La Paz (State / Territory) (Geographic Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carlos Alvarez.

This is an abstract from the "Heat, Steam, and Health: The Archaeology of the Mesoamerican Pib Naah (Sweat Baths)" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. La ceremonia del temascal, el baño ritual prehispánico, está presente desde épocas remotas en muchos sitios arqueológicos de Mesoamérica hasta la actualidad. Para la etnia tojolabal es de gran importancia terapéutica relacionada con la salud del grupo familiar que habita en la casa, en especial la...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stephen Houston.

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 I" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For close to a century, a remarkable set of shells have been found archaeologically across the Maya region and beyond. Most likely shaped and incised in a single workshop, they present a decided paradox, depicting specific warriors and elites yet, on these...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Michael Love. Julia Guernsey.

This is an abstract from the "Theorizing Prehistoric Large Low-Density Settlements beyond Urbanism and Other Conventional Classificatory Conventions" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Mesoamerica is one of only a handful of places in the ancient world where first-generation cities developed independently, and the lowland Maya cities of the Classic period are frequently cited as prime examples of low-density urbanism. Scholars now recognize that the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ellen Bell. Erlend Johnson. Marcello Canuto. Cassandra Bill.

This is an abstract from the "Regimes of the Ancient Maya" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. While ongoing research has clarified much about the strategies Classic period (250–900 CE) Maya rulers used to establish, integrate, and administer their Lowland Maya kingdoms, studies of frontier zones, such as the southeast edge of the Maya area, both provide insights into Maya political organization and highlight local challenges not faced by rulers in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Edward Schortman. Daniel Pierce. Hector Neff. John Dudgeon. Aaron Shugar.

This is an abstract from the "Ceramics and Archaeological Sciences 2024" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Red-on-Natural jars, characterized by nearly identical forms and decorations, were used by people of all ranks who lived in the adjoining Naco, middle Chamelecon, and lower Cacaulapa valleys of northwest Honduras from CE 600–1000. These vessels’ ubiquity suggests that those who used them participated in a community of practice that transcended...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Clifford Brown. Hector Neff. Michael Glascock. Sofia Feliciano. Andrew Terentis.

This is an abstract from the "2023 Fryxell Award Symposium: Papers in Honor of Timothy Beach Part I" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. We describe the Cosigüina ceramic complex from the coastal plain of the Department of Chinandega, Nicaragua. It dates from the Late Formative. We assign it stylistically to the Providencia-Miraflores ceramic spheres of western El Salvador and southeastern Guatemala. We used instrumental neutron activation analysis to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jamie Forde.

This is an abstract from the "The Vibrancy of Ruins: Ruination Studies in Ancient Mesoamerica" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For peoples of the Postclassic Mixtec highlands, ruins of earlier civilizations were often found on mountaintops outside some of the most politically prominent communities in the region. These ruined hilltop sites came to be viewed as places of primordial origin and were sites of religious pilgrimage. In this paper, drawing...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lydie Dussol. Kenneth Hirth. Timothy Scheffler.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Holocene pollen sequences have highlighted several episodes of vegetation opening in Central America since the Archaic period, which have often been related to the dispersal of nomadic slash-and-burn agriculturalists from the Central Mexican Highlands. However, few archaeobotanical data from archaeological sites have been available to date to examine...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Kathryn Puseman.

Charcoal samples from the base of two metallurgical furnaces at the Pulac 050 site in southern Bolivia were submitted for identification to determine if thola (Parastrephia) wood was burned in the furnace. This site appears to be a prehistoric metal working site that may date to the Middle Horizon, around 600-1000 CE. Pieces of modern reference wood were collected by a local man in Bolivia who was familiar with the vegetation. Wood was cut from a known thola shrub, and deadwood was collected...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elisandro Garza. Marc Wolf.

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. The Copan Valley, located in western Honduras, has been inhabited by permanent communities since the Early Formative period (ca. 1400 BC). These early communities developed a lifestyle based on milpa agriculture, which continues today with the Ch'ortí Maya, the linguistic group that is the descendants of the ancient Copanecos....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Erlend Johnson.

This is an abstract from the "I Love Sherds and Parasites: A Festschrift in Honor of Pat Urban and Ed Schortman" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Edward Schortman and Patricia Urban (2012) borrow theoretical approaches from Bruno Latour (1996), Giddens (1984), and Bourdieu (1977) to highlight networks of shared inter-elite interaction in southeastern Mesoamerica that interpenetrate ethnic and political boundaries. The following paper builds upon...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Guy Hepp.

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. In the 1960s, Ford argued that the first Pacific coastal Mexican pottery should more closely resemble that of northern South America than of early highland Mexican wares of the Tehuacán tradition. In the 1970s and 1980s, Kelly argued that Colima’s Capacha phase represented one of several "landfalls" of technological and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Carlos Flores Manzano.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Several explorations were carried out in Cuscatlán (Amaroli 1986; Amaroli 1992; Velázquez & Hermes 1995; Barrera 2018; Arevalo 2018), where the Metropolitan Area of San Salvador (AMSS), El Salvador, now stands, including explorations resulting from archaeological rescues and projects based on the model of preventive archaeology (Bozoki-Ernyey 2007) along...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marie Kolbenstetter.

In 1966, Claude Baudez published a first attempt to compare ceramic typologies between different archeological areas of Honduras, published as Les niveaux céramiques au Honduras: une reconsidération de l'évolution culturelle (Baudez 1966). This article encompassed his research in the Gulf of Fonseca, where he spent a field season surveying and excavating sites in 1964-65. Fifty-three years later, this article still constitutes one of the most extensive descriptions of the ceramic assemblage of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alexander Geurds. Natalia R. Donner.

This is an abstract from the "Postclassic Mesoamerica: The View from the Southern Frontier" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeological work on Greater Nicoya modeled perceived Postclassic changes in material culture by invoking foreign incursions and population displacement. At the eastern edges of Greater Nicoya, however, small-scale communities navigated the increasing flow of Mesoamerican cultural features through a social dynamic of active...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kristin Landau. Christopher Hernandez. Nancy Gonlin.

This is an abstract from the "After Dark: The Nocturnal Urban Landscape & Lightscape of Ancient Cities" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. As the sun set on the horizon, ancient city dwellers would have felt the cooler air, heard cicadas’ songs, and perhaps tasted a late-night snack. Their vision, however, would have suffered the most as dusk turned to night and some form of illumination was necessary to see others, carry on activities, or get to bed....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Charles Cheek.

Dress is an object made up of other objects. I combine a practice approach with the chaîne opératoire and behavior chains methods to analyze technical and social acts involving dress objects. The analysis starts with one segment of the actions involving dress—the actual act of dressing. The study includes only court scenes that appear to memorialize historic events, although some of the observations and conclusions can be applied to other kinds of scenes and other media. After identifying the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dita Auzina.

This is an abstract from the "The Problem of the Monument: Widening Perspectives on Monumentality in the Archaeology of the Isthmo-Colombian Area" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Large stone and earth mounds of Cascal de Flor de Pino in the Caribbean of Nicaragua, which were built between 4 BC and AD 9, are unique in the region and have been suggested as a sign of social stratification and inequality. Indeed, reaching more than 30 m in diameter and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Dominique Rissolo. Holley Moyes. Justin Simkins. Kay Vilchis Zapata. Graham Goodwin.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Actun Tunichil Muknal (ATM), located in Western Belize, is among the most touristed archaeological caves in the Maya area and is well known for its striking physical characteristics and intact cultural deposits. Though well surveyed and studied, the cave and its many fragile and at-risk offerings had not been digitally documented. A collaborative program...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kathryn Sampeck.

This is an abstract from the "Postclassic Mesoamerica: The View from the Southern Frontier" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A significant amount of archaeological evidence demonstrates that Late Postclassic Mesoamericans exchanged cacao intensively and over long distances. A reason for high-volume cacao commerce in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries was the expansion of its use from a ritual offering and the ingredient in socially important...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Hector Neff. Heather Thakar. Clifford Brown. John Jones. Chad Rankle.

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. Evidence for early sedentary villagers is perplexingly difficult to identify in Pacific Nicaragua. Wolfgang Haberland thought he found Early Formative remains, which he named the Dinarte phase, on Ometepe Island, but our own efforts to resample those putative early deposits did not meet with...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amber VanDerwarker. Douglas Kennett. Heather Thakar. Victoria Newhall. Kenneth Hirth.

This is an abstract from the "Beyond Maize and Cacao: Reflections on Visual and Textual Representation and Archaeological Evidence of Other Plants in Precolumbian Mesoamerica" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent research demonstrates that ancient Mesoamericans engaged in forest management long before they domesticated maize. Our research from El Gigante provides additional evidence for the antiquity of tree management practices in several...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Paul Amaroli.

This is an abstract from the "Reconstructing the Political Organization of Pre-Columbian Nicaragua" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Since half a century ago, it has been recognized that the Early Postclassic in the territory of western El Salvador represents a sweeping departure from its Classic period antecedents, as seen in the type site of Cihuatán. Its nature has been variously described as generically Mexican, or central Mexican and Gulf...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Clifford Brown.

The quantitative model of diffusion traditionally studied in archaeology uses Gaussian statistics and Brownian motion to envisage a slow wave of advance. It originates from Fisher’s model for the diffusion of advantageous alleles across the landscape, but was then applied in archaeology to the diffusion of agriculture from the Near East into Europe. More recently, Lévy flights, which are random walks with step lengths derived from power-law distributions, have been proposed as models for human...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ana Luisa Izquierdo. Virginia Arieta.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Hay cierto acuerdo entre los arqueólogos que los olmecas integraron verdaderos estados. Aunque se sostiene que eran sistemas centralizados, la naturaleza política de esta organización permanece todavía poco clara, así como sus mecanismos de funcionamiento. Por ahora, los significativos avances en el conocimiento de la más antigua capital olmeca, San...