Highland Mesoamerica: Postclassic (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Jamie Forde.

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. Prehispanic visual sources and colonial alphabetic texts provide rich descriptions of what scholars have termed "the Flower World" in Mesoamerica. This idealized celestial realm was filled not just with flowers, but an array of other precious substances, ranging from gemstones to precious metals, to bird feathers and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Angela Huster.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In 1565, the Matlatzinca Pablo Ocelotl and the Nahua Alonso Gonzales appeared before a Spanish judge in lawsuit over lands in the community of Tlacotepec, in the Toluca Valley of Central Mexico. While describing the rise and fall of their families under Matlatzinca, Aztec, and Spanish rule, both swore their families were long time residents of community. ...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alejandro Garay Herrera.

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. Among the Maya of northwestern Guatemala, modern populations continue to use the mountains found in their territories as places of worship. Often altars are located directly on the peaks of hills and mountains, while in other cases they are found on pilgrimage routes in or around these high sacred points, such as on the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Juliette Testard. Marion Forest. Elsa Jadot.

This is an abstract from the "Mesoamerican Figurines in Context. New Insights on Tridimensional Representations from Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Recent work conducted in Northern Michoacán by the CEMCA in the Zacapu Basin, 30 km North of the Tarascan core-region, shed light on a specific and poorly defined time period at the region before the Tarascan kingdom: The Early Postclassic. The local phase Palacio ranges from A.D. 900 to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emilie Carreón Blaine.

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. The purpose of this collaboration is to present the results of the analysis of a human skull located at the center of the ball court of Santa Rosa, Chiapas, and to review the implications it presents for the study of the Mesoamerican ball game and its relationship to human sacrifice. It is a...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elizabeth Baquedano.

This is an abstract from the "Misinformation and Misrepresentation Part 1: Reconsidering “Human Sacrifice,” Religion, Slavery, Modernity, and Other European-Derived Concepts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Aztecs and other Mesoamerican peoples were exceptionally aware and observant of their natural world and the cycles of nature, particularly the alternation of the seasons. Many of their representations were aptly identified with the dry or...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Davide Domenici.

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. The Museo delle Civiltà (Rome) holds two famous Late Postclassic Mesoamerican knife-handles, sculpted in wood and encrusted with a mosaic of turquoise, malachite, lignite, Spondylus, Strombus, mother-of-pearl, and gold. Both represent crouching figures—one anthropomorphic and the other zoomorphic—facing toward the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Timothy Knab.

This is an abstract from the "Bringing the Past to Life, Part 2: Papers in Honor of John M. D. Pohl" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. We use metaphors for the human mind just as we do for religious, mythic and symbolic systems. These metaphoric systems reproduce the same social phenomena in ritual process and social organization. It should thus be clear that we find reintegration of social, symbolic, and metaphoric systems as a society is...

DOCUMENT Citation Only James Maffie.

This is an abstract from the "Embodied Essence: Anthropological, Historical, and Archaeological Perspectives on the Use of Body Parts and Bodily Substances in Religious Beliefs and Practices" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Mexica tzompantli (“skull rack”) consisted of multiple, agricultural-style ordered rows of human skull-seeds. As such it constituted an enormous “battery pack,” or milpa, that contained, stored, and radiated the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Laura Filloy. María Olvido Moreno Guzmán. José Luis Ruvalcaba Sil. Edgar Casanova. Cynthya Arellano.

This is an abstract from the "From Materials to Materiality: Analysis and Interpretation of Archaeological and Historical Artifacts Using Non-destructive and Micro/Nano-sampling Scientific Methods" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In the collections of the world, only six aztec feathered objects exist: three shields and a headdress in Europe, and two shields in Mexico. Mexico’s National Museum of History conserves one shield, made of mammal hide,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Meradeth Snow. Michael Mathiowetz. Patricio Gutierrez Ruano. Emma Zoiss.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The world has always been connected through the movement of people, exchange of goods, and sharing of cultural traits; thus, evidence of such can be found within the genomes of individuals, as well as the archaeological sites they leave behind. The present research is comprised of multiple lines of inquiry that address questions of gene flow, genetic...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alejandra Aguirre. Diego Matadamas.

This is an abstract from the "Ceremonial Lithics of Mesoamerica: New Understandings of Technology, Distribution, and Symbolism of Eccentrics and Ritual Caches in the Maya World and Beyond" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The offerings at the Great Temple of Tenochtitlan contain several lithic artifacts that were miniature versions of ornaments, weapons and attire, which were used to produce religious images. For the Mexicas, the act of placing...

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 Helen Pollard. Dorothy Washburn.

This is an abstract from the "Ceramics and Archaeological Sciences 2024" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. As a common material and highly plastic technology, in Mesoamerica ceramics are used to define spatial and chronological units of past social, political, and economic structures. In the present study, we compare (1) the use of the type-variety classification as a “chaîne opératoire,” (2) the use of INA and thin-section petrography in sourcing...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Meztli Hernández-Grajales. Luis Barba. Juan José García-Granero Fos. Alessandra Pecci.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Mesoamerican food has been studied for years, and although much is known about many of the native practices and ingredients, the archaeological study of food in Mesoamerica is still developing and we are learning that we know far less of it than we thought. For this research, we applied a multiproxy approach, that involved the use of GC-MS, starch grain...

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 Stephen Whittington. Soren Frykholm.

This is an abstract from the "Checking the Pulse II, Current Research in Oaxaca Part 1" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Intermediate levels of social organization—above the household, but below the entire settlement, city, or polity—are notoriously difficult to pinpoint in archaeological contexts, but they nevertheless represent a crucial frontier for building new archaeological theory to understand daily social life in the past. Ethnographic...

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 Viola Koenig.

This is an abstract from the "Bringing the Past to Life, Part 2: Papers in Honor of John M. D. Pohl" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Can we compare the power, decline, and survival of Mesoamerican sociopolitical and religious systems with contemporary academic schools? Are there characteristic relationships between researchers and research subjects? Does this apply at least to the Mixteca-Puebla and Oaxaca regions? In other words, what do the...

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...