Collapse (Other Keyword)
1-25 (106 Records)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Jalieza is an important archaeological site in the Valley of Oaxaca that was founded during the Early Classic (AD 200-500). It is an especially useful case study for understanding how and why the Zapotec state fragmented. Previous excavations at the earliest sector of Jalieza, a hilltop called Cerro Danilín, suggested that the site may have resisted...
After the Crisis: Epigraphic Data on Political and Cultural Developments in the Maya Lowlands 800–1000 CE (2023)
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. Maya inscriptions have long been considered an impoverished source on the momentous changes that gripped society at the close of the Classic era. Not only do we see a steep decline in quantity as major centers fall silent, but the texts that were produced...
Ancient Pathogen Genomes from Pre- and Early Colonial Epidemics in Mesoamerica and the Evolution of Parathyphi C (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Ancient DNA in Service of Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Genome wide data from ancient microbes may help to understand mechanisms of pathogen evolution and adaptation for emerging and re-emerging infectious disease. Ancient pathogen genomes provide furthermore the possibility to identify causative agents of past pandemics and therefore elucidate mortality crisis such as the early contact period in the New...
Angkorian Collapse and Aftermath: A View from the Center (2016)
The 9th – 15th century Angkorian state was Southeast Asia’s largest ancient polity; its 1000 km2 core was among the world’s largest preindustrial urban centers. The Angkorian state’s mid-15th century CE “collapse” moved the polity’s rulers and their populations south to a series of new capitals that were closely linked to the Early Modern Southeast Asian economy. Angkor as a capital collapsed, but the Angkorian civilization continued. We use field excavations, surface survey, and remote sensing...
Aztec at the End of Days: Great House to Crossroads (2017)
New investigations of primary source material reveal that the final days of Aztec were extensively recorded (but not published) by Earl Morris. This paper will present analyses of burial, feature, architectural and artifactual data that indicate a chaotic and tumultuous end at Aztec preceded by behaviors that differed drastically from Chaco Canyon or in other 12th century great house sites. These practices are seen in mortuary data, in room remodeling the increased frequency of habitation of...
The Beginning of a New Epoch: The Transition to Post-dynastic Life in Río Amarillo, Copán Valley, Honduras (2019)
This is an abstract from the "The Pre-Columbian Cultures of Honduras after AD 900" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Contrary to what is reported for post-dynastic Copan, where evidence supports abandonment and reoccupation of the area by a new population, in the Río Amarillo area of the eastern section of the Copan Valley ceramic evidence supports a continual occupation that clearly displays an overlap of types and modes from both Late Classic and...
Biological History of the lower Río Verde Valley, Oaxaca, Mexico: An Investigation into Infectious Disease During the Classic-Post Classic Transition at Río Viejo (2025)
This is an abstract from the "The Classic-Postclassic Transition in Oaxaca" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This research investigates population health and infectious disease at the site of Río Viejo during the Classic-Post Classic transition; testing the hypothesis that treponema was endemic in Oaxaca, specifically the lower Río Verde Valley along the Pacific coast, and identifiable in a congenital New World form through dental stigmata, as well...
Broken Molds, Burned Wealth, and Scattered Monuments: Defining the Terminal Classic Period at Pacbitun (2018)
The Terminal Classic period in the southern Maya Lowlands was one of great social transition, witnessing the disruption of long-standing economic systems, and the downfall of divine kingship. The manifestation of this "collapse" in the artifactual record has been well documented at many sites throughout the Belize Valley, yet how it does so at the site of Pacbitun, on the southern rim of the Belize Valley, remains poorly understood, in spite of nearly three decades of archaeological research...
"But We Are Not Broken": Practices of Home in San Francisco Bay Area Homeless Encampments (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeologies of Immigration and Refugee Resettlement" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In January 2018 United Nations Special Rapporteur on Adequate Housing Leilani Farha visited Oakland, CA homeless encampments. Farha reportedly remarked, "every person I spoke to today has told me, 'we are human beings.’ But if you need to assert to a UN representative that you are a human, well, something is seriously wrong." The...
Cahokia’s Western Frontier: Consolidation and Collapse as viewed from the Big River Valley, Missouri (2015)
Cahokia was the largest and most complex pre-Columbian Native American society in North America. Its cultural influence extended throughout the Mississippian period Midwest (A.D. 1050–1400). A diachronic investigation of greater Cahokia from its western periphery provides insight into the polity’s consolidation, fragmentation, and collapse. Cahokian groups appear to have annexed portions of the Big River Valley (BRV) in southeast Missouri as part of the polity’s formational Big Bang. However, by...
The Ceramics of the PRV24, a Petrographic Approach (2025)
This is an abstract from the "The Classic-Postclassic Transition in Oaxaca" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the fieldwork of the PRV22-24 the recovered ceramics were analyzed by conventional methods that include a detailed analysis of the primary contexts excavated, such as ovens, termination deposits, and middens. From the PRV24 collection a sample was taken to study through petrographic analysis. The sample focuses on the fine ceramic...
The Chinggisid Crisis (1330–1370) and Its Archaeological Evidence on the Mongolian Plateau (2025)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. What does the term crisis mean and what are archaeological indicators of a crisis in general? How can archaeology contribute to the ongoing debate about the Chinggissid crises (1330-1370)? The term crisis defies a precise definition and is often used as synonym for collapse, decline, disaster, dissolution, and fragility. In this analysis it is used as an...
A City in Decline: Insights on the Collapse of Teotihuacan from the Southern Basin of Mexico (2016)
In this paper I discuss the urban decline and political breakdown of Teotihuacan from the vantage of Chicoloapan Viejo, an agrarian settlement situated in the Basin of Mexico hinterland, 40 km south of the capital city. Fieldwork in the southeastern Basin, including settlement survey led by Jeffrey Parsons in the 1960s and excavations at Chicoloapan in 2013 and 2014, shows that population numbers in this area grew dramatically in the years surrounding the state’s dissolution. As a settlement...
Climate Change and Social Sustainability: The Case of the 8.2-kyBP Climate Event and the Demise of the Neolithic Community at Çatalhöyük in Anatolia (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The social strategy of imposed egalitarianism provided solid foundations for the unprecedented growth of the Neolithic community inhabiting the large settlement at Çatalhöyük for more than half a millennium. Its constituting elements comprised symmetry and balance among cross-cutting sodalities, as well as integration of domestic and ritual domains....
Climatic variability during the Classic to Postclassic transition in central Mesoamerica. (2025)
This is an abstract from the "The Classic-Postclassic Transition in Oaxaca" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Central-Mesoamerica has several lacustrine basins that stand out as particularly sensitive to moisture fluctuations. The lacustrine sediments they preserve represent good records of hydroclimate variability, which in this region are interesting because they can give a valuable paleoclimatologic background for the analysis of human –...
"Closed by Refurbishment": A General Overview of Teotihuacan from Classic to Epiclassic Times (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Central Mexico after Teotihuacan: Everyday Life and the (Re)Making of Epiclassic Communities" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The aim of this paper is to do a general overview of the different archaeological processes identified in Teotihuacan in the last years of the Classic to Epiclassic period. In a space between the crisis of the Teotihuacan political and ideological power until the reorganization of new players in...
Closing the Portal at Itzmal Ch’en: Termination Rituals at Mayapan (2015)
The ceremonious destruction and abandonment of the Itzmal Ch’en group at Mayapán is symptomatic of ritual violence that marked this city’s near collapse at least 50 years before its final abandonment around 1448 A.D. This new evidence revises Contact Period accounts about the demise of this city, the last regional capital of the Maya realm prior to European arrival, and it also reveals the city’s resilient (if brief) recovery. In the tradition of the interdisciplinary approach of the Forest of...
Collapse in the North American Southwest: A Comparative Study (2016)
This presentation reports the results of a preliminary cross-cultural comparative study of collapse (depopulation) in the late precontact Southwest. Key descriptive characteristics and trends in possible contributing factors to collapse (e.g., population levels, social conflict, natural disasters, environmental impacts, etc.) within eight archaeological cultures will be considered. Generalizable and systematic description rather than explanation is the emphasis. The purpose of this trial study...
Collapse, or Drastic Socio-cultural Transformation?: Some Cases from Japanese Prehistory (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Current Issues in Japanese Archaeology (2019 Archaeological Research in Asia Symposium)" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper proposes to redefine 'collapse' as a type of human responses to changes that happen to the (variously perceived, experienced and utilized) environment in which we live. It is argued that the phenomena commonly termed as 'collapses', such as the disintegration of settlement systems and the...
‘Collapse’ and Population Health in Oaxaca: How the Classic-Postclassic transition influenced health and disease at Río Viejo in the lower Río Verde Valley. (2025)
This is an abstract from the "The Classic-Postclassic Transition in Oaxaca" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Classic-Postclassic transition is hypothesized to have affected health outcomes in the lower Río Verde Valley of Oaxaca, Mexico. Set within a multiscalar approach, this research examined the relationships between health, diseases, culture, climatic changes, and the physical manifestations left behind on the skeleton from a biocultural...
A Comparative Synthesis of Depopulation in the North American Southwest, 1100 to 1450 (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Attention to Detail: A Pragmatic Career of Research, Mentoring, and Service, Papers in Honor of Keith Kintigh" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Given the urgency of local to global sustainability problems, archaeologists must make progress toward understanding and interpreting for the public and policymakers the dramatic population declines that occurred in the North American Southwest during the 12th through 15th...
Comparing Demographic Shifts versus Permanence across the Maya Lowlands: A Multiproxy Approach to the Centuries Surrounding the “Maya Collapse” (2023)
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. he so-called Maya collapse has been seen as an entelechy of the depopulation and emigration of the great Maya cities of the lowlands during the ninth and tenth centuries AD. However, proper paleodemographic and archaeodemographic works that support this...
Contextualing Cahokia's Collapse (2016)
The wide scale abandonment of Mississippian towns in the lower Midwest by the beginning of the fifteenth century has been the focus of interest for the last four decades beginning with the work of Stephen Williams. The largest urban center, Cahokia, is one of the earliest to be abandoned before the end of the fourteenth century. Recent evidence has been presented on a massive flood in the twelfth century as perhaps an important factor in this process, that occurs over a century later. This...
Crafting Community: A Multi-site Analysis of Craft Production and Exchange in the Aftermath of State Collapse (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Techniques derived from analytical chemistry are critical to examining the impact of macro political change on the production and circulation of craft goods in the past. LA-ICP-MS analyses of objects and the raw materials used in their manufacture in the Moquegua Valley of southern Peru have been directed at reconstructing patterns of production and exchange...
Crisis in Geoarchaeological Context: Reassessing Bronze Age ‘Collapse’ at Palaikastro, Crete, Greece (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Research on social change and ‘crisis’ demonstrates that both phenomena require analyses of longer-term processes and discrete local processes that need to be evaluated on site-by-site bases (Vigh, 2008; Visacovsky, 2017). The multi-scalar attention required to study crisis and change at individual Bronze Age settlement sites on Crete, Greece, has been...