Mesoamerica: Western (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andres Saul Alcantara Salinas.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. La propuesta de trabajo abordará el uso del adobe en el Occidente Mesoamericano durante el periodo comprendido entre los años 600-900 dC, el cual representó para los habitantes del Valle de Colima, un movimiento transformador que modificó de manera radical la ideología y costumbres que hasta el año 600 dC fueron utilizadas alrededor de mil años; lo cual se...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Daniel Pierce.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Aztatlán tradition constituted the primary economic and cultural development during the Early/Middle Postclassic (AD 900-1350) in west Mexico. Though politically decentralized, this culture was rooted on the Pacific coastal plain and featured vast trade networks. Located 100 km inland, the Etzatlán Basin is the westernmost lake basin in the Jalisco...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Blanca Maldonado.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Charcoal production along the region known as Bishopric of Michoacan, which included the modern states of Michoacan and Guanajuato, as well as parts of Jalisco, Colima, Guerrero, and San Luis Potosí, in Mexico, has changed very little since the arrival of the Europeans. The expansion of this traditional craft is linked to the development of the colonial mining...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dante Martínez Vázquez. José Luis Punzo Díaz. Cinthia M. Campos. Alfonso Gastelum Strozzi. Max E. Ayala.

This is an abstract from the "Archaeology in South Central Michoacán México, Ongoing Studies" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 2016, Dr. Jose Luis Punzo-Díaz attended to a complaint from the municipality of Turicato regarding the rockshelter Cueva de los Hacheros. As part of Proyecto de Arqueología y Paisaje del Área Centro Sur de Michoacán, the site was excavated. During excavations, the project discovered evidence of multiple periods of human...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Blanca Maldonado. Patricia Castro. Peter Tropper.

This is an abstract from the "From Materials to Materiality: Analysis and Interpretation of Archaeological and Historical Artifacts Using Non-destructive and Micro/Nano-sampling Scientific Methods" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Copper was the main metal produced and worked in Mesoamerica, but data for pre-modern primary production and processing remain elusive. Systematic research at Itziparátzico, a Late Postclassic location in Central...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michelle Elliott. Grégory Pereira.

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. Studies of ritual activities often focus on paraphernalia, architectural structures, and other aspects of performance. While these are all important features, other more subtle elements that are nevertheless crucial to these activities are often not considered in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Larreina-Garcia. Blanca Maldonado Maldonado.

This is an abstract from the "Technological Transitions in Prehispanic and Colonial Metallurgy: Recent and Ongoing Research at the Archaeological Site of Jicalán Viejo, in Central Michoacán, West Mexico" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Contrary to other Mesoamerican cultural and political entities, the Purépecha Empire is renowned for its remarkable development of metallurgical production. Ongoing research at the site of Jicalán Viejo involves the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Miguel Ibarra López. Marcela Lázaro Tovar. Alfonso Gastélum Strozzi. José Luis Punzo Díaz.

This is an abstract from the "Tzintzuntzan, Capital of the Tarascan Empire: New Perspectives" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Just as fire and firewood were considered very important elements in the cosmovision of the Tarascan culture, so were war and sacrificial practices. Prisoners of war were sacrificed to two types of deities, the first linked to the celestial bodies and the second linked to the earth and water. Historical sources mention that...

DOCUMENT Citation Only José Luis Punzo Díaz. Jakob Sedig. Alejandro Valdes Herrera. David Reich.

This is an abstract from the "Increasing the Accessibility of Ancient DNA within Archaeology" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Genomic analytical techniques have matured enough to address longstanding problems about the interactions and migrations of ancient populations inhabiting the north and west border of Mesoamerica, as well with populations from the US Southwest. With this in mind, we have established a collaborative, binational project...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anthony DeLuca.

The Teuchitlán culture is one of many cultures in West Mexico during the Late Formative to Classic periods (300 B.C. – 450/500 AD) that share in the tradition of burying some of their dead in shaft and chamber tombs. The Teuchitlán culture is noteworthy among their contemporaries for the large number of circular ceremonial buildings concentrated around the Tequila volcano and surrounding valleys. Los Guachimontones, located on the southern side of the volcano, is the largest site in the region...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marion Forest.

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 this paper, I present the recent results of the archaeological surveys conducted at El Palacio, an important pre-Tarascan site located in the Zacapu Basin, Northern Michoacán. The settlement was occupied from the Epiclassic through the Colonial era, with an important episode of urbanization occurring ca. 1250 A.D. If...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah Loomis.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Gender is one of the primary identity categories that provides structure to the social organization of societies. It sets expectations for the activities, status, presentation, and spatial organization of individuals within a community. This study aims to interrogate the social role of gender in the Teuchitlán tradition of Jalisco, Mexico, through a survey of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Edwin Harris. Christopher T. Fisher.

The growing adoption of LiDAR for archaeological analysis makes determining how ancient peoples modified, interacted and moved through the landscape more practical. Initial analysis of the LiDAR produced imagery covering the Postclassic (1000-1520 CE) Purépecha site of Angamuco, located in the Lake Pátzcuaro Basin of Michoacán, Mexico showed a highly urbanized multi-nucleated settlement sprawled across 26km2 of an ancient lava flow, with a complex urban structure. Here I discuss the results from...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marion Forest. Elsa Jadot. Aurélie Manin.

Compared to other Postclassic cultures, not much attention has been given to the organization of daily life and domestic space in the Tarascan tradition. The political, religious and economic systems have been the focus of most archaeological and ethno-historical research, leaving the household systems understudied. It is yet critical to understand the fundamental role of household in the community organization, specifically in the context of the growing social and political complexity that led...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Denise Frazier.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The site of Angamuco was discovered during a survey of the Lake Pátzcuaro Basin in 2007. Angamuco is located in western Mexico, within the modern Mexican state of Michoacán. This site has been identified as part of the Purépecha Empire. Angamuco has primarily been examined using spatial data from LiDAR flights. Previous researchers have used the spatial data...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alfonso Gastelum-Strozzi. Yira Castro-García. Ernesto Dena. Jose Damian Carrillo. Jose Luis Punzo-Diaz.

This is an abstract from the "Tzintzuntzan, Capital of the Tarascan Empire: New Perspectives" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This study describes the techniques developed to obtain a set of 2D/3D surface and volume descriptors from photogrammetry and tomography datasets that evaluate the pore space presented in a collection of temporal bones from Tzintzuntzan, Mexico. These methods could help to distinguish between taphonomy and pathological...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kyle Urquhart.

New archaeological research at the site of Angamuco, Michoacán, Mexico demonstrates unequivocally that the P'urépecha (Tarascans) had cities that before the formation of the Late Postclassic empire. This paper will reexamine the ethnohistoric and ethnographic evidence for the organizational structure of P'urépecha urban polities in light of the new archaeological evidence. The evidence presented here suggests a form of political organization superficially similar to the altepetl model of Nahua...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rosa Flores Ramírez. Andrés Saúl Alcántara Salinas.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Los trabajos de rescate arqueológico son constantes en la arqueología de México, el caso que se presenta a continuación es la investigación realizada en 2022 en la Catedral de Colima, donde a partir de un trabajo de supervisión, sobre un problema de drenaje realizado por personal de Monumentos Históricos del Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia en...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Martha Lorenza Lopez Mestas Camberos. Marisol Montejano Esquivias.

This is an abstract from the "Mesoamerican Figurines in Context. New Insights on Tridimensional Representations from Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Las figurillas conocidas originalmente con el término genérico de "Cerro de García", se ubican cronológicamente entre los años 600 a 900 d.C. y son consideradas como una evidencia de interacción intra e interregional por su amplia distribución en el Occidente de México. Sin embargo, a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Muñiz. Kimberly Sumano Ortega. José Luis Punzo Díaz.

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. Habitar un espacio es apropiarse del entorno mediante distintas estrategias que pueden interpretadas por el arqueólogo. Durante el epiclásico se desarrolló el sitio Chavinda en la Ciénega de Chapala, es este lugar se realizaron recorridos sistemáticos de superficie y excavaciones que permitieron identificar unidades...

DOCUMENT Citation Only José Luis Punzo Díaz. Carmen Ramos Osnaya. Fernanda Navarro Sandoval.

This is an abstract from the "Tzintzuntzan, Capital of the Tarascan Empire: New Perspectives" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this poster we will present the data derived from systematic surface prospections within one of these vapatzaquas, the neighborhood of San Pablo, Tzintzuntzan, which is one of the most important in the city, since inside it is located the Great Platform with the five yácatas, as well as another of the largest platforms of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anna Cohen. Michael Galaty.

A key goal in the study of ancient artifacts is determining their provenance. Such information can provide insight into the production and consumption of artifacts, but may also inform discussions about local political economies. Our study uses qualitative optical petrography and geochemical analysis (NAA) to evaluate the tempers and paste recipes in ceramic fragments and raw clays from Angamuco, located in the Lake Pátzcuaro Basin, Michoacán. Angamuco was occupied before and throughout the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Juliette Testard. Marion Forest. Elsa Jadot.

This is an abstract from the "Mesoamerican Figurines in Context. New Insights on Tridimensional Representations from Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent work conducted in Northern Michoacán by the CEMCA in the Zacapu Basin, 30 km North of the Tarascan core-region, shed light on a specific and poorly defined time period at the region before the Tarascan kingdom: The Early Postclassic. The local phase Palacio ranges from A.D. 900 to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Hans Roskamp.

This is an abstract from the "Technological Transitions in Prehispanic and Colonial Metallurgy: Recent and Ongoing Research at the Archaeological Site of Jicalán Viejo, in Central Michoacán, West Mexico" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A thorough exploration of the available historical documents from the colonial period demonstrates that Jicalán was one of many prehispanic settlements inhabited by copper mining, smelting, and smithing specialists...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Véronique Darras. Alejandra Castañeda. Laure Déodat.

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. Alluvial plains in Mexico are still little explored. At first glance their archaeological potential is difficult to appreciate because they are areas of both sedimentary accumulation and destruction caused by intensive agriculture. To compensate these limitations in the Lerma alluvial plain (Michoacan, Guanajuato), we...