Highland Mesoamerica: Postclassic (Other Keyword)

DOCUMENT Citation Only Patricia Fournier. Cynthia Otis Charlton.

This is an abstract from the "The Legacies of The Basin of Mexico: The Ecological Processes in the Evolution of a Civilization, Part 1" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Basin of Mexico book elucidated for a broader audience the work and philosophy of William Sanders and his first generation of collaborators and students and has influenced many generations of Mesoamerican scholars since. We draw on the broad studies of long-term work carried out...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Angela Huster.

In written sources, the Mexica provide stereotyped descriptions of other groups, many of whom had been conquered and incorporated into the Aztec Empire. I use data from the site of Calixtlahuaca to evaluate the archaeological validity of such stereotypical practices for one group, the Matlatzinca. In particular, I focus on the heavy reliance on maguey, and locally distinctive foodways relating to maize. I then consider whether these practices became more or less pronounced once the area came...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Morehart. Angela Huster. Dean Blumenfeld. Rudolf Cesaretti. Megan Parker.

This is an abstract from the "The Legacies of The Basin of Mexico: The Ecological Processes in the Evolution of a Civilization, Part 2" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Epiclassic period (ca. 650-900 CE) in the Basin of Mexico is considered a time of social, cultural, political, and economic transformation and re-organization. Most perspectives stress that, after the collapse of the major state system centered at Teotihuacan, regional population...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Laura Solar-Valverde.

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. Toward the end of the sixth century AD, a great fire destroyed the ceremonial center of Teotihuacan, capital of the largest urban development in Mesoamerica. This event was the culmination of a long process of disintegration of Teotihuacan’s macroregional system, a process that began during the ancient city’s apogee. This presentation will...

DOCUMENT Citation Only José Luis Punzo Díaz. Miguel Alberto Ibarra López. Jakob Sedig.

This is an abstract from the "Looking to the West: New insights into Postclassic Archaeology in Michoacán" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This poster will present the first results from the bioarchaeological analysis of more than half a ton of human skeletal remains recovered from the ossuary of the ancient city of Tzintzuntzan on the shores of Lake Patzcuaro in the state of Michoacán, Mexico. In addition to conventional morphological analysis,...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Alex Garcia-Putnam. Melissa Murphy. Christopher T. Fisher.

Little is known about the impact of Purépecha Empire formation on the skeletal health and well being of communities within the core zone of the Lake Pátzcuaro Basin, Michoacán, during the Postclassic period (AD 1000-1500). Here we report on recent bioarchaeological investigation of 19 mortuary contexts from the ancient Purépecha city of Angamuco located within the imperial heartland. We have identified at least seven different mortuary treatments from Angamuco and we compare these contexts with...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Ingris Pelaez-Ballestas. Karla Rodríguez-Rodríguez. Miguel Ibarra. Patricia Rodriguez. Carlos Karam-Tapia.

This is an abstract from the "Tzintzuntzan, Capital of the Tarascan Empire: New Perspectives" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Otitis and mastoiditis are conditions that produce deafness and disability in the pre-antibiotic era, especially in the fishing community. This study describes lesions on temporal bones in the Western Culture from Mexico living near Lake Pátzcuaro, Michoacán. A sample (n = 41) of temporal bones from Tzintzuntzan sites was...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Angel González López. Jeremy Coltman. Karl A. Taube. Travis Stanton.

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. Heart sacrifice constituted one of the most basic yet fundamental tenets of Mesoamerican ritual practice. At Early Postclassic Chichen Itza, as with the later Aztec of Tenochtitlan, hearts and blood were offered to the bellicose solar deity whose daily journey through the sky not only depended...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kirby Farah.

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. Populated by as many as 200,000 people, the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan—like most cities—was buzzing with activity through the night. Given the dynamism of the city, and especially weighed against our modern understanding of the sounds and lights that keep cities alive during the night, it is significant that one...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Aurelie Manin. Camilla Speller. Gregory Pereira. Christine Lefèvre.

In Mesoamerica, the tropical colourful birds were highly valued for their feathers. Among them, the scarlet macaw (Ara macao) provided bright red, blue and yellow feathers that were traded to the Central Mexican Highlands and, beyond Mesoamerica, until the American Southwest. As suggested by ethnohistoric records, some birds may have been maintained in captivity and harvested to supply the demand in feathers. In spite of examples of large-scale macaw management in the American Southwest, there...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kathy Durand. Jeremy Loven.

This is an abstract from the "25 Years in the Casas Grandes Region: Celebrating Mexico–U.S. Collaboration in the Gran Chichimeca" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The prehistoric inhabitants of the Casas Grandes region of northwest Chihuahua, Mexico, exploited a wide range of local and non-local fauna. This paper explores the value of different animal species throughout the prehistory of this region and how various animals were utilized for daily...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Cinthia M. Campos. James Brady. José Luis Punzo Díaz.

This is an abstract from the "Studies in Mesoamerican Subterranean Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. As cave archaeology emerged as a specialty in the 1990, an unfortunate consequence has been the reification of the distinction between surface and subterranean archaeology. We would note that there have always been problems with this dichotomy. Andrews (1970), for instance, mentions that the entrance to Balankanche Cave was in the middle...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Kea Warren.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Calixtlahuaca is a Middle-to-Late Postclassic (A.D. 1130-1530) Mesoamerican site located in the Toluca Valley of Central Mexico. While originally a Matlazinca settlement, the site was conquered by the Aztec Empire, and documentary evidence suggests subsequent Mexica immigration to the region. I use the site to examine immigration patterns based on the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Destiny Crider.

This is an abstract from the "Interactions during the Epiclassic and Early Postclassic (AD 650–1100) in the Central Highlands: New Insights from Material and Visual Culture" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The interplay of compositional, stylistic, and technological variation of pottery from the Basin provides the framework to assess shifting patterns of regional interaction. The Epiclassic is characterized by Coyotlatelco pottery, although this...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Destiny Crider. Samuel Nelson. Ian Gonzales.

This is an abstract from the "Ceramics and Archaeological Sciences" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Epiclassic Central Mexico (ca. AD 550–850) is characterized by competing city-states in which ceramic distribution aligns with a series of neighboring solar market economies. INAA compositional study provides key evidence for assessing multiscalar patterns of production of diagnostic and decorated ceramic wares in the Basin of Mexico and Tula...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Daniel Pierce.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the Early/middle postclassic period, the Aztatlán tradition grew to be the most influential culture in Western Mexico, creating expansive trade networks that extended far beyond the region. Though these trade networks are one of the most well-known aspects of the Aztatlán tradition, few studies have utilized archaeometric methods to assess trade and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christine Hernandez. Dan Healan.

Sourcing studies conducted over the past 45 years have identified obsidian from the outcrops around Ucareo and Zinapécuaro, Michoacán in archaeological sites located across Mesoamerica including San Lorenzo, Xochicalco, Tula, Chichén Itzá, and Tzintzuntzan. Archaeological investigations including survey and excavation conducted by Tulane University during the 1990s have provided the first detailed information on prehispanic settlement and obsidian exploitation within what is now called the...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Brian McKee. Fernando Zuleta. Katherine M. Cera. Christopher D. Taylor.

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Coroban site, located on a highly-defensible summit in Morazán, El Salvador, was occupied by the Poton Lenca. The Lenca inhabited most of eastern El Salvador and western and central Honduras during the early sixteenth century Spanish Conquest. They spoke two or more languages with multiple dialects and belonged to distinct, albeit related, cultures. The...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Miruna Achim.

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. A well-known passage in the Florentine Codex offers a natural history of *chalchihuitl: its revelation to a few “knowledgeable ones” by the vapor it exudes from underground when viewed against the sun’s first rays; its varieties of green, luminosity, and hardness; the lapidary methods that bring out its brightness and...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher T. Fisher.

At the time of European contact the Lake Pátzcuaro Basin (LPB) was the geopolitical core of the Purépecha (Tarascan) Empire (A.D. 1350-1520), and has long been recognized as a Mesoamerican core region . Cities were an important component of Purépecha statecraft but comparatively little is known about their general characteristics, organization, and evolution. Here I explore the use and division of space within the ancient city of Angamuco to document the development of social complexity, complex...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Patricia Olga Hernandez Espinoza.

This is an abstract from the "The Health and Welfare of Children in the Past" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Funerary practices identified in the Architectural Funerary Complex of La Noria in Tamtoc, SLP, have been interpreted as belonging to a space used to symbolize the social and possibly political importance of the individuals who were buried there during the Late Postclassical period (1350-1521 a. P.). Most of the burials correspond to...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Laura Beramendi-Orosco. Galia González-Hernández.

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. The moment of the collapse of Teotihuacan and the subsequent occupation of the area by other cultures are still subjects of debate concerning this important urban center in Mesoamerica. Understanding what happened after the collapse and dating the different reoccupations of Teotihuacan can be challenging due to different factors, including...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Marie Arnauld.

The paper aims at enhancing the contribution by Dominique Michelet and his teams to the knowledge of sedentism and urbanization on the northern and northwestern fringes of Mesoamerica (mainly San Luis Potosí, Guanajuato, Michoacán, Mexico). Distinct processes of mobility, migration and agglomeration developed in those regions, in particular with reversibility of sedentary life related to multiple factors, among which climatic and agrarian cycles are only partly known so far. Specific community...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher T. Fisher.

This is an abstract from the "Advancing Public Perceptions of Sustainability through Archaeology" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The societal impact of climate change in Central Mexico during the Postclassic Period is an important question in Mesoamerican archaeology. Here, using archaeological evidence from the ancient city of Angamuco, including LiDAR analysis, I argue that an engineered environment buffered the environment from reduced rainfall...

DOCUMENT Citation Only Natalia Moragas.

This is an abstract from the "Central Mexico after Teotihuacan: Everyday Life and the (Re)Making of Epiclassic Communities" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The aim of this paper is to do a general overview of the different archaeological processes identified in Teotihuacan in the last years of the Classic to Epiclassic period. In a space between the crisis of the Teotihuacan political and ideological power until the reorganization of new players in...