Highland Mesoamerica: Postclassic (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Sofía Pacheco-Forés. María García Velasco.

Within Mesoamerica, ritual violence and human sacrifice have long been topics of anthropological inquiry. In this study, we investigate how the perception of social difference contributed to the selection of victims of ritual violence at an Epiclassic (600-900 CE) shrine site in the Basin of Mexico. The Epiclassic was a period of dramatic political upheaval and social reorganization. In such a volatile geopolitical climate, aspects of individuals’ social identities, such as their residential...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Katrina Kosyk.

This is an abstract from the "Advances in Puebla/Tlaxcala Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. More than a means for communication, sound, and music contributed to the formation of identities in the Puebla-Tlaxcala valley during the Late Postclassic to early colonial period. In particular, sonic assemblages contain multisensorial data that can be used to identify how knowledge and musical practices are shared among communities. These...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Meghan Cartier.

The relationship between the Aztecs and the Huastecs is complicated and often defined by Aztec reaction to Huastec culture. The Aztecs have often dominated the landscape of Mesoamerica while the Huastecs have been seen as something somewhat separate. At first glance the difference in Aztec and Huastec sculptural tradition might seem to reaffirm this disconnect. By focusing on male figurative sculpture and how it reflects the construction of gender identity we see that despite clear differences...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kirby Farah.

Immediately after the consolidation of the Aztec Empire, Itzcoatl, the king of Tenochtitlan, ordered the destruction of the ancient codices from newly incorporated territories. By erasing these alternative histories, Itzcoatl paved the way for the construction of an official imperial history that bolstered the political aims of Aztec leaders. Nearly a century later, a second wave of erasures occurred when Spanish conquerors destroyed indigenous books and idols in an effort to eradicate...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Gerardo Cifuentes. Yosselin Angeles. Andres Tejero. Mario Retiz.

This is an abstract from the "Technological Transitions in Prehispanic and Colonial Metallurgy: Recent and Ongoing Research at the Archaeological Site of Jicalán Viejo, in Central Michoacán, West Mexico" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Near-surface geophysics has been widely used as a tool to determine the distribution of objects at depth with archaeological targets. To identify more specific objects, such as ovens and associated structures, the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Susan Toby Evans.

This is an abstract from the "After Dark: The Nocturnal Urban Landscape & Lightscape of Ancient Cities" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Cortes escaped from Tenochtitlan on "La Noche Triste" in the summer of 1520, but many in his entourage did not – a Mexican woman awake in the night saw them heading across the causeway to the mainland and roused the city to pursue them. The intruders had been under siege by the Tenochca, whose daytime prowess as...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jonathan Extract.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Anthropological discourse has placed concerted attention on the role of “axis mundis” in configuring Mesoamerican socio-cosmology. However, in this paper, I highlight the emphasis that many Central Mexican creation-foundation narratives placed on alterity rather than centrality in rendering the boundaries of altepetl “communities.” Nahua cartographic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Tanya Carino Anaya. Juan Carlos Campos-Varela. Irán Rivera. Cuauhtémoc Domínguez Pérez. Javier Martínez González.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. "Chinampas" typically are associated with Xochimilco’s agricultural system. However, recent work by INAH’s ‘Dirección de Salvamentos Arqueológicos’ was undertaken at Iztacalco due to modern population growth. Iztacalco is 15 km from Xochimilco but no information existed about the preHispanic population or the site’s economic activities. Therefore, this...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nezahualcoyotl Xiuhtecutli. Aurelio Lopez Corral.

This is an abstract from the "Tlaxcallan: Mesoamerica's Bizarro World" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Surface survey and excavations of Late Postclassic Tlaxcallan at the site of Tepeticpac recovered various lithic artifacts in addition to the chipped obsidian assemblage. Although the chipped non-obsidian artifacts were far fewer than obsidian artifacts, they were still found throughout the site in both surface domestic and excavated public...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert Markens. Cira Martínez López.

This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Oaxacan Cuisine" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. From 500 BCE onwards, religion in the Valley of Oaxaca was organized in part as an ancestor cult as materialized by the appearance of household tombs in the archaeological record. Heads of households were laid to rest for a number of generations with offerings consisting most often of ceramic vessels, which in domestic contexts were used to serve food...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Max Ayala.

During the years A.D. 550/600 to A.D. 900/1000 there was a significant emergence of sites with large populations who at one point were subjected to Teotihuacan’s control. This period is known in Mesoamerica as the Late Classic or Epiclassic period. At this time emerging groups sought to control specific resources that would give them power over other groups. One of the most sought after and exploited resources was obsidian. It is known that some deposits were not exploited as intensively and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emmanuel Gómez Ambríz. José Luis Punzo Díaz.

This is an abstract from the "Approaches to Cultural and Biological Complexity in Mexico at the Time of Spanish Conquest" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The most important city of The Tarascan Empire was Tzintzuntzan. The Yacatas, political and ceremonial center of this site, was explored in the first half of the 20th Century by Mexican scholars. Nevertheless, information about these excavations is not clear at all. For this reason, here we offer...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Guilhem Olivier. Vera Tiesler.

This is an abstract from the "New Perspectives on Ritual Violence and Related Human Body Treatments in Ancient Mesoamerica" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Beyond the general idea of benefiting society and placating the divine, the polyvalent symbols and meanings of ancient religious sacrifices can be interpreted properly only after combining different disciplinary lenses. In this paper, we scrutinize iconographic and ethnohistorical testimonies of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marc Marino. Lane Fargher. Nathan Meissner. John Millhauser.

This is an abstract from the "Tlaxcallan: Mesoamerica's Bizarro World" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Systems of craft production and exchange in Mesoamerica are often correlated with the socio-political circumstances in which they formed, and such discussions are frequently applied to the organization of lithic industries, including the production of prismatic blades. Systems correlated with direct or centralized distribution networks are...

DOCUMENT Citation Only William Ringle.

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. From at least the Epiclassic period onward, the Feathered Serpent was frequently accompanied by a Cloud Serpent. In the mythology of the Nahuas he was known as Mixcoatl or Camaxtli in his anthropomorphic form, and was either the father or half-brother of Quetzalcoatl. A patron of the hunt, he...

DOCUMENT Citation Only John Pohl. Michael Mathiowetz.

This is an abstract from the "Coastal Connections: Pacific Coastal Links from Mexico to Ecuador" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The pioneering fieldwork of Seler, Lumholtz, Saville, Sauer, Vaillant and Elkholm, the Sociedad Mexicana de Antropología to officially recognize "Mixteca-Puebla" as the fourth and last major cultural horizon of the ancient Mexican World in 1945. By 1960 however, H.B. Nicholson had reduced Mixteca-Puebla to a provincial...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Susan Evans.

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. The European conquest of the Aztec Empire was eased by strong parallels in Aztec and European courtly behavior in their respective (and contemporaneous) chronological periods, the Late Postclassic (1430–1521) and Renaissance (various dates, 1300s to about 1600). Elite marital...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Bianca Gentil.

The Puebla-Tlaxcala Valley in Central Mexico went through significant settlement, economic, and political shifts during the Classic-Postclassic transition, yet there is no clear picture of what happened during the Epiclassic (600-900CE) or the Early Postclassic (900-1250CE) outside of large primary sites such as Cacaxtla and Cholula. A multi-faceted study was developed to target this issue, with a particular focus on rural sites that supported known large centers. Since the early years of...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cuauhtémoc Vidal Guzmán.

This is an abstract from the "Checking the Pulse: Current Research in Oaxaca Part I" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. As in many other parts of Mesoamerica, the transition from the Classic to Postclassic periods in the Nochixtlán valley is a debated topic given the paucity of research in the Ñuu Savi area. Recently, archaeologists have aimed to elucidate the social transformations that took place during this liminal time by conducting excavations at...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Amy Hirshman.

Archaeologically known ceramic pastes from the Lake Pátzcuaro Basin, Michoacán, Mexico, involved long-lived paste recipes that have been identified both visually and via neutron activation. This paper focuses upon Late Postclassic Tarascan state-period ceramics (AD 1350-1525) and contextualizes new petrographic data within the regional geology and prior research in order to assess aspects of the longevity and complexity in potter’s paste choices within the basin.

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elodie Dupey.

This is an abstract from the "Polychromy, Multimediality, and Visual Complexity in Mesoamerican Art" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Through the analysis of several examples of Nahua artistic expression, including the mural paintings of Tlaxcala, the Borgia Group codices, and a wood sculpture encrusted with mosaic, this paper aims to demonstrate that the societies of Late Postclassic central Mexico cultivated a strong interest in polychromy,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Corey Ragsdale. Cathy Willermet. Heather Edgar.

This is an abstract from the "Approaches to Cultural and Biological Complexity in Mexico at the Time of Spanish Conquest" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Cultural processes connected the various regions throughout Mesoamerica. Increased long-distance trade, political alliances, imperial conquest, and spread of religious ideology in the Valley of Mexico facilitated more migration over time. City nucleation to important economic, political, and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Keith Jordan.

Classic Maya stelae have been proposed as precursors for the Early Postclassic stelae at Tula and the relief pillars of Pyramid B at the site in previous scholarship. While suggested Maya connections for the Tula stelae are often overstated, and local central Mexican stela traditions as well as ideas from Oaxaca and Guerrero also probably contributed to the genesis of these monuments, the role of Maya contacts remains plausible. Here I explore possible Maya analogs, including stelae, for the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kim Richter.

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. The Feathered Serpent was one of the principal Mesoamerican deities before the Spanish Conquest. During the Epiclassic and Postclassic periods, the cult dedicated to this ancient deity, associated with wind, fertility, and rulership, became firmly established within an international elite...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Anna Cohen.

This is an abstract from the "Step by Step: Tracing World Potting Traditions through Ceramic Petrography" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Documentation of the chaîne opératoire allows us to investigate the manufacturing steps that transform raw materials into finished products. Study of these steps can facilitate discussions about the intentions of ancient potters and potter communities of practice. In western Mesoamerica during the Late...