En la Costa Sur de Mesoamérica, se han descubierto numerosas estelas esculpidas. Sin embargo, solamente una docena de estas se registró dentro de un contexto arqueológico del período Preclásico. No obstante, en esta región se localizan dos sitios que poseen estelas con las fechas calendáricas más tempranas del Bak’tun 7, como Chiapa de Corzo y El Baúl,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Richard Stark. Alondra Flores. Fernando Gonzalez.

This is an abstract from the "Fire-Cracked Rock: Research in Cooking and Noncooking Contexts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Earth-oven processing of agave food and drink has a time depth in Colima, Mexico, of more than 7,000 years, providing a notable example of localized socioeconomic intensification processes throughout the Holocene. The cultural setting for this research is observant of contemporary Agave Culture, a term used to describe...