Highland Mesoamerica: Classic (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rafael Cruz-Gil.

This is an abstract from the "Ancient Mesoamerican and Andean Cities: Old Debates, New Perspectives" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. While spatial analysis has become commonplace in archaeology, the social implications of mobility and accessibility in urban contexts remain an aspect that can be studied in much more depth. Drawing theories and methodologies from urban design has long been a staple for understanding the lived built environment, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Andrew D. Turner.

This is an abstract from the "Bringing the Past to Life, Part 1: Papers in Honor of John M. D. Pohl" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. John Pohl’s groundbreaking investigations of the tandem roles of merchant exchange, alliance building, and migration have caused us to reconceptualize the multiethnic sociopolitical landscapes of central Mexico and Oaxaca in the Epiclassic and Postclassic periods and the social actors that populated them. In the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Karen Bell.

This is an abstract from the "Gender in Archaeology over the Last 30+ Years" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper builds on the author’s earlier research that documents previously unrecognized female rulers among the Aztec. Over the last 50 years, interest in elite women in other areas of Mesoamerica has grown, and the author presents the outcome of some of that research. Woman rulers from not only the Aztec area but also from the Valley of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Véronique Darras. Alejandra Castañeda. Laure Déodat.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nawa Sugiyama. Saburo Sugiyama. Adrian Chase. Tanya Catignani. Taylor Gibson.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Edgar Rosales.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marc Levine. Alex E. Badillo. Scott Hammerstedt. Amanda Regnier. Marcus Winter.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Zachary Hruby.

This is an abstract from the "Mountains, Rain, and Techniques of Governance in Mesoamerica" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Lithic analysis at various sites in the Maya area, such as Plan de las Mesas, Kaminaljuyu, Copan, and Piedras Negras reveal regional differences between obsidian tool production, distribution, and consumption. Some patterns in obsidian economies were shared between these sites, as well as others more distantly located such as...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emmanuel Posselt Santoyo.

This is an abstract from the "Checking the Pulse II: Current Research in Oaxaca Part 2" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. La conferencia pasada presenté algunas ideas sobre el estudio del movimiento en los sitios arqueológicos a partir del propio movimiento. Continuando con esta temática, en esta ocasión me enfocaré en la movilidad ritual al interior del sitio de Yucu Ñuu Dahui. Este asentamiento es emblemático de la Mixteca Alta debido a que se...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Israel Hinojosa-Balino. Gerardo Gutierrez.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katherine McCarthy.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Scott Hammerstedt. Marc Levine. Amanda Regnier.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Leslie Zubieta Calvert.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tom Froese. Linda Manzanilla.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Saburo Sugiyama.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gina Buckley. Sergio Gómez Chávez. Ruben Cabrera Castro. Fred Longstaffe. Spencer Seman.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nelly Robles García. Saburo Sugiyama. Yuma Takada. Damián Martínez. Miguel Ángel Galván.

This is an abstract from the "Ancient Landscapes and Cosmic Cities out of Eurasia: Transdisciplinary Studies with New Lidar Mapping" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Monte Albán, the central mountain area in the Oaxaca Valley was largely modified around 500 BC and functioned as a ceremonial precinct and state headquarters for more than 1,300 years. As one of the objectives under the umbrella program of “Out of Eurasia,” we here explore the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Clifford Brown.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Annabeth Headrick.

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,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kirk French.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Max Ayala. Cinthia M. Campos.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Shayna Lindquist.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Blaine Burgess. Jeffrey Ferguson. Shannon Fie.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marimar Becerra Alvarez.

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...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Xochitl Leon Estrada.

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...