Collapse (Other Keyword)
1-25 (77 Records)
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...
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...
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...
"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...
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...
The Demise of Angkor: infratructural inertia and climatic instability (2015)
The demise of Angkor and its city-region offers insights into the vulnerability of giant low-density cities to climate extremes. At Angkor, the iterative growth of massive, convoluted and intractable infrastructural networks progressively decreased the resilience of the settlement to changing circumstances by restricting or removing adaptive strategies. The nature and consequences of the water crises in Angkor between the 13th and the 16th centuries has been revealed by a combination of remote...
The Demise of the European Neolithic Mode of Animal Husbandry: A Combined Effect of Milk Consumption, Zoonotic Diseases, and Genetic Changes (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A new form of husbandry developed by the Neolithic settlers of Europe provided solid foundations for their unprecedented growth and sustainability. Its constituting elements comprised the secondary product’s mode of exploitation, the effective adaptation of major domesticates to different environmental and ecological zones, and changes in their genomes....
Diet and Migration in Coastal Oaxaca: Identifying Effects of Political and Social Collapse through the Utilization of Stable Isotope Analysis (2017)
This study reports on diet and mobility among people living in the lower Río Verde Valley, Oaxaca, Mexico, during the Late Classic (AD 500-800) and Early Postclassic (AD 800-1200) periods, specifically focusing on how political and social collapse affected subsistence practices, diet, and human migration. Archaeological evidence suggests that Río Viejo, the region’s largest urban center before AD 800, experienced multiple periods of political fragmentation and instability during its long...
Does Size Matter? Comparing Cave Size to Degree of Modification Outside their Entrances (2016)
Over the past three years, investigations of over fifty ritual cave sites across the country of Belize by the Las Cuevas Archaeological Reconnaissance Project and the Belize Cave Research Project have yielded surprising findings: at least nine of the caves have modifications or construction directly outside of the entrances. These modifications took place for the first and only time during the Late Classic, a centuries-long period characterized by droughts, overpopulation, the failure of Maya...
Embodied Identities and Moving Bodies: The Archaeology and Bioarchaeology of Ninth-Century Cultural Contacts from the Perspective of K’anwitznal (Ucanal), Guatemala (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. Fifty years ago, Maya scholars argued that peoples from the Gulf Coast invaded and settled several sites in the Southern Maya Lowlands in the ninth century, including the site of Ucanal. These invasions were thought to have led to the collapse of Southern...
The End Is in Sight: Preliminary Findings for Terminal Middle Horizon Occupation at Huari (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Seeing Wari through the Lens of the Everyday: Results from the Patipampa Sector of Huari" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Continuing excavations at the domestic sector of Huari in 2018 (re)opened several structures whose occupation spanned the end of the Middle Horizon. The collapse of the Wari empire is not well understood, and the perspective these quotidian examples provide will help us continue to untangle what...
The End Is Nigh: Applying Regional, Contextual and Ethnographic Approaches for Understanding the Significance of Terminal "Problematic" Deposits in Western Belize (2018)
The discovery of cultural remains on or above the floors of rooms and courtyards at several Maya sites has been interpreted by some archaeologists as problematic deposits, defacto refuse, or as evidence for rapid abandonment. Investigations in the Belize River valley have recorded similar deposits at several surface and subterranean sites. Our regional and contextual approach to the study of these remains, coupled with ethnohistoric and ethnographic information provide limited support for...