Copan (Other Keyword)
1-19 (19 Records)
La documentación de los monumentos prehispánicos, ha sido uno de los objetivos principales de los investigadores de la cultura maya por la información que sus imágenes e inscripciones proveen sobre la historia, organización social y cosmovisión de los habitantes de las antiguas ciudades de Guatemala, México, Belice y Honduras. La documentación topométrica digital de alta resolución también conocida como escaneo en tres dimensiones (3D) representa una nueva fase en la investigación y...
Building a Community: Late Classic and Postclassic Residential Structures at Rio Amarillo, Copan, Honduras (2015)
Rio Amarillo, an ancient town, rests 20 km east of the great Maya city of Copan in Honduras. In the last four years residences from the Late Classic and Postclassic period have been excavated at the site. Investigations of the residential buildings from Río Amarillo have allowed us to better understand the influences and allegiances of the inhabitants of this community resting on the margins of the Maya world. The architecture of the structures reflects ties to both Copan and to areas in the...
Capturing the Fragrance of Ancient Copan Rituals: Floral Remains from Maya Tombs and Temples (2018)
Pollen analysis of Classic-period temple and tomb spaces in Copan’s Acropolis revealed a range of plants important to ancient Maya ritual practice. Some of these species were not represented in macroremains in ritual or household contexts. Scholars have described temple spaces as thick with the odor of burned offerings and copal, but added to this would also have been the fresh and heady fragrance of blooming buds and greenery, adding a fecund perfume to the areas of ritual supplication. These...
Community Resilience in the Río Amarillo East Pocket: Commoner Occupation around Río Amarillo and Quebrada Piedras Negras at the end of Late Classic through Postclassic Periods (2017)
Recent and ongoing research at residential groups at the sites of Río Amarillo and Quebrada Piedras Negras are providing a better understanding of the lives of commoners and of the population dynamics during the Late Classic through the Postclassic period in this area. These sites share the second-widest pocket of the Copan River Valley, and lie in the middle of one of the main trade routes between Copan and Quirigua. The excavations and mapping of the household groups distributed in this...
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...
Copan in the Wider Maya World (2017)
The peripheral location of Copan has always raised questions about the ways in which it related to the core of the Maya world. Clearly Copan was no isolate in the Classic Maya tradition, divorced from developments elsewhere, but what did it continue to draw from the center and what were the mechanisms underlying those contacts? What do we know about the influence of centrally placed polities in this far-flung region, which held a symbolic status in the far east, but could never be a significant...
Copan reloaded: a new look at the Ante step and its context (2017)
This presentation reassesses the chronology and meaning of the inscription on the hieroglyphic step of the Ante structure at Copan, Honduras. The analysis was made possible by a high-resolution 3D scan of the step produced in 2011. The new interpretation indicates that the city of Copan underwent a re-foundation event upon the accession of its eighth ruler, Wi’ Ohl K’inich. The known contexts of similar statements are discussed along with the implications of several possible translations for our...
Copán’s Preclassic Pioneers: New Evidence from the San Lucas Neighborhood (2016)
Recent work in the San Lucas neighborhood outside of Copán’s urban core discovered significant human occupation in the Late Preclassic period—centuries before the first king came to power. Construction materials, ceramic styles, obsidian tools, human remains, and radiocarbon dates from three households attest to the early and continuous settlement of this area in the foothills south of the Copán River. This paper reviews the evidence for San Lucas’s Preclassic population, and its significance...
Exhibiciones fotográficas en el pueblo de Copán Ruinas: Arqueología y Comunidad desde 1890 hasta hoy día (2015)
Desde 2007, las autoras han participado en una serie de proyectos de investigación de la comunidad recopilando información a base de entrevistas con personas locales antiguas, archivos, y colecciones fotográficas históricas relacionadas con la historia de la ciudad de Copán Ruinas y el yacimiento arqueológico de Copan, un Sitio de Patrimonio Mundial. Tomando en cuenta el contexto social de las primeras excavaciones, examinaremos cómo las exposiciones, "Memorias frágiles: Imágenes de arqueología...
Human/animal interactions in the Copan Valley from the beginning to the end of the Copan dynasty: Stable Isotope Analysis of the Felids from Altar Q and the Motmot dedicatory offerings (2015)
In fifth century Copan, Honduras, beneath the city’s first dynastic monument a complete puma was offered beside a female human burial. Over three centuries later, under the watchful eye of sixteenth and final ruler of the dynasty Yax Pasaj, a series of sixteen felids (many of them jaguars) were placed in the dedicatory cache of Altar Q, the "stone of the founder." Here we investigate the remains of some of the largest carnivores on the landscape, the jaguar and puma, to analyze human-felid...
Identity on the Edge of the Kingdom: the Artifacts, Residences, and Ritual Areas of Río Amarillo, Copan (2015)
Excavations at the site of Río Amarillo, an ancient Maya town, reveal a community with complex affiliations influenced by the waxing and waning of Copan’s power. While seemingly autonomous during the Early Classic period, the Late Classic inhabitants of Rio Amarillo’s ritual core from the time of Ruler 12 through the reign of Ruler 16 embraced important aspects of the ideology and identity of the Maya city of Copan. These affiliations extended to an elite residential sector where a censer with a...
Leveraging Power: Stonecarvers and Architectural Sculpture Production in the Copan Region (2017)
The abundance and diversity of monumental art, architecture and hieroglyphic texts at sites outside the Principal Group in the Copan Valley, and into the hinterlands, illuminate the timing and intent of regal investiture of authority in elites considered important to the stability of the kingdom. The consistent use of two imagery programs in architecture, and the linking of one of those programs with textual confirmation of membership in the royal court, reveal two strategies for leveraging the...
Macaw Mountain and Ancient Peoples of Southeast Mesoamerica (2015)
In A Forest of Kings, Linda Schele and David Freidel captivated readers with substance and inference about multiple Maya cities and their inhabitants. For Copan, they focused on long- and short-term developments culminating in the death of its last effective king, Yax Pasaj Chan Yopaat, whose death effectively coincided with the end of both dynastic rule and social cohesion at Macaw Mountain, Copan. Extraordinary finds and ideas have come to light since that 1990 publication, things those...
The Making of a Hinterland: Evaluating Classic period Copan’s Political Organization and Territorial limits with Data from the Cucuyagua and Sensenti Valleys. (2016)
The ability of Maya Ajaws to project political power outside of their capitals is a widely debated topic: some investigators sustain centralized territorial models for Maya political organization, and others defend segmentary models. The location of Copan on the southern fringe of the Maya world gives a unique opportunity to study this phenomenon because political boundaries in this multicultural environment are more visible than in other Maya kingdoms. We will explore the tempo and degree of...
New approaches in archaeological research, heritage management and community engagement for the Copan Valley (2015)
Archaeological sites in the Copan Valley have benefited from a number of large-scale Honduran government-sponsored and international research projects over the past 80 years. Those efforts have contributed strongly to the broad dissemination of knowledge about the ancient city, and the conservation of many Copan monuments and residential sites. However, even before the global recession and the traumatic events of the coup in 2009, it was clear that the State was challenged in trying to address...
Retos de la conservación arqueológica: Una vista desde Copan (2015)
Varios proyectos en marcha de capacitación e intervención están contribuyendo a la creación de un programa de conservación de campo sostenible para la arqueología de Copan. La construcción de un nuevo laboratorio para la conservación de la escultura y oportunidades para participar en talleres para personal local están ayudando a reforzar la misión del Instituto Hondureño de Antropología e Historia y las ONG en el resguardo y conservación de este Sitio de Patrimonio Mundial. En este esta...
Sacred Water Mountains of the Copan Valley: A View from Rastrojon (2016)
The temples and stone monuments of Copan are replete with symbols of water and sustenance, both driving forces in the development of complex society throughout the Maya region and greater Mesoamerica. Like other urban environments, Copan harnessed the power and religious nature of water, mountains, maize, ancestors, and the divine ruler, juxtaposed to their dualistic counterparts of fire and drought, to construct their urban landscape, cosmovision and social structures. Research on ancient water...
Socioeconomics of Craft Production in the Copán Hinterland: The Chert Industry of Río Amarillo, Honduras (2016)
This study presents new data from the site of Río Amarillo, Honduras focusing on the social aspects of craft production in the political sphere of Copán, Honduras (A.D. 400 – 900). Between 2011 and 2014, excavations led by the Proyecto Arqueológico Río Amarillo Copán (PARAC) have recovered large quantities of microcrystalline silicate artifacts, including nodules, debitage, and finished tools. Such data are important as they shed light onto the procurement strategies, methods of local...
Tracing the Emergence of Maya Lordship at Secondary Centers of the Copan Polity: An Examination of Residential Differentiation and Access at Centers in the Cucuyagua and El Paraiso Valleys (2017)
In this paper we contend that Copan fundamentally transformed the political structures and social institutions of centers in outlying areas as it expanded and integrated these regions. Evidence from our areas of study, the Cucuyagua and El Paraiso valleys, suggest that these regions had long lived autocthonous populations prior to Copan’s expansion into these regions in the Late Classic period. Using evidence from other non-Maya sites in Western and Central Honduras we contend that while varied...