Postclassic Mesoamerica: The View from the Southern Frontier

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Postclassic Mesoamerica: The View from the Southern Frontier" at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Papers will consider the question of Mesoamerica’s southern frontier during the Postclassic period (800–1520 CE) from the perspectives of El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica. Long considered peripheral from a world systems perspective, ethnohistorical accounts describe migrations from central Mexico to lands along the Pacific shore of Central America by Otomanguean- and Nahuat-speakers in the centuries leading up to European contact. The chronology of these migrations is frustratingly vague, as are the explanations of why the migrations occurred. These historical accounts have been mined to highlight the Mexican connections, and in many cases have been incorporated into the cultural identities of these Central American countries. Using the ethnohistorical sources to guide hypotheses and structure interpretations, the past 20 years have been busy in terms of producing archaeological data to challenge and evaluate interaction scenarios relating "Mesoamerica" with neighbors from the southern frontier. These papers offer important new insights into the Mesoamerican frontier with substantive information and updated interpretations. Can these perspectives be used to revision what is "Mesoamerica"? Papers in this symposium provide archaeological case studies from throughout the region, as leading scholars attempt to critically integrate the ethnohistorical accounts with the material record.