The Movement of People and Ideas in Eastern Mesoamerica during the Ninth and Tenth Centuries CE: A Multidisciplinary Approach Part I

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "The Movement of People and Ideas in Eastern Mesoamerica during the Ninth and Tenth Centuries CE: A Multidisciplinary Approach Part I" at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

For two centuries after the close of the Classic period we know that profound cultural changes swept across Eastern Mesoamerica. What has been harder to ascertain are the vectors of transmission, and the relative importance of migration, commerce, proselytization, and military adventurism in the processes that brought new ideas to the region. This symposium takes a multidisciplinary approach that brings together archaeologists, bioarchaeologists, paleo-geneticists, iconographers, and epigraphers in pursuit of a more holistic understanding of the problem. Gravitating away from familiar but overly fixed dichotomies of ethnic identity, we look for overlaps between research hubs that cover the Gulf Coast, Northern Yucatán, the Central Petén, Belize, and the Pacific highlands reaching down to El Salvador and beyond. Bolstered by new methodologies and pan-regional data surveys, body-anchored approximations will be confronted with data from architecture, artworks, and artifacts. We hereby hope to revitalize discussion about the dynamics of collapse for Classic Maya kingdoms and highlight the various ways in which biological and cultural contacts evolved and many societies prospered after 800 CE, countering the assumptions of hermetically sealed communities in which new cultural concepts float through the ether, rather than being in heads and hands of people on the move.