Highland Mesoamerica: Postclassic (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Kate. J. Heath Anderson. Doug Kennett. John Krigbaum.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this poster, we present preliminary mobility data for individuals recovered from La Mesa, an Epiclassic hilltop settlement in Tula, Mexico. For decades it has been hypothesized that the Tula area may have experienced an influx of immigrants from northwestern Mexico during the Epiclassic period, and that these newcomers played an important role in the rise...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ángel González López. Nelda Marengo Camacho.

This is an abstract from the "Sacrificial and Autosacrifice Instruments in Mesoamerica: Symbolism and Technology" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In Chichen Itza and Tenochtitlan’s religious thought, sacrifice was a creative act closely related to cosmic genesis and world sense. This behavior is evident not only in the archaeological record but also in the iconography. Two of the most common artifacts associated with this ancient practice in both...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Samantha Nadel. Everardo Tapia Mendoza.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Although cochineal has played an important role in Mesoamerican societies, a lack of suitable methods has hampered its investigation by archaeologists. Luckily, recent developments in organic residue analysis suggest the possibility that cochineal production may be identified in the archaeological record through identification of carminic acid, its primary...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Stacie King. Shanti Morell-Hart.

This is an abstract from the "The Archaeology of Oaxacan Cuisine" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The rich culinary traditions of Oaxaca were both enhanced through and catastrophically disrupted by Spanish incursions during the Colonial Period. However, in spite of many radical transformations in cooking techniques and ingredients, indigenous people of Oaxaca persisted in their use of certain foods and practices. This persistence sometimes required...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lisa Overholtzer.

Precisely dated household middens at the Aztec site of Xaltocan suggest that Aztec imperial matter—decorated serving vessels imported from Tenochtitlan and small spindle whorls used to produce tribute cloth, for example—often predates imperial formation and expansion by nearly a century. In this paper, I consider the analytical purchase we might get in explaining this puzzling finding by considering literature from the material turn; Khatchadourian, Bauer, Kosiba, and others have recently...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Keith Jordan.

This is an abstract from the "Animal Symbolism in Postclassic Mesoamerica: Papers in Honor of Cecelia Klein" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This paper examines the predatory animals on the relief friezes of Pyramid B at Tula, clearly based on Teotihuacan models originally expressed in different media and contexts--murals in interior spaces--and the possible reasons for both Tula's borrowing of this imagery and its redeployment in sculpture in the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Niklas Schulze. Luis Barba.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In pre-Hispanic Mexico the use and the importance of fire are demonstrated by materials and objects that, without the use of high temperature processes, or pyrotechnology in general terms, would not exist. As examples it will be sufficient to mention ceramics, metals and lime production. The processes that do not qualify as industrial and that employ lower...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Elena Mazzetto.

This is an abstract from the "Animal Symbolism in Postclassic Mesoamerica: Papers in Honor of Cecelia Klein" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In documentary sources recording Nahuatl culture of the Late Postclassic period, a bird called zollin, identified as a quail (Cyrtonyx montezumae) is especially prominent. Indeed, these small birds were often chosen to be sacrificed before the divine effigies and, in some cases, to be consumed during ritual...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily Umberger.

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. Quetzalcoatl (Feathered Serpent) is often characterized as a wind god, but in Aztec sculptures, the traits of the wind god Ehecatl, principally the buccal mouth mask, are not found mixed with feathered serpent imagery. The mix is found in pictorial manuscripts, and alluded to in written...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alex Badillo. Pedro Guillermo Ramón Celis.

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. Southern Mexico has been the site of many large-scale regional settlement pattern projects that have been instrumental in developing the regional histories that contribute to our understandings of the sociopolitical and economic climate that was encountered by the Spanish upon their arrival nearly...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Natalia Moragas.

This is an abstract from the "What Happened after the Fall of Teotihuacan?" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Life in the ancient city of Teotihuacan did not end with the collapse of Classic period society, but rather, until the constitution of the current zone of archaeological monuments, the area was a place of residence, rituals, and somewhat later, pastures and crops. We must remember that the period from AD 600 until 1521 occupies a broader...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Antje Gunsenheimer.

This is an abstract from the "Misinformation and Misrepresentation Part 2: Reconsidering “Human Sacrifice,” Religion, Slavery, Modernity, and Other European-Derived Concepts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The contribution deals with the question of how crimes were punished in the Aztec penal system. We know that Aztec society—as many other premodern societies—did not have prisons for long-term punishment of crimes, nor for any forms of preventive...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Robert Markens.

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. Monte Albán’s Tomb 7 is the most famous prehispanic find in Oaxaca owing to its exquisite mortuary offering. Since 1932 when Dr. Alfonso Caso and his colleagues discovered the treasure, archaeologists have routinely ascribed the deposit to Mixtec migrants since the tomb’s objects were rendered in the Mixteca-Puebla...

DOCUMENT Full-Text Samantha Nadel.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The interdisciplinary study of cochineal production in Mesoamerica has overwhelmingly focused on the written record. These documents, written by Spanish colonizers, European scientists, and modern-day ethnographers, yield insightful information into the material culture of cochineal production, from the cactus farm to the dye vat. Yet thus far, this...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Lee Ann Monaghan. John Pohl. Manuel Hermann. John Monaghan.

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. Precolumbian manuscripts provide a view of indigenous life that is largely unmediated by Spanish colonialism. The Colombino-Becker is one of the masterpieces of the Mixtec Codices, but poor preservation, missing pages, and an effort to make the manuscript more palatable in a Christian context by erasing not only...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marc Marino. Wesley Stoner. Lane Fargher.

This is an abstract from the "Advances in Puebla/Tlaxcala Archaeology" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Collective action problems arise when individuals expend energy or resources to obtain a common goal or outcome. However, conflicting interests hinder cooperation and preclude joint action. Visibility and trust are two factors that reduce collective action problems among small and mid-sized groups, but research is limited on how these variables...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Rudolf Cesaretti.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The archaeology of the Postclassic (c. AD 900-1520) Basin of Mexico (BOM) is among the most intensively studied in the New World. In spite of this, longstanding questions about population dynamics and social change remain unresolved due to the persistent gaps and coarse resolution of its regional-scale ceramic chronology. Ongoing fieldwork and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Emily McClung De Tapia. Diana Martínez-Yrízar. Carmen Cristina Adriano-Morán. Emilio Ibarra-Morales.

This is an abstract from the "What Happened after the Fall of Teotihuacan?" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Significant changes in sociopolitical and economic organization following the collapse of the Teotihuacan state between the sixth and seventh centuries CE are evident in settlement patterns as well as archaeological materials including ceramics and lithics. The potential magnitude of this event and subsequent ramifications within the valley...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Geoffrey McCafferty.

This is an abstract from the "Cholula to Chachoapan: Celebrating the Career of Michael Lind" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The culture history of Cholula (Puebla, Mexico) has been a roller coaster as different scholars with different paradigms have radically altered direction over the past 100 years. Consequently, when I got onboard the consensus was that Cholula had been abandoned at the end of the Classic period, in the same way as Teotihuacan,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Johannes Neurath.

This is an abstract from the "Sacrificial and Autosacrifice Instruments in Mesoamerica: Symbolism and Technology" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In Mesoamerican religious practice, ritual killings (allosacrifice) and so-called practices of self-sacrifice (autosacrifice) often coexist simultaneously. Therefore, the ethnographic, iconographic, and historical analysis should therefore focus on what may be called the condensation of ritual relations....

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kristin De Lucia. Linda Scott Cummings.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. We examine the use of cooking vessels from Early Postclassic (AD 900-1250) Xaltocan, Mexico, through residue analysis of ceramic sherds. The analysis combined phytolith, pollen, and starch analyses with Fourier Transform Infrared Spectroscopy (FTIR) and Energy Dispersive X-Ray Fluorescence (ED-XRF) conducted at the Paleoresearch Institute. Because our...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Nora Zariñán.

This is an abstract from the "Multispecies Frameworks in Archaeological Interpretation: Human-Nonhuman Interactions in the Past, Part II" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. It has been a while since anthropology experienced an ontological turn that calls to question the universal application of Western concepts, such as nature, culture, and humanity. That questioning, however, has not permeated enough into anthropology, but even much less into...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Destiny Crider. Daniel Pierce. J. Heath Anderson. Michael D. Glascock.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Significant progress has been made in the description and definition of typological and compositional assemblages of Tula, Hidalgo regional ceramics during the Epiclassic period of the Central Highlands. Neutron Activation Analysis conducted at the Archaeometry Laboratory and the Research Reactor Center at the University of Missouri (MURR) now includes...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cinthia M. Campos. José Luis Punzo Díaz. Carlos Karam.

This study reports on osteological remains excavated from the Great Platform at Tzintzuntzán, the Postclassic (A.D. 1300-1522) Tarascan ceremonial capital. The osteological deposit was first uncovered by Alfonso Caso in 1937-1944, re-visited by Rubin de Borbolla and Roman Piña Chan during the 1960’s, by Efrain Cardenas in 1992, and most recently in 2011 by the Proyecto Especial de Michoacán. In 1992, 194 skull fragments (MNI=40) and 28 modified femur fragments were recovered while the most...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christine Hernandez.

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. In the special collections of the Latin American Library at Tulane University is a tracing made by William Spratling of an original *lienzo map centered on the town of Noxtepec, Guerrero. Painted by a *tlacuilo, the *lienzo likely dates to the end of the sixteenth century. This little-known piece exemplifies the...