Manifesting Movement Materially: Broadening the Mesoamerican View

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 "Manifesting Movement Materially: Broadening the Mesoamerican View," at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Both ancient and modern cultures across Mesoamerica emphasize the acts of travel, procession, and movement through space as key elements in ordering the world through action. Movement is apparent and crucial to everything people do. This session aims to broaden the ways that archaeologists working in Mesoamerica explore movement by presenting both theoretical and methodological insights tracking how movement has materialized across time and space. Participants will explore movement as a crucial aspect in archaeological investigations of social processes, including ritual activities, taskscapes, power relationships, monumental construction, community building, and everyday practices.

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  • Documents (9)

Documents
  • Community Formation through Movement: Focal Nodes and Community Landscapes of the Mopan River Valley, Belize (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Victoria Ingalls.

    This is an abstract from the "Manifesting Movement Materially: Broadening the Mesoamerican View" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Movement is often implicitly assumed when exploring the ancient makeup of communities. We conceptualize movement at different scales of interaction – at the hyperlocal through households, as well as between and across communities, polities, and landscapes. Here, I will explore how movement to/from focal nodes on a...

  • Directed Movement at Ancient Maya Centers (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Angela Keller.

    This is an abstract from the "Manifesting Movement Materially: Broadening the Mesoamerican View" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Is there a right way to enter a Maya center? A correct order to the viewing and experiencing of the place? How did the physical act of moving through a center inform the understanding of that place, its leaders, oneself? This paper presents the results of several seasons of fieldwork at the Belizean sites of Xunantunich...

  • How Monumental Architecture Directs Movement: Defensive and Hydrological Features at Muralla de León (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Justin Bracken.

    This is an abstract from the "Manifesting Movement Materially: Broadening the Mesoamerican View" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Tracking patterns of everyday movement by individuals within a local population offers deep insight into the spatialized social structure of the group, providing information such as who interacts with whom, which areas are public and which are private, and the tightness or openness of different social circles. Like most...

  • The Materiality of Movement and Rhythm in Sajama, Bolivia (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Adam Birge.

    This is an abstract from the "Manifesting Movement Materially: Broadening the Mesoamerican View" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Movement and the rhythm of life, from procuring food to trade and ritual, are major structuring forces of human lives. However, examining these practices archaeologically can prove difficult due to the minimal and/or short lived evidence of routes. The Sajama landscape of the Carangas provides an example of these...

  • Moving Off-Road: Traversing Taskscapes at Wari Camp, Belize (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Christian Sheumaker.

    This is an abstract from the "Manifesting Movement Materially: Broadening the Mesoamerican View" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The study of movement has long been relegated to the background of archaeological investigations, as its materialization proves multifarious yet equally elusive. The resulting collection of archaeological "movement studies" generally focuses on the most formalized manifestation of movement: road systems. Yet at the...

  • Postcards in the Landscape: Considering Lower Pecos Pictographs as Nahua Pilgrimage Destinations (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Carolyn Tate.

    This is an abstract from the "Manifesting Movement Materially: Broadening the Mesoamerican View" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Chicomoztoc, the place of seven caves, from which the Nahua ancestors emerged, appears in many central Mexican pictorial manuscripts as a place of origin and one of pilgrimage. Like the mythical Aztlan, its location has not been confirmed; perhaps several such places served different groups of people. However, recent...

  • The Sacred Landscape of Xunantunich, Belize (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only M. Kathryn Brown. Jason Yaeger.

    This is an abstract from the "Manifesting Movement Materially: Broadening the Mesoamerican View" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Early Maya communities centered themselves within a broader sacred landscape imbued with meaning through ritual practices. Centuries of movement through the landscape converted spaces into places that were deeply rooted in cosmology and social memory. Ritual practices at the center of the community and important places in...

  • Transportation or Transformation?: Road Depictions in Relaciones Geográficas of 16th-Century New Spain (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only Shauna Garland.

    This is an abstract from the "Manifesting Movement Materially: Broadening the Mesoamerican View" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The 16th century was a time of extraordinary cultural exchange in Central Mexico. The heterogeneous indigenous populations interacted with recently arrived Spanish and the Creole populations. In this paper, I examine one manifestation of these peoples’ concepts of place, space, and movement as visually represented in...

  • Veneration and Pilgrimage at a Hinterland Shrine: Evidence from the Medicinal Trail Community, Northwestern Belize (2019)
    DOCUMENT Citation Only David Hyde. Lauri Martin.

    This is an abstract from the "Manifesting Movement Materially: Broadening the Mesoamerican View" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Data recovered from excavation of the residential Tapir Group at the Maya hinterland site of Medicinal Trail provides evidence for ancestor veneration and pilgrimage. For veneration, the Maya incorporated ancestors into their built environment through the ritual practice of physically including them in the architecture as...