Collapse (Other Keyword)
51-75 (106 Records)
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...
Looking at the Blind Spot of the Maya Collapse: Highlands Occupation during the Ninth and Tenth Centuries (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. 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...
Making Choices in the Maya Hinterlands: An Analysis of Terminal Classic Households at Floodplain North, Western Belize (2021)
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...
The Materiality of Cultural Resilience: The Archaeology of Struggle and Transformation in Post-famine Ireland (2018)
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...
Materializing the Maya Collapse and Shifting Alliances during the Ninth and Tenth Centuries: Circular Shrines and Other “Mexicanized” Traits in Belize and Beyond (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. 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...
Mediating Powers, Negotiating Inequalities: Ecological Politics at Cahokia (2021)
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,...
Memory and Resilience after the Collapse of the Wari Empire: Analysis from the Remains of Home and Funerary Contexts (2019)
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...
Merit Making at Ancient Bagan, Myanmar: A Consideration of Socio-Religious Entanglements and the Rise and Fall of a Classical Southeast Asian State (2017)
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...
Nossa Senhora do Freixo, Portugal: A Late Antiquity Roman Basilica and the Continued Reuse of Sacred Space (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Excavations at the Late Antiquity Roman Basilica of Nossa Senhora do Freixo, Portugal, provide insight into the surprising significance of this hinterland community within the southern Iberian Peninsula. Recent excavations have revealed architectural components and compositional trappings associated with a center of regional affluence. Imported utilitarian...
On the Fall of Copan, Teotihuacan, and the Origins of the Fate of 8 Ahau (2015)
"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...
An Overthrow of the Past: Tomb Reentry and Political Turmoil at the Classic Maya Site of Nim li Punit (2025)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Terminal Classic (approximately AD 790-900) marked a time of significant social and political upheaval for Maya society. The site of Nim li Punit, located in southern Belize, experienced significant changes during the Terminal Classic period, ultimately leading to its abandonment by around AD 830. While we can note the overall effects of these major...
An Overview of Interdisciplinary Research on the Classic-Postclassic Transition in Oaxaca (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 paper provides an overview of ongoing interdisciplinary research on the Classic-Postclassic transition in Oaxaca. The research focuses on two interrelated but contrasting ecological regions: the lower Río Verde Valley in the semi-tropical lowlands and the Nochixtlán Valley in the temperate highlands. Preliminary paleoecological research...
PEOPLE 3K (PalEOclimate and the PeopLing of the Earth): Investigating Tipping Points Generated by the Climate-Human Demography-Institutional Nexus over the Last 3000 Years (2018)
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...
People without Collapse: An Introduction (2015)
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...
Political and Economic Change on the Eve of the Classic Maya Collapse: Building on a "Ceramic Foundation" (2018)
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...
Politicized Use of the Spaces outside of Caves during the Terminal Classic Maya Collapse (2017)
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...
Population Distance at the site of Río Viejo During the Classic-Postclassic Transition (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 dynamics in the Lower Río Verde Valley (LRVV) of Oaxaca, through the analysis of non-metric dental traits from the prehispanic archaeological site Río Viejo during the Classic to Postclassic Period transition. The LRVV has been continuously inhabited since the Early Formative and has experienced...
Post-Collapse Change and Continuity in Bolivia’s Desaguadero Valley (2015)
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"...
"Problematic Deposits" at Chan Chich, Belize (2018)
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...
Processes of Collapse, Resilience, and Reorganization at El Infiernito, Chiapas (2019)
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...
A Re-Evaluation of Moundville's Collapse (2018)
The disruption of social traditions in ancient societies is often described as the collapse of complexity, but persisting or resilient practices are often ignored, limiting archaeological interpretations of social continuity and change. This paper addresses these historical processes during the terminal occupation of Moundville, a multiple mound Mississippian civic-ceremonial complex occupied from A.D. 1200-1550 and located in west-central Alabama. The collapse of ancient complex societies has...
Reconsidering the Late Woodland: A Critical Reassessment through Decolonizing Approaches (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Late Woodland period in eastern North America has traditionally been conceptualized as a cultural hiatus between the region’s Hopewell and Mississippian traditions. As a drastic (though not complete) reduction in the practices of monumental architecture and art produced with nonlocal materials occurred during this time, the end of the preceding Hopewell...
Reconsidering the Terminal Classic in the Northern Lowlands – A Boom or the Start of a Bust? (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. After many sites in the Southern Maya Lowlands were abandoned during the major societal transformation known as the “Maya Collapse,” settlements in the North grew markedly in size. In the Cochuah region of the Yucatan peninsula, and elsewhere, some of the largest architecture ever built was constructed. More residences than had been seen before, or since,...
Reevaluating Vijayanagara Imperial Collapse (2015)
This paper reexamines notions of imperial collapse by looking at recent archaeological work at the eponymous capital of the Vijayanagara Empire and at settlements of one of its subordinate regional polities. The Vijayanagara Empire is well-known archaeologically through work at its primary capital at modern day Hampi, Karnataka, India, which is today recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. The former primary capital city was intensively occupied until just after the empire suffered a serious...
Rejection and Reinvention: a diachronic perspective on ritual and collapse in the south central Andes (2017)
Scholarship on Tiwanaku (AD 600-1000) emphasizes the ceremonial nature of its capital city and the role of ritual practice in incorporating diverse groups as the state’s influence expanded across the south central Andes. Although debate continues about its cause, recent research indicates that the Tiwanaku state’s political collapse played out over several centuries. In this paper, I draw on data spanning that period of fragmentation to take a diachronic perspective on the ways in which ritual,...