Mesoamerica: Maya highlands (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Victor Castillo.

This is an abstract from the "The Maya Wall Paintings of Chajul (Guatemala)" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archival records suggest that Chajul was the largest town in the Ixil region during the colonial period. Spanish chronicles emphasize that different polities and communities were merged into a single colonial settlement during the foundation of the town as a congregación during the sixteenth century. This information is also remembered in...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Judith Maxwell.

This is an abstract from the "Place-Making in Indigenous Mesoamerican Communities Past and Present" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Mayan communities are located within sacred space. Each town has four principal guardians roughly aligned with cardinal directions and, in precontact times, a central altar. Each of the guardians is associated with a landmark (an escarpment, a cave/overhang, a spring or stream, a mountain) and embodies the energy of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Judith Ruiz. Isabel Casar Aldrete. Vera Tiesler Blos.

This is an abstract from the "New Perspectives on Ritual Violence and Related Human Body Treatments in Ancient Mesoamerica" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A number of non-reverential, highly processed human assemblages containing mutilated sternal bones have been documented in different parts of Postclassic period Mesoamerica and beyond after being described by Carmen Pijoan in a massive ritual deposit from Tlatelolco, in the Aztec capital. In...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Barbara Arroyo. Gloria Ajú.

This is an abstract from the "Art, Archaeology, and Science: Investigations in the Guatemala Highlands" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Kaminaljuyu, Guatemala, had a strategic location along important trade routes. Because of this, the site had the opportunity to access important goods such as obsidian, jade, cacao, salt, and other important goods. Some of the exchange might have involved the ball game. Recent findings from excavations near Ball...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erin Sears.

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. This presentation explores how miniature ceramic figurines were incorporated into the daily lives, rituals and intentions of the Late Classic period Maya of the Alta Verapaz region. Ceramic figurines are also the remnants of Maya musical instrumentation and have been recovered from...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Akira Ichikawa.

This paper provides new insights to better understand the intraregional interaction, especially San Andres and Joya de Ceren in the Zapotitan Valley of El Salvador. Joya de Ceren is a village of commoners that was buried by the Loma Caldera eruption, which occurred around AD 650; it is one of the most studied ancient villages in Mesoamerica. Moreover, the previous study indicate that this village might have been closely connected to San Andres, which is the religious, political, and economic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anarrubenia Capellin Ortega.

Within the Copan Valley a dearth of macrobotanical assemblages have been analyzed, and most that were focused on the area within or close to the Acropolis. As part of a larger project investigating ancient practices of sustainability within the Copan Valley, macrobotanical remains recovered through flotation from two commoner communities, Site 29 and Quebrada Piedras Negras, Group C, in the Rio Amarillo East Pocket have been analyzed. Due to acidic soil in the area both bone and other types of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Iyaxel Cojti-Ren.

This is an abstract from the "Regimes of the Ancient Maya" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the Late Postclassic period (AD 1250–1524), the deities called k’ab’awil had an important role in the formation of collective identities in the Maya highlands, together with the language and the territory. In the political field, the k’ab’awil were vital in integrating the peoples that fell under K’iche’ rule and with whom they maintained dependency...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Chloé Andrieu. Charlotte Arnaud.

This is an abstract from the "The Movement of People and Ideas in Eastern Mesoamerica during the Ninth and Tenth Centuries CE: A Multidisciplinary Approach Part II" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Various studies have suggested that, as a consequence of the radical crises that the Maya cities underwent at the end of the Classic period, a portion of Central Lowlands population could have migrated towards the Yucatán peninsula. However, very few...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lucia Henderson.

This paper examines the foreign connections evidenced by the material record of Early Classic Kaminaljuyu. The author discusses the ways in which public art, architecture, and elite funerary contexts evolved at Kaminaljuyu during this time, evaluating how these changing styles may have tied into evolving relationships with distant sites and regions such as Teotihuacan, Veracruz, and the Maya lowlands. The Early Classic relationship between Kaminaljuyu and Teotihuacan has, in many ways, eclipsed...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nicolas Delsol.

This is an abstract from the "Frontiers in Animal Management: Unconventional Species, New Methods, and Understudied Regions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In colonial Guatemala, cattle constituted a vital element of Hispanic lifestyles through the supply of meat but also by providing basic materials necessary to a multitude of crafts. By the mid-sixteenth century, this flowering industry was thriving thanks to the rapid growth of herds. While the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katarzyna Radnicka-Dominiak.

This is an abstract from the "The Maya Wall Paintings of Chajul (Guatemala)" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The revealing of Chajul mural paintings has opened a completely new chapter in the history of colonial art of Latin America. Most of today’s known examples of colonial art are located in churches or other buildings related to religious spheres, while Chajul murals cover walls of private houses of Ixil Maya families. Not only the location of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kirsty Escalante.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Use-wear analysis is a valuable method for understanding the various functions of stone tools, a central concern in lithic analysis. This poster focuses on the results of a use-wear study of 50 Late Postclassic (AD 1250-1525) prismatic obsidian blades from two Maya sites in the Utatlan/Q'umarkaj region of the Quiché Basin in highland Guatemala: Ismachi and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mark Howell. Igor Sarmientos.

This is an abstract from the "The Maya Wall Paintings of Chajul (Guatemala)" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this discussion the locations of murals in the three houses restored at Chajul are pinpointed, and the placement of musicians and instruments in those murals identified. The authors introduce music archaeology, and explain why its methods are necessary for identification and interpretive purposes; setting up a focus on the three...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Linda Brown. Kitty Emery.

This is an abstract from the "Supernatural Gamekeepers and Animal Masters: A Cross-Cultural Perspective" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In various contemporary Maya communities, hunting involves careful negotiations among various active agents – human and other-than-human – involved in the hunt. A pivotal actor in these negotiations is the deity known as the Lord of Wild Animals, the supernatural gamekeeper of the wild species in the forest....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Caitlin Earley.

This is an abstract from the "Art, Archaeology, and Science: Investigations in the Guatemala Highlands" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent archaeological work at the western Guatemalan site of Quen Santo by the Proyecto Arqueológico de la Región de Chaculá (PARCHA) has investigated the chronology of the site and resulted in the discovery of new monuments. In this paper, I present the results of recent study of these monuments. After reviewing...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Miranda George. Elizabeth Paris. Roberto López Bravo.

This is an abstract from the "Recent Advances in Zooarchaeological Methods" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The utilization of dental morphology for the identification of different dog breeds in archaeological contexts has recently emerged as a promising new avenue for zooarchaeological methodologies, particularly in cases differentiating between coated and hairless breeds. Recent zooarchaeological studies from the Early Postclassic period (ca. AD...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jared Katz.

Over the past several years, the Maya Music Project has documented over 430 ancient Maya musical instruments. In addition to photographing all of the instruments, over 160 musical artifacts have been 3D scanned, and audio recordings were made of many of the artifacts. This paper will focus on the typological analysis of instruments based not only on their stylistic and technological attributes, but also on the tones the instruments are able to produce, as it is clear the artisans who created...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Akira Ichikawa.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Plazas are important spaces for the ancient Mesoamerican daily life. Despite this perception is shared among many scholars, in the Southeastern Maya area, especially in El Salvador, the study of plaza is limited. This paper focuses on San Andres, which was ceremonial center in the Zapotitan valley during the Late Classic period and has been identified two...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Guido Pezzarossi. Kelton Sheridan.

Ceramic assemblages of Postclassic and Colonial Maya sites in highland and coastal Guatemala are dominated by comales: griddle-like cooking vessels indicative of a maize tortilla diet. Given that some archaeologists have interpreted the appearance of the nixtamal/tortilla/comal complex in Guatemala as evidence of the "Mexicanization" of the Maya region, the Pacific coastal region of Guatemala -and its Central Mexican diasporic populations- is seen as the likely source of comales. As a result,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Allen Christenson.

This is an abstract from the "Place-Making in Indigenous Mesoamerican Communities Past and Present" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Throughout the highlands of Guatemala, Maya traditionalists believe that mountains and their associated cave openings are the “mouths of the world” giving access to spiritual realms inhabited by sacred beings that have influence over natural phenomena of importance to the outside world. Each of these caves or watery...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Barbara Arroyo. Javier Estrada. Gloria Ajú.

This is an abstract from the "Ancient Mesoamerican Population History: Demography, Social Complexity, and Change" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The population estimates from the Preclassic period for the site of Kaminaljuyu located in the Maya Highlands were the result of regional surveys conducted by the Pennsylvania State University research program in the 1970s. Since then, Guatemala City urban sprawl has impacted the site conservation....

DOCUMENT Citation Only María Luisa Vázquez De Ágredos Pascual. Cristina Vidal Lorenzo. Patricia Horcajada Campos. Núria Feliú Beltrán.

This is an abstract from the "The Maya Wall Paintings of Chajul (Guatemala)" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The houses of Chajul, region of Ixil, Guatemala, have preserved stucco coatings and mural paintings from the colonial period. Since 2019, the University of Valencia (Spain) has collaborated with the Jagiellonian University (Poland) within the framework of the Project of Conservation of Chajul Murals–COMUCH. The objective of this study has...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Igor Sarmientos.

This is an abstract from the "The Maya Wall Paintings of Chajul (Guatemala)" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this paper, the author discusses an interpretation of the iconography of the murals of Chajul, Quiche, in the highlands of Guatemala. The murals consist of several paintings of Ixil-Maya culture music and dances from the late colonial period. An approach from archaeomusicology and ethnomusicology has been applied in this analysis both...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Paris. Ashley Megan Williams. Gabriel Laló Jacinto.

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. This paper presents an analysis of obsidian artifacts from the ancient Maya city of Tenam Puente. The site is located in the eastern Chiapas highlands, and was occupied from approximately AD 500 to 1100. We analyze a sample of 859 obsidian artifacts from the site’s monumental zone, which were excavated by the Proyecto Tenam Puente,...