Collapse (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alexei Vranich.

This is an abstract from the "A New Horizon: Reassessing the Andean Middle Horizon (AD 600–1000) and Rethinking the Andean State" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The manner in which a polity collapses reveals a crucial facet of the relationship between the residents of the site and the surrounding population. For example, a brief, destructive end could indicate an adversarial relationship that boils over into a violent outbreak against an...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Mara Reyes. Lilian Corzo. Rocio Albarrán.

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. El sureste del Petén está conformado por una diversidad de paisajes geográficos y ambientales que permitieron el desarrollo de asentamientos prehispánicos claramente jerarquizados desde épocas muy tempranas hasta muy tardías, incluyendo los dos siglos que...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew Snetsinger. Maxime Lamoureux-St-Hilaire.

Settlement abandonment studies are crucial for understanding the archaeological record, as they yield the key to decipher the context of on-floor deposits, or assemblages. We advocate the use of a behavioral-contextual method for studying on-floor assemblages for ascribing them to one of several categories of abandonment. This behavioral-contextual approach examines the vertical and horizontal architectural contexts of artifacts, the relative completeness of vessels, and the represented vessel...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sarah E. Adcock.

In this paper, I explore how viewing collapse as a social and political phenomenon might change how we interpret the collapse of the Hittite empire in Turkey at the end of the Late Bronze Age (ca. 1200 BC). To this end, I consider the implications of changes and continuities in animal management at two sites in central Turkey following the collapse of the Hittite empire. The end of the Late Bronze Age was characterized by significant political and economic disruption throughout the eastern...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Arlen Chase. Diane Chase.

Excavations within various locales at Caracol, Belize have recovered artifactual materials on the floors of epicentral stone buildings that were associated with the latest occupation of the site epicenter. These deposits are the result of both "de facto" refuse and rapid short-term abandonment processes. In many cases, complete vessels and other artefactual remains were recovered from the floors of Caracol’s epicentral buildings. Other terminal deposits comprise thin sheet-like layers of broken...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Barbara Stark.

In south-central and southern Veracruz settlement pattern data document a collapse of previous settlement systems and many cultural traditions. Some regions reorganized and some likely were re-populated in part by migrants from highland regions. The timings of collapse in these lowland regions are poorly defined, but variation seems likely. Causes have received little attention because the extent of changes has not been recognized. Likewise, possible consequences are still to be investigated....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Brite.

The deltas of the Aral Sea lie within an internal drainage basin where critical water resources are prone to unpredictable change. The nature of this resource landscape discourages the emergence of enduring centralized states and was a key factor that led to the peripheral status of the deltas in world history. Nevertheless, complex social institutions did develop there in the early 1st millennium B.C. – late 1st millennium A.D., and these were based on especially diverse and flexible economic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Justine Shaw.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over the course of three field seasons, eight round foundation braces supporting perishable pole-and-thatch buildings were excavated in the Cochuah region of west-central Quintana Roo, Mexico. Dating to the period immediately after the region was largely abandoned during what is known as the “Maya collapse,” the structures reveal small populations living...

DOCUMENT Citation Only R.G. Matson.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. What archaeological knowledge might be significant in our climate emergency? I examine this question using climate “triage.” Optimistically, climate warming restricted to a 2°C increase would allow humans to adapt without destroying the global connections that support the modern economic system. A somewhat greater temperature increase could allow some...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Mixter.

In recent years, scholars working in the Classic period Maya periphery questioned traditional narratives of the 9th century Maya collapse by pointing to settlements along the periphery of the lowlands that appear to have maintained relative cultural and demographic stability. However, this generalization obscures dramatic sociopolitical changes these communities implemented to remain successful through the collapse. In this paper, I argue that populations on the periphery relied on a locally...

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 Tiffany Lindley.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Investigations at Floodplain North of the San Lorenzo Survey Area, located in the hinterlands of Xunantunich, examined the political and economic behaviors of a community as the navigated major transformations of the Terminal Classic (780-950 AD) period. While causes of the Maya collapse, the abandonment of large centers, and the changes in elite culture...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stephen Brighton.

Cultural resilience or collapse has been the focus for the study of prehistoric and proto-historic societies. Little, if any work in historical archaeology, or the archaeology of the modern world, has linked the impact of traumatic natural events and social, economic, and political structures to how cultural groups respond. In this paper, cultural resilience theory is employed to discuss the capacity of a culture to maintain and transform its world-view, cultural identity, and critical cultural...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Eleanor Harrison-Buck.

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. Across the Maya Lowlands, circular shrines have been reported that resemble smaller versions of the Caracol building at Chichen Itza. According to Ringle and colleagues (1998), Chichen Itza was one of many centers in a shrine network extending along the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Melissa Baltus.

This is an abstract from the "Materializing Political Ecology: Landscape, Power, and Inequality" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Native American city of Cahokia originates in the creation of a cosmologically powerful landscape formed by the gathering of human and other-than-human participants (including earth, water, and fire) (see Pauketat 2013). At this center humans and their nonhuman partners mediated relationships between Worlds (Upper,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jose Ochatoma Paravicino. Martha Cabrera Romero. Jose Antonio Ochatoma Cabrera.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the last 5 years a team of researchers from the National University of San Cristobal de Huamanga has been carrying out archaeological research in the sectors of Vegachayuq Moqo, Capillapata, Chupapata, and Cerro San Cristobal in the capital of the Wari Empire. The results obtained show an occupation sequence from the Huarpa period (emergence of the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gyles Iannone.

Much of the recent discourse surrounding the collapse of archaic states is centered on the impacts of ecoside or climate change. Driven by natural scientists and increasingly sophisticated data generation and analysis methods, such environmentally-based approaches to collapse have tended to gloss over the myriad cultural factors also involved in such severe transformations, thus inhibiting our ability to fully grasp the complexities of the collapse process in the various case studies currently...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stanley Guenter.

"A Forest of Kings" was groundbreaking for its integration of epigraphy, archaeology, and ethnohistory. In their book, Schele and Freidel discussed the Early Classic Teotihuacan-Maya cultural and political interaction as well as the fall of Copan, and the larger issue of the collapse of Classic Maya cities, and even the fall of Postclassic Mayapan. In this presentation I wish to expand on and integrate these disparate themes in an effort to answer the question of why the Colonial era Maya...

DOCUMENT Citation Only David Byers. José M. Capriles. Adolfo Gil. Judson Finley. Jacob Freeman.

One of the least understood aspects of paleoscience is the interplay between climate, human demography, and how changes in population influence resource management strategies. With the goal of understanding such processes, we created the PEOPLE 3000 research network to study trade-offs inherent to the climate-human population-institutional adaptation system over the last 3000 years. We propose that strategies reducing variation in food production and institutions for protecting those strategies...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Paris. Elizabeth Brite.

Eric Wolf's seminal work, Europe and the People Without History (1982), drew our attention to the periphery as an important locus of anthropological inquiry. By examining "people without history," Wolf was able to show that social complexity before the modern era was not a process that laid solely in the development and decline of isolated societies. Rather, both ancient and modern forms of social complexity rest upon the interconnections among peoples at global scales. This perspective has...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Arthur Demarest. Paola Torres.

Joe Ball’s research, his ceramic studies, his insistence on material culture as basis for work, and his honesty in critique of poorly grounded interpretation together provide a standard of building culture-history on solid ceramic studies, chronology, and material culture analyses. Many recent interpretations of Classic Maya society have not met that standard. Here we aspire to his bottom-up, material culture approach to interpretation in recent collaborative research in the western Peten and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marieka Arksey.

This paper investigates the use of caves as performance spaces for water and agriculturally focused rituals during the Maya Late Classic period (~ A.D. 750-900) and the events of the 'collapse'. Although the ‘collapse’ of the social, economic, and political systems during this period has been the subject of much study, the majority of research has focused on the environmental factors with little consensus as to how rulers attempted to maintain order, social solidarity, and political power...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jennifer Zovar.

There is often a discontinuity between studies of ‘collapse’ and studies of post-collapse periods. This can lead to the periods following collapse being defined by a "lack" of what came before. In the southern Titicaca basin, for example, the period following the collapse of the Tiwanaku state has been defined by a lack of monumental construction, raised fields, large-scale feasting events, or Tiwanaku-style iconography. Nevertheless, recent explorations have demonstrated that while "collapse"...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brett A. Houk.

The Chan Chich Archaeological Project has documented two types of terminal, above floor "problematic" artifact deposits in a number of different locations and contexts at the site of Chan Chich, Belize. The first type comprises light scatters of "exotic" ceramics and other artifacts on the steps to range buildings in epicentral courtyards. The second type is a dense artifact deposit in an ashy matrix at the base of a platform face in a hilltop, elite courtyard. Compositionally, the second type...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Whittaker Schroder.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Discussions of political collapse in archaeology have shifted recently to approaches that incorporate the adaptive cycles of resilience and reorganization that highlight the continuity of certain cultural practices, belief systems, and worldviews alongside the disintegration of political systems. This approach has garnered support especially in the Maya area...