Mesoamerica: Central Mexico (Geographic Keyword)
226-250 (250 Records)
This is an abstract from the "Music Archaeology's Paradox: Contextual Dependency and Contextual Expressivity" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Teotihuacan Sound Mapping Project explores the role that sound and music played in the ancient urban environment of the site. The sound tools and musical instruments of Teotihuacan are re-created and played in different architectural settings, and the instrumental and architectural acoustics subsequently...
Thread Production in Ocotelulco, Tlaxcallan, Mexico (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Tlaxcallan: Mesoamerica's Bizarro World" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological excavations undertaken by the Tlaxcallan Archaeological Project have recovered an important sample of spindle whorls from Late Postclassic – Early Colonial (1420 -1540 A.D.) domestic contexts in Ocotelulco, a subsection of the urban site of Tlaxcallan, Mexico. In this paper, we present the results of the analysis of identified whorl...
Tlalancaleca: Ceramics and Interregional Interactions in Formative Central Mexico (2018)
Using ceramics as a proxy for social contact, we discuss a long history of interregional interactions of Tlalancaleca with other areas during the Formative Period. We have observed some clear changes of ceramic assemblages in the transitions between the Middle, Late, and Terminal Formative (or between the Texoloc, Tezoquipan, and Late Tezoquipan phases). While we do not imply that the presence or absence of certain ceramic traditions serves as direct indicators for political control, it is...
Tlaloques, Tiemperos, and Trees: Cultural Models of Nature in Central Mexico (2018)
Abundant water-related art and architecture produced by Teotihuacanos and Mexica-Aztecs in the central Mexican highlands coupled with the rhetoric of today’s farmers from the same region regarding the catastrophic impacts of changes in local seasonal rainfall patterns make it clear that access to rainwater has always been a crucial factor for agricultural success in the semi-arid highlands of central Mexico, especially in communities that lack a reliable water source for irrigation. We collect a...
Tlatilco Revisited (2018)
Since Tlatilco was discovered in the 1930s by Miguel Covarrubias, our understanding of the Early Formative site has changed with a steady flow over the last 80 years. During the 1940s, 50s, and 60s Tlatilco was excavated revealing the dynamic of the site, with the objective to establish the chronology and preserve the many burials. There seems to be extensive evidence that Tlatilco in fact was more than a burial site. The established (calibrated) dates for Tlatilco to be between 1200-900 BCE...
Tlaxcallan Pottery Manufacture and Restricted Networks (2018)
The debate whether pottery sherds equal people or just their ideas has been ongoing since the days of pioneers such as Ford and Spaulding. The advent of new technologies has given a new wind to old debates in which the questions surrounding pottery styles are examined more closely to determine their origin. Compositional analysis has been especially helpful in shedding new light on the relations between artifacts and people. Compositional analysis carried out on Postclassic Tlaxcallan pottery...
Toward an Archaeology of Indigenous Conquerors: Household Ritual Life at Tepeticpac, Tlaxcala (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Advances in Puebla/Tlaxcala Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over the course of its two excavation field seasons in 2017 and 2022, the community-collaborative Proyecto de Arqueología Cotidiana de Tepeticpac has shifted its focus from the Postclassic period, when the Tlaxcallans formed a state that maintained its independence from the Aztec empire, to the early colonial period, when residents allied with...
Trabajos de recorrido de superficie y excavación en el sitio Santa Lucía 1, resultados preliminares de un hueco regional en la arqueología del noroeste de la cuenca de México (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Aproximaciones arqueológicas y paleontológicas en Santa Lucía, México" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Se hará una revisión de los antecedentes arqueológicos en la zona, dónde el principal asentamiento corresponde al islote artificial de Xaltocan, de filiación otomí, y cuya fundación data del periodo Posclásico temprano y se reconoce por la presencia de cerámica azteca I y II, sin embargo, en el Proyecto de Salvamento...
Transportation or Transformation?: Road Depictions in Relaciones Geográficas of 16th-Century New Spain (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Manifesting Movement Materially: Broadening the Mesoamerican View" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The 16th century was a time of extraordinary cultural exchange in Central Mexico. The heterogeneous indigenous populations interacted with recently arrived Spanish and the Creole populations. In this paper, I examine one manifestation of these peoples’ concepts of place, space, and movement as visually represented in...
Tridimensionality, Multimediality, Polychromy, and Other Forms of Visual Complexity in Late Postclassic Mosaic Art (2021)
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. Building on previous works that led to the definition of various stylistic families within the corpus of Late Postclassic central and southwestern Mexican mosaics, the paper explores the various formal and technological resources that each group of mosaics employed to attain specific forms of visual complexity....
Twentieth century settlement patterns in the Basin of Mexico: In search of Pre-Colombian roots for regional demography and land use (2019)
This is an abstract from the "The Legacies of The Basin of Mexico: The Ecological Processes in the Evolution of a Civilization, Part 1" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological settlement pattern surveys in the Basin of Mexico during the 1960s and 70s capitalized on cultural behavior that seemed to share important connections with the Pre-Columbian past. The labor-intensive agricultural economy that dominated the region throughout much of the...
Unveiling the Artisan Secrets of the Lapidary Goods from the Great Temple of the Aztecs (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Approaches to Cultural and Biological Complexity in Mexico at the Time of Spanish Conquest" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent studies have demonstrated that the cultural provenance and diversity of the goods found in the offerings from the Sacred Precinct of Tenochtitlan are more complex than the archaeologists thought, overlapping their acquisition by tribute, exchange, war prizes, or looting. In the case of the...
Urban growth and land use at Chicoloapan, an Epiclassic town in the southern Basin of Mexico (2019)
This is an abstract from the "The Legacies of The Basin of Mexico: The Ecological Processes in the Evolution of a Civilization, Part 1" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The extensive surveys of the 1960s that culminated in Sanders, Parsons, and Santley’s pivotal 1979 volume put numerous archaeological sites on the map and advanced knowledge of the changing sociopolitical landscape of the Basin of Mexico through time. Data resulting from this work,...
Urban Palimpsest Landscapes: Interpreting the Teotihuacan LiDAR map (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Journeying to the South, from Mimbres (New Mexico) to Malpaso (Zacatecas) and Beyond: Papers in Honor of Ben A. Nelson" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. With 54% of the world’s population living in urban zones, investigating the nature and impact of urban centers has never been more relevant. Archaeology’s unique ability to reconstruct prehistoric urban systems across the long dureé makes the Pre-Columbian metropolis of...
The Usefulness of Institutional Analysis (IAD) for Defining Focal Action Situations in Mexican Cultural Heritage: PROCEDE-INAH and CONACULTA Outcomes after 1992 Reforms (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper analyzes how polycentricity governance is articulated around cultural heritage (CH) performance in an overview of changing contextual factors and focal action situation in Mexican Cultural System (MCS). This paper adds to conversation historical analysis from law changes across time in both countries, and also uses the Network of Adjacent Action...
Using LiDAR to Map an Ancient Purépecha Water Management System in ArcGIS (2018)
Recent applications of LiDAR technology at the Late Postclassic city of Angamuco, located in the heartland of the ancient Purépecha Empire in modern day Michoacan, Mexico are allowing for the identification and analysis of urban features in innovative ways. A complex system of constructed water management features consisting of reservoirs, sunken plazas, and connective canals were a vital form of infrastructure that were required for the movement of water across the dynamic landscape upon which...
Village to City: Formative Period Political Evolution in Central Mexico (2018)
Current research has prompted rethinking about the early development of sedentism, agricultural economies, and complex societies in Central Mexico. We discuss new evidence of significant interconnected changes ca.1000 BC that through multiple trajectories involved intensified maize production, expansion of sedentary villages, expanded interaction networks, and increased social complexity. With the establishment of the first cities, the Late Formative saw corporate political economy strategies...
War Milpas: Wetlands and Institutional Agriculture during the Late Postclassic in Tlaxcallan, Mexico (2021)
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. The Antigua Cienega de Tlaxcala is an area of wetlands located at the core of the Puebla-Tlaxcala valley in central Mexico. Historically, these marshlands have been exploited agriculturally using drained field...
Wealth and Ownership of Indigenous Goods among Spanish Colonizers (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeology and Material Culture of the Spanish Invasion of Mesoamerica and Forging of New Spain" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Scholars have debated the relationship between ownership of indigenous goods among Spanish colonizers and different economic, cultural, and social variables. Some argue that wealth had a strong impact on consumption patterns, and wealthy colonizers used more European imports and less...
Were-Jaguars, Birdmen, and Community Performance in the Rain Petition Ceremonies in the Caves of the Upper Balsas River, Eastern Guerrero, Mexico (2018)
In this paper, we address the role of leaders and their communities during the performance of ceremonies associated with rain petition in a network of caves located in the Mixtec-Tlapanec-Nahua region of Eastern Guerrero. We present newly discovered archaeological evidence in the caves of Pozo de Muerto, Casa de la Lluvia, Cauadzidziqui, Juxtlahuaca and Gobernadores de Techan, as well as ethnographic analogy to shed new light on the use of caves as arenas of ritual and political performance from...
What Lies between the Dots: Exploring the Archaeology of the Broader Basin of Mexico Landscape (2019)
This is an abstract from the "The Legacies of The Basin of Mexico: The Ecological Processes in the Evolution of a Civilization, Part 2" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Basin of Mexico survey established a diachronic palette of settlement locations that has served as the baseline for a wide range of studies. But settlements only comprise the nucleus of the most visible form of past human activities. A wide range of activities, agrarian and...
Where is Camaxtli? Assessing the Iconography of Tlaxcallan Collective Government (2018)
Scholars have acknowledged, for many decades, that Late Postclassic Tlaxcalla (n1250/1300-1519 A.D.) was a state level political entity ruled by a form of collective government having Camaxtli as its main patron deity. Both conceptions are constantly reproduced in academic work although they derive explicitly from sixteenth century historical sources. Unfortunately, few works have undertaken the task of contrasting colonial writings against archaeological evidence in order to test if such...
Women Who Create and Feed the Gods: Female Priestly Work in Mesoamerica and the Andean Area (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper aims to study the role played by female characters presented in the Mexica and Inca religious hierarchy in a comparative perspective. In first case, we mention the cihuamocexiuhzauhque, the "women who fast for a year," (Mazzetto 2017, 2020) while in the second we refer to the acllacuna. The activities carried out by these ritual specialists...
Years to Remember: Another Look at Teotihuacan’s Calendrical Signs (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Teotihuacan: Multidisciplinary Research on Mesoamerica's Classic Metropolis" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. We offer a new look at a series of carved monuments and examples of rock art from Classic Teotihuacan culture (ca. AD 100–500) of highland central Mexico, all of which bear single calendrical dates in the 260-day calendar. Monuments such as those of Cerro Xoconoch and the Plaza de las Columnas serve as records...
Zooarchaeology and Bioarchaeology: Ceremonial Feasts and Human Caches at Plaza of the Columns Complex, Teotihuacan (2018)
Preliminary analyses of the zooarchaeological assemblage from the Plaza of the Columns Complex illustrate a snapshot into past human activities such as specialized ceremonial events and faunal acquisition strategies for food consumption. The fauna from this complex, located just northwest of the Sun Pyramid, add to the database of forty years of archaeofaunal exploration throughout Teotihuacan. Here, we focus upon animal species distributed among four areas to understand the economic and ritual...