Mesoamerica: Gulf Coast (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mauricio Cuevas. Lourdes Budar.

El corredor costero al este de Los Tuxtlas delimitado por las lagunas de Sontecomapan, y del Ostión, los volcanes de Santa Marta y San Martín Pajapan y el mar del Golfo de México, fue el escenario prehispánico de una alta densidad poblacional que entre su desarrollo contó con el emplazamiento de un complejo sistema portuario. Los recursos naturales que ofrecen los cuerpos de agua en esta zona sin duda fueron explotados para su consumo y comercio desde el Formativo Medio hasta el Clásico Tardío....

DOCUMENT Citation Only María Andrea Celis Ng Teajan.

Desde el descubrimiento de una ofrenda masiva de objetos rituales hallada fortuitamente en un arroyo, el sitio Arqueológico de Arroyo Pesquero enclavado en el área nuclear olmeca ha generado una serie de discusiones acerca de la autenticidad de piezas dispersas en museos y colecciones privadas. Las piezas más representativas son máscaras y hachas de piedra verde con una iconografía propia de la cultura olmeca. Sin embargo, una parte del material del sitio se ha subestimado. Por Medellín Zenil...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ivonne Reyes Carlo.

Una constante en la Costa del Golfo es utilizar elementos de deidades del Altiplano (Tláloc por ejemplo) para interpretar las representaciones de seres con características sobrenaturales pertenecientes a esta área de estudio. Si bien, podrían existir rasgos iconográficos que justificaran esas semejanzas no podemos únicamente traslapar elementos similares entre unas imágenes y otras ya que sólo se obtiene una propuesta parcial sobre su interpretación y tal vez nos aleje de su significado...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kyle Urquhart. Wesley Stoner.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The ancient peoples of Classic Period Veracruz employed a suite of strategies for agricultural intensification aimed at increasing agricultural yields and managing seasonal rainfall. One common strategy involved the construction of gridded canal networks with alternating raised field platforms which drained water in the wet season and retained it in the dry...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Caitlin Earley.

Recent study of an hacha from Classic-period Veracruz in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art reveals that hachas and palmas may have been used as costume elements in ritual performances related to the ballgame. As costume elements, these sculptures would have allowed actors to assume the identity of captives, rulers, or deities. This accords well with iconographic evidence of ballgame-related ritual performances in Veracruz, and suggests comparisons with artworks from other...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sam Holley-Kline.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the history and ethnography of archaeology, only recently has archaeological labor – both administrative and physical – become an area of interest. In the Mexican context, recent historical research has dated the emergence of institutional archaeology to the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz (1876-1911). However, there are few site-scale studies that explore...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Krista Eschbach.

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. The Port of Veracruz was significant not only as the landing site of Hernán Cortés, but also as a central gateway for European colonists and African slaves entering New Spain. First encounters between immigrants and natives had significant long-term consequences, but initial interactions were only a starting...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Yuko Kita. Annick Daneels. Alfonso Romo de Vivar.

This is an abstract from the "Plant Exudates and Other Binders, Adhesives, and Coatings in the Americas" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Investigations on monumental earthen architecture in the Classic period La Joya site in Central Veracruz led to the hypothesis that a bitumen additive was used as a stabilizer in construction. The use of bitumen resulted in increased resistance to weathering in a humid tropical environment, as well as control of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nadya Prociuk.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In North America the archaeologically defined prehistoric culture of the Rio Grande Delta is essentially unknown outside of the state of Texas. Even within Texas the culture of the Rio Grande Delta is poorly understood. Adding to this obscurity is the lack of cross-border communication or collaboration between researchers regarding the material culture of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Aurelie Manin. Camilla Speller. Gregory Pereira. Christine Lefèvre.

In Mesoamerica, the tropical colourful birds were highly valued for their feathers. Among them, the scarlet macaw (Ara macao) provided bright red, blue and yellow feathers that were traded to the Central Mexican Highlands and, beyond Mesoamerica, until the American Southwest. As suggested by ethnohistoric records, some birds may have been maintained in captivity and harvested to supply the demand in feathers. In spite of examples of large-scale macaw management in the American Southwest, there...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Renee Bonzani.

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. This paper describes the carbonized wood remains recovered from fifty-five heavy fractions of flotation from seven units and fifty light fractions of flotation from six units collected during the excavations of the Matacanela Site in Veracruz, Mexico. Environmental comparisons are...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Krista Eschbach.

The social structure of colonial New Spain underwent large-scale transformations following the Spanish conquest. Changes in social categories of identification evolved through an interplay between religious and civil administrators -- who attempted to control colonial populations -- and local social relationships of interpersonal interaction. I examine social relations and changing categories of identification at the colonial Port of Veracruz. Throughout the colonial period, Veracruz served as a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cherra Wyllie.

This is an abstract from the "Sculpture of the Ancient Mexican Gulf Coast, Part 2" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Cerro de las Mesas Monument 2 is a colossal portrait head. Its flattened rear surface contains a relief-carved scene with a ruler in a broad-brimmed hat, vanquished captive with a calendric sign above his or her head, and a worn hieroglyphic text placed between them. In its entirety Monument 2 bridges the site’s Olmec heritage with...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dana Bardolph. Amber VanDerwarker. 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. Although there has been much speculation about the nature of agriculture along the Formative and Classic period Gulf Coast of Mexico, the local and regional subsistence economies of these periods remain poorly understood, particularly for Classic-period sites. In this paper, we...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Patricia Olga Hernandez Espinoza.

This is an abstract from the "The Health and Welfare of Children in the Past" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Funerary practices identified in the Architectural Funerary Complex of La Noria in Tamtoc, SLP, have been interpreted as belonging to a space used to symbolize the social and possibly political importance of the individuals who were buried there during the Late Postclassical period (1350-1521 a. P.). Most of the burials correspond to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rex Koontz.

This is an abstract from the "Sculpture of the Ancient Mexican Gulf Coast, Part 2" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. As part of a larger study on Classic Veracruz fragmented bodies and sculptures, I sketch two case studies of contexts in which fragmented yokes, decapitated heads, and figurine body fragmentation come together in Protoclassic and Early Classic Tres Zapotes and Cerro de las Mesas.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cherra Wyllie.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Tuxtlas Polychrome ceramics of south-central Veracruz, Mexico occupy a visible presence in precolumbian museum collections. Boldly rendered deities and zoomorphic figures are the focal point of bowls, plates, and vases, their images alluding to a complex supernatural world. While well represented among the corpus of Classic Veracruz artifacts, these vessels...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brian Ostahowski.

This presentation examines the effects of land loss to the coastal archaeological record. Impacts observable at different scales (coast-wide, regional, and the individual archaeological site) demonstrate that our ability to understand Louisiana's past may be permanently altered. New directions for future research and community engagement are proposed.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marcie Venter. Sean Carr. Shayna Lindquist.

Several Pre-Classic assemblages in the Mesoamerican Gulf lowlands are characterized by obsidian from the Guadalupe Victoria source. Tools produced are characterized by flake-core reduction strategies. The combined visual characteristics of the source material and technology employed are important chronological indicators. But, general similarities in the appearance of the raw material and factors such as variable thickness create the potential for overlap with other sources, such as Pico de...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Matthew Meyer. Marcie Venter. Christopher Pool.

This is an abstract from the "Ceramics and Archaeological Sciences" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over the past 20 years a growing assemblage of Aztec-style ceramics, specifically Texcoco Molded censers and molds, has been recovered from sites throughout the northeastern Tochtepec province of the Triple Alliance Empire. In this presentation, we examine the chemical compositions using pXRF, paste recipes, and decorative attributes and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alberto Ortiz Brito. Arlina Morales Guillen. Daira Hernandez Bellido.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper examines the results of the Proyecto Arqueologico Nestepe-Rancho Cobata conducted in the municipality of Santiago Tuxtla, Veracruz. The project explores the role of Olmec sculptures in the development and contestation of social memory in Tres Zapotes and its hinterland, during the Epi-Olmec period. Previous research carried out in the area show...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Pool.

This is an abstract from the "Coffee, Clever T-Shirts, and Papers in Honor of John S. Justeson" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The greenstone figure known as the Tuxtla Statuette is significant as one of 12 objects with an Epi-Olmec text, and the first to be described in the scholarly literature. For over a century it was misidentified as having been recovered from the Sierra de los Tuxtlas, near the town of San Andrés Tuxtla, Veracruz. The author...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Hirokazu Kotegawa.

Uno de los grandes problemas de los monumentos escultóricos olmecas es que, para identificar la cronología y la cultura pertinente, la mayoría de ellos se ha perdido el contexto arqueológico. Por ello, existen algunos monumentos dudosos por su estilo y los de la procedencia desconocida en el corpus total de ellos. El sitio Estero Rabón es conocido como uno de los centros secundarios de San Lorenzo y fue reportado con la presencia de varios monumentos escultóricos olmecas. Sin embargo, casi todos...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Billie Follensbee.

This is an abstract from the "The Precolumbian Dotted-Diamond-Grid Pattern: References and Techniques" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. As ancient cultures throughout the world developed textiles, knotted and woven fabrics lent themselves to the development of geometric rhombus patterns, first as the diamond-shaped mesh of knotted nets and later as square patterns in twined gauze and plain-weave cloth. Further early experimentation in basketry and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bethany Swartz. Wesley Stoner. Barbara Stark.

This is an abstract from the "Regional and Intensive Site Survey: Case Studies from Mesoamerica" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In recent years, the Mexican Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía (INEGI) released a LiDAR-based digital elevation module (DEM) that provides a mechanism to augment the area covered by pedestrian surveys. The DEM is of low resolution (5-m horizontal grid) compared to research-grade LIDAR studies in Mesoamerica,...