Coastal Connections: Pacific Coastal Links from Mexico to Ecuador

Part of: Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Coastal Connections: Pacific Coastal Links from Mexico to Ecuador," at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Since the days of Marshall Saville and Samuel Lothrop, scholars have drawn attention to archaeological evidence linking the Pacific Coast societies of South America with those of Mexico and Central America. Various investigators pointed to the shared occurrence of shaft tombs, stirrup spout vessels, copper artifacts including axe monies and bells, and even hairless dogs. Nevertheless, these observations were untethered and did not forestall the imposition of the bounded Mesoamerican, ‘Intermediate’, and Andean culture areas that govern the parameters of most current research. The trait lists assembled by early scholars are now being supplanted by a more flexible understanding of the role played by coastal maritime networks in moving exotic crops, materials, and technologies over long distances. These include maize, cacao, Spondylus, copper, and gold (as well, perhaps, as other perishable and as yet unidentified materials) that indicate varying degrees of contact, influence and exchange linking northwestern South America, Central America and western Mexico. For this symposium we propose to address afresh the evidence for interaction along the Pacific littoral of South and Mesoamerica through more specific comparisons grounded in anthropological understandings of trade and interaction.

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  • Documents (14)

Documents
  • Axe-Monies in the Smithsonian Collections (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Kim Cullen Cobb. Emily Kaplan. Michele Austin Dennehy. Christopher Beekman.

    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. A technical study of pre-Columbian copper-alloy axe-monies from the collections of the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of the American Indian and National Museum of Natural History. Research activities include stereo microscopy, digital photography (macro and micro), portable X-ray fluroescence (pXRF)...

  • The Curious Pacific Coast Distribution of Tightly Wrapped Bundle Burials in the Middle Formative (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Joseph Mountjoy. Jill Rhodes.

    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. Highly unusual tightly wrapped bundle burials of previously cleaned and carefully arranged disarticulated human bones dating to the Middle Formative have been discovered by archaeologists at three sites in western Jalisco, Mexico, one site on the Pacific coastal plain in far northern Sinaloa, Mexico and eroding out of the...

  • The Effects of ENSO on Travel along the Pacific Coast of the Americas (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Richard Callaghan. Alvaro Montenegro. Scott Fitzpatrick.

    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. For decades, prehistoric contacts have been suggested between Ecuador and western Mexico, occurring from 400 BC, if not earlier, to the sixteenth century based on similarities in mortuary behaviors, ceramic technology, language, and ethnohistoric accounts, and other lines of evidence. However, the frequency of these...

  • Evaluating Precolumbian Contact between Ecuador and Costa Rica: A Ceramic Approach (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Maria Masucci. John Hoopes.

    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. Archaeologists have long noted similarities in ceramic technologies and traditions between Costa Rica and Ecuador. These are relevant for models of culture change, whether the result of direct interactions or parallel cultural processes in the emergence of social complexity. We test the alternatives of direct,...

  • Jade, Scepters, and Seats of Power: Symbols of Authority on the Central American Coast, 300 BC-AD 300 (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Rebecca Mendelsohn.

    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. This paper documents a widespread shift during the period from 300 BC-AD 300 toward symbolism associated with authority and rulership along the Pacific coast, throughout the region spanning between southern Chiapas and the Nicoya Peninsula of Costa Rica. During this period, several notable changes in burial patterns,...

  • Jama-Coaque Ceramic Traits in Coastal Colima, West Mexico?: A view from the Jama Valley, Coastal Ecuador (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only James Zeidler.

    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. In spite of a long tradition of scholarship dedicated to the theme of prehispanic maritime contacts between the Pacific coastal areas of Ecuador and Mesoamerica, most arguments for these contacts have been based on a wide variety of trait comparisons between ill-defined cultural sequences in the respective contact zones,...

  • Landfalls, Sunbursts, and the Capacha Problem: The Case for a Pacific Coastal Interaction Community in Early Formative Period Mesoamerica (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Guy Hepp.

    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. In the 1960s, Ford argued that the first Pacific coastal Mexican pottery should more closely resemble that of northern South America than of early highland Mexican wares of the Tehuacán tradition. In the 1970s and 1980s, Kelly argued that Colima’s Capacha phase represented one of several "landfalls" of technological and...

  • Long-Distance Contacts along the Coast of Greater Chiriquí (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Francisco Corrales-Ulloa.

    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 location of the Greater Chiriquí archeological region in southern Central America and the available and valuable resources in it (gold, coastal resources) were favorable for the emergence of a complex society that interacted with long-distance contacts for the acquisition of exotic goods. I highlight several places...

  • Pacific Coastal Exchange in Postclassic Mexico: Wealth, Rituals, Feasts, and Marriages (2019)
    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...

  • Puertos, materiales y productos de intercambio (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only José Beltrán.

    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. Desde los primeros estudios arqueológicos desarrollados en el occidente mesoamericano han sido encontrados diversos rasgos culturales, vocablos y artefactos similares a materiales existentes en el noroeste sudamericano. Destacan entre ellos los materiales Capacha, los de tumbas de tiro y la metalurgia, aportando...

  • Reevaluating an Offering Cache from Isla La Plata, Ecuador (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Colin McEwan. Richard Lunniss.

    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. From the Middle Formative onwards, La Plata Island was gradually incorporated into developing local and regional networks of exchange along the Pacific littoral of Ecuador. The island also became the focus of increasing ritual activity evidenced in the material remains of offerings made on the coastal bluffs and at the...

  • "Rich" Men: Caciques in Trade and Exchange in the Polyglottal Southern Central American World (16th Century) (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Eugenia Ibarra.

    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. This paper will explore the relationship between "rich" men and trade and exchange, particularly in polyglottal Costa Rica and Panama in the sixteenth century. It will focus on these caciques's social organizations, their representatives, their political responsibilities, their power exertions, and their rivalries and...

  • Shell and Symbolism in Mesoamerica and the Andes: Are There Parallels? (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Christopher Beekman.

    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. Much research on the links between Mesoamerica and South America has focused on the methods of exploitation of shell (e.g. Spondylus, Strombus) and its possible trade across sub-regions. However, superficially similar methods of exploitation may be local solutions to common problems and methods for sourcing shell remain...

  • Spondylus as a Driver of Long-Distance Exchange (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Benjamin Carter.

    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. For many years the shellfish, Spondylus, has been seen as a driver for long distance exchange. Overfishing of the highly sought Spondylus pushed harvesters farther and farther north, possibly as far as West Mexico, in search of the red, orange and/or purple shell and promoting interaction between distant and disparate...