Highland Mesoamerica: Classic (Other Keyword)
101-125 (174 Records)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. El tablero doble escapulario es un elemento arquitectónico común en varias regiones de Mesoamérica (Centro de México, área maya y Oaxaca), en este último, se puede apreciar muy claramente en sitios arqueológicos como Monte Albán y Mitla, y recientemente, gracias a los aportes realizados por el Proyecto Arqueológico del Conjunto Monumental de Atzompa...
Making sense of a Holy Trinity: the Dioses Narigudos of Classic period Central Veracruz (2018)
Dioses Narigudos are a series of ceramic figurines that are extremely frequent during the Classic period in a very restricted area of South Central Veracruz. They occur generally in ritual deposits under floors of major and minor buildings, combining female and male representations of different hierarchy. Current interpretations relate them to a solar deity or a water deity, none of which identifications apply to all three main figurine types. Their attributes and the contexts in which they are...
Making the Landscape Divine at Dainzú, Oaxaca, Mexico (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Place-Making in Indigenous Mesoamerican Communities Past and Present" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Throughout its prehispanic occupation, Dainzú played a significant ceremonial role in the Oaxaca Valley of Mexico. In the Formative period (200 BCE–CE 200), prominent terrain features were intentionally incorporated into the settlement’s design with the intent of making a shared place through ritual practice. For...
Maya-Teotihuacan Relations Viewed from Front D at the Plaza of the Columns (2018)
Two distinct excavation contexts from Front D in the Plaza of the Columns Complex yielded pictorial representations in different artistic media that strongly suggest the presence of Maya artists in Plaza 50, decades prior to the famous Teotihuacan "Entrada" of 378 C.E. in the Petén. Excavations at this civic-administrative structure at the heart of the ceremonial core of Teotihuacan have revealed a sequence of numerous plaster floors in Plaza 50 associated with Structure 44, whose form is...
Mayan Cosmology Depicted in Ancient Murals: Understanding Gender, Death, and Religious Pedagogy in Mayan Civilization during Classical and Preclassical Era (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Research into ancient Mayan murals in San Bartolo, Bonampak, and Rio Azul demonstrates that the Mayans used paintings to educate people and to portray religious beliefs. The intricacy of their painting technique and the use of natural pigments elicit a durable, complex representation of the Mayan culture rooted in their cosmology of mystic deities called...
Means, Motive, and Opportunity: Use of the Sun Pyramid Cave at Teotihuacan Post Termination (2018)
Ceramics and radiocarbon dates indicate that Teotihuacanos ceased using the cave beneath the Sun Pyramid around the middle of the third century CE, at a time when the city was only just entering its "Classic" period florescence. A reverential termination seems quite likely. Evidence also indicates that post termination use of the cave occurred. As there were approximately 1700 years in between cessation of initial use and modern discovery of the cave in 1974, this paper explores the question of...
A Methodological Challenge: Understanding the Population Dynamics in the Lerma Floodplain through the Case of Tres Mezquites, Michoacan (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Regional and Intensive Site Survey: Case Studies from Mesoamerica" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Alluvial plains in Mexico are still little explored. At first glance their archaeological potential is difficult to appreciate because they are areas of both sedimentary accumulation and destruction caused by intensive agriculture. To compensate these limitations in the Lerma alluvial plain (Michoacan, Guanajuato), we...
Methods of LiDAR Mapping in Urban Landscapes: Introducing the Teotihuacan LiDAR Map (2018)
In the 1970s, systematic and expansive survey techniques enabled Million to create the first map of Teotihuacan, establishing the limits and density of the city. In this presentation we introduce a newly developed 2.5 dimensional map based on a LiDAR landscape model overlaid with a high-precision architectural map of the city drawn in AutoCAD covering 174 km2 area that extends the Million map by 131 km2. LiDAR technologies have greatly aided archaeological research in many landscapes with high...
Mica in Xalla: A Glittering Archaeological Indicator of Power and Specialized Production (2021)
This is an abstract from the "The Palace of Xalla in Teotihuacan: A Possible Seat of Power in the Ancient Metropolis" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Mica, a shiny silicate mineral with a layered structure, was highly valued by the Teotihuacan people. Mica has unique physical properties, but we propose that the most striking one was of an optical nature, owing to the fact that it is a multicolored, specular material. The Teotihuacan elite groups...
Monte Alban’s Main Plaza: New Perspectives Gained Through Geophysical Prospection and Digital Mapping (2018)
Ongoing scholarly debate concerning the function, meaning, and history of Monte Albán’s Main Plaza have important ramifications for our understanding of sociopolitical, economic, and religious life at the Zapotec capital. Although previous investigations have targeted many of the buildings that surround the plaza, none have focused explicitly on the plaza itself. This paper presents the preliminary results of the Proyecto Geofísico de Monte Albán (PGMA), a non-invasive study of the entire Main...
Moving Beyond Drone Technology: Comparing and Interpreting Architecture and Power at Chalcatzingo, Cuicuilco, and Teotihuacan through Volumetric Measurements Obtained with Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (2018)
Drone technology has become widely available, easy to use, and relatively inexpensive over the last four years, and archaeologists have embraced it eagerly. Apart from the technological breakthroughs of the UAV platform and its assortment of sensors, we need to interpret these data beyond the beautiful models and topographic measurements. In this paper, we use the concept of monumentality and compare three iconic sites in Central Mexico to understand how their architectural expression correlates...
The Multiplicity of Murals: Translating Landscapes at Teotihuacan (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Teotihuacan: Multidisciplinary Research on Mesoamerica's Classic Metropolis" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The murals at Teotihuacan have become a common source of fascination in the archaeology and scholarly considerations of the site. Although the site itself may need no introduction, the murals that decorate its walls have been studied with a level of uncertainty. Often depicting complex and abstract...
Multisensor Geophysical Survey of Monte Albán’s Main Plaza (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Monumental Surveys: New Insights from Landscape-Scale Geophysics" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the summer of 2017, we conducted a landscape-scale geophysical survey of the Main Plaza at Monte Albán, Oaxaca, Mexico. We obtained full coverage of the plaza with gradiometry, electrical resistance, and ground-penetrating radar and also generated a centimeter-level accuracy map using a drone and a robotic total...
Narratives in Clay and Pigment: Cultural Knowledge and Social Practices in the Sierra Mixe, Oaxaca (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The artistic expressions of the Ayuujk (Mixe) peoples are little known in Mexican archaeological research. In this presentation I discuss the possible narratives behind the presence of plastic art and rock art, unprecedent in Mesoamérica, located in the context of a subterranean landscape in the Sierra Mixe of Oaxaca. In particular I will focus on the...
A Network Model of Co-Rulership and Community Ritual in Teotihuacan: From Neighborhoods to Districts (2018)
Experts remain divided about the nature of the sociopolitical system of ancient Teotihuacan, which was one of the earliest and largest urban civilizations of the Americas. Excavations hoping to find compelling evidence of a powerful dynasty of rulers, such as a royal tomb, keep coming away empty-handed. However, the alternative possibility of a corporate or collective government, perhaps headed by a small number of co-rulers, also remains poorly understood. A third option is that the city’s...
New Data and New Perspectives of the Feathered Serpent Symbolism and Polity at Teotihuacan (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Tales of the Feathered Serpent: Refining Our Understanding of an Enigmatic Mesoamerican Being" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Intensive excavations carried out by the Proyecto Templo de Quetzalcoatl more than 20 years ago suggested that the pyramid symbolized human sacrifice, warfare, and rulership in Teotihuacan. The lack of a royal tomb inside the building indicated that more than 200 warriors were sacrificed in...
New Isotopic Research from the La Ventilla Neighborhood of Teotihuacan: Demography, Migration, and Diet of Two Socioeconomic Groups (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The neighborhood of La Ventilla in the city of Teotihuacan was extensively excavated in the 1990s, during which the largest skeletal collection was recovered at this great urban center. However, it was not until the last several years that stable and radiogenic isotope analysis were conducted on a large-scale at this site. New strontium and oxygen isotope...
Nonlinear and Multiscalar Dynamics of Migration (2018)
The quantitative model of diffusion traditionally studied in archaeology uses Gaussian statistics and Brownian motion to envisage a slow wave of advance. It originates from Fisher’s model for the diffusion of advantageous alleles across the landscape, but was then applied in archaeology to the diffusion of agriculture from the Near East into Europe. More recently, Lévy flights, which are random walks with step lengths derived from power-law distributions, have been proposed as models for human...
Now You See Her, Now You Don’t: Female Gender and Its Contexts at Teotihuacan (2023)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper explores the confounding issue of female-gendered images at Teotihuacan. Figures clad in female-gendered clothing appear within Teotihuacan’s most prominent and luxurious arts. Some of the largest sculptures and most precious stone figures are female, and these sculptural images were recovered from highly symbolic, civic spaces. Similarly,...
An NSF Broader Impact Story in the Teotihuacan Valley of Mexico: 60 Years in the Making (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Innovations and Transformations in Mesoamerican Research: Recent and Revised Insights of Ancestral Lifeways" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. For many, the “broader impact” of a grant proposal frequently involves outcomes that will happen somewhere between immediately and the next five years. Yet, the scope of the broader impact is often unexpected, unknown, and/or will take place many decades later. In 1960, when Eric...
Obsidian Distribution in Michoacán during the Epiclassic Period (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Crossing Boundaries: Interregional Interactions in Pre-Columbian Times" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the Epiclassic, well known as a transitionary period, some emerging chiefdoms sought control of exchange networks and natural resources like obsidian. Specifically, in Western Mesoamerica, in Michoacán are two obsidian sources that had a local distribution across the Lake Chapala basin, the central mountain...
Obsidian Production and Consumption Practices at Matacanela (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Olmec Manifestations and Ongoing Societal Transformations in the Tuxtlas Uplands: A View from Matacanela" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Matacanela’s chipped stone assemblage overwhelmingly is dominated by nonlocal obsidian, including both products and by-products of multiple reductive technologies. Overarching temporal trends and classification of Matacanela’s obsidian assemblage have previously been discussed within...
Obsidian Technologies at the La Magdalena Site in the Eastern Bajio of Guanajuato, Mexico (2021)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Archaeologists attribute many possible connections between the Bajío and Basin of Mexico during the Formative through Postclassic periods. Elemental analysis of obsidian from the site of La Magdalena (Q-25) in the eastern Bajío region of Mexico both support and challenge different aspects of these connections. Excavations conducted by Beloit College in 1958...
Paisajes aprovechados y causes modificados en el sistema portuario de la costa este de Los Tuxtlas, Veracruz (2018)
En la zona este de Los Tuxtlas se ha identificado un complejo sistema de intercomunicación fluvial y marítima, construido a partir del aprovechamiento y acondicionamiento de corrientes acuáticas. Una gran parte de estas vías de comunicación confluyen en el sistema portuario de la costa este de Los Tuxtlas. La región se caracteriza por estar en un abanico aluvial, por lo que presenta un gran dinamismo fluvial, es decir los causes no son estáticos en el tiempo. En los estudios arqueológicos debe...
Paisajes, recursos y su aprovechamiento en Los Tuxtlas, Veracruz, Mexico (2018)
Síntesis de una investigación arqueológica que se enfocó en analizar y comparar la morfología del paisaje cultural de antiguos asentamientos prehispánicos en la sierra de Los Tuxtlas, Veracruz, México. Combinando aspectos de la geografía cultural, procesualismo, y unidades de paisaje geomorfológico se pudieron describir y analizar sitios arqueológicos en Los Tuxtlas, así como discernir las posibles dinámicas de agencia y adaptación del medio ambiente, uso del espacio y aprovechamiento de los...